Matt, a suggestion looking forward. In light of your points about blue states or blue cities getting things done, so that we can point to those and go "Hey, look, this stuff can be done well". I'd love to see you or guest writer(s) actually write about such successes. Partly I think in a world of doomscrolling, we (and I mean this in a non-partisan way) don't celebrate our successes enough. And partly it's just good to just shine a light on what interesting things are being done outside of our normal range of vision.
I've banged on this in the comments before, but I think what Fairfax County is trying to do with the Richmond Hwy corridor is both a very difficult problem to address, and also doing it in a way that shows real flexibility and prioritization of goals. It's an effort I worked on in the initial planning phase on a citizen advisory panel, and it's sort of amazing that we're going to try to take one of the worst stroads ever built and turn it into something much, much better. I'd kill to read some deeper dives into other areas of the country and how they've tried to tackle such issues.
This newsletter was a highlight of the year for me. I get a ton of them and pay for a few, but this is my “desert island” substack. It aces my test for incoming information: is it worth reading/listening to even if I don’t think I’m interested in the topic? I might even read/ see Dune!
This is a weird sentence to write but I also (especially?) love the comments. I have learned a lot and found quite a few new sources of information in this space.
Thanks everyone and hoping for a 2022 that somehow exceeds expectations!
Yes, please do more "weird" posts! They have the highest VART. And continue to highlight or dialog with other writers with weird takes; I don't have the time or patience to do a wide trawl on Twitter for overlooked gems, but I trust you as a curator.
A couple requests for articles in 2022, policy mysteries that you may be one of the best-positioned journalists to investigate:
* Who keeps killing funding for greater IRS enforcement and why? This is one of the most obvious and most-widely-known low-hanging fruits for policy improvement but it still can't get off the ground after a decade. Is it some kind of personal vendetta by some congressional group? Is it really rich tax cheats lobbying to keep getting away with tax cheating? I tend to be skeptical of those kind of conspiracy/corruption explanations, but this case is so baffling . . .
* What on earth is going on with the legal immigration system? The visa backlog and processing time for every category of application are exploding. I have friends that want to stay and are qualified to stay, but are having to leave the country because their employers can't wait that long for processing. Is there some political calculation here? Is it just poor execution - and how did it get *so* poor? This seems like a crucial topic for the One Billion Americans agenda!
One of our major political parties has been running for fifty years on the slogan 'Government is the Problem', and they've done everything they could to make their case.
Sure, but slogans are just slogans. What are the actual bills in Congress and/or executive actions that could be implemented, and why are they *not* being implemented? Who is blocking them? Have they even been written, or are they just PR talking points?
I'd also like to see something about marijuana decriminalization. Every few months I see a headline that Schumer is going to introduce legislation, then nothing ever happens. It seems like the bill could be really, really short - just remove MJ from the list of schedule 1 drugs.
To put a little finer point on my other comment: if Biden would do his job, it would force Congress to do its, including at at least 10 Republicans. If Biden drew up a list of prominent individuals involved in the cannabis business (scientists, financiers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, Republican campaign donors, etc - the kind of person you see in a suit at life sciences industry events), and said his oath of office leaves him no choice but instruct the Justice Department to begin filing indictments and forfeiture actions against these people, just as it would against drug dealers in the inner city, unless Congress brings the law into conformity with what the public in these states wants, Congress would act. So blame Biden for the lack of federal action, along with Congress.
Ideally there probably would be a federal role for regulating legal marijuana rather than just repealing any federal role, but in the absence of agreement on what that would look like, this would be a good interim step. There's something really wrong with the current situation where three Presidents have committed serious dereliction of duty, arguably impeachable violations of their oath of office, by simply sitting on their hands and watching as large parts of the country openly, flagrantly, violate federal criminal law. Either enforce it or repeal it.
See posts and the other comments on how Democrats should focus on an example Democratic state that’s well run. You can’t blame all government dysfunction on Republicans.
