Subscriber Writing, March 2026
Hello folks! Here’s the latest bimonthly roundup of writing written by subscribers, for the month of March 2026. Readers, please take a little time and see if any of these descriptions appeals to you. I’ve discovered so much great writing through these roundups, and many who submit things report that they’ve meaningfully grown their audience this way. If you aren’t a subscriber and you want to take part in this opportunity in May, you know what to do. Be kind in the comments, far kinder than you feel you have to be with me.
Thank you for your patience, waiting an extra week for this - this past weekend we celebrated my son’s first birthday, and the party was a lot of work. But just look at the little guy.
On with the show.
Luke T. Harrington, 8 thoughts on playing Donkey Kong: Bananza with your autistic daughter
Some thoughts on autism, physical strength, C. S. Lewis, and also that smashy monkey game
Nigel Writes a Blog, I’m Done with Being Done with My Phone
For me, there’s no peace to be found in going fully off-line. There just isn’t.
Adam Rosen, In Search of Lost Monsters
A review of the experimental novella Krackle’s Last Movie by Chelsea Sutton.
Nick Barone, Review of Fabrice Bensimon’s Artisans Abroad: British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe, 1815–1870
Review of a book about the migratory patterns of working-class Britons to continental Europe at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
CA Grawl, Smoothie
I’m just like everyone else, really. I brush my teeth twice a day. I ride my hovercar to work five days a week. And every year on my birthday, a new eye emerges somewhere along my body.
Mark Newheiser, Detective Manse and the Infohazardous Basilisk
A sci-fi/cosmic horror short story about a confrontation across time with Roko’s Basilisk, an AI thought experiment once considered an Infohazard too dangerous to discuss.
Mari, the Happy Wanderer, Scenic Overlook
Photos and stories from Prague and Switzerland, a theory about why dog-owners live longer, and an unexpectedly profound moment at a traffic light all inspire us to take a moment to take in the view.
Barry Goldman, Incompleteness and Its Discontents
A riff on Godel, AI, ethics, labor arbitration and internal medicine
Trevor Jackson, The Men Who Sold the World
When the EPA stops regulating fossil fuel emissions and revises down the official value of human life, we could call it market failure and externalities, or we could call it capitalist sabotage.
Luke Allen, Of Course America is Anti-Family
We need to move the pro-family vs anti-family debate out of the cultural sphere and into the world of material and practical policy.
A.W. Martin, An Abuse of Nazi History
No, proportional representation was not responsible for the end of the Weimar Republic.
Erica Etelson, Why MAGA-shaming doesn’t work
Shaming and scorning people makes them double-down on their pre-existing beliefs. This is a well-documented psychological dynamic that Resistance liberals would do well to heed.
Katerina Grishakova, Euclid Alone
A serialized novel about a classic rock gig player who gets elected mayor of Atlantic City
David Roberts, Blinded By the Light
My experiences with celebrities and the downsides of fame. Starts with the time Christie Brinkley borrowed my phone after a gathering with then president Bill Clinton.
Cole Healy, I’m Terrified of my Niece
A newborn in my life made me understand fear and trembling, so I wrote about why I thought it was beautiful her dad kept saying he was afraid of her.
Amod Sandhya Lele, Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of Musk and Manson
Being certain about your experience doesn’t make you right.
Mike McGibbon, A Lesson For AI Tutors
Silicon Valley wants to create AI tutors, based on the gold standard: 1-to-1 human tutors. But have we ever studied the very best tutors?
Old Mole, Does socialism abolish private property?
Social ownership of the means of production does not abolish private property.
Christopher J Feola, Military Journalism is the Jumbo Shrimp of Media
The last time the Pentagon took editorial control of Stars & Stripes I got banned from the Pacific Rim
Brent Lucia After AI: Taste, Timing and the New Human Advantage
My essay argues that fears of AI replacing human work overlook a key shift: as AI automates production, human value will increasingly lie in taste, judgment, craftsmanship, and timing—the ability to evaluate quality, shape meaning, and communicate effectively in real-world contexts.
Jimmy Nicholls, The alt right can’t write pop music
On the low quality of MAGA’s artistic endeavours
Nicholai Roscoe, Rick Rubin Loses His Mojo
A comedy short about The Creative Act: A Way of Being.
