PinnedMember-onlyThe Through-Line in My Writing“What is to be done?” I think about this question a lot. Not what is to be said, but done. A lot of writing about the contemporary world focuses on telling us how bad a problem is, or who’s at fault. OK, yes: the world is broken, politicians are often…Politics4 min readPolitics4 min read
Jan 24Member-onlyWhat the Media Forgot About David CrosbyHe was an unreconstructed 1960s radical who kept his political commitments til he died — I am a very late member of the Baby Boom generation, born in 1962. My first musical tastes involved a membership in the Partridge Family fan club that I shared with my younger sister. But I can date precisely when I woke up to the real music of my youth…Rock3 min readRock3 min read
Dec 16, 2022Member-onlyPutting the “Twitter Files” in Perspective (Part Two)You can’t understand this without looking at the larger project of people involved in the Meme Wars of the last decade — It’s been quite a few weeks over at Twitter, where Elon Musk has been busy replatforming big chunks of the alt-right and deplatforming reputable journalists and leftwing accounts, along with handing selective access to Twitter’s internal data to a claque of iconoclastic anti-woke writers. In part one of this post…Elon Musk6 min readElon Musk6 min read
Dec 16, 2022Member-onlyPutting the “Twitter Files” in Perspective (Part One)The latest in an ongoing battle to control the narrative about democracy in America — If you are a “very online person” or even just a somewhat online person, you’ve probably heard something about “The Twitter Files” in the last ten days or so. I tried to stay away, I really did. But while there’s very little to the stories tweet-threads that have been published…Elon Musk6 min readElon Musk6 min read
Oct 31, 2022Member-onlyElection 2022: This is Gen Z’s MomentThere’s been a surge in youth voting since 2018, and if it continues it’s going to upend next week’s US election — According to a new national poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School, 40% of 18–29 year olds say they are definitely going to vote in the mid-terms. That is on track to match or maybe even surpass the record level of turnout from young people in 2018. …Elections4 min readElections4 min read
Oct 27, 2022Member-onlyElon Musk: “Après Moi, Le Déluge”Chasing crazy dreams, our would-be Big Tech Emperors are hastening the destruction of any kind of healthy democracy — Five years ago, when Facebook hit two billion global users, no one imagined that we would start referring to the company in the past tense as something that used to matter, with a slumping valuation now lower than Home Depot, the big box store. Nor did anyone think that Twitter…Elon Musk5 min readElon Musk5 min read
Oct 26, 2022Member-onlyThe Lies Republicans Tell ThemselvesSupport for Trumpism, like support for Nazism, is built on a edifice of self-deception, as former GOP campaign guru Tim Miller’s new book makes clear — If you’ve ever wondered how so many professional Republicans, people who work in politics on a daily basis, have justified their support for Donald Trump and the larger miasma of manipulation, prejudice, lying, cruelty and incompetence that is Trumpism, make time for Tim Miller’s book Why We Did It.Trump9 min readTrump9 min read
Oct 19, 2022Member-onlyDoing the Work of Democracy Despite Lousy Tech and DataDoor-knocking is the best way to earn votes, but for all their vaunted tech savvy, Democrats’ core tools and voter data are a mess — Sunday I spent the afternoon walking the hills of ex-urban Woodbury, NY, about an hour north of New York City, knocking on doors with about 30 other volunteers from my local Indivisible group, NYCD16-Indivisible, along with a smattering of other grassroots activists from Westchester county. …Organizing5 min readOrganizing5 min read
Oct 13, 2022Member-onlyAs Election Day Approaches, More Republicans are Breaking RanksIn Kansas, Idaho, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington, longtime GOP officeholders and business leaders are putting country over party. — What do these life-long Republicans all have in common? Former governors of Kansas Bill Graves and Mike Hayden. Idaho’s former Gov. Phil Batt, former Attorney General and Idaho Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones and former Secretary of State Ben Ysursa. Former Pennsylvania Congresswoman and state Supreme Court Justice Sandra Schultz…Politics4 min readPolitics4 min read
Oct 12, 2022Member-onlyHow to Save Content Creators from the Spotify Death SpiralIt’s time to artificially limit the supply of content in order to prop up pay rates, the way we did during the Depression for farmers — In 2020, just 184,000 artists made more than $1,000 from uploading their songs to the Spotify platform. That’s out of a much larger universe of more than 3 million artists on the music platform. Spotify is one of the lowest paying streaming sites, offering about 1/3 of a penny per…Music3 min readMusic3 min read