Henry, are you an American citizen? I was born one and married a French woman in 1982. She obtained American citizenship fairly smoothly as I recall, a trip or two to the American embassy in Paris, and maybe a six month wait for her passport. In the meantime she could travel on her French passport. Both our children have duel citizenship, which is a blessing. I've stupidly never applied for French citizenship. I imagine covid has made everything, from renewing your driver's license to applying for citizenship, a bureaucratic headache. A friend recently spent three months renewing his passport and another three applying for Social Security.
As an aside, your US/Canada comparison seems beside the point. Let's imagine the countries were geographically flipped, Canada bordering Mexico, the US bordering Canada. The issue for Americans isn't legal immigration, but undocumented immigration, and I bet if Canada and the US were flipped, Canadians would be as upset by immigration as Americans are and Americans would be as chill as Canadians.
David, I could be wrong, but you realize you now need to be living in the county continuously for at least 5 years (3 if married to a US citizen) to successfully apply for citizenship, yeah? Sounds a little more difficult than in ‘82.
And seriously no disrespect here, I have a lot of friends who are trying to get through immigration right now and the system is much more onerous now than it was in the past.
That could well be. I’ve had friends go through the process recently who suffered a lot of grilling over whether the marriage was real (see Gerard Depardieux’s ‘Green Card’). So my memory of my wife’s experience may be out of date. I think we had been married and living in the US several years before she applied; perhaps there was a residency requirement. At the time (don’t know about today), the spousal exemption from estate tax wasn’t available to foreign spouses. The tax then kicked in at a relatively low amount (something like $500k), and while it was irrelevant to us then when our net worth was approximately zero, it seemed like it could be relevant by the time one of us died. So my wife became an American.
I wish you would begin to write on regulation more broadly. For me, the pandemic has made absolutely clear that our regulatory agencies really are functioning abysmally, that Alex Tabarrok is at least 90% right, if not 100. This has become clear for the FDA and CDC, but I assume it must be true much more broadly. And of course, as your writing on housing demonstrates, this is not just confined to centralized federal regulation but permeates the polity. Nevertheless, regulation is necessary. What I would like to hear about is: i/what is plausibly a better regulatory order? ii/how can one plausibly move in that direction?
Broadly speaking I think its good for agencies to follow cost-benefit analysis methods and the ones that do outperform the ones that don’t. But you get weird things that fall between the cracks, so the EPA licenses gas power plants on the grounds that the benefits of electricity exceed the pollution harms. Fair enough. But then the NRC doesn’t do cost-benefit with nuclear plants, they do maximum safety. So nuclear is always more expensive than gas even though the benefits are the same (electricity is good) and the downsides of nuclear are smaller.
I think this also ties into something that Matt occasionally mentions, about how California or New York or Massachusetts or New Jersey or other blue states aren't turning absolutely reliable Democratic control of government into highly functioning great governance.
If the Democrats are the party of "the government can make your life better," how can they actually do that?
JB Pritzker here in IL might be a dark horse contender. The state has had one of the best vaccine roll-outs in the nation: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/28/us/covid-deaths.html. Despite seeing the progressive income tax referendum fail, the state budget is less of a basket case than usual. Longtime machine operator Mike Madigan is out as speaker of the state House, as a state rep at all, and as chair of the state Democratic Party. And the long statewide population decline has slowed to almost nothing, and actually reversed in Chicago. He's playing from a much tougher starting point than WA, but if the present turnaround keeps up he'll be looking pretty great in 2024.
I think you might be exaggerating the Dem’s “party of government” shtick. More accurately, the Dems are the non-nativist/educated folk party where people who aren’t Republicans feel comfortable, if not welcome.
Thanks for the great reads this year! As a piece of unsolicited feedback - I wonder if the current pace will start to burn you out. I know you feel pressure to deliver content so people get their subscription fee's worth. But speaking for myself, and likely for many other subscribers: the value proposition here is not that we'll have a lot more to read. We have plenty of stuff to read, in 2022, on the internet - usually too much.
