Subscriber Writing, February 2023

Here are links to writing by subscribers for the month of February, presented in the order in which I received them. I always find cool stuff to read in these, so please check out whatever you might fancy. Try someone whose stuff you haven’t tried before. This post is too long for email, so please click the headline to pop over to the website.

Guys, please follow directions! People who replied to the newsletter email call for writing, rather than to the fredrik.deboer Gmail account as directed, almost were left out because they weren’t in the right inbox.

If I’ve missed someone entirely, please let me know and I’ll be sure to include you next month; if I’ve misformatted something, comment and I will fix it on the website. Those of you who formatted your submissions in the way I asked are the real MVPs. Please note that while I tried to remember every email sent to the wrong address, I disavow any responsibility if I missed yours!

Please check out Luke Harrington’s runner-up book review from the book review contest if you haven’t already.

Christian Lorentzen, At Random

A report on the PRH/S&S merger trial for Harper’s.

BJ Campbell, ChatGPT Would Kill Black People to Avoid Saying the N-Word

The great freakout about trying to unbias Large Language Models (LLMs) is missing a golden opportunity, because building ones intentionally biased to a particular echo chamber allows us to speak directly to the zeitgeist within the echo chamber itself and ask that zeitgeist questions.

Hal Johnson, What If Nixon Had Contested the 1960 Election?

Part of my substack on alternate history scenarios (and inspirational quotations); the title says it all.

M. E. Rothwell, Tracking Bears through the Carpathian Mountains

Travel writing in the old sense of the term.

David Roberts, Carpe Diem?

A short, personal essay (1,000 words) on loneliness and connecting.

Chuong Nguyen, How Ibram X. Kendi Became a Brand

see title

Thomas Reilly, Acting out your dreams…a harbinger of Parkinson’s disease?

Exploring what’s behind REM sleep behaviour disorder, a prodromal sign of neurodegeneration.

Benjamin J. Smith, Dylan Planet

A tribute to Bob Dylan; a trip to the Bob Dylan Center

Kyle Imes, On Beating a Dead Horse Named Noma

A critique of a wholly unoriginal take on the worlds best restaurant closing, and a defense of speaking to the perspective of those you would aim to enact change for.

Thomas Parker, Only Disconnect: Ray Bradbury's "The Murderer"

Hate Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the rest? Ray Bradbury saw it coming seventy years ago.

Nick Russo, They Will Come For Andrew Callaghan // Andrew Callaghan Allegations

I wrote a glowing endorsement of Andrew Callaghan as an establishment-rattling force to be reckoned with // 3 days later, I learned he'd been credibly accused of sexual misconduct.

Mari, the Happy Wanderer, Guilty Pleasures. Not. Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Romance

If you are curious to learn why romance is like horror, or if you would like to read a sweet story about Emma Thompson, or if you would enjoy one photo of a shirtless man and another of Denzel Washington, or if you are just looking for some recommendations for romance novels that range from G-rated stories about dukes all the way to hot and spicy stories of today, this post is for you!

Andrew Zaleski, What Does Wellness Mean When You're Living With an Incurable Disease?
I've written about health for years, but when I was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, staying healthy took on a new meaning.

Adam Nathan, Laughing with Kittens

I'm going full Cassandra on ChatGPT and Generative AI, and you're too busy staring into your phone to hear me.

Zack Morris the Elder, The business model depends upon you living a life glued to your phone

The modern economy is built upon everybody looking at tiny screens for hours a day.

Michael Woudenberg, The Con[of]text - The loss of physical communication in an increasingly digital world

We are imperfect humans, using imprecise language, to communicate incomplete ideas; here are some common pitfalls of text communications so you can avoid the Con[of]text and ensure true Context.

Darrell Hartman, Battle of Ink and Ice

It's about feuding North Pole explorers but equally about the origins of modern media - especially the populist 'yellow' papers versus the conservative 'quality' press of NYC, exemplified by the resurgent NY Times. The main reason I wrote it was because of the many remarkable echoes of today's media landscape and culture wars - which these fur-clad explorers weirdly fit right into.

