1. More U.S. troops died in the Civil War than in World Wars I and II combined. (Silver Bulletin)

2. Argentina has the world’s highest concentration of psychotherapists per capita. (The Week)

3. The printing press bankrupted Gutenberg, and his creditors seized control of his workshop and equipment. He never personally profited from his invention. (Dwarkesh Podcast)

4. In 2007, Curb Your Enthusiasm director Larry Charles shot a Curb-style pilot for HBO with Kanye West in the lead role, but HBO passed. (WTF with Marc Maron)

5. Because of prolonged strikes by bank employees, Irish banks were closed 10 percent of the time between 1966 and 1976. (David Oks)

6. James Patterson is the largest financial supporter of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. (Businessweek)

7. Mel Brooks produced David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, but declined a credit because he was worried that audiences wouldn’t take the film seriously if they saw his name attached to it. (Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!)

8. Maxwell House coffee is (coincidentally) named after the hotel where the KKK held its first official meeting. (The Rest Is History)

9. The creators of Barbie and Hot Wheels are husband and wife. (Forget where I heard this one…)

10. Cabbage, bok choy, collard greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower are all descendants of the same wild plant. (Works in Progress)

Previous things I learned in: January, February

Ovation inflation

This is my term for the way audiences have started giving standing ovations at the end of every theatrical performance, no matter how uninspired, in the bizarro-world mirror of the way every economic transaction now invites you to leave a tip. But at least someone actually benefits financially from tipping—standing ovations are entirely symbolic, so if they become expected, all we’ve done is replace regular applause with something much less convenient. (Though you can still tell a true standing ovation from the half-hearted, peer-pressured-into-it kind, as the latter always starts with an overly enthusiastic minority and is followed only gradually by the remainder of the audience, a few at a time, as they reluctantly choose not looking like an asshole over than their integrity.)

But actually, I suspect that this rise (ha) in standing ovations doesn’t even have anything to do with showing appreciation for a good performance. My pet theory is that this all started when a few people realized that by standing early they could get a head start on the rush to the bathroom, and then things just kind of spiraled out of control from there.

Drivers who don’t use their turn signal

The thing that really pisses me off about this is its wildly out-of-whack ratio, as compared to other inconsiderate driving maneuvers, of personal benefit to inconvenience inflicted on others. When someone cuts me off going 100 mph, I am of course irritated, but I get what’s in it for them: driving fast is super fun! A hardcore utilitarian might even argue that the speeding driver’s pleasure outweighs the minor annoyance he causes the other nearby drivers (ignoring, as utilitarian thought experiments often do, other factors like the risk of accidents).

But where’s the joy in not using your turn signal? We’re talking about a near-effortless flick of the wrist here—you have to place so little value on the experience of other drivers to be unwilling to move your hand a few inches for them.

It’s like the difference between stealing someone’s wallet because you want their money, and stealing someone’s wallet and then throwing it in the trash just for kicks. Both are crimes, but only the latter is the mark of a true monster.

The term “late-stage capitalism”

This trendy phrase is actually much older than people think. It was coined in one of history’s most fertile environments for new lingo and ideologies (1920s Germany, baby!), and it has a much nicer ring to it in the original German. (I’d be 100% on board if we were all still calling it Der Spätkapitalismus.) The fact that this term is already a hundred years old nicely illustrates my main objection to it, which is that we have no idea what stage of capitalism this is! For all we know, it could still be early!

You’d think we would have all learned something from the lexicological debacle of “modern” art now meaning art from 60+ years ago, but apparently not. Besides, 99% of the time you see “late-stage capitalism” in an essay, it isn’t part of some well-considered Marxist argument about capitalism inevitably collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions; it just means something like, “capitalism, but also you should know that I, the author, am cool and hold all the right opinions.”

I, this author, am also cool and also hold all the right opinions, but at least I have the decency to just tell you that outright.

All living Kennedys

Author’s note: the last time I wrote about the Kennedys, I received many angry comments from crazy Kennedy fans/conspiracy theorists. If you’re a crazy person, please skip this section.

The Kennedys have always been flawed, but at least in JFK’s day they represented youth, vigor, and a generational turning of the page in American politics. Now they’re just nepo babies, or nepo babies’ babies, who have all the same flaws as the originals—the entitlement, the womanizing, the reckless thrill-seeking—but none of the charm, like a Xerox of a Xerox. They don’t even have the cool accents anymore!

And instead of symbolizing the best of American politics, they now symbolize the worst: our addiction to rehashing the same tired old candidates and tropes. It was crazy for Jeb! to look at the political landscape in 2016 and conclude that what Americans really wanted was another Bush. It’s even crazier for someone like Jack Schlossberg to look around now—when this country’s contempt for its political establishment has grown so obvious that even Gavin Newsom, a two-term governor who began his political career in his twenties and grew up family friends with the Gettys, is pitching himself as an outsider—and conclude that what people really want is the continuation of an eighty-year-old political dynasty by someone with no apparent skills or accomplishments besides tweeting about how hot is own grandmother is.

At least RFK Jr. was a genuinely accomplished environmental lawyer back in the day. If he wasn’t JFK’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg would be selling weak coke to aspen ski bums or abandoning his a podcast about “modern masculinity” after three episodes. And also, I’m sorry, but being a Catholic named Schlossberg is so ridiculous that it’s basically disqualifying. If this guy actually gets elected to Congress I’m going to go full Peter Thiel and lose what little faith in democracy I have left.

Rap songs where the twist at the end is that they’re talking about something different than what you originally thought

Corniness is always a risk in a genre so reliant on puns and wordplay—a lot of classic rap songs, even by masters of the form, are actually incredibly dumb if you listen to the lyrics too closely. And the corniest move a rapper can pull is the twist ending, where a song that seems to be about one thing is revealed by its last line actually to be—surprise!—about something else entirely.

This was maybe a passable move the first time someone came up with it: Common’s 1994 “I Used to Love H.E.R.,” where the narrator’s laments about how the object of his affections has changed for the worse are not, as you’re led to assume, about a woman, but in fact about… wait for it… hip-hop itself1. Though the twist is undercut by the way Common blatantly cheats in the setup: if you’re going to rap about “the way her titties hung,” it’s pretty weak to turn around at the end and be like, Psych! It wasn’t a girl at all, it was hip-hop the whole time! M. Night Shyamalan he is not.

By the time we got to Atmosphere’s 2008 hit “Yesterday” (seemingly about a bad breakup, actually about his dad dying) and Eminem’s 2010 “25 to Life” (literally the exact same twist as the Common song, no titties though), this trope had overplayed itself into self-parody. The real twist ending in all these songs is that they start out seeming pretty good, but actually, it turns out they suck.

Asking why poor people vote against their economic self-interest

Whenever the working class votes Republican, you hear the same comment from a certain type of self-satisfied liberal: how did these poor fools once again get conned into electing someone who’s going to cut the social safety net they rely on all so he can lower rich people’s taxes? It’s assumed that if these uninformed voters (duped, perhaps, by a spooky bogeyman called “misinformation”) could simply be made to see that they’ve been voting against their own economic self-interest, they would immediately slap “Bartlet for President” bumper stickers on their cars and go cast ballots for Elizabeth Warren.

But the person making this argument is almost always an upper tax-bracket Democrat who themselves votes against their own economic self-interest. When a millionaire votes for a Democrat, no one thinks they’re too stupid to understand which party’s policies would most thicken their wallet; we understand that people factor more into their vote than their personal finances. People of all socioeconomic levels are allowed to see outside their own narrow class interests, not just the rich.

Tea

This country was practically founded on throwing tea away. If you don’t like the taste of coffee, then drink Bawls or Cocaine like a real adult.

If you didn’t hate this post, throw me a like below. And if you want to hear about more things I hate, you might be interested in this piece from almost six (!) years ago. Come for the headline, stay for the incredibly dated references to the 2020 election.

1. David Lynch was offered the chance to direct Return of the Jedi, but turned it down. (Bennington Review)

2. Luca Guadagnino is writing a slapstick tragedy about OpenAI. (New Yorker)

3. Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio are both only one-quarter Italian. (Reddit)

4. Baby expert—and Snoo—inventor Harvey Karp has no biological children and has never raised a baby himself. (He has a stepdaughter, but she was already past infancy when he married her mother.) (New Yorker)

5. Saudi Arabia is the biggest country in the world with no rivers. (Uncharted Territories)

6. Uniqlo’s spelling is a mistake. (New Yorker again… I guess I read a lot of New Yorker articles last month)

7. The Amish are cool with GMOs. (Tyler Cowen)

8. Jethro Tull was a real person: a British agriculturalist who invented a horse-drawn seed drill. The band got their name from a history buff member of their booking agent’s staff. (Wikipedia)

9. The Old English “ye”—as in “Ye Olde Pub”—was always meant to be pronounced like “the”: it’s a stand-in for the thorn (þ), an Old English letter that represented the “th” sound. When the printing press arrived, typesetters—working with imported equipment that lacked the thorn—substituted the visually similar “y” rather than commission an entirely new character. (Dead Language Society)

10. Ezra Edelman, the director behind the epic O.J.: Made in America, has completed an eight-hour, supposedly incredible Prince documentary that Prince’s estate is blocking from release. (NYT Magazine)

1.

This book is largely the story of two guys: civil engineer John “Hey, That’s the Guy the Street’s Named After” Roebling, and his son Washington. Roebling Sr. conceived of, designed, and advocated for the bridge, but Roebling Jr. was the one who actually got most of it built, after Senior, while out location-scouting for the bridge, got his foot crushed by a ferry, refused medical treatment, and died of tetanus. The book, however, is framed not as a biography of these men, but as a biography of the bridge itself.

These days there are lots of history books about objects, and they’re easy to spot because they all follow the same dumb title format: Boxer Briefs: the Renegade Undergarment that Split the Difference and Changed the World or The Doorstop: How a Forgotten Wedge of Wood Propped Open the Gates of Progress. But this framing was much less common in 1972, when The Great Bridge came out. I commend David McCullough both for the original approach and for not giving his book a stupid subtitle.

2.

It was probably inevitable that the Brooklyn Bridge, or some equivalent, would have one day been built: the economic logic of connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn would eventually be indisputable to even the most diehard naysayers. But as with much of the world, what seems obvious now was far from obvious at the time. When the bridge was first proposed in 1852—and for much of the next 31 years until it opened to passengers—a significant percentage of the public considered the idea to be some mix of unnecessary, too expensive, or outright physically impossible. After all, ferries—of which there were over a thousand per day—worked just fine1.

Without the Roeblings, the bridge could have easily taken another decade or two. The next NYC<>Brooklyn crossing, the Williamsburg Bridge, wasn’t completed until 1903, and its financing and political support were heavily dependent on the Brooklyn Bridge having already proved its success. Or we could have just ended up with a bridge that was much uglier: the Roeblings’ deliberate attention to design and aesthetics was unusual for an era when most bridges prioritized engineering efficiency over visual appeal.

3.

The fear that a suspension bridge over the East River was physically impossible wasn’t unwarranted. Bridge collapses were a common occurrence in the 1800s, and they often destroyed their makers both financially and psychologically. In 1879, for example:

The new Tay Bridge over the Firth of Tay, in Scotland, one of the biggest, most famous bridges in the world, gave way in a gale and collapsed into the sea, taking with it a train carrying seventy-five people, all of whom were killed. The bridge was the work of Britain’s leading engineer, Sir Thomas Bouch, who had been knighted by Queen Victoria that June. His bridge, a series of trusses, had been built mostly of wrought iron, however, not steel, and subsequent investigations of the disaster indicated that he had not calculated his wind loads accurately. The conclusion was that the engineer was mainly to blame. (His health and mind broken by the ordeal, Bouch died in less than a year.)

Tough break for Bouch obviously, but I actually think there’s something darkly heartwarming about how seriously these bridge-builders took their public responsibilities. Compare that to today: I’m not aware of any Boeing executives who had their health and mind broken by the 737 MAX disasters, or any pharma execs killed by their grief over the opioid crisis. If I'm driving over a bridge, I kind of want to know the guy who designed it would be destroyed if it collapsed.

4.

This is hardly an original observation, but it’s striking how much more risk-tolerant American society was in the 1800s. There are the obvious examples, like how lax construction-safety standards were—27 people died building the Brooklyn Bridge, an order of magnitude more than you’d expect for a comparable project today. (Though to be fair to the people in charge, this was on the lower end for the era, and most of the deaths seem to have been caused not by cheapness or carelessness, but by the limited state of technical and scientific knowledge at the time.)

But it’s the smaller stories of insane-to-modern-ears risk tolerance that really stuck out to me. My favorite: after the suspension cables had been hung across the bridge, but before the actual span had been built, the engineers set up a narrow wooden footbridge as a temporary tourist attraction. Anyone could walk across for 50 cents (a hefty sum at the time), and tons of people did, even though the footbridge had a tendency to sway terrifyingly in the wind and a single slip could send you plummeting to your death. When bridge management finally did close the footbridge—after a guy had a seizure midway across and very nearly fell off—much of the public thought they were being overly cautious.

5.

The workers who built the bridge risked their health and safety in ways we wouldn’t tolerate today. But unlike their modern counterparts, the men in charge were right there with them.