The value proposition is that the takes here can deliver higher quality reading material than the alternatives. A sort of Value Over Replacement Take (VORT?) where the replacement take is already something quite high quality. Delivering a high VORT a couple times a week easily justifies the subscription. And, equally, forcing yourself to crank out a replacement-level take just to have something up that day does very little for the value proposition. And too many below-replacement takes can destroy value by lowering the average quality of my reading material, even if you also have some great ones; I've unfollowed a number of people on twitter for exactly that reason.
Absolutely agree. In 2021 I trimmed back my consumption of numerous platforms and replaced with just a handful of resources. I picked yours because I had hoped (and was rewarded) that I'd get Weeds-level analysis in written form. When you left the show I stopped listening, further trimming back consumption, hoping to get what Loren is describing as VORT. Selfishly, I do not want you to burn out, because I don't want to have to go shopping for a similar product. If you posted less, but made your posts in-depth thoughtful analysis (like you usually do) I wouldn't hesitate to keep renewing my subscription. I have more to read than I can possibly get through anyway. Thank you for what you are doing. Happy New Year!
Overproduction can be a problem. This is explicitly why Andrew Sullivan pulled the plug on the Daily Dish some years back. The solution is to do a weekly guest post from Boise, Better.
This is a tough issue. Matt now is in the space Sullivan was ten years ago, brain on fire, writing something smart every day. I pay for Sullivan's Substack but today it doesn't have the value his old Daily Dish had. At some point, he burned out, understandably. I don't know anything about Matt's and Sullivan's deals with Substack. Of the three I subscribe to, Matt Taibbi's has the most comments and I assume the most value to whoever owns Substack. I would be sad to see SB become more like the Weekly Dish than the Daily Dish. That said, I can understand why Matt might be burning out. One thought would be to let others write more for the site. Milan would a great start. He's smart, young and just as importantly gets readers sounding off, which is half the fun and why many of us subscribe.
Going to sound messed up but this is my #1 source for news every thing else is just headline scrolling. Like I teach kids I have to lesson plan etc I can’t fuss around going to multiple organizations.
100% agreed with this. I've been very happy with what my subscription bucks have delivered in 2021. I'd frankly be just as happy with the same quality of content but only delivered MWF.
Matt, thanks for a great first year (and for your evangelism on popularism, which seems necessary in our gerrymandered country). Yours is one of the few Substack newsletters I’ve stuck with. I look forward to whatever you have planned for the Slow Boring community (is that the right word?) in 2022.
I'd definitely love some political science-ey writing about how to sell incremental increases in immigration. I'd love to have a hemispheric Schengen Area, but I also know that that probably won't be politically feasible in my lifetime :'(
An honorable mention that I didn't see reflected here: your post on why ethnic studies - i.e., curricula that are responsive to the culture and ethnicity of students - are actually a good thing. I like the nuanced views you bring to Ed policy, that is fully aware of the excess of wokeness, but also committed to good policy. Thanks.
Favorite article this year from this blog was “Covid 1889.” Really gave new information that nobody was getting elsewhere and led to wonderful perspective.
Overall though despite paying more for this than I pay for my digital WSJ subscription (after I call and haggle with them every year) this stack is well worth it. Great tone. Great perspective.
Consider spending some subscription dollars on hiring another full time writer. Happy with the subscription for now, but at some point other interesting people will create interesting bundles. I’d rather you create a bundle at the same price that reaches more people (myself included) than maintain a niche product.
I think the product works best because it is unbundled. I read Vox for Matt and stopped reading it because the other writers were extremely to the left of me on culture issues. Similarly I read FiveThirtyEight primarily for Nate and models, the rest of the staff is vanilla progressive journalism. As someone who identifies as a weird mix of ordoliberal and traditionalist, I don't expect any opinion writer or policy maker to write from my worldview but being able to pick and choose is far better than fixed bundles.
Honestly to me it feels better to pay for one writer I think is really good than exactly the same amount of money for that writer plus others I don't like much. The reason I rarely subscribe to things is that I feel compelled to be absolutely certain that every writer who receives money from me "deserves" it. It's maybe not terribly rational but it's the way my brain works.
The NYT should be able to pay more for top talent (larger bundle) so I would suggest hiring talented people who are unlikely to be hired by the NYT because of their points of view.