Iain Carlos and Sam Carlen Prosecutor’s Chicago gang investigation ended in disaster. Then she became evidence gatekeeper
Former federal prosecutor Erika Csicsila spearheaded Operation Snake Doctor. In the wake of the investigation’s overturned convictions and civil rights lawsuits, she tried to block disclosure.
Alex, A blog-shaped peg in a social media-shaped hole
A blog post about the evolution of social media, from the blogging era to Bluesky.
SandraMiller, Fern
“She knew they called her Funny Fern. Never to her face, but still she knew.
‘No one means any harm,’ her brother Avery reassured her.”
Cody Cimbal, Tether to the Earth
A post is about how the influence of society (and social media) is setting up young men to equate attention with meaning.
Cole Patrick Murphy, Only if you Believe
A short story about a man consoling his son while air raid sirens sound.
Karen Karason, Something New
A personal essay about the silencing of mental illness, both self-silencing and others’ silencing, and how one mother realizes her own silencing, both of herself and her daughter.
Tony Bozanich, My Favorite Weird Sightseeing
Some places to see after you’ve seen all the main attractions
Chris, A Ghost is a Memory
A brief meditation on grief, memory, and the nature of ghosts.
Michael Celentana, What The Music Knows Before We Do
Or: A Meditation on Schoenberg, Tom McGah, and Whatever the Algorithm Just Served You
Ahmed Ahmed, Who Owns the Founding? Akhil Reed Amar’s Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution
A review of Akhil Reed Amar’s Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, an incisive history of politics in the antebellum era.
Foreign policy often operates through a Bootleggers and Baptists dynamic, where self-interested actors pursue strategic gains while moral or ideological narratives provide the public justification.
Hal Johnson, The most annoying thing ever made
Using science, I tracked down the peak of human annoyingness (ca. 1995; I’m sure there’s been worse since).
Barrett Hathcock, Airports should be silent
Time to play the quiet game for keeps
Brian Howard, The Worst Purchase in the History of Capitalism
Raise your hand if you ever had to put together your own snow shovel.
Bram E. Gieben, Hypercapitalism and its Discontents
On rising political violence, surveillance capitalism and Ted Kaczynski.
Eric Dezenhall, `YOUR Daughters Are Fair Game
What Jeffrey Epstein’s crowd was really after. Hint: it wasn’t girls.
Whitney Sha, Acting Out and Acting In
Two traditions in American film and how they intersect with the popular reception of psychoanalysis.
Adam Whybray, How to survive as a substitute teacher
Some advice on surviving as a subtitute teacher in the UK which might give people who are not subtitute teachers or in the education sector in the UK some insights into how it is (in the public sphere at least).
Josiah Duran, How to Make Egg Noodles
And, surprisingly, I actually do explain how to make egg noodles.
Warren Tusk, The Goetist
A wisdom book in the shape of a sorcerous rite. A man conjures a demon, and bids it teach him how to live; its answers take the form of poetic essays, in the style of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.
Ryan Self, Contempt, Common Ground and The Coddling of the American Mind
A former Obama speechwriter tries to find common ground with a family member, but only displays contempt. Chris Cillizza coddles him.
Nicholas McDonaldr, A Post-Mortem on the Christian Film Industry
Some Reflections on Kevin Sorbo’s Latest Godsploitation Film.
Kristina Usaite, Forbidden Love in Ukraine
In Ukraine, there was no place for the love I felt — only fear. Until I fled.
Nigel Bowen It’s your time to shine, highly disagreeable contrarians
There’s rarely been a greater need for those willing to bear the social costs of championing inconvenient truths
Elena Trueba, child bride Elsie Dinsmore
A reconsideration of a classic children’s series in light of the legality of child marriage in the U.S. and the Epstein files
Kody Cava, Psychosis Is Killing Us
An argument for involuntary commitment of psychotics against those who downplay and fundamentally misunderstand psychotic violence
Dirk Hohnstraeter, Learning from Palantir?
Forward-deployed engineers as a model for the humanities
Samuél Lopez-Barrantes, RAËLIAN BODIES
A UFO cult shows you the City of Light
T.J. Elliott, Chasing The Dead: Adventures in Amateur Genealogy
Top of FormBottom of FormA decades long pursuit of facts and stories about my ancestors as epistemology
Hannibal Lector Ávido,Abundance & Red Plenty
In the first entry of a series of semi-regular paired book reviews, I consider two very different visions of a future free from the suffering of scarcity: the dorky optimism of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance alongside Francis Spufford’s semi-fictional dramatization of the socialist calculation debate Red Plenty.
