Soundtrack: Lynyrd Skynyrd — Free Bird
This piece is over 19,000 words, and took me a great deal of writing and research. If you liked it, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’
It’s surprisingly tricky to define “religion,” and that’s good thing
A mural at St. Andrews-Wesley United Church in Vancouver showing the ending of the Noah’s Ark story as if it happened on a BC Ferry. The word “religion” does a a lot of heavy lift…
Bari Weiss and David Ellison Threaten to Sue the Internet
On Sunday evening, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss killed a 60 Minutes segment about men deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison—a story that had been screened five times, cleared by CBS attorneys, cleared by Standards and Practices, and was scheduled to air in less than three hours.
I keep trying to think of a cool or interesting introduction to this newsletter, and keep coming back to how fucking weird everything is getting.
Two days ago, cloud stalwart Oracle crapped its pants in public, missing on analyst revenue estimates and revealing it spent (to quote Matt Zeitlin of
If Fear Built These Systems, Imagination Can Replace Them - Interaction Institute for Social Change
Notes from Race Forward’s Just Narratives for Multiracial Solidarity 2025 Years ago, in my first nonprofit communications role, a colleague asked me why I was shaping my work around what the system allowed (what I thought was “realistic”), instead of imagining a system that actually served us. That question changed everything for me. At Race... Read More
The twentieth century was marked by rapid technological advancements and population growth, never seen before in the history of humans. It was also a century where creativity reached new heights, especially ideologically speaking. One of these political experiments was the creation of Yugoslavia. It is a country that no longer exists; however, nostalgia for it...
Radical Technology and Neighborhood Power At Reason (“The Anarchist and the Republican,” April 13), Jesse Walker writes of a period in the 1970s when an Old Rightist speechwriter for Barry Goldwater turned New Leftist (Karl Hess), and a Nixon Republican and future Reagan speechwriter (John McClaughry), could reach unlikely consensus around values like worker self-management...
American Classmates Having Difficulty Understanding Better Educated Foreign Exchange Student
SACRAMENTO, CA—Addressing the glaringly obvious cultural and linguistic differences that have become apparent in their American classroom, students at Anderson Valley High School admitted Thursday that they were experiencing difficulty understanding Timo Mäkinen, a far more thoroughly educated foreign exchange student visiting from Finland. “I feel bad because Timo is new to this country and we want him to feel welcome, but every time he speaks, the class gets lost in about five seconds because of the thoroughly informed, nuanced concepts he shares,” Anderson Valley principal Alexis Howard said of Mäkinen, whose nation avoids the almost useless practice of regular standardized testing and pays for the mandatory Masters education required of all Finnish teachers. “He always raises his hand respectfully while participating in class discussions, talks about countries the students have never heard of, and tries to help other students with the basics of math and science, but they just get confused. He even sticks out at lunch because he doesn’t eat hot dogs and cafeteria pizza. Timo’s polite about it, but he just sticks to vegetables and yogurt. And it doesn’t help that kids say it’s really hard to understand what he’s talking about due to his precise English diction and extensive vocabulary.” Howard remains hopeful that she could still make Mäkinen feel at home, as they were slated to spend time hiding in the same room during next week’s school shooting lockdown drill.
Pluralistic: America’s collapsing consumption is the world’s disenshittification opportunity (16 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