Eh. Not much to comment on that post. I probably wouldn’t be subscribing if I didn’t agree with him mostly. The only thing he really gets wrong is homelessness and downplaying the effect of substance abuse.
Other than that, I just want to wish my fellow subscribers and commenters a happy new year. I can almost guarantee that the majority of you will be hit by omicron in the next few weeks. Take care of yourself.
I’ve decided to opt out of the pandemic as my New Year’s resolution.
I finally stopped traveling at least for a couple of weeks. I need to get caught up with Homelife.
I look forward to spirited debate with you guys in 2022.
I'd really like to see more cross-pollination from other Substacks -- sort of the 2022 version of a blogroll or re-bloging. I miss having a chance to see a wider ecosystem.
I feel like your argument on homelessness is a bit simplistic. Oregon is a great place to look I think, because in Portland you can absolutely find cheap places to live even if rent is going up. When you have huge camps set up there where people are taking super hard drugs making them half-psychotic, it's hard to say the issue is "not about drugs" because it's such a strong factor in the psychology of the drug abusing homeless. I think there's a point when you get on this stuff that where you live is less of a priority than the drugs, and it's up to the city to disincentivize doing them in public.
Matt, a suggestion looking forward. In light of your points about blue states or blue cities getting things done, so that we can point to those and go "Hey, look, this stuff can be done well". I'd love to see you or guest writer(s) actually write about such successes. Partly I think in a world of doomscrolling, we (and I mean this in a non-partisan way) don't celebrate our successes enough. And partly it's just good to just shine a light on what interesting things are being done outside of our normal range of vision.
I've banged on this in the comments before, but I think what Fairfax County is trying to do with the Richmond Hwy corridor is both a very difficult problem to address, and also doing it in a way that shows real flexibility and prioritization of goals. It's an effort I worked on in the initial planning phase on a citizen advisory panel, and it's sort of amazing that we're going to try to take one of the worst stroads ever built and turn it into something much, much better. I'd kill to read some deeper dives into other areas of the country and how they've tried to tackle such issues.
I like this idea!
This newsletter was a highlight of the year for me. I get a ton of them and pay for a few, but this is my “desert island” substack. It aces my test for incoming information: is it worth reading/listening to even if I don’t think I’m interested in the topic? I might even read/ see Dune!
This is a weird sentence to write but I also (especially?) love the comments. I have learned a lot and found quite a few new sources of information in this space.
Thanks everyone and hoping for a 2022 that somehow exceeds expectations!
Well said. This is what the New Yorker used to be for me: I have no idea what the next story will be about but it will be made compelling.
Why the New Yorker isn’t that anymore is a whole other topic. But Slow Boring *is* that! Money well spent.
Also: I would love more of the weird stuff, go for it.
Happy New Year, everyone!
I feel the same way about the New Yorker, including the evolution of feeling!
+1 re more weirdness.
Yes, please do more "weird" posts! They have the highest VART. And continue to highlight or dialog with other writers with weird takes; I don't have the time or patience to do a wide trawl on Twitter for overlooked gems, but I trust you as a curator.
A couple requests for articles in 2022, policy mysteries that you may be one of the best-positioned journalists to investigate:
* Who keeps killing funding for greater IRS enforcement and why? This is one of the most obvious and most-widely-known low-hanging fruits for policy improvement but it still can't get off the ground after a decade. Is it some kind of personal vendetta by some congressional group? Is it really rich tax cheats lobbying to keep getting away with tax cheating? I tend to be skeptical of those kind of conspiracy/corruption explanations, but this case is so baffling . . .
* What on earth is going on with the legal immigration system? The visa backlog and processing time for every category of application are exploding. I have friends that want to stay and are qualified to stay, but are having to leave the country because their employers can't wait that long for processing. Is there some political calculation here? Is it just poor execution - and how did it get *so* poor? This seems like a crucial topic for the One Billion Americans agenda!
Here's an American Immigration Lawyers Association policy brief on the second issue, if it helps to have concrete proposals to get your teeth into: https://www.aila.org/advo-media/aila-policy-briefs/policy-brief-reopening-america
They propose, among other things, allowing virtual immigrant interviews and resuming a stateside visa processing program that ceased in 2004.