E.F. Farrington, one of the project’s top engineers, was the first person ever to cross the “bridge”—a word I put in quotes here because it wasn’t even really a bridge at the time he went across. Explaining that he would never ask one of his men to do something he wouldn’t do himself, Farrington rode across a single steel cable connecting the two spans in what was essentially a seat jury-rigged to a pulley. Oh, and did I mention he was 60 years old at the time??

Chief Engineer Washington Roebling, meanwhile, went down into the underwater foundations2 with his workers so frequently that he developed a case of decompression sickness he never recovered from. He somehow oversaw the final ten years of construction entirely by letter, while he remained confined to his home3. More than half of the people who worked on the bridge never once saw him in person.

I don’t think there’s any single explanation for why this culture—of the big shots getting their hands dirty with the little guys—has changed so much in the intervening years. But one factor has to be that when the Brooklyn Bridge was built, there was really no such concept as “management.” The men in charge were all themselves engineers, and they saw little distinction between coming up with the idea for the bridge, doing the scientific and engineering work to make it possible, and running the company that got it built. It would have seemed ludicrous that one could play a significant role in the design or construction of the bridge without being physically on site.

No one can write about a large public works project without mentioning Robert Moses at some point, so here goes: his reign almost a century later is an instructive contrast. Moses’ most essential skill wasn’t designing infrastructure, but mastering the levers of power that enabled him to make things actually happen. Calling him “not an engineer” is an understatement: despite being responsible for more New York City roadways than any other single individual, he never even learned how to drive.

6.

One thing I always enjoy when reading history is placing whatever I’m reading about alongside other, unrelated things that were happening around the same time. Here’s a fun one for the Brooklyn Bridge: only a few years before it opened, a coalition of Native American tribes defeated Custer’s army in the Battle of Little Bighorn. There’s something wild to me about these two events, which feel like they belong to entirely different eras, happening side by side. At one end of the country, a bridge so technologically advanced that even in 2026, 143 years after it opened, it’s still carrying hundreds of thousands of people a day. At the other, an army on horseback defeating its enemy largely with bows and arrows4.

A couple of other great pairings: The first fax machine was invented the same year the Pony Express launched. The New York City subway overlapped with the existence of the Ottoman Empire for eighteen years. The last verified widow of a Civil War veteran lived until 2020.

7.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was built, parts of Brooklyn were still farmland, and Manhattan was so underdeveloped that the bridge’s towers were the city’s tallest structures except for the spire at the top of Trinity Church. For its first few decades, human passengers shared space with livestock, who were charged dedicated tolls (five cents per cow and two cents per sheep or hog—a bargain!). Nonetheless, the bridge was designed with such foresight that it was later able to start handling cars and trains with no significant modifications, and is first major structural revision wasn’t needed until the 1940s. By comparison, the projected lifespan of a new bridge built today is only 50–70 years.

8.

The Roeblings (and others of their era, like Frederick Law Olmsted and Chicago planner Daniel Burnham) were a type of guy who doesn’t really exist anymore: the ambitious visionary, eager to make their mark on the world, who does so via the pursuit of grand public works. These guys weren’t exactly government employees, but they weren’t exactly entrepreneurs either; they needed political patrons, public financing, and democratic buy-in, but they drove the vision personally.

Today, someone with that kind of personality and drive would go into the private sector, or maybe seek political office. But they wouldn’t operate in that middle space between public and private, because it doesn’t really exist anymore. The Brooklyn Bridge endures not just as infrastructure but as a physical artifact of a time when this kind of ambition got channeled into public life.I suspect that part of the reason it remains so beloved today is that, as with a great work of art, people can on some level feel the personal care of its makers seeping through, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not.

Thanks for reading! A few closing notes:

• If you liked this piece, please let the world know by hitting the heart button at the bottom. I haven’t made this ask in a while because I find begging for likes to be incredibly degrading, but it really does help people discover my writing.

• As an experiment, I enabled comments for the first time ever on the JFK piece. The results of the experiment were ambiguous (no topic brings out the crackpots quite like the JFK assassination), so I’m leaving them on for this piece too, and we’ll see what happens.

• If you liked the JFK piece: 1) You are insane. 2) You might also like some of my other tumbles down American politics rabbit holes:

Phew! Long postscript. That’s it. Thanks all!

—Max

“Things do not ‘happen.’ Things are made to happen.”
—John F. Kennedy

The Behistun Inscription, a cuneiform rock relief carved around 500 B.C. by the Persian king Darius I, tells of a devious plot by the Magi priest Gaumata to seize the throne. After murdering the true king, Gaumata impersonates him and rules in disguise—until the heroic Darius exposes the deception, kills the imposter, and saves the empire.

It’s a great story, at least by 500 B.C. standards. There’s just one problem: it isn’t true. Most historians agree that there never was a Magi imposter—the “false king” was the real king all along. The Behistun Inscription actually depicts history’s first recorded conspiracy theory, most likely spread by Darius himself to justify a coup.

Conspiracy theories may have been born in ancient Persia, but it’s America that elevated them into art. Forget jazz, Broadway, comics, or hip-hop—in my book, conspiracy theories are the true Great American Art Form. This country was practically built for them: start with a deep-seated distrust of authority, stir in the Protestant idea of unmediated access to individual truth, and top with the First Amendment to let it all bloom in public.

You could even say the United States itself was founded on a conspiracy theory: the Founding Fathers wove a tale of powerful elites (King George) secretly plotting against ordinary people (the colonists) to advance a villainous scheme (subjugate them through oppressive taxation and military control). As with many conspiracy theories, there’s a kernel of truth to this story—but the reality is that what the founders interpreted (or spun) as a deliberate plot against them was really just a patchwork of clumsy, improvised policies from a disorganized British government.

If conspiracy theories are the Great American Art Form, there’s no question as to which is the canonical work of art—our Kind of Blue, West Side Story, Superman, and Illmatic all rolled into one: the theories surrounding the 1963 assassination of our third-best president named “John,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy1. The belief that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone is the country’s most widely-believed conspiracy theory—if, indeed, it even is a conspiracy theory—sustained across generations and deeply woven into American cultural memory through countless books, movies, and TV shows.

In fact, we even have the Kennedy assassination to thank for the term “conspiracy theory” entering widespread use in the first place: as revealed by a declassified 1967 document, the CIA encouraged the use of the then-obscure phrase as a pejorative term to discredit critics of the official narrative.

In his book Reclaiming History, Manson prosecutor and best-selling true crime author Vincent Bugliosi cites 44 different organizations and 214 specific individuals who have been accused of conspiring to assassinate Kennedy, including the Nazis, the Teamsters, the French OAS, Watergate plotter E. Howard Hunt, and Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician. Needless to say, this review will not manage to investigate all of them. The limits of time, space, and human sanity will sadly constrain me to just ten of the most well-known conspiracy theories, which I will evaluate both for plausibility and—far more importantly—for entertainment value.

But first, let’s take a look at…

What we know for sure happened

Nellie Connally (wife of Texas Governor John Connally): “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”

Kennedy: “No, you certainly can’t.”

—JFK’s last words

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy took a break from his busy schedule of shooting amphetamines2, hiding his medical issues from the American public3, and taking teenagers’ virginities in the White House4, to campaign in Texas—which, if you can believe it, was a swing state back then. To secure reelection, Kennedy needed to preserve a fragile coalition of conservative Southern racists and liberal Northern industrialists, a political marriage of convenience already strained even by his tepid, cautious support for civil rights.

As part of this Texas tour, Kennedy was riding in an open-top motorcade through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, with the Secret Service—at Kennedy’s insistence—following in a second car rather than riding with him5. At 12:30 pm, three shots were fired. Kennedy was hit twice, once in the neck and once in the head. He was rushed to the nearby Parkland Memorial Hospital and pronounced dead thirty minutes later. Texas Governor John Connally, also in the motorcade, was hit in the back, but survived with no long-term injuries.

In a nearby building, police found a gun owned by Lee Harvey Oswald, a local delinquent and prime example of why you should never trust someone with three first names. Oswald managed to leave the scene of the crime without arousing suspicion, then shot and killed a nearby policeman over a minor altercation. He once again escaped without getting caught, only to finally, after all that, get busted for the comically small-scale crime of sneaking into a movie theater without paying. He was arrested at 1:36 pm and immediately denied masterminding the assassination, famously claiming “I’m just a patsy.”

Two days later, an eccentric nightclub owner and Kennedy superfan named Jack Ruby6 emerged from a crowd of reporters in Dallas Police Headquarters, where Oswald was being transferred to county jail, and fired a single, fatal shot. The entire thing was captured on live television, in an unprecedented moment in American broadcast history: the first time a murder was witnessed in real time by the general public.

Ruby, who holds a rarified position as one of history’s few (non-Mossad) Jewish assassins, cited two main motives for his actions: the somewhat reasonable desire to spare Jackie Kennedy from the pain of a prolonged trial, and the somewhat less reasonable desire to fight antisemitism by (his words) “showing that a Jew has guts.” The American public, unmoved by Ruby’s self-assigned role as an ambassador of semitic courage, found his actions extremely suspicious. Within days, a Gallup poll revealed that only 29% of the country believed that Oswald acted alone.

One week later, new President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Warren Commission to investigate the tragedy. In September of that year, the Commission—clearly unaware of the number 888’s numerological associations with success and good luck—released an 888-page report concluding that Oswald and Ruby had both acted alone and that there was no evidence for a broader conspiracy behind the assassination. In what became known as the “single-bullet theory,” it concluded that Kennedy’s death and Connally’s injuries had both been caused by the same bullet, as separate bullets would imply a second shooter. The report assigned no motive to Oswald beyond describing him as an isolated, impulsive loser, “perpetually discontented,” with a life “characterized by a lack of meaningful relationships.”

Notably, of the Commission’s seven members, three—Senators Richard Russell and John Sherman, and Representative Hale Boggs—are now known to have had misgivings about their own report. None of them fully bought the single-bullet theory, but the White House pressured them into signing on, despite the fact that LBJ himself secretly doubted the theory as well.

The Warren Commission’s compromised and unsatisfying report completely failed to quell public speculation about the assassination. Another report—that of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), released fifteen years later in 1979—muddled the picture even further, concluding that there was a “high probability” of a second gunman and that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy,” though, paradoxically, it also explicitly ruled out every common conspiracy theory7.

Every generation of history nerds and conspiracy diehards has clung to hope that some future document dump will finally crack the case—and every generation has been disappointed. Donald Trump’s much-hyped declassification order ended up revealing almost nothing new, and at this point, barely any relevant documents remain unreleased. It seems probable that we’ll never know with 100% certainty what happened.

But this is America, where a lack of facts never stopped anyone from making wild assertions. So let’s dive into the theories, starting with one of the most common:

The CIA did it

“I want to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
—John F. Kennedy, venting after the Bay of Pigs

Ever since the humiliating Bay of Pigs debacle—when, in JFK’s view, the CIA had pressured him into a poorly-conceived invasion of Cuba, tried to box him into escalating militarily, and then left him twisting in the wind when the whole thing blew up in his face—Kennedy and the CIA had a strained and distrustful relationship. Ironically, many of his criticisms of the agency echoed those the conspiracy theorists would later make. The CIA was an unaccountable fourth branch of government. It was running its own shadow foreign policy. It withheld crucial information from civilian leadership. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy fired the CIA’s top brass, and started building out the Pentagon’s intelligence capabilities in an effort to create a competing power center.

So the CIA had plenty of reasons to dislike Kennedy. But did they dislike him enough to kill him?

One person who suspected they might was Attorney General/nepo brother Robert F. Kennedy, whose first move after the assassination was to give the CIA a call to directly ask if they were involved. (I guess he thought maybe they’d pick up the phone and just be like… “You got us, Bobby! Our bad!”) During his own presidential campaign, he told associates that if he won, he planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s death. At times, Lyndon Johnson also speculated that the CIA might have had something to do with it.

As with most of these theories, there is no single definitive version of the CIA hypothesis, but the general idea is that the agency, or rogue elements within, used Oswald to eliminate Kennedy because they saw him as a threat to their own interests. The highest-profile public believer in this theory was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who in 1966 charged businessman and part-time CIA contact Clay Shaw with being part of the conspiracy. But that case is now regarded as an embarrassing overreach by a hot-headed, media-hungry prosecutor. Shaw was acquitted of all charges in less than an hour of jury deliberation, and a federal judge later ruled that the charges against him had been brought in bad faith. Nonetheless, he remains the only person ever charged in connection with the Kennedy assassination8.

Believers in the CIA theory often cite the agency’s sketchy behavior in the aftermath of the assassination. The CIA certainly acted like it had something to hide—because it did. But it wasn’t hiding a role in Kennedy’s murder. Rather, the CIA was desperate to conceal its string of cloak-and-dagger plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. These probably-unlawful schemes, which tended to fail in comically embarrassing ways, made the agency look both sinister and incompetent. Compounding the problem, it turns out the CIA had long been monitoring Oswald, but had utterly failed to flag him as a potential threat.

So the CIA lied—or, as the agency later called it, in a masterful example of government doublespeak, “engaged in a benign cover-up,” keeping all of that from the Warren Commission. “If we had known then what we know now,” commission member John J. McCloy later said, “the treatment of the CIA [in the report] would have been quite a bit tougher.”

Lying under oath is never a good look. But even if you’re willing to accept that the CIA would engage in what’s essentially a revenge killing against an American president—at enormous risk to itself—there have been many, many investigations into CIA black ops and abuses of power since 1963. If the agency had been involved, at least a little bit of evidence would have probably turned up by now. So no, the CIA isn’t guilty—at least, not of this particular crime. But their shady conduct following the assassination did them no favors, which is probably why they remain at the center of so many conspiracy theories.

