Thompson now had the recipe for his journalism career, and it involved three conceptual breakthroughs.
- The story behind the story is the real story.
- The writer is now the hero of each episode.
- All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.
Why couldn’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson.
But it grows tired and predictable in the hands of today’s imitators — and the Gonzo King never invited either of those modifiers. Yes, blogs and Substacks are part of his legacy, formats that blur the line between diary, confession, and journalism. But he did it before all the rest, not as a desktop publisher — instead putting his life at risk on the road with total fear and loathing.
So if Substack is the grandchild of Hunter Thompson and New Journalism, it is a tame, well-behaved descendant — and nothing like its brave forebear, who kept going full speed without a helmet until the end.
Even the reader has to run to keep up.
Ted Gioia, “The Rise and Fall of Hunter Thompson (Part 2 of 3)”, The Honest Broker, 2025-09-08.
December 10, 2025
QotD: The “rules” of Gonzo journalism
September 28, 2025
The beginning woodworker … an easy mark
On his Substack, Christopher Schwarz posts a weekly “earlywood” article pulled from his extensive back-catalogue of woodworking books and magazine articles. This week, he addresses the plight of the beginner in the woodworking hobby just before the internet became ubiquitous:
When people begin woodworking, most go through a phase (I did) in which they are willing to soak up every single piece of information they can find. Many will subscribe to multiple woodworking magazines, buy astonishing numbers of woodworking books, seek out catalogs and advertisements for woodworking tools, and buy anything they can afford that looks remotely useful.
This is when people are vulnerable. They need guidance. Unfortunately, woodworking is a mostly solitary pursuit. And so we spend incredible, astonishing and shocking amounts of money on equipment, books and instruction. And most of it is of questionable worth.
Because of this phenomenon:
- The woodworking magazine business had a glut of magazines. When we ran the numbers in the 1990s, we surmised that there should be three magazines serving woodworkers. Instead, there were more: Fine Woodworking, WOOD, American Woodworker, Woodsmith, Shopnotes, Workbench, Popular Woodworking, Woodworker’s Journal, Woodshop News, Woodcraft, Weekend Woodcrafts, Woodwork and a host of specialized magazines. What propped up these magazines? Beginners. Eventually, most woodworkers winnow their subscriptions down to one or two magazines. But the spendthrift beginner made it possible for many magazines to survive.1
- The woodworking book industry produced a glut of books. In the 1990s, my mailbox was stuffed with new woodworking books every week. It wasn’t unusual to see seven or eight new woodworking titles in a month. That’s coo-coo. Why did this work? New woodworkers wanted the latest information. New books are better than old books (duh!). And so publishers churned out books that had an 18-month life cycle before disappearing forever.2
- The woodworking tool industry thrives on new SKUs. After covering woodworking tool manufacturers for nearly three decades, it’s obvious that they introduce new products every year to goose sales. That’s why you have a new crop of cordless drill/drivers every year. And it’s also why you have a rash of odd products that seem (on the surface) to be innovative – silicone glue brushes, painter’s pyramids, many router table jigs, marrying a chisel with a rasp, aluminum squares, putting a laser on everything, oddball and worthless sanders (the Black & Decker Mouse; Porter-Cable Profile Sanders), and battery-powered clamps and tape measures. The list is endless, and it’s not a modern phenomenon. When my grandfather was woodworking in the 1970s, he was charmed by a jig that let you cut dovetails with a corded drill. The only people who are dumb enough to fall for these products are beginners and woodworking journalists. Beginners don’t know better, and journalists need copy to fill the empty space between the covers.3
Some of you might be thinking I’m exaggerating my experiences. I’m not. The good news is that the Internet did a Half-Nelson on most of these stupid business practices. When people now go through their “indiscriminate sponge” phase, they do it on YouTube and soak up as much ridiculousness as they wish.
For free. Mostly.
Eventually, they will be able to ignore the tool-chugging nincompoops and focus on what’s important: Building basic skills using simple and robust tools (and maybe a few well-built machines).
Honestly, it’s a good thing to be a bit jaded about the woodworking tool and publishing industries. It makes you a better consumer and encourages us to do better. So please, for the sake of the future of the craft, don’t buy the Bench Cookies.
- Some modern context follows. Many of these magazines have disappeared or have been consolidated. But you know what? I still think we have too many woodworking magazines these days. Or not enough. I forget which is right.
- More modern context follows. Most of these publishers have gone tits up. And good riddance. We don’t need a new book every year on advanced router techniques.
- Modern context follows. Nothing has changed here.
I matched this profile of the “indiscriminate sponge” beginner and I had huge numbers of woodworking books and magazines … until I finally noticed that the magazine articles in the latest issue were basically the same as the ones I’d first seen three years earlier, just with more gee-gaws and doo-dads added (microadjusters-for-everything were flavour of the month when I finally exited my sponge phase).
August 15, 2025
Ted Gioia on Hunter S. Thompson
I must admit that I got hooked on Hunter S. Thompson’s writing very early. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in my mid-teens and it blew my mind. I couldn’t actually believe everything he wrote, but I couldn’t completely discount it either. I certainly haven’t read everything he wrote … especially his later sports commentary, but I have read most of the best-known books. On his Substack, Ted Gioia is running a three-part series on the writer and his work:
That’s Hunter Thompson. There’s always someone in control behind the wheel — even when he seems most out of control.
