Subscriber Writing, October 2024

It’s time again for a subscriber writing roundup!

Luke T. Harrington, Losing weight isn’t easy, but it is simple

Good news: your body is subject to the laws of physics

Jarrod Baniqued, The Age of Ex-Memes

An attempt to understand the metamorphosis of American society through reviews of JibJab videos

Nicholas Reville, GRACE: Proposing a New GLP-1 Based Harm Reduction Strategy

Immediate-access craving relief therapy can bridge the gap between harm reduction and treatment for people at risk of overdose

Integrity Talk, Taiwan: The Hidden Gem of East Asia

How the small island became a champion of living standards

Julian Randall, How Missy Elliott Normalized Maximalist Hip Hop Style

Missy Elliott thwarted expectations of how Black women rappers should dress by thinking outside the box

The Memory Hole, Untenable Risk

A history of threats against the U.S. President

Will Maclean, Monopoly, The Salmon, Fist full of Crystals

The death-baiting old men in British traditional climbing

Jonathan Kissam, Who Will Our Next Oppressors Be?

Dune, race, and democracy

Julian Gough, The deep ocean floor is covered in naturally-occurring batteries that make oxygen... Wait, WHAT?!

A recent discovery means we might find life in the liquid water oceans that slosh beneath the frozen surfaces of the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn

Mari the Happy Wanderer, You Go, Ginkgo!

Fun facts and photos about some weird trees, plus some inspiration, a couple of songs, and a chance to join our Bookshop book club

Hal Johnson, What Is the First American Graphic Novel?

A deep dive into 101 years of potential claimants for the title, from 1849–1950

Lisa Abend, The Unplugged Traveler: Glasgow

A phone-free trip to Glasgow turns up bar name plagiarism, a domineering hotel receptionist, and extremely dedicated Fallout fans

Dana Leigh Lyons, It’s Not Political. It’s Hate.

On exiting our echo chambers and opening our hearts

Some Guy, My Stepfather was a Micronesian White Supremacist Amateur Elvis Impersonator

A reflection on race, mental illness, forgiveness, and intimately knowing a brown person who was in love with Hitler

Josh Spilker, Writing a Novel Was Not a Good Financial Decision (But I'll Probably Do It Again)

The trade-off of opportunity costs when writing a novel

Thaddeus Haas, We Used to Know, But Now We Think...

The older I get the less I know; it turns out the same is true for science

Brian Howard, You Didn't Go Anywhere

On the overuse of the word "journey"

Peter James, What I Learned From “Failing” At Comedy

A former stand-up comedian examines the unexpected benefits that emerged from dreams not coming true

Matt Landis, The Teacher Salary Debate

A public school teacher weighs in on the fiery compensation debate

Nick Roman, Against Humanoid Robots

I argue against techno-optimism in the realm of humanoid domestic robots and the idea that the home should be optimized

Chand Sooran - Closest Point of Approach, Knowing Me, Knowing You

Tying in economic and mimetic theory to analyze Trump’s plans

Amod Sandhya Lele, Is it a racial crime for me to be myself?

Despite what monochrome Americans will tell you, some of the rest of us already have postracial lives

Tony, Dr. Horrible or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Nerd Culture and Myself

An analysis of a now-forgotten web series phenomenon and the horrible world it augured

Kyle McCormick, Top 20

New column with exhaustively ranked and reviewed Top 20 lists of the best albums of each year

Luke Allen, We're All Going to Die

An argument for the importance of some sort of spiritual practice to help us come to grips with our mortality

Jessica Nordell, How To Keep Going When Your Life Implodes

From abject despair to a life worth living

Damian Penny, They Know You Know They're Lying

How propagandists and conspiracy theorists engage in gaslighting, not persuasion

T. Scott, The Undecideds

I’m unable to denigrate my political opponents, but I fear where they are taking us