One of our major political parties has been running for fifty years on the slogan 'Government is the Problem', and they've done everything they could to make their case.
Sure, but slogans are just slogans. What are the actual bills in Congress and/or executive actions that could be implemented, and why are they *not* being implemented? Who is blocking them? Have they even been written, or are they just PR talking points?
I'd also like to see something about marijuana decriminalization. Every few months I see a headline that Schumer is going to introduce legislation, then nothing ever happens. It seems like the bill could be really, really short - just remove MJ from the list of schedule 1 drugs.
To put a little finer point on my other comment: if Biden would do his job, it would force Congress to do its, including at at least 10 Republicans. If Biden drew up a list of prominent individuals involved in the cannabis business (scientists, financiers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, Republican campaign donors, etc - the kind of person you see in a suit at life sciences industry events), and said his oath of office leaves him no choice but instruct the Justice Department to begin filing indictments and forfeiture actions against these people, just as it would against drug dealers in the inner city, unless Congress brings the law into conformity with what the public in these states wants, Congress would act. So blame Biden for the lack of federal action, along with Congress.
Ideally there probably would be a federal role for regulating legal marijuana rather than just repealing any federal role, but in the absence of agreement on what that would look like, this would be a good interim step. There's something really wrong with the current situation where three Presidents have committed serious dereliction of duty, arguably impeachable violations of their oath of office, by simply sitting on their hands and watching as large parts of the country openly, flagrantly, violate federal criminal law. Either enforce it or repeal it.
See posts and the other comments on how Democrats should focus on an example Democratic state that’s well run. You can’t blame all government dysfunction on Republicans.
Henry, are you an American citizen? I was born one and married a French woman in 1982. She obtained American citizenship fairly smoothly as I recall, a trip or two to the American embassy in Paris, and maybe a six month wait for her passport. In the meantime she could travel on her French passport. Both our children have duel citizenship, which is a blessing. I've stupidly never applied for French citizenship. I imagine covid has made everything, from renewing your driver's license to applying for citizenship, a bureaucratic headache. A friend recently spent three months renewing his passport and another three applying for Social Security.
As an aside, your US/Canada comparison seems beside the point. Let's imagine the countries were geographically flipped, Canada bordering Mexico, the US bordering Canada. The issue for Americans isn't legal immigration, but undocumented immigration, and I bet if Canada and the US were flipped, Canadians would be as upset by immigration as Americans are and Americans would be as chill as Canadians.
David, I could be wrong, but you realize you now need to be living in the county continuously for at least 5 years (3 if married to a US citizen) to successfully apply for citizenship, yeah? Sounds a little more difficult than in ‘82.
And seriously no disrespect here, I have a lot of friends who are trying to get through immigration right now and the system is much more onerous now than it was in the past.
That could well be. I’ve had friends go through the process recently who suffered a lot of grilling over whether the marriage was real (see Gerard Depardieux’s ‘Green Card’). So my memory of my wife’s experience may be out of date. I think we had been married and living in the US several years before she applied; perhaps there was a residency requirement. At the time (don’t know about today), the spousal exemption from estate tax wasn’t available to foreign spouses. The tax then kicked in at a relatively low amount (something like $500k), and while it was irrelevant to us then when our net worth was approximately zero, it seemed like it could be relevant by the time one of us died. So my wife became an American.
I wish you would begin to write on regulation more broadly. For me, the pandemic has made absolutely clear that our regulatory agencies really are functioning abysmally, that Alex Tabarrok is at least 90% right, if not 100. This has become clear for the FDA and CDC, but I assume it must be true much more broadly. And of course, as your writing on housing demonstrates, this is not just confined to centralized federal regulation but permeates the polity. Nevertheless, regulation is necessary. What I would like to hear about is: i/what is plausibly a better regulatory order? ii/how can one plausibly move in that direction?