Sean Vernon, On Being a Bat
Summary and criticism of Thomas Nagel’s seminal article What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
Patrizia, The Sister Wives of the Quaint and Scenic Hudson Valley: Chapter 6
“They stashed me in what must once have been a servant’s room back when the mansion was first built in the 1880s, with a steeply sloped ceiling, scarcely big enough to fit a cot. It was oppressively hot. I’d always been a restless sleeper, tossing and turning on the king-sized mattress in my apartment….”
Tanner Gesek, Help Me, I’m Starving: Some comments on psychosis
A primer on psychosis – what it is, how it works, and why it matters
Hubert Horan, Understanding the LLM Bubble
After summarizing the overwhelming evidence of an LLM bubble the article focuses on the largely ignored questions of how this trillion-dollar capital misallocation was created and sustained, and why the alignment of powerful supporting groups will make correcting this misallocation far more difficult than any previous bubble. Since OpenAI faced the same challenge Uber faced—creating bubble level enthusiasm for a company that is hemorrhaging cash and cannot explain how they could ever achieve their fundamental technological promises (e.g. profitably dominate car services worldwide; fully achieve AGI by 2028), they have followed the Uber’s narrative-based playbook on a copy/paste basis.
The Ivy Exile, An Exile Looks at 40
A Columbia University whistleblower looks at the agony and the ecstasy of being 40, both living my best life professionally and taking care of my dying mother.
Steven Aoun, Bearing Witness
On the naive realism of citizen journalism, or seeing the world through our own filters (George Floyd, Renee Good, Alex Pretti et al).
Will Wilder at Books Worth Reading, Is the most hyped novel of the year actually any good?
My review of the book everyone is talking about
Brian Leli, LLMs Are Antithetical to Writing and Humanity
Where will the incipient use of LLMs as tools for writing and human inquiry lead us? There’s good reason to doubt that it will be to our triumph or our doom. But there’s plenty of fraught and dismal territory in-between, and we would do well to scrutinize it now rather than later—lest we become a culture of human copies copying copies of LLM copies copying copies of human copies copying copies, ad infinitum.
Dr. Dana Leigh Lyons, DTCM, I Am Never Upset for the Reason I Think
After freezing in a group conversation where I knew something was wrong but couldn’t find my voice, I began to look more closely at what was actually beneath my anger.
Matthew Clayfield, Psytrance for people who can’t be bothered to dance to it
How I spent New Year’s Eve doing a supposedly fun thing that I didn’t even want to do the first time. Additionally, how I came to own half a camel.
Kate Clanchy, Literal Violence The inside story of the 2021 cancellation that ripped the UK literary establishment apart. Names names, makes jokes.
Samuel M. Jay, The Thing AI Didn’t Break But Definitely Exposed
AI didn’t break assessment in higher education; rather, it has made our long-standing failures to reliably measure student learning impossible to ignore. This piece argues that those with the most to lose and the least margin for error can’t afford to wait for someone else to solve it first.
Sara Eckel, Today Will Be My Peaceful Day
Does it help to show compassion to those who would shoot me in the face?
John D. Zhang, false witness
A young man’s changing relationship to his father leads him to reconsider fundamental narratives about his life.
Robyn Duncan Keith,Mousey Come Home
A young family navigates a mice infestation in their home.
Stephen Skolnick, Freddie de Boer, Please Let Me Sequence Your Gut Microbiome
Another attempt to get this in front of your eyes. [Ominous! - ed.]
Samantha Hedges, In Honor of Dr. Seuss, Read a Banned Book
Dr. Seuss’ best book is no longer published because the censors got their way, but, to celebrate his birthday, you should read it anyway.
Meghan Boilard, Scott Adams and the Art of Dying (and Living Forever) Online
On livestreaming terminal illness, AI-generated bereavement, and prospects of digital progeny
Rain Oliver, The Ones Who Walk Towards Omelas
Writing a happy ending to the classic story because I’m a toxic optimist.
Eric Stinton, Looking Into the Wind
On the wind, loneliness, and what it means to belong.