This hidden discipline showed up in other ways. Years later, when he ran for sheriff in Aspen or showed up in Washington, D.C. to cover an election for Rolling Stone, savvy observers soon grasped that Thompson had better instincts and organizational skills than some of the most high-powered political operatives. People rallied around him — he was always the ringleader, even going back to his rowdy childhood. And hidden behind the stoned Gonzo exterior was an ambitious strategist who could play a long term game even as he wagered extravagantly on each spin of the roulette wheel that was his life.
“I don’t think you have any idea who Hunter S. Thompson is when he drops the role of court jester,” he wrote to Kraig Juenger, a 34-year-old married woman with whom he had an affair at age 18. “First, I do not live from orgy to orgy, as I might have made you believe. I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people believe.”
That wasn’t just posturing. It had to be true, merely judging by how well-read and au courant Thompson became long before his rise to fame. “His bedroom was lined with books,” later recalled his friend Ralston Steenrod, who went on to major in English at Princeton. “Where I would go home and go to sleep, Hunter would go home and read.” Another friend who went to Yale admitted that Thompson “was probably better read than any of us”.
Did he really come home from drinking binges, and open up a book? It’s hard to believe, but somehow he gave himself a world class education even while living on the bleeding edge. And in later years, Thompson proved it. When it came to literary matters, he simply knew more than most of his editors, who could boast of illustrious degrees Thompson lacked. And when covering some new subject he didn’t know, he learned fast and without slowing down a beat.
But Thompson had another unusual source of inspiration he used in creating his unique prose style. It came from writing letters, which he did constantly and crazily — sending them to friends, lovers, famous people, and total strangers. Almost from the start, he knew this was the engine room for his career; that’s why he always kept copies, even in the early days when that required messy carbon paper in the typewriter. Here in the epistolary medium he found his true authorial voice, as well as his favorite and only subject: himself.
But putting so much sound and fury into his letters came at a cost. For years, Thompson submitted articles that got rejected by newspapers and magazines — and the unhinged, brutally honest cover letters that accompanied them didn’t help. He would insult the editor, and even himself, pointing out the flaws in his own writing and character as part of his pitch.
What was he thinking? You can’t get writing gigs, or any gigs, with that kind of attitude. Except if those cover letters are so brilliant that the editor can’t put them down. And over time, his articles started resembling those feverish cover letters — a process unique in the history of literature, as far as I can tell.
When Thompson finally got his breakout job as Latin American correspondent for the National Observer (a sister publication to the Wall Street Journal in those days), he would always submit articles to editor Clifford Ridley along with a profane and unexpurgated cover letter that was often more entertaining than the story. In an extraordinary move, the newspaper actually published extracts from these cover letters as a newspaper feature.
If you’re looking for a turning point, this is it. Thompson now had the recipe, and it involved three conceptual breakthroughs:
- The story behind the story is the real story.
- The writer is now the hero of each episode.
- All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.
Why can’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson …
August 14, 2025
The “Big Mac Index” is bogus and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is wrong
I started reading The Economist when I was in college in the early 1980s. I subscribed after I left college, no longer having access to the school library’s copies, and I continued my subscription for about 20 years. Eventually, I gave up on The Economist as their editorial stance shifted further and further leftward. One of the things they ran regularly was their “Big Mac Index” which compared prices of McDonalds’ Big Mac hamburgers across a range of countries to show the Purchasing Power Parity of the respective countries’ currency against the US dollar. I thought it was a neat way to use readily available data in a form that most consumers would be familiar with to illustrate a wider economic fact. But, as Tim Worstall points out here, the index isn’t actually measuring what it claims to be measuring at all:
Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) constitutes a foundational concept within mainstream international economics, asserting that, over the long term, real exchange rates will naturally adjust to equalize the purchasing power of currencies across nations. This suggests that the cost of an identical basket of goods should, in principle, be uniform globally once currency exchange rates are applied. This notion is frequently popularized through informal measures such as the Big Mac Index. PPP is conceptualized as a specific application of the Law of One Price (LOOP), which posits that, when abstracting from transactional frictions like transportation costs, tariffs, and taxes, any particular commodity traded or purchased should sell for a similar price regardless of its geographical location.
Aaaand, no. The Law of One Price says that a *traded* commodity should be at the same price everywhere, absent transport costs, tariffs and all the rest. Anything that’s not traded this will not be true of. For example, to use an example provided to us:
For instance, if a Starbucks coffee is considerably more affordable in Tokyo than in Manhattan, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) would indicate an undervalued Yen.
No, Starbucks coffee is not a tradeable item. Coffee beans are globally traded, yes, and coffee beans are the same price the world over — given transport costs, tariffs and so on. But the coffee bean is pennies on the dollar of a Starbucks coffee.
The use of the Big Mac in The Economist‘s popular version of PPP actually runs entirely the other way around. The note is that a Big Mac is made the same way around the world. But it’s always made of *local* ingredients, not internationally traded ones. Therefore we are not measuring whether tradeable goods are the same price in different places at all — we’re measuring what local goods cost in different places.
Comparative advantage, whereby nations specialize in their most efficient productions for reciprocal benefit, is a myth. Absolute advantage reigns supreme.
Then there’s that as well. Which is to misunderstand comparative advantage as well. The insight is not about whether Britain makes cloth better than Portugal and then the same again with wine in reverse. Which is indeed absolute advantage. It’s about whether Britain makes cloth better than Britain makes wine, whether Portugal makes wine better than it does cloth. Each should do what they are *least bad at* and then share the increased production making both richer.