Mike Pearl, My Eternal Old Man

On pretending an ex-president is immortal to make my own mortality less scary.

Mark Newheiser, The Library of Eristat.

A short fantasy story about a library organized by correspondence with truth, with some titles too dangerous to release; when the librarian's son finally has full access to the library, he discovers a mysterious book that changes the course of his life.

Jonah Davids, How Sad Are Psychologists?

Evaluating the mental health of mental health professionals.

Nethan Reddy, I Teach

Just got hired as a high school special education teacher and this post details the mindset I have going into this work. 

CEBK, The Case Against Civil Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Part One

A deep dive into how unaccountable administrative agencies hijacked civil rights law, and how current AI tools may radically worsen this tendency among power-seeking bureaucrats (whose favored cause area gains attention as its conditions deteriorate, and whose favored ideology justifies the most when it's the least realistic); see the 'stack for part two.

Sarah, Scorpio Sun, Taurus Ascendent

A few years ago, I looked around and realized that I was becoming one of the only women I knew who didn’t publicly identify as a witch.

Amy Letter, Mr Meeseeks in an AI in Pain 

This 2013 Rick and Morty episode has something to say about 2023’s hallucinating AIs.

Nicholas Coccoma, Yellowstone & The Western: The Corruption of an American Film Genre

This terrible, horrible, no good, very bad show destroying America is the most popular series on television. 

Meghan Boilard, The Impossible Task of Understanding Aaron Carter

The first installment of a multi-part series exploring the rabbit hole that was Aaron Carter's reality.

Billy Trout, Anxiety: The Dictator We Elect

A vibrant cross-examination of anxiety disorders and dictatorships, from how they rise to power to how they crumble.

Christopher J Feola, Sadly, Freddie DeBoer is really, really wrong 

Freddie DeBoer writes “the 90s were objectively the Best Time to Be Alive...there wasn’t this constant sense of the world falling apart.”

EXCUSE ME!?! Has everyone forgotten the mass hysteria that was Y2K? People LITERALLY thought civilization was ending with the 90s. In the ensuing panic there was a real estate boom in…wait for it…bomb shelters.

Boz, On Sarcasm

Sarcasm is a scourge and I blame Jon Stewart.

Joe Mayall, Answering the Question: "Don't Business Owners Deserve Profit for Taking All the Risk?"

As the title implies, I provide a Socialist response to the argument that business owners take all the risks of opening a business and therefore should get all of the profits (as opposed to the workers). 

T Scott, Road Trip: Memphis to Tallahassee

We can’t deal with the latest Memphis tragedy without wrestling with the questions that have been banned from Florida classrooms.

Arnold Kling, What Economics (and Sociology) Ought to Be

What students of economics need to unlearn.

Duncan Cary, In Flux

A comparison of the current state of the Miami Heat basketball team as well as our domestic policy under the Biden Administration.

Amod Lele, King's improvement on Gandhi

A scholar of Indian philosophy looks at how Martin Luther King Jr. drew on Mohandas Gandhi's ideas and did Gandhi one better.

Christine Axsmith, Sex, Power and True Crime

"True crime” isn’t entertainment, it is about women and power.

Sasha Breger Bush, February 17, 2023: Global News Roundup

Global energy crisis grinds on—geopolitics, natural gas markets, and the Nord Stream pipelines.

Spencer Brooks, Redeeming The Artichoke

A brief essay on the many downsides of the artichoke and how, in the 1950s, an Italian man discovered a superior way to prepare it. 

Sasha Chapin, 5-MeO-DMT, a Review by a Concerned Customer

I discover that the fabled toad medicine, which brought Mike Tyson inner peace at last, can bliss you out, but also blow apart your consciousness and leave you reassembling your mind for weeks.

Austin James, What if Democracy has just gotten too big?