Doctrix Periwinkle, Inoculated

Chesterton’s fence constrains the borders of a cemetery for children

Christopher Pearce, Lolita Isn’t Subtle

Lolita is actually very upfront about what Humbert Humbert is

The Ivy Exile, That's the Ticket

On two decades of disillusionment inside the progressive establishment as it abandoned the working class

Brendan Ruberry, Alex Ross Perry’s Hall of Mirrors

A review of the new Pavement documentary, which changed how I see Pavement, like Pavement once changed how I see the world

Megan Gafford, America was supposed to be Art Deco

A visual essay lamenting our loss of America’s once great architectural tradition

Nicky von Hartz Shapiro, Barbarian Haze

Trust a memoir at your own risk

Dirk Hohnstraeter, What is it like to live in a landmark?

An exploration into what living in houses built by Bauhaus architects, Le Corbusier, and Loos feels like

Tolly Moseley, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Sex They Might Have Had

A reconsideration of this Biblical duo

BJ Campbell, Explaining Trump Support to Liberals

A clean categorization of the three fundamental factions supporting Trump, explaining their actual motivations

Cinema Timshel, Ideologically Out of Line and Insufficiently Diverse

On social justice, independent film nonprofits, and a scandalous documentary

Liz Moyer Benferhat, When social justice feels like LARPing

The risk of becoming characters in a game, reflections from an insider

Christopher J Feola, The 2024 Election is Irrelevant

Regardless of who wins, the world is undergoing the same sort of convulsion that it did when the British Empire collapsed

Nigel Bowen, How vibrant diversity is working out in my homeland

Some reflections on open(ish) borders from the son of a migrant

Jane Song, Dispatch from the r/popheadscirclejerk lurker who was there the day “indie” died

On the failure and futility of trying to be a hipster as a high schooler in 2014

Nathaniel Page, Clean Energy for the Future

A satire about clean energy, another purity obsession for the Victorian oligarchy

Kody Cava, Those Who Choose to Play the Game Are the Ones Who Win

An analysis of how our modern society creates outcasts and misanthropes and what they can teach us, through the lens of the 1965 movie A Thousand Clowns

Samantha Hedges, Politics Are Personal

A tale of Eleanor, whose dominant personality and series of life events drove her politics - just like yours

Gabriel Kahane, On Songwriting: Part I

The first of two essays on the craft of songwriting

R.B. Griggs, Tech for Life—A Manifesto

Putting technology in service of life itself

Triangulation, The Inside-Outside View Asymmetry

Using the example of the war in Ukraine, I show that discussions on contentious issues are unproductive because disagreement is often about framing

Andrew Berg, Jesus Died on Passover, Not Yom Kippur

The cross is not just forgiveness from sin, the cross brings liberation from death, hell, and the devil

Dhruv Methi, Understanding pain, mental illness, and grief

Understanding these as consequences of our attempt to reconcile our mental model of how the world works with our experiences

Josh off the Press, Why do you write so much, Josh?

I just remember the thrill I got out of writing. It was like a runner’s high to me

Mark Braund, Israel/Palestine one year on

As long as we can imagine the possibility of a solution, there is hope; only when our imagination fails absolutely does endless war becomes inevitable

Brian Leli, Meaning in Extremis, Part 1

Extremely difficult situations are portals into moments of deep meaning

Thomas Parker, Little Madhouse on the Prairie: Wisconsin Death Trip

Cheer yourself up by reading Wisconsin Death Trip, where Laura Ingalls Wilder meets Edgar Allan Poe

J. E. Knowles, The Discreet Traveler

U.S.-born, now a citizen of three countries, I travel with my comedic English partner trying to explain the world to America and America to the world

Meghan Bell, The Androgynous Mind

In “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,” Leonard Shlain argued that literacy triggered a rise in misogyny. What if it gave rise to misandry too?

Jonah Davids, Mental Health Credentialism Costs Lives

The case for a quicker route to becoming a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist

Stan Hister, Montreal: a night

A childhood memory! Proustian! Poetic prose!

James Mills, The Dying Dream of DEI

What Happens When Progress isn’t Progressive?