Broadly speaking I think its good for agencies to follow cost-benefit analysis methods and the ones that do outperform the ones that don’t. But you get weird things that fall between the cracks, so the EPA licenses gas power plants on the grounds that the benefits of electricity exceed the pollution harms. Fair enough. But then the NRC doesn’t do cost-benefit with nuclear plants, they do maximum safety. So nuclear is always more expensive than gas even though the benefits are the same (electricity is good) and the downsides of nuclear are smaller.
I think this also ties into something that Matt occasionally mentions, about how California or New York or Massachusetts or New Jersey or other blue states aren't turning absolutely reliable Democratic control of government into highly functioning great governance.
If the Democrats are the party of "the government can make your life better," how can they actually do that?
Who is the best Dem gov currently? Hard to think of any
I like Jared Polis
Jay Inslee? WA managed the pandemic very well, the Seattle economy is white hot, and I think they've done above average on housing/land use reform. WA is the fastest-growing blue state: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/dec/2020-percent-change-map.html
JB Pritzker here in IL might be a dark horse contender. The state has had one of the best vaccine roll-outs in the nation: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/28/us/covid-deaths.html. Despite seeing the progressive income tax referendum fail, the state budget is less of a basket case than usual. Longtime machine operator Mike Madigan is out as speaker of the state House, as a state rep at all, and as chair of the state Democratic Party. And the long statewide population decline has slowed to almost nothing, and actually reversed in Chicago. He's playing from a much tougher starting point than WA, but if the present turnaround keeps up he'll be looking pretty great in 2024.
Doesn’t get enough love: Andy Beshear.
I think you might be exaggerating the Dem’s “party of government” shtick. More accurately, the Dems are the non-nativist/educated folk party where people who aren’t Republicans feel comfortable, if not welcome.
Thanks for the great reads this year! As a piece of unsolicited feedback - I wonder if the current pace will start to burn you out. I know you feel pressure to deliver content so people get their subscription fee's worth. But speaking for myself, and likely for many other subscribers: the value proposition here is not that we'll have a lot more to read. We have plenty of stuff to read, in 2022, on the internet - usually too much.
The value proposition is that the takes here can deliver higher quality reading material than the alternatives. A sort of Value Over Replacement Take (VORT?) where the replacement take is already something quite high quality. Delivering a high VORT a couple times a week easily justifies the subscription. And, equally, forcing yourself to crank out a replacement-level take just to have something up that day does very little for the value proposition. And too many below-replacement takes can destroy value by lowering the average quality of my reading material, even if you also have some great ones; I've unfollowed a number of people on twitter for exactly that reason.
Absolutely agree. In 2021 I trimmed back my consumption of numerous platforms and replaced with just a handful of resources. I picked yours because I had hoped (and was rewarded) that I'd get Weeds-level analysis in written form. When you left the show I stopped listening, further trimming back consumption, hoping to get what Loren is describing as VORT. Selfishly, I do not want you to burn out, because I don't want to have to go shopping for a similar product. If you posted less, but made your posts in-depth thoughtful analysis (like you usually do) I wouldn't hesitate to keep renewing my subscription. I have more to read than I can possibly get through anyway. Thank you for what you are doing. Happy New Year!
Overproduction can be a problem. This is explicitly why Andrew Sullivan pulled the plug on the Daily Dish some years back. The solution is to do a weekly guest post from Boise, Better.
This is a tough issue. Matt now is in the space Sullivan was ten years ago, brain on fire, writing something smart every day. I pay for Sullivan's Substack but today it doesn't have the value his old Daily Dish had. At some point, he burned out, understandably. I don't know anything about Matt's and Sullivan's deals with Substack. Of the three I subscribe to, Matt Taibbi's has the most comments and I assume the most value to whoever owns Substack. I would be sad to see SB become more like the Weekly Dish than the Daily Dish. That said, I can understand why Matt might be burning out. One thought would be to let others write more for the site. Milan would a great start. He's smart, young and just as importantly gets readers sounding off, which is half the fun and why many of us subscribe.
Going to sound messed up but this is my #1 source for news every thing else is just headline scrolling. Like I teach kids I have to lesson plan etc I can’t fuss around going to multiple organizations.