It’s also, once we move away from Ricardo, nothing to do with countries either. It’s something that applies to each and every individual. We should all do what we’re least bad at then swap the production. This does produce an interesting result for given how good, *ahem*, my economic writing is take a guess at how skilled I am at other ways of making a living? Quite.
So, you know, not getting PPP, LOOP nor comparative advantage — but still ending up calling for world government and that proper democratic control of the economy. Ah well, at least it’s fashionable even if incorrect.
July 11, 2025
William F. Buckley
In Quillette, Ronald Radosh reviews the long-awaited biography of arch-conservative William F. Buckley by his friend Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America:
President Reagan meeting with William F. Buckley in the White House, 21 January, 1988.
Photo from the White House Photographic Collection via Wikimedia Commons.
William F. Buckley Jr. was a polymath of unusual erudition. The author of scores of books (including nearly two dozen novels), Buckley was an ardent apostle of conservatism at a moment when American liberalism was ascendant. But he was also an accomplished musician who played the harpsichord, a sailor who entered competitions and spent most summers on the sea, and an avid skier who spent his winters on the slopes of Gstaad after a morning of writing. Most Americans knew him as the host of a weekly television talk show called Firing Line, in which he interviewed and debated a wide range of politicians and intellectuals, most of whom he vehemently but politely disagreed with. (Many of these episodes are now available to view on YouTube.)
Television allowed Buckley to display his not inconsiderable wit and charm. He interviewed prominent socialists like both Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, but he invited fellow conservatives onto his show as well. He had fellow conservatives on his show too, but he particularly relished debates with ideological opponents like Julian Bond (the young black leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), author Norman Mailer, journalist Christopher Hitchens, Ramparts editor Robert Scheer, and leaders of the Black Panther Party. The only people he would refuse to debate, he told the TV network, were communists lest he lend them legitimacy. Agents of the Soviet Union, he maintained, were not worth engaging with.
Buckley’s other major accomplishment was founding and editing America’s first nationwide conservative magazine. The bi-weekly National Review was the conservative counterpart of the influential liberal publications of the day, including the New Republic, The Nation, The Reporter, and the New Leader. Those liberal magazines all had rather small circulations but they also had the field to themselves until Buckley’s NR came along. Buckley hired a roster of old-style conservatives and ex-communists, including the former Trotskyist James Burnham, the former Communist agent (and accuser of Alger Hiss) Whittaker Chambers, Willi Schlamm, and Frank Meyer. As time went by, he added prominent young conservatives to the magazine’s masthead, many of whom would go on to become political leaders in the new American conservative movement. His prize protégé may have been Gary Wills, who eventually left NR‘s ranks and, much to Buckley’s disappointment, became an influential American liberal. Other NR contributors went on to become important American essayists and authors in their own right, like Joan Didion, George Will, and John Leonard, who edited the New York Times Book Review during the 1970s.
Buckley was the scion of a wealthy Connecticut family with a great estate in Sharon, Connecticut, that his father William F. Buckley Sr. named “Great Elm”. However, Buckley Sr. was also a Texan who identified closely with the American South, and after he made his fortune speculating in oil in Mexico and Venezuela, he purchased a mansion in Camden, South Carolina, for use during the cold Eastern winters. He named it Kamchatka, and the neighbouring residents, Tanenhaus writes, embraced the family “as Southerners who had come home”. Kamchatka had previously been the home of a Confederate general and senator who left office when Lincoln was elected President in 1860, but Camden would play an important role in the civil-rights movement.
By the 1950s through the ’60s, Tanenhaus writes, “the institution of Jim Crow — the legacy of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction — was being shaken at its foundations”. In the ’50s, the nation learned about the brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmet Till and massive protests by the black population began to appear across the South. The liberal magazines of the day covered the rise of the civil-rights movement and did what they could to mobilise Northerners in support of Southern blacks. In the deep South, activist efforts culminated in the famous Freedom Summer movement for black-voter registration in 1964. Camden, too, became the centre of a massive resistance movement.
Yet all this political and social upheaval never received a word of positive coverage in the pages of National Review. The reason for this was not complicated. Buckley’s family believed that “race was a settled question” and that racial separation was justified “as a matter of law as well as custom”. The Buckley family, of course, hired black help for their Camden mansion, whom they treated with respect and support. But members of the “Negro” race, as blacks were then called, had to know their place. So, Buckley wrote a number of unsigned editorials in February 1956 defending the South’s “deeply rooted folkways and mores”. The South, he argued, “believes that segregation is the answer to a complex situation not fully understandable except to those who live with it”, just as his own parents and siblings did. He vigorously objected to the Supreme Court’s verdict in 1954 outlawing segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education, and he wrote editorials arguing that the Court’s decision was not an interpretation of the Constitution but rather “a venture in social legislation.”
In Camden, meanwhile, the Buckley family started and financed a newspaper called the News, which was meant to be a vehicle for the white South’s racist population and their “Citizens’ Councils”. Instead of burning crosses and lynching, the Councils preferred to use “legal threats, economic harassment, and public denunciation” in defence of segregation. In one case, a business owned by a black protestor was destroyed and his family harassed by the Council, after the owner tried to register to vote. As the violence in Camden became more extensive and widely reported, Buckley responded with an unsigned NR editorial on 10 January 1957 in which he argued that “the Northern ideologists are responsible for the outbreak of violence”. He did also condemn the “debasing brutality” of the white population’s behaviour, and for years, that remark remained his strongest condemnation of white violence. He continued to ignore the support provided to the Councils by South Carolina authorities.