William Carroll, Suzuki Seijun and Postwar Japanese Cinema

An analysis of the work of filmmaker Suzuki Seijun that addresses broader industrial and cultural shifts in filmmaking in Japan from the 1950s to the 1980s

Mazin Saleem, Color-blind casting as historical whitewashing

What if period dramas with diverse actors have perverse consequences? What if they soft-pedal the racism of the past? What happens when a filmmaker means too well?

John McMillian, Am I Racist? is Part of the Problem, Not the Solution

A mixed-review of Matt Walsh's controversial new film.

Jon Busch, Happiness vs. Satisfaction

A 43-year-old man realizes he might as well just keep pursuing his childhood dreams

Stony Stevenson, Regime Change in Iran Already Happened Three Months Ago

Observations and warnings about Iran-Western relations. I've been closely following Iran-related news for nearly two decades

CrabbyGirl, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Rosemary Sullivan

Opinionated book review: what's that creepy (but true) saying? People love dead Jews

Zach Winters, Zach Blog: Riding the Curves of Cyclical Time

Recent posts on 1990s eco-pessimism in Jurassic Park, AI tools as occult knowledge spells, and some hints of Spengler in modern-day doomerism

Metaconcepts - Misinformation, Rhetoric, and (Post)Modernism

On the uses and abuses of “Misinformation,” discussing modern arguments, postmodern accusations, and their surprising resemblances to ancient discourse

Burke Bindbeutel, The Youth is the Future

Sex, cruelty and motocross in Paul Verhoeven’s Netherlands

Desystemize, The Fractal Ratchet

How much of what you see is an artifact of how hard you looked?

Nolan Louis Buonomano, Mass Modal Shift

A discussion of the goals and guiding philosophy of transit advocacy in the United States

Elsa Figueroa, Not for your consumption

An exploration of the concept of Outsider Art, developed by Jean Dubuffet, and what it says about the art industry and its place today in the age of social media

Ramon Gonzalez, The joys of going under: what it’s like to scuba dive

Suiting the reader up, dropping them in the water, and breathing life into both the wonders and rhythms of diving down below and what stays with you after

William Schwartz, Pachinko Corrects Itself

A review of the second season of Pachinko - much better with the themes, history still questionable

Socratic Psychiatrist, The Psychiatric Evaluation for Non-Psychiatrists, pt. 2

Part 2 in a series on the psychiatric evaluation for non-psychiatrists, with this post covering the Mental Status Exam

A.J. Fezza, The Wasting of Time

An examination of time as a stressor and the extent to which daily human effort, both inside and outside the workplace, can be a waste of time

Brook Manville, Introducing the Civic Bargain Summary Series

Background and Overview of our Civic Bargain book

Matthew Vernon Whalan, Fountain Prison, Alabama

Overcrowding, prisoners sleeping on floor, violence, heat, illness, sewage leaking - photo documentation obtained from inside the prison

Clint Cornelson, An IMAX-Sized Lamentation

A personal reflection on Chicago’s now-closed Navy Pier IMAX, and on the pleasures of big, loud, large-format cinema

Thomas Barrie, Gladiator was the greatest sports movie ever made

On sportswashing, stardom, and the mob

Eva Sylwester, A Law Written in Tears

Literary cancel culture provoked a painful conflict for my family; this is the story

Shelby Kearns, The Myths of Plastic Surgery

Busting the myths of plastic surgery as a “harmless choice” that puts you in touch with your “real self”

Kristina Usaite, In the Shadow of Ukrainian War: Stories of Survival

Devastation and unimaginable loss faced by Ukrainians in war-torn cities, highlighting their stories of survival, resilience, and enduring love

Tapirclip, Roasting “Apple Black Origins: The Spectrum and the Spectre”

Part one series critiquing the YA light novel “Apple Black Origins” by Odunze Oguguo

Lisa Jacobson, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition

Examines how the alcoholic beverage industries transformed drinking from a transgressive vice into a respectable pleasure