The Rubesletter by Matt Ruby (of Vooza)

News! I’m filming a special in NYC… …and I want you there. Tickets available now (code “groovy” gets you discount before October 1). It’ll be really good so assemble the laughers.

I’m mad at Dolly Parton because it worked. She tricked me. All my life, I bought into the cartoon version of Dolly: the big hair, the rack, the rhinestones. I liked a few of her songs, sure. But honestly, I didn’t pay her much mind. Until her passing, that is. Ever since, my timeline’s been a surprising reveal of what lurked underneath the persona, the true depth of her artistry and humanity. In fact, I’ve cried every day since her passing at something she said or sang.

The antisemite of the week is
 đŸ„ Mark Ruffalo! He spoke out against Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion plan to buy Warner Bros. Discovery which led to pro-Israel influencers putting his head on a Piker.

There’s a problem with how people on the left talk. The problem is they don’t talk, they write. And that means they continually invent terms that ignore how human beings actually speak. Human beings like to cut to the chase when they’re speaking. Yet the woke/tolerant/PC/whatever-we’re-calling-it-now way is almost always the long cut. It shouldn’t be faster to say the hateful word or phrase than the correct one and yet…

The New Yorker: “Are Psychedelics Right-Wing Now?” Me: Um, paging Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.1 Look, if you’re taking psychedelics and you’re still right-wing…THEN YOU DIDN’T TAKE ENOUGH. I’ve never been tripping balls on shrooms and thought, “We need more masked agents grabbing people off of the street and putting them into unmarked vehicles! Now crank the Khruangbin, man.” According to the piece, the psychedelic spotlight is now shining on Ibogaine. Why?

Have you seen the DSA co-chair (aka Socialist Jesse Raphael)? She keeps giving interviews that make her seem like a psy op designed to make people dislike the DSA. After listening to her, I feel like DSA members probably watch Die Hard and root for Asian Dawn. I guess weā€™re pendulum swingers that must go from far right to left now. My hatred of all things šŸŠ is giving me mixed feelingsā€¦because do we really have to swerve all the way to the other pole of kooky extremism?

I just can’t with the width of jeans these days. Here’s The Ramones if they were Gen Z… This is how I use AI. Pretty punk rock, eh? At least it’s a better image than… That just seems like an ED pill ad targeted at seniors. Btw, I was gifted a couch recently: 🎶 Got time, time to wait for tomorrow / To find it, to find it, to find it 🎶 We have fun. Here are some more goofy/legit music musings… 🥁 “Disco nap” is a great way to use music to cover up depression.

Things I jotted down in my notebook while on a recent plant medicine weekend
 Lessons đŸŒ± You seek to be overwhelmed so your lesson is in subtlety. đŸŒ± Effort is the tax you pay for the outcome you desire. đŸŒ± Tell everyone you love how much you appreciate them. It’s free yet still the most valuable thing in the world. Crazy. đŸŒ± If you’re doing what you want to do, your entire life is a vacation. Wounds đŸŒ± Your past will eat up your bandwidth until you process it.

Reading is over. It‚Äôs a podcast, livestream, and clip world now. Media platforms spent years promising a ‚Äúpivot to video.‚ÄĚ They neglected to mention it would also mean a pivot away from literacy. Why is all this happening? Well, there‚Äôs the whole ‚Äúpeople are dumb and lazy‚ÄĚ thing. But we also need to examine the incentives at play. These platforms need to monetize attention ‚Äď and the written word is actually too efficient at expressing ideas. In effect, writing is a compression algorithm.

We entered the paddock and were told not to approach the horses. Hold your hand out and the horse will give you a nod with his snout, a fist bump of sorts, if heā€™s open to interacting. After a few minutes, Domingo moseyed over toward me. He had a brown coat and downcast eyes. What I knew about Domingo: Before coming to his new home, heā€™d been a racehorse and then a workhorse for the Amish, who are notorious for grinding horses down by overworking them.