Young Adult Novels, Starring Various Pundits, That I Made Up

Matt Yglesias & the Legend of Big Muggy. Everyone’s favorite contrarian blogger searches for a mythical giant turtle in the Amazon, risking life and limb in his quest to bring sensible centrism to cryptid zoology. Under assignment from a mysterious new thinktank, our hero travels to the rainforest in search of the legendary beast. Dogged by radical climate activists, libertarian seasteaders making a go of it on the world’s largest river, and a mercenary team sent by the Brookings Institution to secure Big Muggy’s DNA, Yglesias seeks to chart a common sense middle path using the power of reason and a keyboard, with the Holy Market as his guide. His only allies on this journey are his translator/father Rafael, who to Matt’s considerable angst has converted to Maoism; a dog-eared copy of The Good Society, signed by David Broder for some reason; and his snarky socialist Gen Z research assistant Renata, who’s being paid only in college credit. Can Matt survive in the sweaty expanses of darkest South America, dodging extremism on both sides, to chart a path forward for pragmatic Muggy governance? The last reasonable man is risking it all to find out the the truth about the jungle’s last myth.

Taylor Lorenz & the Bad Witch Switch. Taylor Lorenz has been planning her Halloween look since August. The hat, the cape, the just-right amount of edge… she’s documented every step of the process across seventeen Instagram stories, three TikToks, and a 900-word Substack post titled “What My Costume Says About Where Internet Culture Is Headed.” But when she arrives at school on October 30th and spots her best friend Cassie in an identical sexy witch outfit, Taylor does what she always does when something important is happening: she takes out her phone and starts reporting. What begins as a simple costume conflict quickly spirals into a sprawling investigation of friend group dynamics, the unwritten rules of social media, and whether it’s ethical to doxx your own best friend for journalistic purposes. Along the way, Taylor will learn that not every interpersonal conflict is a story, that sources deserve protection even when they’re standing right in front of you at your locker, and that sometimes - just sometimes - you have to put the phone down and actually talk to someone.

Ross Douthat, Class President, Monster High School. Ross did not expect to be very popular, as the only human at Monster High School. And yet the vampires are too busy feuding with each other over ancient grudges to organize a coherent campaign; the werewolves have energy but no message discipline; the witches keep hexing their own coalition meetings; Frankenstein keeps running out of electricity in the middle of his stump speech; and the zombie bloc, well, where to begin! Winning office at Monster High School, Ross realizes, is not so different from winning a regional Republican primary. Armed with a sensible platform, a firm handshake, a genuine belief that institutions exist for a reason, and his handy crucifix, Ross discovers that Monster High School doesn’t need a monster for class president - it just needs someone boring enough to actually read the bylaws. Sometimes the scariest thing in the room is a reasonable guy with a plan.

Ezra’s First Date. Young Ezra Klein has read twelve books about attachment theory, listened to forty-seven hours of podcast interviews with leading relationship scientists, and written a 2,000-word personal essay about the systemic failures of modern dating… and he hasn’t even asked anyone out yet. But when the new girl Sophia transfers into his AP Economics class and mentions, casually, that she thinks housing policy is “kind of interesting,” something shifts. Ezra knows that feeling! He’s read about that feeling. He has strong structural explanations for why that feeling exists and what social conditions produced it. What he doesn’t have is any idea what to do about it. With the help of his Zoomer podcast producer, who keeps telling him to “just text her,” Ezra must navigate the terrifying, inefficient, and deeply under-theorized world of teenage romance, a world with no peer-reviewed literature, no expert guests, and no opportunity to reframe the question. Will Ezra finally let himself feel something without first convening a panel about it? Will Sophia say yes? And will he please, please stop sending her longform explainers about why they’re a good match? Some things can’t be optimized. But that won’t stop Ezra from trying.