One of Tanenhaus’s most stunning revelations is that, in 1956, Buckley dispatched an NR contributor to report on the National States’ Rights Conference in Memphis. The man he sent was one Revilo Oliver, whom Tanenhaus correctly describes as “a fanatical racist and anti-Semite”. The following year, NR published Buckley’s most infamous editorial, titled “Why the South Must Prevail”. The white community, he wrote, had a right to defend segregation because “for the time being, it is the advanced race”. The white South, he wrote, “perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’; and intends to assert its own”. And since NR “believes the South’s premises are correct”, the black population could justifiably have its interests thwarted by “undemocratic” but “enlightened” means. That editorial, Tanenhaus rightly notes, “haunts [Buckley’s] legacy, and the conservative movement he led”. Buckley also believed that if suppression of the black vote violated the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment, then that and the Fifteenth Amendment should be considered unconstitutional — “inorganic accretions to the original document, grafted upon it by victors-at-war by force”.
July 8, 2025
“One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere”
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Itxu Díaz considers the work of P.J. O’Rourke:
Though P.J. O’Rourke passed away three years ago, his sharp wit and defense of freedom continue to resonate in a world still tempted by interventionist solutions. Reclaiming his work is more vital now than ever. What he told us through laughs and jabs in recent decades has proven to be one of the sharpest diagnoses of the dangers of postmodern left-wing ideology — and one of the most inspired reflections on why we must root our societies in individual liberty, private property, the free market, and the Judeo-Christian values that shaped the West for centuries.
Progressives want bigger government, and often conservatives don’t want it as small as we ought to like. O’Rourke knew all too well that the larger the state grows, the smaller individuals become. He devoted much of his work to explaining this in a way anyone could understand — even those not particularly interested in politics. His words resonate today in a new light, and fortunately, they remain easy to access: the Internet is full of O’Rourke’s articles, and all his books are still in print. The ideas, the jokes — the profound, the outdated, and even the ones that haven’t aged all that well — are still out there, waiting to be discovered by any digital wanderer with a sense of humor and a thirst for sharp thinking. It’s almost frightening to realize that some of O’Rourke’s tech-related jokes would go completely over a Millennial or Zoomer’s head today. And it’s even more pitiful to think that some of his old comments would be cancelled in today’s dull, hypersensitive postmodern world. Perhaps it’s because, as he once said, “One of the problems with being a writer is that all of your idiocies are still in print somewhere”. Incidentally, that’s where O’Rourke found his only point of agreement with environmentalists: “I strongly support paper recycling”.
The hippie student he was in the ’60s lost his enthusiasm for leftist ideas the following decade, as soon as he got his first paycheck from National Lampoon: a $300 check that filled him with joy — until he was told $140 would be deducted for taxes, health insurance, and Social Security. That day, he got mad at the government, and the grudge never faded. Before that, while still sporting what he called “a bad haircut” — think John Lennon’s worst style — he’d decided to tell his Republican grandmother he’d become a communist. Her response threw him off: “Well, at least you’re not a Democrat”.
O’Rourke was never one to romanticize his drug-fueled college days. “Oh God, the ’60s are back,” he wrote. “Good thing I’ve got a double-barreled 12-gauge with a chamber for three-inch magnum shells. And speaking strictly as a retired hippie and former beatnik, if the ’60s come my way, they won’t make it past the porch steps. They’ll be history. Which, for God’s sake, is what they’re supposed to be.”
From his time as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon in the ’70s, we got his account in The Hollywood Reporter, “How I Killed National Lampoon“. The job was a blast, but the environment was hell: “Having a bunch of humorists in one place is like having a bunch of cats in a sack”. As a satirical war correspondent covering every late-century conflict, O’Rourke filled countless pages describing the struggle to find a damn glass of whiskey in the burning countries at the “end of history”. His last dangerous assignment was in Iraq. “I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for twenty-one years, in forty-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq,” he wrote in Holidays in Heck.
May 8, 2025
Ted Gioia is apparently “the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything“
I’ve been reading Ted Gioia‘s work for a few years now, but I somehow failed to pick up on the fact that he’s some kind of Bond supervillain:
Many articles have been written about me over the years. But I’ve never been hit with an opening sentence like the one published on Monday by The Atlantic.
Last year, I visited the music historian Ted Gioia to talk about the death of civilization.
Whoa! That makes me feel like a Bond villain.
I need some henchmen — any volunteers?
Ted appears to like the classic goon uniforms for his to-be-recruited legion of minions.
What an unexpected turnabout! For many years, I was known as an expert on music, especially jazz and blues.
But now I’ve taken on a new guise. I’m the guy you consult about the total collapse of everything.
I don’t sing the blues. I don’t write about the blues. I now deliver the blues.
I originally declined the interview request from The Atlantic. But their staff writer Spencer Kornhaber pushed back, insisting that I was an essential source for his article.
The subject was, he explained, a “pervasive suspicion that we’re in an era of cultural decline, especially in arts and entertainment”.
He said that I needed to be part of the story — because everybody saw me as the decline-of-culture guy.
This caught me surprise. But I thought it over. maybe this is why I don’t get invited to many parties anymore.
Dammit, Ted, we’re trying to have some fun here — and you keep droning on about the collapse of the Roman empire.
I eventually agreed to a phone conversation with Spencer, and that went well. And this led to him getting on a plane, and visiting me at home here in Austin.
To help him in his research, I laid out more than 40 books on a countertop in my library — these were essential works, I explained, for anyone studying social or cultural decline.
