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...
The Most Important Book I Read This Year: “Poverty, By America” by Matthew Desmond
Roughly 1500 US families face eviction each week We live in a neoliberal world. In Thursday’s class, we had a seminar discussion about the concluding chapter...
Napoleon: The Lamentations of a New-ish History Teacher
Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon in Egypt This week’s newsletter is coming to you on Monday. We hosted Friendsgiving this weekend and my basketball team had a...
One Year Take-iversary
Photo by Elizaveta Kushnirenko on Unsplash Smarter people than me have written volumes about the antics of Elon Musk and the decline of Twitter. However, it...
Rejecting Brain-Dead Neutrality and Censorship
Photo by Şeyma D. As I mentioned last week, this upcoming Sunday will be the first anniversary of Takes & Typos. I am planning to publish a reader mailbag to...
No, Markets Aren't Self-Correcting — Corporate Consolidation Part III
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood From time-to-time, the newsletter does an unintentional or unplanned series. We are in one such triplet (see: here and here) about...
Monopolies and Corporate Consolidation are Neither Natural nor Inevitable
Photo by Suzy Hazlewood Happy Sunday, This week’s newsletter is a continuation of our conversation from last week about the causes of the diminishing...