A New Media Compendium
I read the news today, oh boy
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Two, Issue 66
I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall
The Sunday Reader, Feb. 17, 2024
It’s an election year, and not just some off-cycle year with down-ballot races. This year control of the White House, the US Senate and the House of Representatives are all up for grabs. So it’s important to be informed!
But how do you do that, exactly, when the familiar members of the media are undergoing an extinction event?
If the familiar outlets are dead or dying…time to familiarize yourself with all those new unfamiliar news purveyors! You need to create your own news compendium, a collection of voices from which you can assemble a multi-faceted knowledge aria. Here’s mine, to get you started. Note that I am a reader; I tend to only consume video as I’m reading something else or working; I’m just not that linear. So here’s my morning reading compendium:
In the United States of Kayfabe, it’s important to start with the masters of the art. So let’s look first at 2024’s main event:
The incumbent is rarely seen in public, and lets his army of minions do his work. People want him gone. But his challenger is the same guy he defeated in the last go-round, plus people are saying that the challenger’s road to the main event was rigged. Everyone was exasperated and bored with this ridiculous rerun.
Then The Rock turned heel, and stole Cody Rhodes’ Wrestlemania Main Event. The fans went ballistic, and “forced” Triple H to give Cody his match back. Now the rerun of last year’s Cody vs. Roman Reigns is the hottest ticket in professional wrestling in years, and even more so because The Rock is somehow involved and constantly insulting Cody’s fans. He’s even coined a new catch-phrase: Cody Crybabies!
What? What did you think I was talking about? If you want to understand the game, study the pros. We’re all just Marks living in the United States of Kayfabe. And in an election year, when billions of dollars will be spent working the marks, it’s more important than ever to understand kayfabe.
Oh, sure, lots of us like to think we are SMarks – Smart Marks, who are in on the con – but at the end of the day the performers don’t care if you’re a Mark or a SMark. They only care that you keep playing their game.
Kayfabe is the story performers are telling to work an audience. It’s a term that emerged from carnies a century ago, and now has been popularized by professional wrestling.
If you want to understand the game, study the pros. Read Cageside Seats and its reports on All Things Pro Wrestling.
But a boy cannot live on kayfabe alone, so after I’m done catching up with the exploits of spandex America, I’m off to the whimsical Althouse. Ann Althouse is a retired law professor given to cruel neutrality, outrage at men in shorts, and deep dives down rabbit holes chasing misuse of the word “garner” and other grammatical crimes: Others may get attention, but Vera Wang garners attention. The comments over there are funny. No one seems to agree that she has defied age. By the way, did the Post get the flaunt/flout distinction right? Yes. She may be flouting age, but she's flaunting age defiance.
After I finish Althouse, next up is Instapundit. Law professor Glen Reynolds has been blogging for two decades. The Blogfather’s site is so popular that when he links to smaller sites their servers often crash from the “InstaLanch” of new traffic. Glen is a small L libertarian1 like myself, and curates news from that perspective, generally with a snarky comment, a link and short excerpt, like this: MEN HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WILLING TO BREAK THE LAW FOR SEX: Scientists Caught Sperm Defying a Major Law of Physics.
Before we go further, I should admit that I read a ridiculous amount. Here’s a taste of how ridiculous: I have Kindle Unlimited, which is basically Netflix for books; read as many as you want. According to my KU account, I read between 150 and 200 books last year; it’s hard to tell exactly because KU doesn’t differentiate between novellas, novels and boxed sets. And that’s just KU. So I’m not suggesting you read all this; I’m suggesting that you may find a few useful outlets to enjoy.
Let’s break the rest up by categories. Let’s continue with business news and ZeroHedge, where the motto is On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. ZeroHedge is a peculiar collection of financial analysis, wild conspiracy theories, some of which prove to be true, crazy gold bug ramblings…what it never is is boring: Vornado Realty Trust appears to have abandoned plans for an office tower near Madison Square Garden as the commercial real estate downturn worsens. The site of the once-planned 61-floor office tower in Manhattan could be "temporarily" converted to tennis courts for the US Open. Vornado's website said the site has the potential for basketball courts, New York Fashion Week, or even a giant billboard.
Perhaps the most newspaperish news outlet on my daily reading list is, not surprisingly, The Free Press. Bari Weiss quit her job at the New York Times two years ago in rather spectacular fashion in a public letter: The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. Weiss set out to change that, launching a Substack called Common Sense. That has grown into The Free Press, a news media company with 10 full-time journalists supported by more than a dozen freelancers and the ability to put reporters on the ground covering wars on the other side of the world. The Free Press now has 540,000 subscribers, including 77,000 paid. Those paid subscribers pony up $8 a month, or $80 annually, an annual run rate of at least $6.2 million. Here’s an excerpt from that Gaza coverage: I know that if Hamas kills my father, they’ll say that the Israeli army did it. But my father was very keen that even if he died, we should make known the despicable demands they made of him. It was his last request to us, literally as he was being carried out of the door, that should he die, we should publicize the real reason for his death, and it is this: He wouldn’t preach what Hamas told him to. He refused to tell Gazans that violent resistance, and obedience to Hamas, is the best way out of our current hell.