The Cubans and/or Soviets did it

“It would have been absolute insanity…Nobody who’s not insane could have thought about [killing Kennedy]”
—Fidel Castro, 1977 CBS interview

“We’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this…and kicking us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour.”
—Lyndon Johnson, encouraging Sen. Richard Russell to direct the Warren Commission’s speculation away from the communists

In the heated atmosphere of the Cold War, communist plots tended to become the default explanation for every American misfortune, and Kennedy’s killing was no exception. He had stared down Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and greenlit covert efforts to topple or assassinate Castro. Could Moscow or Havana have decided to hit back by killing him? After all, Oswald did have suspicious communist ties: he briefly defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, then returned to the U.S., with a Russian wife, and became involved in pro-Castro activism.

Believers in this theory point to a quietly unsettling reality: the U.S. government really, really didn’t want to find out that the Soviets had done it. Johnson’s administration feared that accusing Moscow—especially without proof, but possibly even with it—could escalate into nuclear war. They leaned on the Warren Commission not to look too closely into this theory, and the commission obliged.

Still, this version of events runs up against a few inconvenient historical truths. By 1963, Khrushchev’s and Kennedy’s relationship was actually pretty good, at least by Cold War standards—they’d just signed a nuclear test ban treaty, and Khrushchev had praised a recent Kennedy speech calling for a reset in U.S.-Soviet relations. Besides, the Politburo prized stability above all else, seeing unpredictability—especially in foreign affairs—as a direct threat to regime security. American intelligence later confirmed that far from celebrating Kennedy’s death, Soviet leaders were deeply alarmed, even briefly panicking that someone on their side actually had killed Kennedy without running it all the way up the ladder first9. Khrushchev was reportedly so distraught upon hearing the news that he fell to his knees and wept, and even Castro reacted with concern. Associates report that he started frantically asking his deputies what this Lyndon Johnson’s deal was, worried that the next president would be even worse for Cuba.

Simply put, the risk-reward calculus for a Soviet or Cuban plot would have been wildly out of whack. The Cubans almost certainly would have been wiped off the map if they got caught killing a U.S. president—Castro himself later said “our country would have been destroyed by the United States” if they’d done it—and both countries would have risked nuclear war.

And to what end? Until 1804—when the 12th Amendment ended the practice of making the election’s runner-up the vice president—the death of a president could conceivably bring a different political faction to power. But today, with the VP hand-selected by the president, their ascension is unlikely to cause major policy shifts. In fact, a lone assassination anywhere is rarely an effective way to achieve political goals. This is why the U.S. only kills other countries’ presidents as part of a broader project of regime change (see: Congo, South Vietnam, Chile, Libya, the Dominican Republic, and probably some other places we don’t know about yet), and why our homegrown assassins tend to be motivated by more realistic goals, like impressing Jodie Foster.

The communists were crazy, but they weren’t that crazy. In the depths of Cold War paranoia, it was understandable that some thought the Soviets or Cubans were involved in Kennedy’s killing—though it’s worth noting that even then, no serious government official ever reached that conclusion. Today, with the USSR long-dissolved and many of its once-secret files revealed to historians, its innocence is undeniable. If you want a good communist conspiracy theory, you’re much better off with the one that says Castro is secretly Justin Trudeau’s father.

The Mafia did it

“I help get Jack elected and, in return, he calls off the heat.”
—Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, allegedly

The Mafia harbored little affection for American politicians in general, but they especially disliked the Kennedys. Perhaps that was just because Bobby made an aggressive crackdown on organized crime the centerpiece of his tenure as Attorney General. Or perhaps it was because of a deal struck with the mob during JFK’s candidacy: steal Chicago, and thus the 1960 election, for him, and he’d go easy on them as president. The mob complied, but Kennedy welched on the deal—and so, the theory goes, they had him killed.

There are hints of Mafia involvement everywhere you look—and as the wiseguys say, “You smell garlic, you know someone’s cookin’”:

• In the months leading up to the assassination, Jack Ruby made a bunch of phone calls to Mafia associates, and after killing Oswald, he received regular prison visits from a mob lieutenant.

• Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli, when called to give congressional testimony on an unrelated matter, gave cryptic and suggestive answers that seemed to hint at the Mafia’s involvement, though he stopped short of claiming firsthand knowledge. The next year, a fisherman off the Miami coast found Roselli’s decomposing body in a 55-gallon steel drum, fueling speculation that he himself was killed for knowing too much.

• And most tantalizing of all: In the 1980s, New Orleans don Carlos Marcello was captured on an FBI prison bug confessing to “having the son of a bitch killed.”

The circumstantial evidence was compelling enough for the HSCA’s chief counsel, a man with the born-for-government-reports name of G. Robert Blakely. An organized crime expert who’d led the drafting of the RICO Act, Blakely later authored a book, The Plot to Kill the President, which pointed to a Mafia conspiracy. The HSCA report as a whole didn’t blame the Mafia directly, though it left room for “the possibility that individual members may have been involved.” However it happened, Kennedy’s death did result in the feds turning down the heat: Lyndon Johnson booted Bobby Kennedy from the Attorney General’s office and replaced him with Nicholas Katzenbach, who deprioritized anti-Mafia efforts in favor of civil rights.

The backroom election-theft plot makes for a great story—but it probably didn’t happen. Yes, there was voter fraud in Illinois in 1960, as in pretty much every midcentury election there. But it was concentrated in Chicago, where Mayor Daley’s machine was powerful enough that the additional involvement of the mob—already in decline by the sixties—wouldn’t have been necessary. Even if the Mafia could have swung the election, it’s absurd to think they’d trust Kennedy—especially with his brother, the country’s top anti-mob crusader, by his side. And if they had struck a deal, why kill JFK but leave RFK untouched?10

Of course, the Mafia could have come for Kennedy even in the absence of a secret election-theft deal. But this would have been a big departure from their usual behavior: unlike their Sicilian counterparts, the American Mafia historically went out of its way not to kill politicians, knowing that to do so would bring potentially existential law enforcement scrutiny. The most prominent political figures known with certainty to have been killed by the mob are all city aldermen—going from those nobodies to the president would be an enormous leap.

As for all the circumstantial evidence? Well, it was hardly out of the ordinary for a midcentury nightclub owner to have Mafia contacts. Nor was it out of the ordinary for Mafia bigshots like Marcello to play fast and loose with the truth if it makes them seem more powerful—or to simply start getting their facts mixed up when they’re sick and near death, as he was when his comments were recorded.

Nonetheless, this remains the most plausible of the major conspiracy theories—one that’s just waiting to be made into a Scorsese movie. The Mafia had the means and the motive, and they aren’t shy about killing people.

Lyndon Johnson did it

“He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.”
—RFK on LBJ

“I’ve had more women by accident than he ever had on purpose.”
—LBJ on JFK

In a crowded field of backstabbers and power-grabbers, Lyndon Johnson takes the crown as America’s most ruthless president. Among other things, he froze out longtime backers forever over the smallest slights, almost certainly stole the 1948 Texas Senate election, and established dominance over his aides by making them join him in the bathroom to take dictation while he sat on the toilet.

And although he never made Kennedy watch him poop, their relationship still ranks among the most dysfunctional of any modern presidential team. Kennedy never liked Johnson and only picked him to secure Southern votes; Johnson, in turn, felt disrespected and marginalized. He was excluded from key decisions and mocked by Kennedy aides, who called him “a political barnyard animal,” and came up with awesome nicknames for him like “Uncle Cornhole” and “Huckleberry Capone.” “They treat me like I’m some kind of bastard at a family reunion,” LBJ said, later referring to the Vice Presidency as “the worst damn fool mistake I ever made.”11

The Roman consul Cassius said that to solve a crime, you should first ask “cui bono?”—who benefits? By that measure, Johnson—the single largest beneficiary of Kennedy’s death—should be suspect #1. In 1963, Johnson was in serious political and even legal danger due to a corruption investigation into one of his longtime aides that was getting close to implicating Johnson himself, and leading Kennedy to consider dropping him from the ticket. But the assassination instantly shifted the political dynamics. Congress couldn’t stomach investigating a new president during a time of national mourning and crisis, and the inquiries dried up overnight.

Of course, plenty of people profit from events they didn’t instigate. In the decades since Johnson’s presidency, we’ve been gifted with an endless stream of unflattering details about him: his corruption, his habit of whipping out his dick in front of congressmen and reporters, his many extramarital affairs, his insistence on having a custom shower installed in the White House that would blast water directly onto his ass12. But the only “evidence” that’s ever surfaced tying him to the assassination is a sketchy deathbed claim by Watergate burglar Howard Hunt, a known perjurer who had previously derided conspiracy theorists and supported the Warren Report’s conclusions.

Besides, Johnson spent the year between his ascension and his 1964 landslide consumed by self-consciousness about being an accident who hadn’t earned the presidency in his own right; given how much he feared being seen as, in his words, “a pretender to the throne,” it’s unlikely that he would have intentionally elevated himself in such a manner. It’s even less likely that a man as calculating as Johnson would have Kennedy killed in such a public, attention-grabbing way—and in Johnson’s home state, no less!—rather than, say, having him quietly poisoned in the White House. A sitting vice president—one of the most heavily-surveilled people in the country—plotting to kill the president would require an enormous and airtight conspiracy, one almost certainly beyond the means of even a master schemer like Lyndon Johnson.

Or, to put it another way: if this had happened, Robert Caro would have definitely found out about it by now.

The military-industrial complex did it

“If we do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive.”
—Kennedy on advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff

The best conspiracy theory villains are powerful, shadowy groups whose exact contours and membership remain stubbornly vague: the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the lizard people, the… military-industrial complex? Everyone thinks they know what the military-industrial complex is, but no one can really explain it, which makes it an ideal bogeyman. Why would it—whatever “it” is—come for Kennedy? Well, it’s simple: he was scaling back the Cold War, getting us out of Vietnam, and thus threatening the profits of Big Military.

There are certainly shreds of truth here. Kennedy wasn’t particularly hawkish, at least by the standard of U.S. presidents: he pushed for a nuclear test ban treaty and back-channeled peace feelers to Castro and Khrushchev, and he resisted some of the Joint Chiefs’ more aggressive proposals. More importantly, his most ardent defenders insist that had he lived, there would have been no Vietnam War—he had reportedly approved plans to withdraw U.S. advisors from Vietnam after the 1964 election, though whether he would have actually followed through is an open question13.

Ultimately, this theory is so broad that it’s hardly a theory at all. Blaming Kennedy’s assassination on the military-industrial complex is like blaming social ills on “society” or “the system”—it might make you sound smart to the guy next to you at the bar, but it doesn’t really explain anything. It’s also not very entertaining, since a good story needs characters. That’s probably why the depictions of this theory in pop culture—most famously Oliver Stone’s JFK, but also the lesser-known, Dalton Trumbo-written Executive Action—tend to have the military guys as secondary actors, typically working with the CIA and/or the Mafia and/or communists.

The military-industrial complex theory is basically the CIA theory’s lamer, more boring cousin. It has all the same holes—but at least the CIA has a track record of assassinating world leaders.

Israel/the Jews did it

“Having written a book on such a ‘controversial’ topic as the JFK assassination, with a highly ‘sensational’ thesis, has proven quite an adventure. It’s brought me a lot of new friends—and lots of enemies, too!”
—Michael Collins Piper’s surprisingly chipper introduction to his 750-page polemic blaming the assassination on Israel

Sooner or later, every conspiracy theory circles back to two suspects: aliens and the Jews. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to the aliens soon.)

In this theory, the Israeli government—working, of course, with “world Jewry”—killed Kennedy over his opposition to Israel’s nuclear weapons program. You can read all about it in a sprawling book by Michael Collins Piper, a Holocaust denier who also blames Israel for, among other things, killing Martin Luther King Jr, doing 9/11, controlling the American Mafia, and—most devious of all—promoting political correctness.

What separates this theory from your run-of-the-mill antisemitic nonsense? Well, the Mossad really are master assassinators, and it’s true that Kennedy didn’t want Israel to get nuclear weapons, though his stance was rooted in a broader anti-proliferation philosophy rather than anything specific to Israel. But, obviously, the Israelis didn’t kill Kennedy, they didn’t do 9/11, and if Collins Piper had ever talked to an Israeli, he’d certainly know they’re not exactly fans of political correctness either. This isn’t even the best Mossad conspiracy theory—that award goes to the one about their agents training sharks to attack Egyptian tourists.

This theory is perhaps most interesting for its bizarre mirror twin, in which the real killers are anonymous gentiles who orchestrated the assassination specifically to frame the Jews. The main believer in that idea? None other than Jack Ruby himself14.

The bankers did it

“I guess I’d have to say that my biggest asset is my father’s money.”
—John F. Kennedy, joking around with aides during his 1946 congressional campaign

If blaming the Jews is too openly antisemitic for you, why not try pointing the finger at (winks suggestively) powerful financial interests? Perhaps they can be based in (winks grow more frantic) New York? And what if they also (winks now resemble a full-body twitch) happen to own a few media properties?

