A Claymation Fox Growing Flowers in Its Garden
This is basically the sequel to the National Review cruise essay Joe Hagan wrote for New York Magazine in 2012.
Song: “1000 Times” by Big Blood.
I’ve been enjoying Jon Stewart’s return to The Daily Show. I’m also aware of how Stewart’s comment at the end of his first show — the very true statement that improving your country is a daily, quotidian thing — didn’t quite seem to land on the internet the way one thought it would, and I’m taking the naive step of writing in a newsletter (for those of you who don’t know what a newsletter is: think of them as ‘Lesser Podcasts’) that you should mind those words. Improving your country is a daily, quotidian thing.
The latest from the realm of perpetual experiments: I’ve launched a Patreon that’s just going to be freeform online classes. It’s called ‘The Electric Treehouse.’ Read the first (paywalled) post introducing the concept of worldbuilding here. Other tiers will follow, but — for now — you can join The Electric Treehouse for the embarrassingly cheap $1/month. (A reminder to those who might not have caught it: I’ve stopped payments on this substack in light of Substack’s policy regarding quite literal nazis.)
Pulp at Reading in 2011. (Do I even need to say the song?)
The outsized reaction to a piece by Ezra Klein where he calls for an open convention strikes me as being similar to the reaction of Seth Moulton saying that the Democrats should replace Nancy Pelosi. Imperfect messenger, imperfect argument, imperfect timing, but … what if there’s something — of some kind — there? All of which is to say: the backlash to Stewart and Klein suggests to me that there are some quite obvious amounts of unresolved fear/anxiety in the narrative dynamics of the moment.