A look back at the first year of The Present Age, Part 3
A "best of" look at the first year in business
I launched The Present Age on June 7, 2021. Since then, I have published 167 newsletters. If you’ve read any of them, I’d like to thank you for doing that. If this is your first, welcome aboard! That being said…
This week, I’ll be sharing “best of” articles from the first year of The Present Age. Tuesday was June through September 2021; Wednesday was October 2021 through January 2022; today is February through May 2022.
February 8, 2022: I wrote about Joe Rogan and Spotify. In it, I argue that if there was a time to stop Rogan from having his show on Spotify, it was before he was hired. In short: Spotify got exactly what they paid for when they made a deal with him.
February 10, 2022: I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of journalists sitting on important info so they can sell a book. That’s what this post was about.
February 14, 2022: This was around the time there were a bunch of “ughhhh, why are people still worried about COVID! COVID is overrrrr” type pieces published in places like The Atlantic. I argued that those were dishonest narratives (and it seems that I was right).
February 28, 2022: I wrote about the “Plan to Rescue America” put out by the National Republican Senatorial Committee (the Republican group led by Sen. Rick Scott to help elect more Republicans to the Senate). In addition to a bunch of other horrific stuff, there’s also a not-so-subtle hint that Republicans want to essentially purge trans people from public life. That’s bad, obviously.
March 2, 2022: This piece is about people on the internet and their tendency to fake expertise.
March 7, 2022: Thinking back on “Freedom Fries,” I warned against taking a broad anti-Russia stance that goes beyond the people responsible for its atrocities.
March 21, 2022: After trans swimmer Lia Thomas won at the NCAA national championships, I wrote this piece about the controversy surrounding her participation and how bad actors were using her to justify their broader anti-trans push.
March 29, 2022: I had just started using Midjourney’s artificial intelligence art tool, and put together a post about how completely fascinated I was by just how good it was.
April 12, 2022: Despite the media narratives about the “censorious left” and “cancel culture,” little attention had been paid to the actual threats to speech being waged by the right.
April 20, 2022: After Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz pulled back the curtain on the person operating the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account, a narrative started up that the account was actually fine because all it did was post other people’s videos unedited. I pushed back on that argument by highlighting one time it helped create an entirely false story.
April 21, 2022: Rudy Giuliani appeared on Fox’s The Masked Singer. I tried to explain why I felt that was a sign that we failed as a society.
April 27, 2022: I spent a day digging through 4chan to explain why “total free speech” probably isn’t what anyone wants, and why Elon Musk’s vision for Twitter was a little off-the-mark.
May 17, 2022: I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of people getting duped by a fake story and then going, “But doesn’t it say something about society that I believed it!?”
May 26, 2022: After the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting, Republicans tried to blame the attack on trans people. This was not the first time they’ve done this, and it won’t be the last.
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>I spent a day digging through 4chan
I feel like we need some FEMA/EPA hybrid to run decontamination after an experience like that.