In 1963, Kennedy signed an obscure executive order relating to the Treasury Department’s authority to issue silver certificates. This was a routine, administrative document that went uncovered by the media and unnoticed by the public—until decades later, when conspiracy theorists seized on it as providing the key to understanding the assassination. They claimed that the real purpose of Kennedy’s order was to strip power from the Federal Reserve, leading influential financiers—in most tellings, Rothschilds and/or Rockefellers—to have him offed so they could reverse his monetary policies.

The irony of “powerful financiers” being behind the Kennedy assassination is, of course, that Kennedy himself came from a family of powerful financiers. He was our second-wealthiest president (after Trump)15, and his administration was generally pretty friendly to finance and business. Besides, this allegedly Fed-threatening Executive Order did nothing but delegate already-existing powers to the Secretary of the Treasury—C. Douglas Dillon, a Republican and former investment banker who was himself also a powerful financier.

So while it’s fun to imagine JFK as a martyr to populist monetary policy, in reality, he was more Goldman Sachs than gold standard, and it doesn’t make sense to think the bankers would have targeted one of their own.

Woody Harrelson’s dad did it

“I killed Kennedy! I killed Kennedy!”
—Charles Harrelson (during a cocaine bender, later recanted)

A lifetime ago in 2016, Trump accused Ted Cruz’s dad of being involved in the Kennedy assassination. But there’s another, wilder theory involving a different famous guy’s dad: Charles Harrelson, Woody’s father, who really was a contract killer.

Harrelson was convicted of multiple murders for hire, including the assassination of a district judge on behalf of a drug dealer about to be sentenced16. He “confessed” to killing Kennedy near the tail end of a six-hour standoff with police, but then later recanted the confession, explaining that he had been out of his mind on cocaine at the time.

The full story of the standoff is pretty epic. From a Texas Monthly article about Harrelson:

[Harrelson] had been driving down I-10 in the desert somewhere east of Van Horn, shooting cocaine and seeing agents’ faces on highway signs. He stopped to inspect a rattling muffler, which he attempted to repair by shooting it with his .44 magnum. In his drug-induced dementia, he missed the muffler but managed to shoot out a rear tire. Motorists reported a crazed hitchhiker standing on the highway with a gun pointed at his head; when the police arrived they discovered Charles Harrelson. He held them off for six hours, pressing the muzzle of the .44 against his nose.

Very few people actually believe Harrelson was involved with Kennedy’s killing. And look: who among us hasn’t done too much blow and confessed to being the second shooter, right? But he was a convicted murderer—and he did (briefly) say it was him—so he gets an honorable mention.

Aliens did it

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, and because we want to meet moon aliens.”
—real, historically accurate quote from John F. Kennedy

Kennedy had access to secret files revealing the existence of UFOs and alien life. And unlike with his serial infidelity, his severe health problems, and his covert escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, he believed the public had a right to know the truth. But the aliens preferred to stay in the shadows, so they had him killed. Or, alternatively, Kennedy was working on a groundbreaking human-alien partnership, which other interests (NASA, the CIA, anti-alien bigots) opposed—so they had him killed. This probably didn’t happen, but come on—you can’t write about conspiracy theories without at least mentioning aliens.

Besides, this theory’s biggest promoter has a name that’s so on brand I couldn’t leave it out: Jim Marrs. You can’t make that up! But you can make up the idea that aliens killed Kennedy, which they didn’t do.

The Secret Service did it—by accident

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
—Mel Brooks

What if there was a second shooter—and it was the Secret Service? Oswald missed, and the fatal shot was actually fired by an agent riding in the follow-up car behind Kennedy, who picked up his rifle and, in the chaos, accidentally discharged it into the president’s head. If the funniest outcome is the most likely, then this is definitely what happened.

Even the legal battle surrounding this theory is comic. Its main promulgator is a Kansas City journalist by the unusual name of Bonar Menninger, who grew skeptical of the official story after participating in the totally normal leisure activity of recreating the shooting using live ammo. But Menninger didn’t just blame “a Secret Service agent” in his book: he blamed a specific guy, Special Agent George Hickey. Hickey sued Menninger for defamation, but he waited too long to file the lawsuit and his case was dismissed. The legal clock was restarted on a technicality when the book came out in paperback, at which point Hickey sued again and reached a confidential settlement with the publisher. But Menninger had the last laugh: after Hickey died in 2005 and could no longer file lawsuits, Menninger repackaged his claims into a documentary called JFK: The Smoking Gun.

The best part of this theory is the way it makes absolutely everyone angry. Obviously, all the experts find it completely implausible—with hundreds of witnesses to the assassination, you’d think at least one of them would have seen Hickey’s gun go off. The diehard conspiracy theorists, meanwhile, all hate this theory because it’s incredibly unsatisfying, and because it doesn’t actually answer the big question of why Oswald attempted to shoot Kennedy in the first place. In fact, it’s really not a conspiracy theory at all: by blaming a dumb accident, it manages to reject both the Warren Report and the idea of a broader plot. This theory is fucking hilarious and the fact that everyone hates it makes it by far my personal favorite.

Conclusion

“You know, if someone really wanted to, it isn’t very difficult to shoot the president. All you have to do is get up in a high building with a high-powered rifle and there’s nothing anybody could do.”
—John F. Kennedy, morning of November 22, 1963

A young, popular American president is shot and killed in full view of the public. After a brief manhunt, the gunman is caught—only to be killed himself soon after. There is never a trial. Conspiracy theories flourish almost immediately, with fingers pointed at wartime enemies, shadowy government agents, and even the slain man’s own vice president. It seems everyone has a different story—and nobody knows who, or what, to believe.

The year was 1865, and the president’s name was Abraham Lincoln. Yet within a few decades, these conspiracy theories would fade away, and the official narrative would become so accepted that most Americans today have no idea there were ever others. The Kennedy story, by contrast, still stubbornly resists closure. Since the Warren Report’s release in 1964, the percentage of people who accept its conclusions has never made it above 50%. Throughout this essay, I’ve continually referred to the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone as a “conspiracy theory,” yet among the general public, that is actually the mainstream view. It’s really the official narrative that’s the fringe belief.

Until researching this review, I was one of the majority who didn’t buy the official story. For most of my life, I would have said essentially the same thing as that unsatisfying 1979 House Select Committee report: I didn’t know who killed Kennedy, but I doubted the official narrative contained the whole story. It just felt too implausible: a conveniently dead suspect, a witness pool riddled with contradictions, and sworn testimony from intelligence agencies who we know weren’t telling the whole truth.

But having now gone deeper down the Kennedy rabbit hole than any sane man should go, I’ve been convinced otherwise. To butcher Winston Churchill: Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone is the worst explanation for the Kennedy assassination—except for all the others17.

It’s not just that every specific conspiracy theory has good arguments against it. All of them, even the most plausible, suffer from the same fatal flaw: using someone as unreliable as Oswald as your assassin makes no sense. Here was a mentally unstable guy with a history of violent outbursts who couldn’t even defect to the Soviet Union right, and who, after the assassination, basically begged to get caught, shooting a cop in broad daylight and then deciding this was a good time to go see a movie right by the scene of the crime. As Kennedy himself eerily foreshadowed, a competent assassin probably could have killed the president and gotten away with it—as, indeed, many people believe happened with the alleged second shooter. But if the second shooter was real, why even bother with Oswald? Competent conspirators would have never enlisted Lee Harvey Oswald, and incompetent conspirators wouldn’t have been able to keep their scheme a secret for the past six decades.

The conspiracy theorists do get a few things right. There was a cover-up—but it was just the CIA covering its own ass. High-level government officials did go into the investigation favoring some explanations over others—but it just so happens that the scenarios they were most afraid of really didn’t happen. The Warren Commission didn’t get the whole truth from all of its witnesses—but it got the core story right anyway.

This sucks, and I’m pretty bummed about it.

After all, the official narrative is deeply unsatisfying, and accepting the government’s version of events just feels so… uncool. I came of age in the George W. Bush era, when distrusting the experts and assuming the government was always lying were hallmarks of the left. Sometime in the Trump years, that all flipped. I already find myself cheering for Liz Cheney and defending the FBI. Now I have to tell everyone the Warren Report is accurate? When did being on the left become so fucking lame?

Earlier in this piece, I said that the person who benefitted most from Kennedy’s assassination was Lyndon Johnson. But that wasn’t quite right. There’s someone who benefitted even more, and his name was… John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Or at least, his legacy benefitted.

In case it’s not obvious from the tone of this review, I think Kennedy is a wildly overrated president, one whose reputation rests more on what he represented than what he actually accomplished. And that reputation would not have survived a second term intact.

Kennedy’s tenuous strategy of trying to have it both ways on civil rights—courting Black voters with promises while placating segregationists with inaction—wouldn’t have remained viable through 1968. Eventually, he’d have had to deal with Vietnam one way or another, and both options were bad: either fully own the war, or withdraw and be blamed for handing a win to the communists. His growing health problems would have become harder and harder to conceal: it’s not implausible to think that if Oswald had missed, Kennedy’s Addison’s disease would have finished the job before his second term was out. And his near-daily philandering, already an open secret in Washington, probably wouldn’t have stayed a secret through the late sixties, when increasing public cynicism and the rise of investigative journalism radically changed the norms of what the press would cover.

In his death, Kennedy became a symbol, an empty vessel onto which people can project their hopes and dreams. And this symbol is way more powerful if his death was the result of a conspiracy. If shadowy groups wanted Kennedy dead, that must mean he would’ve been a transformative president, martyred just as he was about to deliver racial justice, or end the war in Vietnam, or dismantle the CIA, or reveal the truth about aliens.

There are a lot of reasons the Lincoln conspiracy theories died down while the Kennedy ones live on—a simpler story, a slower and more fragmented media ecosystem, a collective desire to put the Civil War behind us. But a big one is that Kennedy’s killing collided with the end of widespread American trust in government and the beginnings of the so-called “post-truth era.”

From today’s vantage point, it seems comically naive that anyone involved in the Warren Commission ever thought an official government report was all it would take to stamp out conspiracy theories. But 1964 was a different time: 77% of Americans back then said they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” That was the highest that number has ever been. Over the next few years, it began a sharp downward plummet, and except for a brief and probably illusory post-9/11 spike, it hasn’t crossed 50% since. Today, it stands at just 22%.

If a president were assassinated today, would there be anything but conspiracy theories? Could you even get a bipartisan cross-sample of respected politicians to align on a Warren-style report? The 35% of us who believe the official Kennedy story is high compared to what we’d get if a modern-day Lee Harvey Oswald pulled a similar stunt.

You might expect that I’m telling you all this as a prelude to bemoaning the state of things today, as is the current trend. But I’m not complaining—I like living in a country where dissenting worldviews flourish and everyone’s a skeptic. Or at least, I’m pretty sure it’s the better of two bad options. After all, we lost our trust in government for good reason: because the government consistently abused that trust.

Besides, a vibrant and innovative culture requires an unruly, freethinking society. The Kennedy theories are, in their own crazy way, an emblematic example of American creativity and imagination. The country whose citizens consistently report the highest trust in their government is Singapore, and while they get a lot of things right, I’d rather live here—with graffiti on our buildings, buskers on our subways, and conspiracy theories on our minds.

In one final irony, Jack Ruby was never held fully liable for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. He was convicted and sentenced to death, but this was overturned on appeal, and he was granted a new trial, only to conveniently fall ill and die before the new trial could begin. Legally speaking, Ruby died an innocent man—a fittingly unsatisfying coda to a story as messy and irritating as America itself.

You made it all the way to the end! Thanks for reading. If you liked this piece, please let the world know by popping the heart button at the bottom. (I hate asking for likes so blatantly—I guess I wouldn’t be a good politician—but it really does help other people discover my writing.)

If you liked this piece, you might also like some of my other tumbles down American politics rabbit holes:

Baby Meets World, Nicholas Day

The first task awaiting every new parent is to decide what to worry about. Luckily, if you’re not sure, there’s an entire industry of books to give you ideas. You can worry about whether your kid is sleeping the right way, or when to give them a phone, or whether or not your choices can be justified by randomized controlled trials. Much harder is finding the book that helps you worry less: I thought Bringing Up Bébé would turn me into one of those chill French parents, but it mostly just made me stress about not being sufficiently relaxed.

Enter Baby Meets World: the best parenting book I’ve ever read, largely because it’s not really a parenting book at all. Instead it’s a work of (very amateur) anthropology, a tour through the wide-ranging child-rearing practices of many different peoples and cultures, across many different time periods.

And I mean wide-ranging. We’re not talking when to introduce solid foods or take away the pacifier. We’re talking giving your newborns twice-daily enemas (the Beng people of Côte d'Ivoire), avoiding eye contact with infants at all costs (the Gussis in Kenya), or swaddling your babies so tightly you can leave them propped against the wall like a forgotten 2x4 (medieval Europeans). And don’t even get me started on pap, which was basically formula before formula: a concoction of flour, mushy old bread, butter, onions, and whatever else was lying around, mixed with beer or water and—since this was obviously pre-bottles—poured down babies’ throats with a funnel.

And guess what? Pretty much all of these babies turned out fine. (I mean, they didn’t all turn out fine, obviously—a lot of them died, but that was because of the poor state of pre-modernity medicine and public sanitation, not anyone’s parenting choices.) Even the ones forced to guzzle beer actually did okay. In medieval Europe, the most dangerous ingredient in pap was actually just… the water.

It’s hard to read this book without concluding that most of the things we stress about as parents don’t matter—and that the things that’ll fuck our kids up the most are probably the practices so embedded in our culture that we don’t even think to question them.