Glenn Greenwald & the Last Puppy. The governments fell. The institutions crumbled. The surveillance apparatus - which Glenn had been warning everyone about for decades, not that anyone ever listens! - turned out to be the least of humanity’s problems. Now, in the ash-gray ruins of what was once Western civilization, only one thing of value remains: a small, frightened Golden puppy named Civil Libby, the last known dog on Earth. Glenn has him, and Glenn will keep him, and Glenn does not care who you are or what flag you’re flying - state actor, rogue militia, or concerned NGO with suspiciously well-funded “humanitarian” objectives - if you come for this puppy, he will publish everything he knows about you. Hunted across three continents, filing dispatches the whole way on a hand-cranked Substack terminal, Glenn must decide how far he’s willing to go to protect the one institution he’s never questioned, dog ownership. The answer, it turns out, is quite far. Some call it extremism. Glenn calls it journalism.

Detective Dictionary Demsas and the Clockwork Conundrum. The kids at Maplewood Middle School know: when something’s wrong, they need Detective Jerusalem “Dictionary” Demsas. Jerusalem runs her private investigator operation out of a three-ring binder she calls The Case File, which is organized by subject, cross-referenced by date, and contains a surprisingly sophisticated index. When the school’s beloved old clocktower disappears overnight and Principal Campbell claims it was hurting “the neighborhood’s character,” Jerusalem smells institutional failure. It has the same scent as every other institutional failure: something that seemed inevitable in retrospect but was actually the result of many small, unaccountable decisions made by people who faced no consequences for making them. Armed with a library card, a podcast recorder, and an unshakeable belief that the boring procedural explanation is almost always the correct one, Jerusalem follows the paper trail - the zoning variance, the anonymous complaint, the suspicious community meeting where only six people showed up but somehow thirty signatures appeared. She’s out for justice, and no property value-protecting homeowner is going to get in her way. The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed… and that’s the problem.

Breaking Points: Battle Royale. The Capitol has many names. The corrupt have many faces. But everyone knows the rules: each year, one populist from the left and one populist from the right are thrown into the arena together, forced to survive not only the elements but the mainstream media commentators who circle the perimeter, whispering that they’re “not serious people.” Saagar enters the arena with a hunting knife, a firm conviction about the decline of the American working class, and a surprisingly detailed knowledge of military history that keeps coming in handy. Krystal enters with a slingshot, a Wall Street short-seller’s instinct for spotting weakness, and absolutely zero patience for anyone who tells her what she’s supposed to think. They disagree on nearly everything, but they agree, completely, that the game itself is rigged - by the donors, the consultants, the think tanks, and by the suspiciously well-dressed man from the centrist PAC who keeps appearing at the edge of the forest offering “bipartisan solutions.” Together, they fight. Together, they broadcast. And when they finally corner the architect of the whole corrupt system, they do the only thing that feels right: they turn the cameras on, and they go live. The revolution may not be on cable. But it’s gonna have pretty good streaming numbers.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Derek Thompson. Derek Thompson has a lot of questions. About the economy. About technology. About why certain things become popular and other things don’t. About whether remote work is actually good or whether everyone has been thinking about it wrong. About the future of cities. About whether the thing everyone believes about productivity is, in fact, supported by the data. About whether the conventional wisdom is true… or all wrong. He’s been writing them down in a journal since he was twelve, and over time it’s become less of a diary and more of a lightly-sourced encyclopedia-length essay addressed to a God who Derek suspects would, if pressed, have some genuinely interesting things to say about the labor market. As Derek navigates the bewildering landscape of eighth grade (the cliques, the confusion, the dawning awareness that most people are operating on vibes rather than evidence) he finds himself returning, again and again, to the same desperate nightly prayer: “Are you there, God? Have you seen the latest jobs report? Because I have, and I have some thoughts, and I’ve prepared three alternative interpretations and a chart, and it might seem counterintuitive at first, but….” Growing up is complicated. But with enough data, Derek believes, it’ll all make sense.