[At a future date, I will provide more details about these books, and share a reading list on — to quote The Atlantic — the “death of civilization”.]
But this begs the question: Is our culture really collapsing?
I spoke with Spencer for many hours about this subject. But only a few of my comments found their way into the finished article.
So today I’ll offer a fuller diagnosis for your benefit.
May 6, 2025
Online tools for the curious autodidact
Like many people, I was generally not a good student and in primary and middle school, I was notorious for reading the “wrong” parts of books because they were closer to my interests than the assigned readings, but I generally was able to scrape together enough marks to pass the tests on the stuff I skimmed or ignored. This is hardly the way to make an academic career — not that I would ever have done so, unless they just let me study what I wanted to learn about. A useful Substack for my fellow autodidacts [Wiki] is a side project of military historian Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson called Extra Muros, and his latest post provides some information on tools for online research that you may find helpful:
Gustav Wenzel – “A Carpenter’s Workshop” (1881)
The “advanced search” page of the Internet Archive allows you to …
- download copies, in various electronic formats, of
– books and magazines published before 1929
– works (such as those created by the US Federal Government) that have always belonged to the public domain
– relatively recent works uploaded by people in countries (such as India) with less restrictive copyright laws
- examine books that you might want to acquire for enjoyment the old-fashioned way
- find higher-quality copies of items that you found on Google Books
- obtain an overview of the works (to include foreign language translations)
– of a particular author
– on a particular subject
The “advanced search” page on the website of the Hathi Trust allows you to do many of the things you might otherwise do on the Internet Archive. Alas (and, indeed, alack), the interface restricts the direct download of complete volumes to “participating institutions”. As a result, mere mortals must either seek the PDF in question on Google Books (to which Hathi provides a direct link) or use a bit of freeware called Hathi Download Helper.
The Hathi Trust search engine also makes it easy for you to search within books for specific words and phrases, as well as the mention of particular places and personalities. Doing the former turns the Hathi Trust database into a kind of dictionary, a way of discovering ways that people in various climes and times have used the expression. Doing the latter converts that cornucopia into an encyclopedia.
The NGram Viewer performs a similar service. However, as it sits atop a smaller collection and suffers from a number of irritating defects, it has proved less useful to me than the website of the Hathi Trust.
January 16, 2025
The allegations against author Neil Gaiman
I haven’t read the article in question, but it certainly looks ugly if even a few of the allegations turn out to be true:
New York magazine has just published a very long investigative piece on alleged sexual misconduct by the author Neil Gaiman, both contextualizing previously-known allegations and introducing new ones. Writer Lila Shapiro, who clearly did an awful lot of legwork, found several new women who allege various forms of bad sexual behavior against Gaiman. It’s all very serious and disturbing, obviously. I have nothing to contribute and no one cares what I think about such things, so we can leave that story there.
But I’m afraid that Shapiro’s piece does again force me to think about New York‘s story last year about Andrew Huberman. You could be forgiven for thinking “New York‘s SIMILAR story last year about Andrew Huberman,” but this would not be a correct characterization; where Gaiman is accused of many acts that, if true, rise to the level of sexual misconduct, including rape, the Huberman piece contains no such allegations. Huberman is accused of dating multiple women at the same time without the knowledge of all involved, of infidelity generally, and there’s a bizarre fixation on his regular tardiness. It is not a MeTooing piece. And the trouble, I’m afraid, is that the piece was written, edited, packaged, and promoted in a way that inevitably gave audiences the impression that such allegations were included — that Andrew Huberman had been MeToo’d.
The fact that the piece contains no allegations of that type, but seems to have been very deliberately associated by New York, its author Kerry Howley, the magazine’s social media channels, and their many media kaffeeklatsch allies with MeToo stories, was a terrible error in editorial judgment. The Gaiman story helps underline why: this shit is so serious that we can’t afford to play around with these types of narratives. The Rolling Stone University of Virginia gang rape fraternity initiation story, a narrative that fell apart under the barest scrutiny and should never have survived even an amateur journalistic investigation, did a lot of damage in our ongoing efforts to take sexual assault on campus seriously. There’s a higher bar to clear with this stuff for that reason, and the Huberman story utterly failed to clear it.
The story’s presentation in the magazine was draped with innuendo, with as many leading terms and dark implications as can be stuffed in. The image on the cover is styled and colored to make him look sinister. People associated with New York tweeted about the piece as if it was a nuclear bomb, using the kind of language that we’ve grown accustomed to when a MeToo story is published and kills a career. I would argue that the story is deliberately written in the slow-burn reveal style that is typically deployed in MeToo stories — that’s deployed, in fact, in the Gaiman story. (There it makes sense, because the slow burn leads to actual accusations.) At every opportunity, the story exaggerates the implication of a man who, yes, was a shithead to some women he dated. The article is forever presenting quotidian-if-unfortunate behaviors and acting as though we should interpret those behaviors as worthy of the kind of censure that has been brought to bear by men guilty of sexual misconduct in the MeToo era. “I experienced his rage,” says one of Huberman’s exes, suggesting some sort of domestic violence situation, when in fact that’s a reference to a verbal argument — again, maybe unfortunate, but simply not in the world of misconduct.