But I’m still not giving my kid any beer. He’ll have to get his alcohol the way God intended: by sneaking it from the pantry when his parents aren’t home and then carefully rearranging the remaining bottles so that we don’t notice anything’s missing.

Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford

Historians would have you believe that there are only two ways to make sense of the past: you can see it as the inevitable result of sweeping, structural forces, or you can see it as driven by the willful efforts of the so-called Great Men. But there’s a third option: history as a series of highly contingent, borderline random events, with small, seemingly insignificant moments cascading, butterfly effect-style, until they shake the world.

That kind of story is hard to tell in a textbook, though. It’s much more effectively explored through alternate history. And for the past decade or so, this genre has been having a real moment, with popular stories asking questions like What if the Soviets won the space race?, What if the Axis won World War II?, and What if you woke up in a world where the Beatles never existed, and instead of displaying any curiosity about how this change might have affected other historical events, you just passed their songs off as your own to impress women?

(I will leave it up to the reader to speculate as to why audiences starting in, oh, I don’t know, 2016 might have become especially eager to imagine ways in which world events might have turned out differently.)

So anyway. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. We’re dropped into a version of the U.S. much like our own, except that this one has a region dominated by a minority ethnic group, complete with its own language and customs, and even its own brand of cigarettes. Two detectives—one earnest and cheery, one world-weary and gruff—investigate a murder case, which spirals from a run-of-the-mill killing into a grand conspiracy involving powerful political figures, shadowy institutions, and maybe—just maybe—even supernatural forces, all with ominous implications for the region’s long-term sovereignty. And, as in any good detective story, substantial quantities of alcohol are consumed throughout.

Of course, I’m not talking about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—as you probably gathered from the title of this section, which I’m now realizing spoiled this dumb bit before it even got started—but about Cahokia Jazz, which—though I’m sure the author hates when people describe his book this way—is basically The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but with Native Americans instead of Jews.

Although I quite like both books, Cahokia Jazz’s much earlier (implied) departure point means it does a much better job imagining how culture evolves over time: YPU’s Alaska Jews are basically just regular American Jews from the actual world, whereas the Cahokians are a strange blend shaped by hundreds of years of counterfactual history. (For example, Cahokia ends up with a significant population of both Irish immigrants and escaped slaves.) This is a great read for alternate history buffs, detective story enthusiasts, and antisemites who like the idea of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union but want a less Jewy version.

Parkland, Vincent Bugliosi

And speaking of alternate histories: only 29% of Americans believe Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK alone, so you could say that, by the public’s standards, the Warren Report is itself a work of alternate history. Reading the whole Warren Report sounds too boring even for me, someone hovering at the outer limit of how interested you can be in the JFK assassination without tipping fully into nutcase territory, so instead I settled for Parkland, a minute-by-minute account of the days leading up to, and immediately following, the killing. And I mean “minute by minute” literally: the 504-page book covers roughly 72 hours, with almost every minute getting its own thoroughly-detailed section. Bugliosi was inspired to write the book after playing the part of the prosecutor in an unscripted 21-hour mock TV trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, a role he took after his career as an actual lawyer imploded in scandal.

As you might expect from a book that spends seven pages covering the sixty-second period between 1:38 and 1:39pm, I learned a lot from Parkland. More than that, though, this is the only media I’ve ever consumed about the JFK assassination that genuinely moved me emotionally. I can’t exactly say I recommend this book to the general reader, as you have to be a very specific kind of person to get into it. But unfortunately for me and my loved ones, I am that kind of person.

Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte

Every fiction writer, even the amateur ones whose only readers are the dozen or so other hungover kids in their college creative writing workshop, worries that others will interpret elements of their work as, well, not so fictional. It’s terrifying to reveal parts of yourself in a personal essay, but at least that’s on purpose. Far more terrifying is the fear that your fiction may have accidentally revealed your psyche’s deepest and most disturbing abscesses without your even realizing. Shouting “It’s fiction, it’s fiction!” will be no defense—after all, even if the sick and twisted things you put in your writing aren’t true, doesn’t it say something about you that you’re even capable of coming up with such fucked-up ideas?

This is why I think Tony Tulathimutte might just be the bravest writer alive today. Rejection—a set of interconnected stories about unsympathetic malcontents at the bottom of the modern sexual pecking order suffering egregious, self-inflicted humiliations—contains thoughts I would be embarrassed to admit I was even capable of thinking, let alone writing down, most notably in a fourteen-page tour de force that is undoubtedly the most deranged sexual fantasy ever committed to the page. I am honestly a little worried that even just recommending this book reflects poorly on me, but it is really, really good.

McAtlas, Gary He

The delicious paradox of McDonald’s is that, on the one hand, it’s the ultimate symbol of globalization—Thomas Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” posited that no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever gone to war, though that was only debatably true when he proposed it in 1999, and it’s definitely not true now post-Russian invasion of Ukraine—but at the same time, it’s so wildly customized for each of its host countries that it’s simultaneously a great illustration of cultural difference.

I almost never visit a new country without stopping to check out the local McDonald’s, and there’s often a kind of uncanny valley effect where the half-familiar food of a foreign McDonald’s somehow feels more foreign than a completely new cuisine. It’s like when you have a dream where you encounter someone who both is and isn’t your ex-girlfriend at the same time.

Anyway, is it weird to put a coffee table book on my “best of” list? McAtlas is a photo book of unique McDonald’s locations around the world—with a truly brilliant cover/spine design:

This book is basically Baby Meets World, but for McDonald’s instead of children. Wow… see how I brought everything full circle there? I bet you thought I wasn’t going to find a way to tie this all together, but I totally did.

If you liked this, I review every book I read (usually much less thoroughly than this) on my Goodreads.

1. The average West Virginian eats more than one hot dog per day. (Food Republic)

2. Half of U.S. vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. (Consequence of Sound)

3. Boba (as in boba tea) is Taiwanese slang for “big breasts.” (The Fitzwilliam)

4. There are only two escalators in all of Wyoming. (Cowboy State Daily)

5. Joseph Pilates came up with the idea for his eponymous workout while in a World War I internment camp. (The Verge)

6. Arnold Schwarzenegger became a millionaire from starting a successful bricklaying business before he went into acting. (Matt Lakeman)

7. The majority of the people on the Hindenburg survived. (The Atavaist)

8. When caterpillars become butterflies, they retain memories of their caterpillar existence even though their brain is dissolved and reconstituted during metamorphosis. (Psychology Today)

9. Jelly Belly created blueberry jelly beans for Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, so that they’d have a blue color to go with red (cherry) and white (coconut). (Reagan Foundation)

10. The Beatles’ film Help! is dedicated to Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine. (The Neighborhoods)

When you’re about to have a baby, you quickly learn two things about those who already have one. The first is that nothing you can do will stop even complete strangers from regaling you with their thoughts about parenthood, whether you want them to or not. (In fact, the length of these monologues tends to be inversely correlated with your level of interest.)

The second is that almost all of these people’s thoughts are identical. Sure, the specific words vary, like a college student hastily disguising a paragraph copied from Wikipedia. But underneath it’s just the same few clichés regurgitated over and over. They grow up so fast. Everything changes overnight. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. And of course, it’s impossible to explain to anyone who doesn’t have kids themselves—not that this ever stops anyone from trying to explain anyway.

I desperately hoped that when I became a parent myself I’d find that these clichés didn’t capture my own experience. Of all the possible ways parenthood might change me, the one I feared the most was that it would turn me into the kind of person who spoke about one of the biggest experiences of my life exclusively in hand-me-down platitudes.

So: a year or so into parenthood, what’s the verdict? Unfortunately, my answer thus far is extremely unsatisfying. I wouldn’t necessarily say the clichés are true. But also, I wouldn’t say they’re definitively not true. Like most clichés, they exist in that annoying grey area where it all depends on how you look at them.

In the first draft of this piece, I was much less wishy-washy. I confidently declared that many of the most common parenthood tropes were wrong, and furthermore, that anyone who repeated them as if they were true was an idiot or a liar or both. I even found a way to work a Joseph Goebbels quote in there (don’t ask). But unlike Goebbels, the more I explored my ideas, the less sure of them I felt.

For one thing, like every other parent, I’m deluding myself if I think I know very much about “parenthood” writ large: we are all extrapolating from an extremely small sample size. Really, all I know about is the experience of parenting my particular child. And even then, he acts differently with other people than he does with me!

It’s begun to strike me as kind of odd, actually, the way we talk about parenthood as if it’s one uniform thing, when really it’s a contingent relationship with a specific person. I guess we generalize similarly about falling in love, but we tend not to do this with other types of relationships—you much less often hear people talk in such sweeping terms about having a friend, or working for a boss, even though most of us will have many more friends and bosses than lovers or children1.

In cases where I do think the conventional wisdom is genuinely wrong, it tends to be wrong less by being outright false and more by being gently misleading. For example—and this is embarrassingly basic—no one told me how fun parenting would be! Granted, it’s not like anyone explicitly told me it wouldn’t be fun, but from the way people talk about it you’d think most of parenting was in the “hard in the moment, glad you did it later” category, the kind of experience that a certain kind of annoying person loves to call “type 2 fun.”

But actually, I find the day-to-day experience quite fun in the normal, type 1 way, full of little moments of delight. For example: my kid understands the mechanics of drinking from a straw, but he has yet to master the timing, so each time, he opens his mouth as wide as it’ll go well before the straw is anywhere near him and then just sits there with his ridiculous gaping maw as he sloooooowly brings the cup to his face2. Or there was the time he discovered that grabbing his penis in the bath made us laugh and then started doing it over and over until we were fully in hysterics. (I don’t know why the pediatrician never alerted us about this important developmental milestone.)

Then there are the cases where the cliché actually is kind of right, just not in the way I’d originally interpreted it. Take the trope that parenthood brings meaning to one’s life. So far, at least, this has not happened for me in the way I thought people were saying it would. I did not have one of those movie-scene experiences where I looked at my newborn son and suddenly felt that everything had changed forever; I do not feel like parenthood has given my life a sense of purpose that was lacking before, or altered my deeply-ingrained sense of cosmological nihilism.

Instead, parenthood has enhanced my sense of meaning in much the same way meditation does: by forcing me to be more present, more attuned to the small moments of beauty and joy that are everywhere if you can just slow down enough to notice them. By day four of the silent meditation retreat I went on a few years ago, I was spending an hour or so each afternoon watching a squirrel prance around the backyard of my cabin, finding great pleasure in his goofy movements. Having a baby is kind of like that, except millions of years of evolutionary instincts mean it doesn’t take 96 hours of silent contemplation to get me into the right mental state to pay close attention to my child.

Another way parenthood has increased my sense of meaning: it’s made me way too busy to ruminate on unhelpful questions like “What is my life’s meaning?” Which is not a knock against it—there’s a reason life in a monastery involves an endless succession of mundane chores.

I’ll leave you with one last thought about all these clichés: I’m starting to think that hearing them over and over might be rotting our brains a little.

If you’ve ever taken a drawing class, you’ve probably heard the thing about how learning to draw is really about learning to see. Beginner artists tend to default to symbols and shorthand, drawing what they think a face or a chair or a banana looks like instead of the far more complex image that’s actually in front of them. Art teachers have all these little tricks to defamiliarize the world and force their students’ brains to actually see what they’re looking at: drawing something upside-down, for example, or drawing the negative space around an object instead of the object itself.

That, in my best moments, is what I’m trying to do with parenthood: pretend I’ve never heard any of the clichés, that no one ever stopped me in the street and told me that I’d never be the same again or that this would be the hardest job I’d ever had, and just really, truly see what’s in front of me.

You might say I’m trying to look at my son the same way he looks at a straw: with rapt attention, a wide-open mouth, and absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next.

If you liked this one, you might enjoy these other parenthood-related pieces: Having a Kid Is Already Fucking Me Up and He Hasn’t Even Been Born Yet, and Sketches from Parenthood, Days 1–30 and Months 2–6.

Someone once told me that, since time feels like it speeds up as you get older, your life is—subjectively speaking—almost over by the time you turn 30. There’s something to that idea. My four years of college felt so stuffed with life that Robert Caro would have needed multiple volumes to cover them all; the decade since feels like it could all fit on one of those laminated placemats of fun facts from history you get at a kids’ restaurant. If the trend continues, I’ll be 60 by the time I finish writing this essay.

As a teenager I would sometimes consider the abstract possibility of dying, usually while listening to Death Cab for Cutie, and in my imagination I was always impressively equanimous. In these hypotheticals I created for myself, no matter how little time I got, I always felt like it would have been enough. Life was already so rich and full; every other day something happened to me that was the most important thing in the world. Now that seems crazy—of course it wouldn’t have been enough. Can it ever be enough? I hear a lot of people say that having kids makes the thought of dying worse, that they want to stick around long enough to find out whether their children become doctors or artists or black market cigarette kingpins in the gulags of the future, whether they have a family of their own or live a childfree life of pleasure with their eight AI girlfriends.

But I started feeling this way long before my own child existed, back when he was just the running joke I had with my girlfriend about how she really needed to be less forgetful about taking her birth control. Maybe my equanimity back then was just your typical teenage know-it-all-ness, a natural outgrowth of my certainty that the things happening to me and my friends were the most important and meaningful events in all of human history and that nothing that happened to anyone over eighteen mattered whatsoever.

