The Case of the Missing $64,000 Homes
An ad for a mid-century Sears Kit House I want to open with a silly data point. The most clicked link in last week's newsletter was to the WrestleMania...
Cairo's Soccer Data Farms, Zoom Cashiers, and Holes in the Job Market
Soccer fans in Cairo | Muhammad Ghafari After a brief health scare, mom is home from the hospital. The Sounders got their first win of the season (although...
The View from Below
A woman working in her "Sari-Sari" store | John Martin Perry Last week's newsletter pissed-off the kind of readers who hate when Black people talk about...
The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and American Meritocracy
First Officer Carole Hopson, one of the Black pilots at United Airlines | Karston Tannis. It’s spring break here in the Gulf and Hope and I are headed to the...
Experiencing Ramadan in the Gulf
Iftar is the meal where Muslims break their fast at dusk | Whaton.ae Ramadan is a holy month, marked by communal fasting and deepened devotion to the Islamic...
Traveling through History in Uzbekistan
The Registan, a 1400-1600s era Madrasah complex in Samarkand, Uzbekistan The Republic of Uzbekistan was born in August 1991. It was one of the 15 states that...
A Spoiler-Free Appreciation of Dune Part II
Warner Bros Promo Photo for "Dune Part II" As a nerd and a homer, I am contractually obligated to dig Dune. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, grew up in...
Reader Mailbag on the Demise of Utopianism
WWI started with dudes from the French countryside, riding horses in Napoleonic uniforms into battle and ended with rat infested trenches, aerial bombing,...
A Requiem for Vice
Dearly beloved, we gather here today to say farewell to "Vice" On Friday, Vice closed up shop. That morning, employees found themselves locked out of company...
Where Did All the Utopians Go?
Over 65,000 workers took part in the Seattle General Strike of 1919, shutting down the city for five days - University of Washington On Friday, I wrapped up...
The Mortality of Black Men
Photo by Rickie Crouch My father died when I was a sophomore in high school. My Vice Principal called me to the office and told me there had been an incident...
The Time Lost to Commuting
Photo by Robert So There are a handful of peculiar American institutions: overdraft fees, health insurance tied to your employer, and my topic today—the...
Learning to Not Believe Your Eyes
Photo by Cottonbro Studios It feels like deep fakes hit the mainstream this week, with disastrous results. A deepfake is a “video of a person in which their...
Scam AI Deep Fakes are More Popular than that Katt Williams Interview
A stressed Phylicia Rashad facing off with online scammers in the film “The Beekeeper” I never thought that a Jason Statham movie could give a fit of...
How I Fell in Love with a Bagel
Photo by Lucie Liz Getting eight hours of sleep is extremely underrated. Welcome to perhaps the most jet-lagged edition of the newsletter. I am fully in that...
The Bastardization of Colorblindness
Former President of Harvard University, Claudine Gay Greetings from lovely, snowy, and brick cold New York City. I'm in my third timezone this week and...
Merry Christmas, America — I Don’t Know What Else to Say
Photo by Rosemary Ketchum Welcome to the first edition of Takes & Typos hosted on Buttondown. If you missed the update midweek about the switch from...
I Refuse To Share Space With Neo Nazis And White Supremacists
It's time for me to exit Substack I don't have a lot of redlines in my life. But one redline I do have is that if an institution or business says that “Nazis...
The Bear is the Best Thing on TV this Year and Nothing is Really Close
FX’s “The Bear” is the most important thing on television and nothing is particularly close Here in Takes & Typo-stan, we’ve been winding down 2023 with a...
The Most Important Thing I Heard to This Year — Slow Burn, Season 8: Becoming Justice Thomas
Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving and arguably most influential member of the United States Supreme Court I am 44 years old. Clarence Thomas has been on...