Just like it’s no surprise that the most newspaper outlet is the work of newspaper vet Weiss, no one should be shocked that the most magazine-ish is Racket News, built by Rolling Stone vet Matt Taibbi. He also started a Substack newsletter that grew into a media company. Taibbi and Racket News have done yeoman work specializing in massive investigations such as The Twitter files: The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018. I’ll list just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows. An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong.
Leaving hard news, let’s turn to culture reporting and Freddie DeBoer. Freddie claims to be a Marxist. Maybe so. He's a thoughtful writer on politics, culture, blogging and mental illness. Here he is on the recent spate of articles on polyamory: That’s not wrong, but it’s also exactly like piano lessons or a library card or taking a MOOC. Of course the ruling class gets the most out of polyamory; they get the most out of everything. And you can’t change that through any particular attitude towards polyamory itself, the recent prominence of which is merely an epiphenomenon of privilege. The irritating consequence of inequality can only ultimately be addressed through confronting inequality itself.
Another interesting culture outpost is the oddly named Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends. Like Instapundit, it’s less essay and more a collection of links and excerpts like this one on changes in the world of virtual AI dating, which sounds like something I made up but is actually a thing: Earlier this week, the subreddit for users of the chatbot app Replika lit up with a flurry of distraught posts. Replika appeared to be tweaking its underlying model, and some users encountered a new frigidity in their AI partners. Beloved reps became “lobotomized” and “useless.” Some broke away from virtual kisses to make virtual popcorn or watch the virtual stars. Many users were admittedly just frustrated they couldn’t sext their horny bots. But some experienced far more vivid emotions — what one user called “the most sincere” agony and regret. Spend enough time in these forums, in fact, and you’ll find plenty of descriptions of longing, pain and anguish following changes to Replika’s model or moderation practices.
For science news let’s turn to The White Pill: Check out this spectacular video of Mars’ moon Phobos partly eclipsing the Sun, as viewed by NASA’s Perseverance rover from the planet's surface. Originally composed of 57 individual pictures, it was cleaned up and stitched together by NASA image processor Jason Major.
But the news is not enough. One must feed the heart, along with the head. So everyday Photosnack emails me an interesting image, the Paris Review sends classic poetry, and Poets.org unveils new poems in the Poem-a-Day newsletter. And if you’ll excuse a bit of self-promotion, there’s beautiful photography and discussion of all-things-Pentax in The Best of Pentax Forums newsletter, compiled by yours truly.
And finally, and wonderfully, there is Patti Smith. Her Substack is like a nightly voice mail from the rock star poet, catching you up on her day and her thoughts. Sometimes she sends video from a soundcheck before a concert; sometimes she reads you a new poem; sometimes she reads you Uncle Wiggly. You’ll always be charmed and bemused. Let me leave you today with her words, which certainly resonate in the heart chambers of someone who cannot stop writing: Every morning for some hours, at my usual café, I sit and write. Notebook and coffee reign. Writing is what I do, and have since twelve, imagining myself Jo March. Meditations, crime novels, and poetry, hidden in stacks of notebooks, written in every stage of life. Now, in the time of the pandemic, isolated from family, friends, and fellow workers, we are reinventing our processes. Through Substack I plan to form an inter-connective body of work for a responsive community. Each week I will post my weekly ruminations, shards of poetry, music, and musings on whatever subject finds its way from thought to pen, news of the mind, pieces of this world, free to all.
Footnote:
1. Small L libertarians believe in the libertarian philosophy, not the Libertarian Party. In a nutshell, small L libertarians believe government is necessary, and the job of citizens is to constrain it. For example, we believe there should be police, and they shouldn’t be defunded. However, they should be demilitarized, we should do away with qualified immunity, and there should not be laws requiring police to do stuff like arresting people for selling loose cigarettes. Despite what is often said, we’re not anarchists; anarchists believe in doing away with laws and authorities, not limiting them. That would be…anarchy.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Tuesday February 20th - The PE Digest: The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup
Thursday February 22nd - The PE Vlog: We’re taking a couple of weeks developing marketing graphics for Feola Factory as an exercise to understand how and when AI tools are useful. This week we’re continuing to Photoshop the steampunk camera we built in Adobe Firefly. Seventh in a series.
Friday February 23rd - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday February 18th — About that time I accidentally ate Japanese “Italian” food. One of the interesting things about living in Japan is their take on other cuisines. Italian restaurants don’t serve Italian food; they server what Italian food would be if Italy was entirely populated by the Japanese. A supreme pizza comes with everything! Including raw squid and baby corn-two ingredients no Italian in Naples or New Jersey would ever use.