None of this stops me from feeling an almost instinctive revulsion when I read about those crazy rich people who are trying to live forever. Most of them are so fixated on lengthening their lives that in the meantime they forget to actually do any actual living. Or else their super-scientific, objective, not-at-all-driven-by-repressed-emotions forecast just so happens to determine that the ability to indefinitely extend life will be developed… just in time to prevent them from dying. (Also, Ray Kurzweil was my friend’s neighbor growing up, and his wife called the cops on them multiple times for extremely minor infractions.) These people always make me think of that probably-apocryphal story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller at a party on Shelter Island, where Vonnegut tells Heller that their billionaire host has made more money in a single day than Heller has earned from Catch-22 over its whole history, and Heller says, “Yes, but I have something he’ll never have: the knowledge that I have enough.”

So I’d never consciously choose to live forever. But maybe if it were an option I’d keep signing up for one more year, just one more year, over and over and over, until it ended up approaching forever after all. It’s like all the stupid domain names I keep buying: I never intended to hang onto maxx.sexy or alexandmaxineurope.com for the rest of my life, but now here we are, several decades and thousands of dollars in hosting fees later, and I keep hitting that “Renew” button every time they ask me even though by this point there’s absolutely no good reason to keep any of these websites going.

Ultimately, though, I think it’s kind of like how it’s better for a night out to end when everyone’s still a little disappointed to go home. Because otherwise it turns into one of those nights where you’re wandering around the city far too late, surrounded by weirder and weirder people, getting either too fucked up or sobering up too fast, slowly realizing that the night actually ended a while ago and you just didn’t want to admit it. That’s why, when people ask me if I think there’s any kind of afterlife, I always say that I can’t be certain, but I sure as hell hope not.

Write what you know. The thing is, most of what you know is probably boring. We don’t need another divorce memoir, and we definitely don’t need another novel in which a shy, horny young man navigates the Brooklyn literary scene. (I will support whichever political party makes it illegal to publish another one of those, no matter how odious the rest of their positions.)

Instead of writing about what you already know, try tackling something unfamiliar and taking your reader along as you figure it out. Alternatively, you can just make stuff up.

I’m not saying you can never write about what you know: doing so can be a good idea if you know about something really awesome like hostage negotiation, or if you’re Keith Richards. But if either of those things were true, you probably wouldn’t be seeking out writing advice in the first place.

Show, don’t tell. This maxim has pushed too many writers into overwrought lines like “The edges of Fred’s mouth tipped downwards as his forehead reddened and brow furrowed” when they could have just written “Fred was mad.” Think of your friends who tell the best stories: do they stuff every sentence with unnecessary imagery, or do they just, you know, tell you what happened? This advice is the opposite of an actual good tip, which is to write more like how you talk.

Kill your darlings. Here’s a crazy idea: instead of getting rid of the good parts of your writing, how about getting rid of… cue suspenseful music… the bad parts? Yes, occasionally a piece of writing can be improved by removing a great line that just doesn’t belong. But most of the time, if you have a sentence or scene that’s particularly compelling, you should probably try to keep it in there. If it truly doesn’t fit no matter what you do, it might actually be the rest of the piece that needs to be removed.

Know your audience. If you really wanted to know people, presumably you would have taken up one of the more social art forms, like improv or barbershop quartet. Besides, avid readers are generally weirdos who you’re better off not knowing. I would rather never write a single word ever again—not even a grocery list or condolence note—than be forced to know even the slightest detail about any of you vile freaks.

Knowing your audience in a more general sense—understanding what they’re interested in and what they want out of your work—is an even worse idea. You can always tell when a writer wants to please their audience too much: the desperation seeps through every sentence, and it’s disgusting. The best writers maintain a healthy distrust of their audience, and in some cases are motivated by a desire to actively repel them.

Disclaimer: I do support “knowing” your audience in the biblical sense. If interested, respond to this email.

Don’t write about erotic octopus wrestling. Perhaps the worst tip of all: every great book has at least one libidinous octopus tussle. Who can forget the charged writhings of Inky and Wrigglesworth in The Great Gatsby, or the sensual tentacle interlock between Eight-Legs and Sucksy near the end of Lincoln in the Bardo? The only possible explanation for the ceaseless spread of this so-called “advice” is a conspiracy by Big Author to keep aspiring writers in their place by hogging the powers of cephalopod entanglement for themselves. Don’t fall for it.

Cut unnecessary words. This one sounds good at first—ditch a “needless to say” here, an “in my opinion” there, and soon your writing is flowing much more smoothly. But where does it end? When you really think about it, all of your writing is probably unnecessary. I mean, does anyone really need this newsletter? If I cut out all the unnecessary words, there’d be nothing left.

Recently, on vacation, I listened to the radio for the first time in years, and sandwiched between ads for reverse mortgages and personal injury lawyers I heard one for “Cape Cod’s top-rated marijuana dispensary.” Except for the wares being hawked, it was your typical radio ad: announcer’s voice uncannily sped up, business’ name repeated every three seconds, jingle so obnoxiously catchy that even the guy from Memento would get it stuck in his head. And I thought to myself, Are there really enough marijuana dispensaries on Cape Cod to necessitate a ranking? And more importantly: When did buying drugs become so incredibly un-cool?

Back in the ancient days of the Obama administration, when “budtender” and “cannabis concierge” were still nonsense words, if you wanted to buy weed, you had one option: knowing a guy. (And it was pretty much always a guy.) When you went over to his house—because he rarely came to you—you’d usually have to play a round of Mario Kart with him or make small talk about his new drum kit before you could leave.

And if you wanted edibles? Forget about a label indicating how strong they were—you’d be lucky if they even came in a loose baggie. Before the mid-2010s, the THC content of an edible was information that existed far outside the limits of human knowledge, like what happens after we die, or who really killed JFK.

And just like with the JFK assassination, one guy wasn’t necessarily enough to get the job done. Really, you needed multiple guys, since half the time your main guy would randomly stop responding to your texts, or fall asleep and not hear you ring the bell, or just run out of weed, Soviet grocery store style. So you’d spend a lot of time attempting to find guys, which usually involved sizing up everyone you knew in a given city—neighbors, coworkers, some girl you’d just met at a party—trying to figure out who might know one. Sometimes you’d get it wrong, and you’d accidentally ask a type of person who doesn’t really exist anymore—someone who not only didn’t smoke weed, but looked down on those who did—and then they’d always act a little weird around you after that, even though really it was their fault, because what were they doing wearing a Baja hoodie if they didn’t smoke weed?

All of this was a huge pain in the ass—but in retrospect, it was also pretty fun. I look back fondly on a lot of my wackiest guys, like the one whose girlfriend walked around topless in front of us, or the one who lived way out in rural Michigan, and who we called the Drug Wizard because he looked exactly like Gandalf, if Gandalf had really let himself go. Back in the Era of Guys, you didn’t even need to actually do drugs, because merely acquiring them was an adventure in and of itself. And all the effort you’d put into getting them made you enjoy the experience that much more, IKEA effect-style.

That’s all gone now, and not just for weed. Psychedelics may still technically be illegal, but they’ve fallen victim to this same process of enlameification. Ecstasy used to come in sketchy little pills with skulls or Pikachus stamped on them, and you took it at clubs so you could feel up strangers or trick yourself into liking terrible music. Now it’s called MDMA, and your stepdad takes it with his therapist to help process his divorce. LSD used to make you drop out of society, or at least get you kicked off the Harvard faculty; now it’s something you microdose so you can be 10% more productive at your job optimizing Google ads.

Could it be that part of the reason young men have become so much more conservative is that we took away most of their other options for rebellion? Drugs are self-care. Parents have tattoos. Polyamory is a daily presence in the New York Times. When my eight-month-old is a teenager, what will be left for him to rebel against? (“You don’t understand, dad—my AI girlfriend is real, and you’re a bigot for not wanting her to have equal rights!”) If drugs were still illegal, maybe all these anti-woke comedians would be getting stoned and forgetting about politics instead of voting for Trump and immediately regretting it.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad people aren’t getting sent to jail for having a joint in their pocket anymore, and I’m glad psychedelic therapy is helping people with PTSD. I don’t even think there’s anything wrong with microdosing LSD for productivity, if that’s what you’re into1. But as a society, we have to find a happy medium between imprisoning people for buying drugs and making them easier to buy than deodorant and toothpaste. Tear down the dispensaries. Bring back the guys. Keep drugs illegal—and keep them cool.

From oldest young person to youngest old person. During my last few years of childlessness, I was surrounded by twenty-year-olds everywhere I went—cool, hot twenty-year-olds, with mysterious slang and incomprehensible fashion choices—and it got hard to find anywhere to go or anything to do that didn’t leave me feeling like an ancient, rotting husk. I was worried that becoming a parent would accelerate this process, but to my surprise, it’s actually left me feeling younger than I did before.

Maybe that’s because I’ve gone from the tail end of one phase of life to the beginning of the next. Or maybe it’s just that, at 35, I’m actually kind of a young dad by New York standards, with hopefully at least a few more years to go before I develop the evasive hair and sad little paunch that defines so many of the middle-aged men I see pushing strollers in the street.

There’s one thing that does make me feel super old, though: thinking about how events I lived through will only ever be distant history to my kid. To him, 9/11 will be as far back in the past as the Vietnam War was to me, and the single most defining historical event for all millennials—the time Dave Matthews Band’s tour bus dumped 800 pounds of human waste onto an open-top sightseeing boat—probably won’t even make it into his textbooks.

The other day, I was in the car with him listening to “The Real Slim Shady,” and I thought about how to him, Eminem will never be anything but lame old-person music, and the idea that he was once so controversial that he was denounced on the Senate floor by the Vice President’s wife will seem as ridiculous as the idea of 1950s TV stations cutting away from Elvis’ wiggling hips.

Then again, when I shared this insight with a friend, she was like, “Max… Eminem has been lame old-person music for at least a decade already.”

Are you (emotionally) smarter than a six-month-old? Watching my son go from overjoyed to anguished in an instant—a transition that happens many times a day—two things are obvious. One, he’s usually upset about something extremely trivial, and two, he often has no idea what it is1.

This is one way in which he’s very much unlike me. When I’m upset, I usually know why, and it’s usually some complicated situation related to the specific circumstances of my life—either that, or your standard-issue, garden-variety free-floating existential angst.

At least, that’s what I used to think. Now I’m not so sure. Am I actually better than a baby at figuring out what’s making me upset? Or am I just better at telling myself elaborate lies?

Now that I think about it, when I’m dealing with an agitated adult, I often suspect the real cause isn’t what they’re pointing to. But I rarely turn that same lens back on myself, and maybe I should.

Feeling follows action. An old neighbor of mine, a psychiatrist in training, once told me that we think we treat people based on how we feel about them—but in reality, the relationship is bidirectional: we start to feel a certain way about people based on how we treat them. If you make a habit of being kind to someone you don’t like, you’ll probably start liking them more. That, he told me, is the real reason you shouldn’t be mean to the people you love: not (just) because it hurts them, but because it’ll make you love them less.

I think about this often in the context of parenthood. Saying that I take care of my son because I love him is no more or less accurate as saying that I love him because I take care of him. It’s obvious to me how you can love an adopted child just as much as a biological one, or, conversely, how outsourcing too much of your kid’s care—whether because you’re a one-percenter with a 24/7 live-in nanny or just a fly-by-night father who doesn’t change diapers—could make you feel less connected to them.

This idea probably has applications in areas other than childcare (Cate Hall recently wrote a fantastic piece exploring similar themes in the context of romance), but I will leave figuring out what those are as an exercise to the reader.

My second-greatest parenthood fear. My greatest fear as a parent is that something horrible will happen to my child, like getting hit by a truck, or growing up to be one of those guys who sells nitrous balloons in the parking lot outside Phish shows. But my second-greatest fear is that I’ll end up writing about parenthood in a really lame way.

Having a baby has been one of only two experiences I’ve ever had where pretty much all of the clichés have turned out to be true2, and “it’s just like everyone says” doesn’t make for very interesting writing. But also, I just like parenthood so much, and it’s hard produce good copy about something unambiguously positive. There are very few best-selling memoirs about happy, low-conflict marriages, or people who did a bunch of drugs, had an awesome time, and didn’t suffer any negative consequences.

Of course, it’s not like I expected to dislike parenthood. It’s just that I expected to like it the same way I like everything else: in a considered way that leaves plenty of room for nit-picking and criticism. I assumed that, as with most things, there’d be good parts and bad parts, and that on net, the good would outweigh the bad. Instead, it almost always feels like it’s exclusively positive.

Note that I said it feels that way, not that it is that way. On some level, I can tell that my subjective perception of experiences has become untethered from reality in a way that would honestly be a little concerning if it happened in any other context. Obviously, some part of me understands that having a baby brings certain downsides, like sleeping less, and getting pooped on significantly more than you used to. But somehow, they almost never feel like downsides in the moment. Even the poop one.

Because I’m edgy and cool and not like the other dads, I previously compared parenthood to taking psychedelics, and this gulf between the valence of an experience as I intellectually understand it and as it feels in the moment is another such parallel. Once, in my mid-twenties, I stood in the freezing rain for hours, waiting for a Killers concert to start, thinking, “I am very cold and very wet and that is unpleasant,” but somehow loving it all anyway.

Parenthood is just like that concert, is I guess what I’m saying. Only way more expensive, and you’re wet from pee instead of rain, and you live at the venue forever now.

