A maple in my parents’ backyard has elegant limbs that spiral up to the sky like the arms of a ballerina. I read somewhere that trees can grow like this, up and not out, from stress. More likely that my parents taught the tree to reach up, lopping off the limbs that stretched out too far towards the roof of the family home. 

This tree is nearly 40, old enough to be tapped for sap. The tree sap could cook down into syrup.

I am the same age as this tree. I’ve wondered sometimes whether I’ve already been pruned and tapped and boiled, my arms clawing up towards a distant sun that never seems to nourish me quite enough.  

It is unsurprising that a reporter like me who specializes in the Bad Stuff — whether that’s the parade of mass shootings I covered on the breaking news desk at the Washington Post, or the internet awfulness I looked at as an online culture reporter — deals with stress and burnout.

My newsletter is not about all that, not directly. If anything, Golden Idol Milkshake is a product of enduring it.

In the two years since I left what will probably be my last permanent full-time writing job in journalism, I’ve tried to teach myself to stretch, to let myself grow out instead of shooting up. My brain now feels like it has a better shape, and my relationship to my chosen industry is healthier and protected by some careful boundaries.

The damaged and twisted branches in my mind from years of relentlessly reporting on real-life horrors with too little support and for too little money have healed a little. Now I am nearly a maple worthy of a landscape painting, just before the world ends. 

My election night assignment in 2016 was to monitor the conspiracy-laden, racist right-wing forums that supported Trump. In 2024, those same forums – 4chan, 8chan, r/thedonald – are diminished, hidden deeper in enclaves of the fascist internet, or offline altogether. The “Trump internet” is now defined by AI slop Boomer bait more than any sort of internet savviness. Besides, this particular abyss has left containment. The bad stuff I reported on leading up to the 2016 elections has long flooded into the mainstream. I wrote about this flood in 2020. The water has not receded since. 

This newsletter, Golden Idol Milkshake is and is not about the abyss. Instead of diving down as deep as we can go, we will stretch out and conduct an expedition into how the monsters below have reached up into the places where the light still hits. We’ll also look for monster hunters. But most of all, this newsletter is about finding and interpreting the “glittering distractions” of life online and mapping how these shiny objects fit into a bigger picture. 

I want to look into weird wellness TikTok ads, YouTuber scandals, and viral churn, and connect them to bigger ideas. I want to find the dumbest possible thing I can on the internet and make you care about it. I want to show you where meaningful, good things are happening, where people are actually finding community and care and hope. And also, I want to remind you that anything — anything — can be weaponized to cause harm online, so long as it gets views.

I want to do archaeology on internet culture’s latrine and extract artifacts that tell a bigger story about how we got here, to connect ephemeral moments into patterns and loops. To even further mix metaphors, we will not be staring directly at the sun, but instead building a camera obscura to safely bear witness. 

But most of all, this newsletter is a place for me to write and try things out. I’ve struggled to enjoy writing for years, if I’m honest. My healing branches are itching to write again without fear of a pruning saw.

I’m still developing my schedule and reporting plan for this newsletter, but there’s something I’d like to make clear upfront: this newsletter will remain free. 

This is a personal project of mine, a space for me to try out things. Golden Idol Milkshake is intended to be kind of niche. I have no plans to put its content behind a paywall. However, if you like what I’m doing, there will be options to financially support my work.

Thank you for signing up to read what I do here. In the tradition of Jenna Marbles, I’ll be sending out something every other Wednesday/Thursday, starting next week. Hope nothing important happens before then!!