The magazine’s internal references to the piece, and their social media, played up the usual teasing manner of such publicity, broadly hinting at bad behavior in the realm of sex and romance. The repeated phrase used was “manipulative behavior, deceit, and numerous affairs”. I don’t need to tell you that many people, trained by six-plus years of reading about sexual misconduct, are going to assume that a vast cover story in one of the country’s biggest magazines about a man’s bad behavior and deceit towards his partners is going to be a MeToo story. As many would go on to say, the fanfare and length and publicity about the piece themselves implied that it was a MeTooing. After all, what else would justify that level of attention?
November 12, 2024
QotD: Roger Scruton, terroiriste
>Good wine is a “somewhere”, not an “anywhere”. It is stamped with a place and a year. Rooted, literally. The fancy French word for this is terroir, referring to the way in which environment — soil, geology, even the history of a place — is all responsible for a wine’s character. Terroir is a sense of place in a glass. Roger Scruton often referred to himself as a “terroiriste“. And this could describe his political philosophy as much as his philosophy of wine. From 2001 to 2009, Scruton wrote a wine column in the New Statesman, enabling him to smuggle into that otherwise exclusively Left-wing journal, all sorts of reactionary political ideas: about God, about fox-hunting, about beauty, about his love of the countryside.
Wine, for Scruton, was never just about the taste, never a merely aesthetic sensation. Indeed, he was extremely sniffy about all those “blind tastings” — the ones where we delight when an expert fails to spot the difference between plonk and Premiere Cru. They miss the point, says Scruton. Blind tasting, he explained, is like blind kissing — not a good way to distinguish, for example, between someone who is sexy and someone who is not. Indeed, if the experiment on Love Island is anything to go by, it’s not even a good way to distinguish who your own girlfriend is.
That’s because sexual chemistry, like wine, is a great deal more than some momentary sensation on the lips. It’s a great deal more than a message sent by taste receptors to the brain. It is all about the terroir. And this is not just a comment about wine but about aesthetic experience in general. When we encounter a work of art, we bring a whole hinterland of knowledge that makes sense of that specific experience and gives it its character as art. Music is more than a vibration of the air and its reception by the ear and the brain. So too with wine and taste.
Giles Fraser, “Raise your glass to Roger Scruton, the terroiriste“, UnHerd, 2020-01-15.
October 19, 2024
The worst month for legacy media … so far
Ted Gioia has a (paywalled) post on the awful, terrible, bad, no-good month for the mainstream media. I think the headline needs an appropriate meme:
These events all happened in the last few days.
They are NOT unconnected:
- SEPTEMBER 24: The Financial Times reports that a Substack launched two years ago by Bari Weiss is now worth $100 million, and has just raised $15 million from investors.
- OCTOBER 1: One week later, journalist Taylor Lorenz announces that she is leaving the Washington Post to launch an online periodical on Substack. She plans to hire other writers and offer in-depth coverage of tech and internet culture.
- OCTOBER 14: Gallup announces the results of a new poll showing that trust in mass media has reached an all-time low.
Source – Gallup
- OCTOBER 15: The Wall Street Journal reports that bestselling novelist James Patterson is launching on Substack. He has sold 480 million books since publishing his first novel in 1976, but now will sell subscriptions to readers at a price of six dollars per month.
- OCTOBER 15: That same day the New York Times reports that the “queen of legacy media” Tina Brown — formerly editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair — is now launching on Substack. She is also charging six dollars per month.
October 18, 2024
Accidentally creating an epidemic of food allergies, from the best of intentions
Jon Miltimore discusses how the unintentional outcome of professional organizations making recommendations to the public without proper scientific understanding created so many of the allergies that now plague youngsters:
“Peanuts, LEAP study (Learning Early About Peanut allergy)” by jlcampbell104 is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 
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In 1992, with the help of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, The New England Journal of Medicine published a report on a rare phenomenon: fatal or near-fatal anaphylactic reactions in young people due to food allergies.
Examining a period of 14 months, researchers identified thirteen cases, twelve of which involved asthmatic youths. Six of the thirteen anaphylactic reactions resulted in death, and each case had involved a young person with a known food allergy who had unknowingly ingested the food.
“The reactions were to peanuts (four patients), nuts (six patients), eggs (one patient), and milk (two patients), all of which were contained in foods such as candy, cookies, and pastry,” researchers wrote.
The paper said nothing about banning these foods, but concluded that “failure to recognize the severity of these reactions and to administer epinephrine promptly increases the risk of a fatal outcome”.
Nevertheless, food bans followed, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began to encourage educators to “consider possible food allergies” during food preparation.
By 1998, the New York Times was reporting on the rise of peanut allergies and the measures school districts were taking to stop them.
“Prodded by parents warning of lethal allergies, by the contentions of some researchers that peanut allergies are on the rise and, not least, by a fear of litigation, growing numbers of public and private schools across the country, including many of New York City’s most selective independent schools, have banned peanut butter from their cafeterias,” wrote Anemona Maria Hartocollis.
“The Biggest Misconception”
When the Times published its article in 1998, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) was not yet issuing recommendations about peanuts or food allergies in infants. But as public concern grew, they decided they had to offer guidelines of some kind.
“There was just one problem,” Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins University surgeon, noted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Doctors didn’t actually know what precautions, if any, parents should take.”
Instead of remaining mum, the AAP followed the lead of the United Kingdom’s Committee on Toxicology and recommended that mothers avoid peanuts during pregnancy and lactation, and that children avoid peanuts until the age of 3.
The decision to make such a sweeping decision in the absence of compelling scientific evidence was a mistake, allergists say, and runs counter to basic immunology.