Mazin Saleem, Less is memento mori
From Alan Moore to Alex Garland and back again, cult UK artists search for the meaning of love via the living dead
Christopher Burgess, Just a Phase
I’m a stay-at-home dad who writes unsentimentally about modern parenting. This one is about my toddler learning to walk before she learned to think.
Imi, The Insomnia Plague
On restlessness, identity, and the two minds we learn to live with
Jon Busch, The Dude Abides
Discovering the wisdom of Ecclesiastes in The Big Lebowski
Mitch Bogen, Seven Arguments for Political Non-Attachment
Some thoughts in favor of taking a step back.
John Brundage, Not Even God Could Win This Game
You understand intellectually that you couldn’t win a chess championship, but you’re still massively delusional about your chances if you haven’t dedicated years to studying the game.
Alex Dabertin, Quaint Under the Stereoscope
My Hometown
Tom Berry, The Monk
A story about a boy who wanted to be a monk.
Rosanne Ullman, pangram
Flash fiction story about family communication.
Jack Rathmell, How the Rhino Lost His Horn: Cautionary Tales from Appalachia to Africa
With college - and a mountain of debt - approaching, Jack breaks free from small-town America and heads off to Africa to save the children (the oldest trick in the aspiring do-gooder/gap-year-taker’s playbook). Things don’t quite go to plan; nevertheless, his adventures Cape Town teach him all about how people, politics, and power work in the real world.
A Locked Room, Tactical Morality... Is No Morality At All
Is No Morality At All
Tom Barrie, On rawdogging David Foster Wallace
In 2026, the ability to concentrate on something dense and difficult is a practically magical power.
Esther Berry, A Vague Feeling of Unease Will Be the Last Thing You Remember
An essay defending the fragile moral intuitions that tell us not to sell our souls to AI technology
Jeff DeLisle, Marking the Retirement of a Physician
A Poem about the labor and difficulties encountered by a physician as he reflects on his career in medicine
Alexander Kaplan, Consolation
Formal verse about the death of a child and whether art can solace us in such situations.
Daniel Fetz, Mini Cities
minicities.org is an ongoing exploration of whether a permanent miniature city could replace school. I think it might, but the questions are endless: Does a miniature city need a police force? Why are all the existing miniature cities only temporary summer programs? Does the boundary between the miniature city and the adult world around it have to be deliberately porous to avoid becoming monotonous?
Etana Edelman You Probably Didn’t Have An Eating Disorder in the 2000s
A massive unnecessary nitpick
Christopher Jay Jones, Let’s be Cartoonists
Can’t draw but you have great ideas for cartoons for The New Yorker? AI to the rescue
The Civil Beast, Canvassing the Suburban Ayatollah
Recollections of a suburban canvass during the start of a deadly war
Jarrett Horne, Surgeon At War
Discovering my grandfather’s service as surgeon in WW2; featuring dodging kamikazes, Purple Hearts, why the US nuked Japan, and performing surgery for 30 hours straight in a 4-foot basement while under artillery fire.
Wabi Sabi, Self-Love: The Ultimate Silver Bullet
A lot of our most persistent hangups can’t be resolved, only tackled indirectly via blanket self-acceptance.
Aaron Wright Miller Wright Miller
There’s more to surviving than not having died. I think not being quiet is part of it too. Anyway: He’s dead and I’m not, and that means I win, and that means I get to tell the story.
Genevieve Conaty, Carry Yourself With the Confidence of a Generational-Talent Puerto Rican Man
An essay exploding the utility of the phrase Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man via three key moments in the life of Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Andrew Berg, Unlimited Housing Would Literally Be Hell–According to C.S. Lewis
Americans need to (re)learn how to live near each other.
Husr, Conquest of Avalon
A series of fantasy novels where the protagonists work at cross purposes in a modernizing world.
Eva Sylwester, Weekend Entertainment Guide 3/7/26
Bride of Charlie by Candace Owens epitomizes Mercury Retrograde in Pisces
Hanifesto, Feminization and Its Discontents
An article addressing the debate about the Great Feminization and the male drift problem
SCHPSYCH, Death Alone
An episodic fiction about a young man, AI, and regret.
Happy Birthday lil guy! Freddie I am fully in favor of your letting that person analyse your poop, if that's the kind of thing you accept public input on.
Thank you for sharing my odd little autofiction. Honored to be included. Can't wait to parse through the other pieces!