This is the third entry in what I guess is now a trilogy about parenthood. If you liked it, check out Having a Kid Is Already Fucking Me Up and He Hasn't Even Been Born Yet and Sketches from Parenthood, Days 1–30.

Some facts about phones:

• Until the 1950s, most rural telephone service was provided by “party lines,” which connected many households to one operator. If another house was already using the line, you could just pick up your phone and listen in on their conversation. One small town in North Dakota relied on a party line until 2001.

• In the telephone’s early days, there were no ringers. Callers would get the attention of the person on the other end by yelling loudly into the receiver until someone picked up.

• To make sure parts of the AT&T telephone system were durable, Bell Labs engineers would do things like bury them in a swamp for 25 years, then dig them up to see how they’d fared.

• When someone is talking on the phone, they send signals only 35% of the time. The remaining 65% is pauses. By briefly disconnecting someone every time they paused, AT&T was able to double the capacity of its early phone channels.

• The first car phones were released in the 1940s. Bandwidth was so limited that fewer than a dozen people could use their car phones in Manhattan at any given time.

• Cell phones were designed without dial tones so that callers would spend slightly less time connected to the network, saving AT&T money.

• The term “cellular phone” comes from the arrangement of the transmitter towers that power the network: they are spread out to create a honeycomb-like grid of coverage areas, each hexagon a cell.

Some facts about the transistor:

• During the early development of silicon, none of the existing measuring equipment could tell when the silicon was contaminated with a minute amount of phosphorous. The only way scientists could identify the contaminated silicon was by smelling it for phosphorus.

• The first transistors were so delicate that they sometimes failed if someone slammed a door nearby.

• The transistor cost $25,000 to license, with one exception: it was free for anyone who wanted to use it for hearing aids, as a tribute to AT&T founder Alexander Graham Bell’s work with the deaf1.

When researchers in the Bell Labs patent department conducted a study to determine what made some people at the company so much more productive than others, they found only one common thread: the most productive people all hung out with a guy named Harry Nyquist, who didn’t accomplish much himself but who had an incredible gift for inspiring others.

Some facts about midcentury American businesses:

• Memos used to have way cooler titles, like one from 1940s AT&T called “A First Record of Thoughts Concerning an Important Post-War Problem of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and Western Electric Company.”

• Actually, companies used to have way cooler titles too—AT&T stands for American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Or at least, it used to. They very lamely renamed themselves to just “AT&T” in 1994.

• So many of the high-level AT&T executives this book worked their way up the corporate ranks from the absolute bottom, like Fred Kappel, who started his career digging holes for telephone poles and ended in charge of all of Western Electric. It’s been a long time since that kind of career path was possible.

The device that would eventually become the laser was given a much dumber name while still a research project: “stimulated emission.” The term—which refers to the way certain photons can make an atom produce additional photons—was not supposed to be funny.

Some facts about William Shockley, co-inventor of the semiconductor:

• In a note apologizing to his wife for having attempted suicide via Russian Roulette, Shockley calmly explained that the odds of dying were actually a bit less than one in six, because even if you drew the loaded chamber, there was still the small chance the gun might misfire.

• Later in life, Shockley became an extreme racist and eugenicist. One time, a reporter asked why, if his eugenecist views were true, none of his children had accomplished anything significant. Shockley responded, “In terms of my own capacities, my children represent a very significant regression.” He blamed the situation on his ex-wife’s lesser intelligence.

• In 1956, Shockley returned to his hometown of Palo Alto and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. He recruited a group of brilliant young engineers, but his paranoia, micromanagement, and poor leadership led eight of the best ones to leave and start their own companies—thus birthing Silicon Valley.

• Shockley is often called “the Moses of Silicon Valley,” having led a group to the promised land but having failed to enter it himself. Another parallel, which this book criminally fails to call out, is that Moses’ children—neither of whom are significant biblical figures—could also be said to represent “a very significant regression.”

For fun, Claude Shannon once built a device he called “the ultimate machine.” It was a box with a single switch. When you flicked the switch on, the box top opened and a mechanical hand came out and reached and turned the switch off, then retracted back into the box.

Fiber-optic communications required the development of a new kind of super-translucent glass. If you were to look through a pane of this glass that was an entire kilometer thick, it would be as clear as looking through a regular window.

The failure of the Picturephone:

• AT&T first developed video calling technology in the 1950s and made plans to bring it to market via a dedicated device called the Picturephone. Early market research was promising.

• The Picturephone debuted to delighted crowds at the 1964 World’s Fair and was launched commercially in 1970. The monthly fee for the device and thirty minutes of calls was $160—roughly $1,200 in today’s dollars.

• If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard about this before, it’s because the Picturephone was a spectacular flop. In the four years before it was unceremoniously discontinued, it sold fewer than 500 units.

• The Picturephone was unpopular even among AT&T employees. In a story with echoes of Infinite Jest, one executive positioned a still photo of himself looking attentive in front of his set so that he could walk around his office during calls.

• The Picturephone’s failure discouraged work on similar technology for decades, and current video call interfaces are still heavily informed by its lessons. For example, Picturephone users didn’t see themselves until their call connected—and were often unhappy with how they looked. That’s why modern video calling apps show you a preview of your camera before the call starts.

The most significant engineers at Bell Labs almost uniformly hailed from the kinds of small midwestern towns that today are hollowed-out shells of their former selves. One of the main forces behind these towns’ declines was the development of communication technologies that these engineers themselves created.

Why are there no great corporate R&D labs today? Many point to the unique status of AT&T’s monopoly—Bell Labs was supported by those monopoly profits, and its innovations were dispersed freely thanks to the regulatory agreements AT&T made with the federal government to be allowed to keep that monopoly. When AT&T was finally broken up in 1984, Bell Labs’ decline soon followed.

But another factor is the rise of startups. In the Bell Labs era, scientists and engineers generally didn’t have a shot at getting rich, so industrial labs (and academia) were their most compelling options. Today, the tech industry provides not only a potential path to real wealth, but—as important, if not more so, for many—the ability to work on technologies that will reach the general public quickly, and not risk being locked away in a lab for decades.

Thomas Edison disliked bathing and regularly worked for days on end without pausing to sleep, eat, or shower. Unsurprisingly, he often smelled terrible.

St. Thomas Aquinas said, “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” But Ross Douthat didn’t become your liberal mom’s favorite conservative by giving Thomas Aquinas the last word. His new book Believe is marketed as presenting “the case for the rationality of religious belief in a contemporary world often marked by skepticism.” In other words, it’s one long explanation, aimed squarely at those without faith.

Despite having just written about how I’m more or less no longer an atheist, I think I still qualify as one without faith. In fact, my current mix of religion-skeptical and religion-curious puts me smack dab in Believe’s target audience, which is an embarrassing thing to admit about any book by a New York Times opinion columnist1. This week I’m reading a Ross Douthat book, last week I made an impassioned argument for not throwing away “all these good boxes”... middle age sneaks up on you fast.

Believe’s subtitle is “Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” But that “should” is a little misleading. This isn’t one of those trendy cases for the social utility of religion, these days an uncontroversial idea even among nonbelievers. Nor is it an argument for the loose, New Age “god,” that vague sense that some undefined greater-than-us thing is out there. No, Douthat believes in the biblical God, the one with the capital G and the bushy beard who regularly intervenes in human affairs. He wants you to believe not (just) because religion is good for you, but because it points to the truth about our world.

Like a lawyer at the Supreme Court, Douthat throws out as many arguments as he can, hoping the cumulative effect will be convincing even if they don’t all land. He starts with the so-called “fine-tuning argument,” which is basically intelligent design, but for physics: the theory that the underlying structure of the universe is so precisely calibrated for life and scientific discovery that it must have been designed.

Though physicists once thought they might find that the specific properties of our universe are inevitable, it now appears universes with many different properties are theoretically possible. But these other possible universes mostly either wouldn’t support life (if the nuclear force were just infinitesimally larger, hydrogen would be unable to form), or else would support life, but harshly limit science (if the electromagnetic force were slightly different, microscopes wouldn’t really work). Convergence on all of these properties is so incredibly unlikely to have happened by accident, the idea goes, that it must be the work of a creator2.

There’s an undeniably appeal to the image of humanity on a divinely-inspired quest to discover the true nature of reality (it’s why I think space exploration is important, even in the absence of any practical applications). But if the universe was actually designed for life, wouldn’t you expect… more life? It seems pretty arrogant to think the world was fine-tuned for life when as far as we can tell life makes up a negligible percent of the observable universe. The human body is in some ways “fine-tuned” for the production of poop, but if the poop thinks it’s the point of the whole system, it is sadly deluded.

Next, the book addresses miracles, which Douthat believes in largely because there are so many historical sources attesting to them. (He’s particularly into levitating saints, which were apparently a big thing in Middle Ages Europe.) As for the scarcity of such sights today, please ignore the inconvenient fact that such “miracles” stopped happening right as we developed better methods for verifying them. The real situation is kind of like that guy from the 1999 Ben Stiller vehicle Mystery Men who can turn invisible, but only when no one’s looking—miracles have just naturally declined as our world has gotten less spiritually “tuned-in.”

It’s easy to dismiss testimony from 500 years ago3; harder to make sense of the strange experiences people still report today, especially when they happen to the last people you’d expect. The book’s most compelling example comes from a guy named Michael Shermer, who in his sixties encountered a ghostly presence that made him think the supernatural might be real. Not so unusual—expect that Shermer is a professional debunker and the literal founder of Skeptic magazine4.

This part of the book actually did convince me that we should take the so-called “supernatural” more seriously. Still, occasional glimpses of the uncanny don’t necessarily add up to a personal God watching over us. It’s a big leap from weirdness to worship.

Like a politician, Douthat is better at attacking the other side than boosting his own. He doesn’t score any knockout blows for God, but he does land a few solid punches on atheism’s jaw.

This book provides a surprising counterexample to the common assumption that science dispels mysteries once explained by religion: near-death experiences. These were rare before modern medicine, since coming near death was usually a prelude to actually dying. But now, thanks to our increased resuscitation capabilities, such experiences are far more common. And many people, across many cultures, describe them in mystical terms: out-of-body experiences, moving through a tunnel, encountering a bright light, etc.

So here we have an example of scientific progress actually increasing the prevalence of spiritual experience. And these reports—Douthat calls them “evidence,” though I think that’s a bit much—suggest that, at the very least, we don’t live in the most obviously atheistic universe, which would be one where everyone who came close to the end just reported seeing black. The fact that they don’t obviously isn’t proof of anything, but it does admittedly make you wonder.

If you had to get someone to believe in God, how would you do it? (Let’s stipulate that you can’t give them drugs.) Luckily, history provides us with many methods to choose from. You could try to instill a sense of awe with a grand cathedral or a majestic ritual. You could lure someone in with the practical benefits of religion—community, tradition, moral guidance—and hope that faith follows. You could tell them stories that offer answers to life’s biggest questions. And of course, there’s always the time-tested approach of threatening to kill anyone who doesn’t convert to your preferred religion.

You probably wouldn’t do what this book does: make a considered, methodological argument for religion’s factual truth. If that approach worked, every preacher would sound like a Ken Burns documentary, and every conversion story would just be a guy quietly reasoning his way to God.

Perhaps this book would land better if it had a bit more uncertainty. Every great religious narrative has a moment where the believer’s faith is tested, but Douthat never evinces even the teensiest bit of doubt. I would have found him much more persuasive if he at least conceded the occasional point to agnosticism. In the absence of even a perfunctory gesture at evenhandedness, he reminded me of a conspiracy theorist, seeing evidence everywhere for what he already thinks5.

Besides, I don’t even think the “evidence” Douthat lays out is the true reason for his belief. I don’t think he believes in God because of the precise value of the nuclear force or some guys who say they saw saints fly, just like I don’t think Sam Harris is an atheist because he determined that it’s biologically impossible for a snake to talk. This book purports to explain why everyone should believe, but I don’t even buy it as an accurate explanation of why Douthat himself believes. This stuff operates on a more mystical, less explicable plane, and that’s the point—you can no more reason your way into religion than you can reason your way into explaining why a joke is funny or a desert is beautiful. One has faith in spite of the evidence, not because of it. Otherwise, is it really even faith at all?

It was horror movie night at the enormous, dilapidated artists’ hovel she shared with eight housemates in West Oakland. For obvious reasons, I did not reveal the fact that I was/am absolutely terrified of even the tamest scary movies. (In fourth grade, I watched The Sixth Sense at a friend’s house and slept with the lights on for the next six months. My parents never forgave him.)

We watched The Babadook on a blurry projector, the eight housemates scattered around the room like discarded laundry. I cuddled with her on the couch, positioning myself behind her so she wouldn’t see that I had my eyes closed for half the movie. Afterwards, I stayed over—and alarmed us both in the middle of the night when I woke, very obviously from a nightmare, screaming and thrashing and drenched in sweat. We did end up going out a few more times after that, but I don’t think she ever looked at me quite the same way again.

She’d been my girlfriend for almost a month, but we had yet to go on an actual date, because that’s how things worked in eighth grade—our “courtship,” if you could call it that, had been conducted entirely over AOL Instant Messenger. But that afternoon, after school, it was finally happening: a trip to the ice cream shop.