Dr. Gideon Lack, an allergist at King’s College London, says the collective effort to cocoon children from peanuts and other foods is responsible for what has been described as a “food allergy epidemic”.
The data suggest Lack is right.
In the 25 years since the AAP issued its recommendation, the US (like the UK, which also advised peanut avoidance) has experienced an explosion of food allergies, especially peanut allergies. Data from Mount Sinai Hospital System in New York show that peanut allergies more than tripled in the decade and a half following the AAP’s guidance. In 1997, peanut allergies affected 1 in 250 children in the United States. By 2002, this rate had risen to 1 in 125, and by 2008, it reached 1 in 70 children.
Anecdotally, I only remember one kid in my middle school who had food allergies … and poor Rusty had ’em all. He was known as the “Kid with a thousand allergies” and had to be so careful of what he ate and even what he touched. but this was the mid-1970s and there weren’t formal school guidelines on what we could bring in our school lunch bags or use scented things like deodorant. (It was the 1970s, and a lot of us were just hitting puberty and many of my classmates were new Canadians from poorer countries … we needed the deodorant!)
July 31, 2024
“You really can’t hate them enough”
Elizabeth Nickson links to a short excerpt from Michael Walsh’s introduction to his upcoming Against the Corporate Media:
Today’s journalists now openly celebrate the death of objectivity, arguing that reporters have biases like everybody else, so why pretend that they don’t? In clear violation of their own — and now very much outmoded — Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, they happily ignore such tenets as:
- Identify sources clearly.
- Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity.
- Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
- Expose unethical conduct in journalism, including within their organizations.
Thus, after nearly a century’s consensus about journalistic best practices, we have come full circle to the days of naked partisanship that marked the earliest American newspapers. Gossip has become news, journalistic crusades are fabricated out of whole cloth and attributed to anonymous sources as justification. It’s noteworthy that the word “objectivity” nowhere appears in the current SPJ code, which was revised in 2014. Why would it? Objectivity has become the mortal enemy of the current vogue for “explanatory” or “advocacy” journalism — otherwise generally known as propaganda.
The transformation of journalism from rank advocacy to lukewarm “objectivity” and back to even ranker political propaganda (nearly all news stories today are couched in political terms, including those about pop music and sports) is one of the principal subjects of this book. Accordingly we have assembled a corps of forty-two journalists — some grizzled veterans, some newcomers, some of whose primary occupations lie in the wider fields of book publishing, fiction, non-fiction, television, and even Hollywood — to analyze the startling changes that have come over the profession in our lifetimes.
You really can’t hate them enough.
Even greater than the abandonment of “objectivity” as a pernicious influence on journalism is the internet, the great destroyer of printed periodicals, which has laid waste to the newspaper and magazine industry and has fallen under the control of the social-media giants, such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, and is now subject to favoritism and even censorship by near-monopolies like Google, a search engine that also now controls visual media via its ownership of YouTube. Whether the patrician Walter Lippmann would have admired his wishful handiwork now that it is a reality is open to question, but surely he would celebrate the intrusion of the American federal government, along with governments around the world, into both de facto and de jure informational control of cyberspace. In many countries around the world, the press and attendant broadcast media are now directly and unabashedly controlled by government entities which, in many cases, openly fund and censor them.
Even in a work of this length, it is of course impossible to touch upon every aspect of the current state of the media. From the point of view of one who has labored in it, off and on, for more than half a century, it is parlous and getting worse. Ask someone with less than ten years’ experience in the field and you may well — very likely will — get a different answer: that it’s liberated, responsive, unfettered. Still, my work as a historian has convinced me of the truth of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s famous axiom, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The Paris-born Karr, who lived from 1808 to 1890, was, of course, a journalist himself, in addition to being a critic, novelist, and flora-culturalist. But that was back in the day when “journalists” were men of accomplishment in other fields.) That is to say, the fundamental things apply in all walks of human endeavor, and among these things is mankind’s innate desire to convince others of the rightness of his position on any given subject. The question always has been: What’s the best way to go about it?
July 6, 2024
“Western media resembles … the consumer landscape of the Soviet bloc. We find the same product on offer everywhere in all leading publications”
eugyppius invites us to contemplate the “awesome, terrifying power of the press”, and not for its useful role in keeping us proles informed about the goings-on of our governments and the doings of the great and the good, but its utterly cynical co-ordinated manipulation of “the narrative”:
Take a moment to contemplate the awesome and terrifying power of the press.
Since 2020, the United States have had a geriatric president who suffers from serious mental deficits. The media discounted this awkward state of affairs as a conspiracy theory or as Trumpist propaganda for years, substantially blunting the political impact of Biden’s dementia. Then, after the president’s terrible debate performance on 27 June, the press made Biden’s incapacity the centre of their coverage, finally welcoming this fact into official regime-sanctioned reality and bringing Biden’s candidacy into crisis. All of this happened within just hours. As I write this, Biden has no more than even odds of securing his party’s nomination, and the press are working overtime to rehabilitate Kamala Harris. Journalists who spent years quietly mocking the vice president for her abrasive personality and her bizarre speaking gaffes are now making the latter a cornerstone of her candidacy. Are you coconutpilled, dear reader?
The Biden Affair is nothing new. So overwhelming is the influence of the press over our politics, that many have described liberal democracies as media-steered regimes, wherein politicians adopt positions and enact policies calculated above all to secure favourable coverage from journalists.
As I mentioned the other day, a healthy media would provide a range of opinions wider than our current spectrum of centre-left/left/hard-left/totally woke. That they do not, despite that spectrum not covering the majority of beliefs among the general public, shows just how monolithic and partisan the surviving mainstream media outlets have become.