Problems with hyper-scale governments, and a look back to the roots of human government for some possible solutions.

Josh off the Press, My Mother's 8th Heavenly Birthday

This is a post celebrating my Mother's 8th Heavenly Birthday. While she got sick too young, and died too soon, I would be wrong to say she cheated me out of time.  All she ever did was make time for me.

Trevor Williams, Roll Tide and War Eagle

Observations from a New Englander on College Football in Alabama.

Michelle Federico, The Internet Has Turned Us Into the ChatGPT of "Takes"

Explaining the lack of true political understanding and intellectual development in modern debate and activism by comparing the way we form opinions and express takes to how machine learning bots like GPT learn to put their responses together.

Arch Morrison, Penn’s Woods

Strange events start to occur as a young man drives aimlessly through the woods after work.

Rob Moura, Deerhunter Were My First Queer Salve

I wrote a personal retrospective on the band Deerhunter and its latent role as a queer-fronted act.

Allison Hewitt Ward, Post-Conceptualism to Neo-Surrealism, Postscript

As contemporary art finds itself in a crisis of quality, recent public art fumbles — Boston's MLK tangle and New York's courthouse demon goddess — conjure an anemic and far from liberatory pastiche of Surrealism. 

Frederick Prete, Women Don’t Produce Eggs

A comical but informative take on a high school biology teacher's claim that "women" don't produce eggs.

Valerie Tarico, Abortion isn’t the Only Part of Women’s Healthcare That Just Lost Half a Century

The best way to reduce unmet need for abortion is to reduce need for abortion; but to avoid any hint of influence, the left is violating normal medical best practices and undermining patient knowledge about trustworthy contraceptives. 

Matthew McFarlane, White Noise Stayed True to the Book. That Might Be Why it's Such a Mediocre Film.

Critics who said Don Delillo's masterpiece was unfilmable may have been right.

Luke T. Harrington, A sonnet about the Florida Skunk Ape

A meditation on virtue, mortality, and a smelly cryptid.

Alex Wallace - Ten Years Later

I contributed a short story to this science fiction anthology whose proceeds go to Ukrainian refugee relief.

Cade Stuart, Why Isn't Nuclear Power More Common?

An analysis of anti-nuclear power arguments and an argument for its expansion.

Sam Mace, Politics as a Feeling

The piece argues that our rationalisation of politics and attempts to control political movements are fundamentally flawed.

Gregory Pettys, Hiareth

Confessions of an educational hitman.

Matt Farquharson of Typical Man, A Man's Guide to Miscarriage

A personal take on five 'inviable foetuses'.

Max Nussenbaum, The Space Between Careers and Hobbies

Why we should create space for a third kind of "work" in our lives and minds.

Piers Eaton, The Banality of Twitter

An exploration of propaganda, not as deceitful rhetoric, but rather as a failure to think at all, and how this plays out on social media.

Andy Boenau, 15-minute cities are either for lockdowns or liberations
A real-life James Bond villain endorsed good urbanism ideas, and the sky fell.

Kody Cava, They Will Not Return

A poem about how labor exploitation and environmental degradation affects all of us generationally.

Richard Massey, The Band Nerds vs. the Ku Klux Klan

In 1987, my high school marching band was at a football game in the Southeast Texas stronghold of the KKK, and beneath the Friday night lights, we did the best we could – with our drumline and brass section, we blew the Klan right out of their own stadium.

Alicia Kenworthy, Confessions of a Restaurant Hostess

Reflections on what it was like working at a popular restaurant in my 20s that asked for -- if not flare, something flare-adjacent.

Jonathan Schneiderman, The Miller's Fun

A consideration, hovering between rigorous academic analysis and belle-lettrisme, of how much Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of carnival describes Geoffrey Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" (not very) and why it matters (the tale is saturated with a familiar and distinctly non-Bakhtinian brand of hollow cruelty).

First Toil, then the Grave, Medium-Sized Breasts and Gaussian Distributions

Do modern identities originate from a misunderstanding of how psychological traits are sorted?

