Another post-election mailbag

Is it all Milton Friedman's fault?

I want to start today’s mailbag by shouting out state senator (and mayoral candidate) Zellnor Myrie’s incredibly ambitious housing plan for New York City.

The plan not only has an impressive headline target (one million units), it includes a ton of specifics on everything from public housing to rezoning to building code reforms. If he succeeded in implementing this, New York would almost instantly become a faster growing, more prosperous place with more tax revenue available locally and a positive halo effect for Democrats everywhere. It’s obviously not the case that voters voted for Trump because blue state land use policy is bad, but I do think it’s true that we’ve been lacking for a while now in examples of really exciting, effective executive leadership from non-DC Democrats and that housing is at the center of that.

So read the plan and say something nice about the guy. I’d love to see everyone else in the race try to match this level of ambition.

Meanwhile, on to this week’s questions. I should warn you that questions are still very tilting in the direction of post-election commentary, which is understandable. So we’ll do one more election focused mailbag, but I am happy to talk about other things going forward!

Alexa: According to the readership survey you did a few months ago, over 80% of your readership is male. Why do you think that is? Is there something about your content that appeals more to men? What kind of content do you think would draw more women to your newsletter?

It’s hard to know exactly why people like what they like, but back when I was hosting The Weeds with two women on Tuesdays and adhering to a rule that a majority of the guests on the Friday interview episodes would be women, our audience was majority male. My big takeaway from that was that women just really hate me, despite (in those cases) significant mitigation efforts. But I will say that when I heard from the minority of Weeds listeners who were women, they tended to really like the show and mention things like it was fun to hear Dara talk over me or it was great that I highlighted so many female policy experts on the Friday episodes.

Which is to say, I think:

1. A large majority of the audience for this kind of politics/policy content is men.

2. The women who are in the market for politics/policy content are nonetheless an underserved market who really appreciated a politics/policy podcast that had heavy female representation.

Here on Slow Boring, though, it’s just me.

And the reality of me is that outside of politics stuff, almost all my interests are very male-stereotypical. I like sports and political/military history and Harry Bosch and action movies, and while subscribers are obviously here for our politics articles, a lot of our most engaged readers are here just as much for our Habsburg content. So I don’t think it’s totally surprising that I don’t have a particular knack making this content more appealing to women. I think the Weeds editorial strategy of “have more women on the show” did more or less work, and if I hired women to write for Slow Boring, they would probably pull in a less male-dominated audience. Unfortunately, almost all the freelance pitches we get are from men. This is not because we are refusing to publish pitches from women. In fact, for precisely some of the reasons discussed in this post, I am much more interested in pitches from women, so if you’ve got an idea, please tell us about it!

Robert Frodeman: Your comments and articles have taken a tone of equanimity to the re-election of Trump — noting your disagreements while eschewing alarmism. Can you imagine any possible events in the coming term (e.g., the effective destruction of the FBI by Patel) that would cause you to change your tone? Or do you think that this approach is the best no matter what transpires?

I mean, who knows what the future may hold? In two years time, maybe I’ll be applying for refugee status in Ireland.

But I think it’s pretty clear that Trump thrives on an atmosphere of hysteria and, to an extent, even markets himself as a guy who’ll do abuses of power to help enact his followers’ revenge fantasies. I think it’s best to try to remain even keeled and to remind people that while a wide range of outcomes is possible, the most likely one by far is that Trump abuses power mostly for the purposes of corruption and self-enrichment. Note that MAGA Twitter is still fantasizing about RFK Jr. somehow ending high fructose corn syrup, while back on Planet Reality, he’s already gotten rolled on all his putative ideas about the food system in favor of a normal agribusiness lackey. And Trump’s picks for deputy secretary at HHS and to run the FDA are typical business-friendly Republicans. There is no secret plan to take on Big Farm or Big Pharma, and there never was. The sky is not falling in the way that some people worried, but there is also no exciting populist story here. Just Republicans going Republicaning.

Which isn’t to say nobody should worry. I was very upset when George W. Bush became president, and then 9/11 happened, which greatly widened the scope of things he could possibly do. He opted for some very unwise military decisions, a global network of secret torture prisons, and an illegal domestic surveillance program. Trump never did anything that bad, but he also didn’t have a 9/11-like scenario to empower him. The only thing we can really do is keep our eyes on what’s in front of us. And what we have right now, on top of several blah cabinet appointees, are some real problems, like Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and — yes — Kash Patel. I hope the Matt Gaetz precedent shows us that some of these people can be beaten.

TT: You wrote that you aren’t as excited about Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s aggressive re-urbanization of Paris as some other people. Why?