100% agreed with this. I've been very happy with what my subscription bucks have delivered in 2021. I'd frankly be just as happy with the same quality of content but only delivered MWF.
Matt, thanks for a great first year (and for your evangelism on popularism, which seems necessary in our gerrymandered country). Yours is one of the few Substack newsletters I’ve stuck with. I look forward to whatever you have planned for the Slow Boring community (is that the right word?) in 2022.
I'd definitely love some political science-ey writing about how to sell incremental increases in immigration. I'd love to have a hemispheric Schengen Area, but I also know that that probably won't be politically feasible in my lifetime :'(
Completely agree about the hemispheric Schengen zone for the New World. There already are one billion Americans, just not all in one country.
An honorable mention that I didn't see reflected here: your post on why ethnic studies - i.e., curricula that are responsive to the culture and ethnicity of students - are actually a good thing. I like the nuanced views you bring to Ed policy, that is fully aware of the excess of wokeness, but also committed to good policy. Thanks.
Favorite article this year from this blog was “Covid 1889.” Really gave new information that nobody was getting elsewhere and led to wonderful perspective.
Overall though despite paying more for this than I pay for my digital WSJ subscription (after I call and haggle with them every year) this stack is well worth it. Great tone. Great perspective.
The WSJ opinion section has always been recognised as a joke for decades.
Consider spending some subscription dollars on hiring another full time writer. Happy with the subscription for now, but at some point other interesting people will create interesting bundles. I’d rather you create a bundle at the same price that reaches more people (myself included) than maintain a niche product.
I think the product works best because it is unbundled. I read Vox for Matt and stopped reading it because the other writers were extremely to the left of me on culture issues. Similarly I read FiveThirtyEight primarily for Nate and models, the rest of the staff is vanilla progressive journalism. As someone who identifies as a weird mix of ordoliberal and traditionalist, I don't expect any opinion writer or policy maker to write from my worldview but being able to pick and choose is far better than fixed bundles.
Dylan Matthews is a pure policy journalist who literally never writes about culture war stuff, he's excellent and doesn't belong in that group
Matt left Slate but then it followed him to Vox!
Honestly to me it feels better to pay for one writer I think is really good than exactly the same amount of money for that writer plus others I don't like much. The reason I rarely subscribe to things is that I feel compelled to be absolutely certain that every writer who receives money from me "deserves" it. It's maybe not terribly rational but it's the way my brain works.
Yea, but I like the stuff the interns do. I am with you I won’t subscribe to the NYT because there is too much I don’t agree with there.
I wonder at what point he is poaching from the NYT. Like getting Jane Or Sarah back would be dope.
The NYT should be able to pay more for top talent (larger bundle) so I would suggest hiring talented people who are unlikely to be hired by the NYT because of their points of view.
Eh. Not much to comment on that post. I probably wouldn’t be subscribing if I didn’t agree with him mostly. The only thing he really gets wrong is homelessness and downplaying the effect of substance abuse.
Other than that, I just want to wish my fellow subscribers and commenters a happy new year. I can almost guarantee that the majority of you will be hit by omicron in the next few weeks. Take care of yourself.
I’ve decided to opt out of the pandemic as my New Year’s resolution.
I finally stopped traveling at least for a couple of weeks. I need to get caught up with Homelife.
I look forward to spirited debate with you guys in 2022.
I'd really like to see more cross-pollination from other Substacks -- sort of the 2022 version of a blogroll or re-bloging. I miss having a chance to see a wider ecosystem.
More podcasts please! Also, did we ever receive the Slow Boring swag (mug, I think?) promised to us loyal commentators?
I feel like your argument on homelessness is a bit simplistic. Oregon is a great place to look I think, because in Portland you can absolutely find cheap places to live even if rent is going up. When you have huge camps set up there where people are taking super hard drugs making them half-psychotic, it's hard to say the issue is "not about drugs" because it's such a strong factor in the psychology of the drug abusing homeless. I think there's a point when you get on this stuff that where you live is less of a priority than the drugs, and it's up to the city to disincentivize doing them in public.
Happy Nude Year everybody