Dive Bar Blues, Is It Possible To Have A Society Without Hatred? 

An examination of humanity and hatred, using "Lord of the Flies" and "Candide" as reference points. 

McJunker, Sekhmet the Warrior

Previously published in my short story collection Fifty Short Horrors under the pen name Jim Schauter (available on Amazon Kindle), this short story was dedicated to my wife, whose beloved cat Jackson died just days before I wrote it for her.

Nick Ottens, Abolish the NHS

Britain has the worst health care in Europe. It's time to change the system.

Matt Saccaro, How Much Does an MFA Cost?

On the surface a post about how I paid for an MFA with cryptocurrency, but really a personal essay about what it was like to work in the media industry for 11 years amidst the progeny of incomprehensible wealth.

Conrad Spectacle, Stranger Things and the Cul de Sac of Nostalgia 

A blog post I wrote a couple of years ago in which I compare my own late 80's/early 90's childhood to the rather more glamorous depictions of the same period from pop culture, and pontificate on the nature of nostalgia.

Aaron Murphy, Doing Nothing.

Freedom is not a prescription. 

Daniel T (Technopoptimism), Empyrrhical Evidence

A case study on how winning and losing aren’t as different as we think they are.

Rebecca Eydeland, Failing upward with inspiration from Ross Ulbricht, Moses, Anne Lamott

A discussion on the intersection between the Healing Road and the darknet website, Silk Road.

Wabi Sabi, Narcissism and Validity 

Vanity and neediness share a cause; they also share a solution. 

Alex Olshonsky, Seven Years Drug and Alcohol Free 

I believe recovery is as individual as it is collective: something meant to be shared, something meant to be celebrated.

Samantha Hedges, Socializing Parents

A take on how current trends dominate parenting, along with the fear of judgement and shaming.

Tipper Raddle, Privacy and the Narcissism of Small Differences 

How an erosion of personal privacy has fueled societal divisions.

radical edward, Videogame criticism needs to grow up

Discussing biased journalism and access journalism in order to understand the controversies surrounding Hogwarts Legacy.

Renyasco, In Which the Wordage Used is the Appropriate Wordage

I resolve to quit Benadryl, review a message from the borough commissioner, and reflect on the sources of my art. 

Lewis Roberts, Lessons Learned From the Ohio Train Derailment

The federal government intervened to settle a labor dispute and the consequences have been worse than we expected.

Klaus, The Search for the Missing English Cognates

Where are the English versions of "wissen" and "wohnen," and why is the conjugation "to be" so weird?

itsnotmyfault, No Bad Cards

On the brewer's ethos, and finding value in unlikely places.

Benji Mahaffey, The Ordering of Things, Vol. III: Simple Human

A new father's misadventures co-parenting with Amazon's Alexa, 21st-century beta-male nesting, and a diaper pail that became a psychic window into the banal domestic life of an infamous atheist podcaster.

Damian Penny, A national divorce is right around the corner, and always will be

A Canadian, who's lived for decades with part of his country threatening to secede, marvels at some Americans who want to import that problem to their own nation.

Kevin Daley, Sadie’s Alley

A very short story about a man who walks his dog.

Richard Amico, Revisiting Mad Men's "The Crash"

Mad Men's season six episode "The Crash" is a reminder that television used to be pretty interesting not so long ago.

Barrett Hathcock, On Giving Up

Shameful short essay about finally giving up Twitter.

J.R. Leonard at Dutch Comfort, Things that Work are Just Things that Have Yet to Break

Some thoughts on "brokenism."

Jeremiah, A Cautionary Tale

Documentation of a new type of advance fee scam which cost some friends of mine hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Education Realist, The Problems With Accountability

We don't really hold students accountable. When we tried....well, we quit trying.

Nigel Bernard, That one time I helped cover up police misconduct

The biggest problem with police abuse is just how banal and forgettable it all is, which I think this personal story illustrates rather well.