Imagine, for a moment, that you wanted to found your own periodical. Maybe you hope to run a weekly magazine or a daily newspaper, maybe you have ambitions of amassing an enormous audience of millions, or maybe you’re content to collect primarily regional readers. Whatever the details, you want to cover national politics in some way. The most rational approach – before you even rent office space or begin to hire staff – would be to study what existing publications are saying and what they’re reporting on, and plan to offer something different. Unless you provide content that your readers can’t get anywhere else, after all, you’ll have trouble convincing anyone to read you.
You’d think, therefore, that the media landscape would be a richly differentiated thing – especially when it comes to big, national stories. Variation like this is present everywhere else in the consumer economy. There are a near-infinite variety of headphones, energy drinks, shoes and coffee makers. Newspapers should be just as varied in their coverage, focus and analysis as all of these other things.
But of course, it is the opposite. Western media resembles much more the consumer landscape of the Soviet bloc. We find the same product on offer everywhere in all leading publications. As in the communist East, variety is confined to a kind of black market – that is to say an array of blogs, social media accounts and alternative (mostly online) publications that you’re not supposed to read and that the official discourse wholly ignores. This anomaly is easy enough to see if you spend multiple hours every day reading news stories. The average consumer of political reporting, however, has a much more casual and sporadic relationship to press discourse, and he’s apt to think that the convergence is entirely natural. The New York Times, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Le Monde report the very same things in the very same way at the very same time, often under extremely similar headlines, because they’re just reporting on the way the world is.
In hard authoritarian regimes, like National Socialist Germany, regime propaganda was an open, blunt instrument. Everybody who read the Völkischer Beobachter knew very well that the paper propagated the official Nazi Party line. The soft authoritarianism of the liberal West, in contrast, manages the information and opinions available to the public in a much more effective manner, namely by pretending not to. Millions of people open their newspapers every day in the belief that they contain accurate accounts of the goings-on in the world, and they form their beliefs and political preferences within this highly convincing illusion.
The distributed propaganda network maintained by our establishment press is very expensive. Especially the opportunity costs are very high. In a healthy, uncoordinated media environment, it would be impossible for somebody like me to make a living blogging about the insanity of German politics. I’d have very stiff competition from a multitude of professional, well-funded journalists who would be fighting at every moment to take my readers away from me by writing the kinds of things I do, only more effectively, more frequently and with fewer typographical errors. Of course I am a very small player in the broader ecosystem of alternative media; the audience for this content is hundreds of millions strong. It consists of all those people who have been written off by the establishment press, as the necessary price of exercising narrative control.
Among the forces that conspire to keep legacy media on-message is their aforementioned collaboration with the political establishment. This collaboration includes a tacit understanding that leading politicians and bureaucrats will only provide interviews and information to regime-adjacent journalists, granting them an effective monopoly on political news.
July 3, 2024
The profound, utter, inescapable uselessness of the legacy media
As an early and enthusiastic blog reader and eventually a blog creator, I’ve always sought interesting aspects of stories in the news — even when I disagreed with the source or the presentation, it’s always a good thing to approach any topic “in the round” whenever possible. Getting all your information from one viewpoint or even one source is a good way to gaslight yourself. Once upon a time, while the TV networks tended to be as bland as they could (because going too far toward sensationalism would be a good way to get in bad with the regulators who control your broadcasting privileges), newspapers were not under such strong moderation. You could find very progressive, mildly progressive, centrist, and even mildly conservative voices with relative ease. At least, that’s what a rosy view of media history suggests — I think you have to go back before World War II to find really vigorous debates among the major newspapers.
Here in Canada, the mass media were already overly deferential to the government of the day — unless it was a Conservative government, of course — and after the internet and social media ate all the profit out of their business, they turned as one to the government to bail them out. In return, they became even more deferential to official story lines unless the foreign press forced their collective hand to present a more complete story. Over the last few years, as the surviving mainstream media shed jobs, many journalists have “crossed the lines” and become much more like their distant predecessors in the media: diggers of dirt, tellers of uncomfortable truths, and impartial mockers of government incompetence (Canada’s The Line is an excellent example of this … even when I don’t link to them, I almost always find their articles interesting and informative.)
All that throat-clearing out of the way, here’s Chris Bray asking what you have learned from the mainstream media lately:
When was the last time you read something in the mainstream news media — an op-ed piece, a major revelation that some clever and persistent investigative reporter dug up, a sharp bit of news analysis — that surprised you? When was the last time you read something in the news that changed your understanding of a major issue? When was the last time something in the “news” reframed an issue in your head with an argument you hadn’t anticipated, or with new evidence that you hadn’t heard before? “Man, I’d never thought of it that way,” you say, tossing the New York Times down on the coffee table.
Related, when was the last time a report or a panel discussion on television news surprised you and made you see something differently?
My impression is that the public sphere is now made up almost entirely of people saying things that we already know they’re going to say. “Jennifer Rubin will now analyze the presidential debate.” You don’t need to hear that. There’s no need to listen to any of it, ever. Andrea Mitchell is for [current thing]. Of course she is. If you know what [current thing] is, what’s the point of an Andrea Mitchell?
It’s all so dull.
There are at least a couple hundred prominent media and academic figures in the United States who could die tonight without anyone noticing, as long as there was a tape or a computer program of some kind to go on posting the received wisdom of the day under their names.