She knew that I had never kissed a girl before, so in advance of our date, she sent me a link to a website called “How to Kiss,” with illustrated, step-by-step instructions. From the middle school computer lab, a friend and I scrutinized each pixel of this website with the intensity of someone studying the Zapruder film. Nonetheless—and with no disrespect intended to the creators of the sadly now defunct HowToKiss.net—it would be several more years before I successfully learned how to kiss.

We matched on Tinder. The plan was to meet at my place for a quick drink, then head to a concert.

My place, at the time, was a formerly-abandoned mansion in Detroit that some friends and I had purchased at auction and were in the process of renovating. I’d mentioned this to her, but I’d probably failed to sufficiently emphasize just how decrepit the house still looked from the outside. When she pulled up, she was too creeped out to come in, so she made me talk on the phone with her for thirty minutes, while she sat in her car outside, to prove I wasn’t a serial killer.

She told me her type was “spicy whites”—Italians, Greeks, Jews, etc. Later, I met her high school boyfriend, and he looked unnervingly like me.

During a quiet moment in bed, she asked me what I was thinking about. An ex had gotten mad at me for always replying to that question with “nothing,” so I decided—stupidly—to be honest. I said, “I’m thinking about how weird it is that most of the Muppets have actual names, but Big Bird’s name is just a description.”

After a few drinks, she explained that she “couldn’t decide” whether or not she was attracted to me, and asked that we extend our date so she could take some more time to think about it. Two drinks later, she still hadn’t reached a definitive conclusion, so I got bored and went home. I assumed I’d never hear from her again, but a couple days later she texted to say she’d that given it some more thought and could now confirm that she definitely wasn’t attracted to me. I couldn’t decide if I was stung by her disinterest or flattered that she’d devoted so much time to considering the matter.

A couple years after we hooked up, she published a memoir about the men she’d encountered in the New York dating scene. It was called Bad Sex.

It was fall 2020. The plan was to meet at a combination coffee shop/wine bar, grab some drinks to go, and head to the park. When I arrived, she was already inside, aimlessly browsing, and I started chatting her up. She was a little standoffish, but I didn’t think much of it—Covid had made us all forget how to socialize normally. After a few minutes of stilted conversation, I suggested that we order our drinks and head out. She looked at me like I’d just suggested we go lick the subway pole.

That’s when the little bell above the front door jingled and my actual date walked in. I had been talking to a stranger who just looked a lot like my date with her mask on.

She told me I came across as arrogant and obnoxious. Nonetheless, we got married a year later.

In the mid-2000’s, when I was a teenager, it sometimes seemed like the entire internet had been created for just two purposes: accessing pornography and debating the existence of god.

This was the heyday of the so-called “New Atheism”—think Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris—and back then, religious flame wars were so pervasive that it was common for forums totally unrelated to religion to have a dedicated section for such discussions, just to prevent them from overwhelming the rest of the site. (Writing that sentence made me feel incredibly old.)

I was never strident about my pornography viewing, but I was certainly strident about my atheism. Not that it’d taken a Sam Harris book, or even a poorly-spelled internet post, to get me over to that side. I grew up in a secular household without much god talk, and unless you count my childhood devotion to the tooth fairy, I can’t recall ever having so much as a flicker of belief. Even the rabbi at the temple where we made the occasional perfunctory appearance said we didn’t have to believe in god, though I always suspected he was just trying to lure us in by pretending to be more laid-back than he actually was, much like one might do on a first date.

Being an atheist felt important back then, and not just because everything you believe feels important when you’re fifteen. This was the peak of the George W. Bush era, and it really did seem like religious nuts were controlling the country, and that if we could just convince a critical mass of people to be less religious, all of our political problems would be instantly solved. (Of course, like basically everything I thought when I was a teenager, that turned out to be wildly off-base—who knew that the post-religious right would be even worse?)

I never went looking for god, but I certainly went looking for something. Like many young people who want to convince themselves that their misbehavior is meaningful, I became a bit of a seeker. I was certain there was something more out there, and I was desperate to find it, even if I couldn’t explain exactly what it was. I figured I’d know it when I saw it, but either I saw it and I didn’t know it, or I just never even saw it in the first place.

I tried meditation and psychedelics and all-consuming ambition; I tried concerts and sexual experimentation and really long walks. But it never even occurred to me to try religion, and if someone had suggested it, I’d have laughed at them as hard as Sarah laughed at God when he said she’d bear a child at ninety years old—a reference I wouldn’t have gotten at the time.

I may not have found whatever it was I was looking for during this phase of my life, but along the way I had many experiences I’d describe as mystical or even spiritual. I stared at my arm in the grass until the boundaries between them dissolved and all I saw was atoms next to atoms. I lost myself in laughter at things that wouldn’t make any sense the next day—that barely even made any sense in the moment—sure somehow that the meaninglessness was the point.

But all of these experiences seemed compatible with an uncompromisingly materialist worldview, and none of them gave me a sense of the divine. I took it as a given that I would stay an atheist forever.

I lost my atheism the same way Hemingway said you go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.

The gradual part: I started getting interested in religion from a purely intellectual perspective. In my youthful smugness, I’d rejected something I knew very little about, when of course not believing in something isn’t a good reason to avoid learning about it entirely. I don’t believe in Nazism either, but I’ve still read so many books about the Third Reich that they have a dedicated section on my bookshelf.

Besides, I’d long prided myself on having a broad base of knowledge. Did it really make sense for me to know the specific meal Richard Nixon ate the day he resigned, but have no idea what happens in Deuteronomy? Pretty much every human culture ever has developed some form of religion. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true, but it does mean there’s probably something there worth paying attention to.

So I read the entire Bible cover to cover; it turned out to be pretty boring, but I’m still glad I did it. And I found myself seeking out more works by religious thinkers, or at least reacting with something other than immediate dismissal when I happened to stumble across them. I didn’t come away a convert, but I was left very curious about what it’s like to have a deep, genuine religious faith. If we ever develop some kind of high-fidelity sci-fi brain simulator, that’ll be the first program I download after I get bored with all the sex stuff.

The sudden part: I drank ayahuasca out of an empty Gatorade bottle with a dozen strangers and a Peruvian shaman on an old hippie’s farm outside San Francisco. I didn’t do it because I was looking for god—I didn’t do it for any reason at all, really, besides idle curiosity. The opportunity presented itself, as such opportunities tend to do in the Bay Area, and I said yes because it seemed more interesting than saying no.

Two of the most annoying things to read about are spiritual revelations and psychedelic experiences, so I won’t risk my subscribers’ wrath by going into too much detail about a night that combined both. Suffice it to say that, for a few brief moments right after I’d finished vomiting in the dirt, I was certain I’d touched the face of something I could only describe as god.

Maybe that experience was so powerful that it would have shaken even the most insistent materialist. Or maybe it was just the final block pulled from my Jenga tower of nonbelief. Either way, as I drove home Sunday morning, I realized, to my great amusement, that I no longer thought of myself as an atheist.

That experience got me to stop calling myself an atheist. But it didn’t get me to start calling myself anything else.

It’d take a lot more than one night on a farm to turn me into a full-on religious believer. Nor can I bring myself to identify as agnostic, a word that’s always filled me with an admittedly irrational hatred. It’s a weasel word, the sign of someone who hasn’t given the issue sufficient thought, or is just too much of a wuss to admit they’re an atheist. Agnostics aren’t sure what they believe; I am sure what I believe, it’s just that what I believe is that I’m not sure. I know those two sentences sound like they both mean the same thing, but I swear there’s a difference in my mind.

In a lot of ways atheist still feels closest to where I’ve actually landed, at least for now, which is that there probably isn’t a god in any traditional sense, and that if there is something bigger and mysterious out there, it’s almost certainly so different from what people typically mean by “god” that using the same word feels like stretching language past its breaking point. But calling myself an atheist implies a level of certainty that no longer sits right.

Maybe I’m an atheist the same way Bill Clinton was a stoner: he smoked pot, but didn’t inhale; I saw god, but didn’t believe. Or maybe I’m an atheist the same way I’m straight: there’s that one blurry night that I just don’t count.

I suppose it’s a victory for atheism that the uproar over books like The God Delusion now seems wildly old-fashioned. Culture moves on, and nothing stays controversial for long: Ice Cube went from killing cops to hanging out with Elmo, and you’ll hear all seven of George Carlin’s dirty words you can’t say on television in ten minutes of Succession.

It’s not so much that the atheists won as that the whole question just stopped feeling important. Or at least, it did to me. After that weekend on the farm, my friends all asked if I’d been hit with any earth-shattering revelations, and I was never sure how to respond. On one hand, you could say that whether or nor there’s a god is the single biggest question facing humanity; on the other, wavering on my answer to that question had zero practical impact on my life. What you believe matters a lot less than what you actually do, which is probably why so many religious traditions emphasize practice even in the absence of faith.

If there is a god who experiences anything close to human emotions, I can’t help but imagine it wouldn’t really care whether we believe in it or not, and would likely be highly amused by all the time and energy we spend on the question. For all we know, god spends most of its time observing geological formations, and we’re just those unimportant monkeys who occasionally mess up the rocks.

It’s an ironclad law that all newsletter writers must publish a self-indulgent piece on or around January 1st, reflecting on the past year. If you’re anything like me, your inbox is full of them. Newsletters I barely remember subscribing to, summarizing a year of posts I didn’t read. Newsletters that, as far as I can tell, only publish on New Year’s, each piece looking back on the previous New Year’s piece, an endless Matryoshka doll of self-reflection. And yet here I am, ever the hypocrite, putting out one of my own. Forgive me Father, for I have Substacked.

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve now been writing this newsletter for a little over four years. That’s longer than I’ve done most things in life: longer than I spent in college, longer than I’ve lasted in most jobs, and longer than my longest relationship. It’s also longer than the average tenure of British Prime Ministers since 1900, according to some ChatGPT math that I didn’t bother to double-check.

Last year I published ten pieces, more or less meeting my more or less pledge that this newsletter comes out more or less monthly. These pieces touched on a wide range of topics, from machine politics to the point of humanities majors, but the most popular were all about my personal life. Unintentionally, they ended up telling a story in three acts:

• In Rave New World, I found myself, and my self-confidence, in Detroit’s rave scene.

• In Some Quick Tips on Finding Love, I explained how to fall in love with someone you actually like.

• In Having a Kid Is Already Fucking Me Up and He Hasn't Even Been Born Yet, my life changed forever when my then-girlfriend, now-wife forgot to take her birth control for a few days.

More important than the pieces I published, though, are the pieces I didn’t publish. This year—probably because it was the first year I wasn’t holding myself to any kind of set schedule—I set a new record for unfinished pieces, including such half-written potential masterpieces as Why I Don’t Care About Having a Legacy, My Life as a Failure, Longing for Asexuality, and Drugs Were More Fun When Buying Them Was Hard. Perhaps I’ll eventually finish some of these and you’ll get to enjoy them in 2025 or beyond. Or perhaps they’re already finished in a parallel world, delighting readers of Candy for Breakfast’s shadow newsletter in the spirit realm.

Back our realm, 2024 was the biggest year so far for growth in this newsletter’s readership. There are now 1,102 of you, meaning Substack has finally given me that coveted “Over 1,000 subscribers” badge.

Late at night, rocking my child back to sleep, I wonder: who the hell are all you people? Substack provides me with the barest hints of information about each of you—mostly it shows me the other newsletters you subscribe to—and I try to figure out what those other newsletters say about you and, therefore, what they say about me. I wonder how you found me, what your lives are like, what your hopes and dreams are, or at least, your hopes and dreams as they relate to reading this newsletter. I wonder how long will it’ll be before I disappoint you and you unsubscribe.

New Year’s resolutions allegedly originate from the ancient Babylonian festival of Akitu, some 4,000 years ago. During the twelve-day ceremony, the Babylonians made promises to their gods to repay debts and return borrowed items, believing this would bring favor and good fortune in the coming year. They also staged puppet fights, burned effigies, and humiliated the king in a ritual slapping; if they slapped him so hard he cried, it was seen as a good omen for the coming year.

Sadly, we’ve abandoned all the cool parts of Akitu and hung on only to the lamest component: resolutions. I refuse to make New Year’s resolutions for myself, but I did make a few for this newsletter, and here they are:

More Lennon, less McCartney

John was always the raw, ungovernable wildman; Paul, the polished, managerial pragmatist. Without John, a lot of Paul’s solo work is uninspired—but without Paul, a lot of John’s solo work is unlistenable. Like most Type A people, I’ve always gravitated more towards Paul. Yes, his try-hard energy can be annoying, but I admire his work ethic, without which the Beatles would have likely broken up, or perhaps just faded away, a few albums before they actually did. By the end, he was kind of like that kid in school who doesn’t want to be in charge of the group project again, but has realized that if he doesn’t step up, nothing will get done, so fine, sure, he’ll take the lead one more time.

This year, though, I want to embrace a little more of my inner John. More id. Less editing. More typos. Less polish. Let’s get weird. And if that means putting out occasional Au, I guess that’s the price I have to pay.

Humiliate my family

This year, I want to self-censor less. With every essay, I’ll ask myself, Will my parents be horrified when they read this? And if the answer is no, it’s not done yet. (My parents, reading this in dismay: Wait—you mean this isn’t already the un-self-censored version?!?)

This year, I resolve to use this newsletter to fully destroy whatever microscopic chance existed that I might someday run for office. I resolve to alienate my new subscribers, greatly reduce my future career prospects, and make every woman who has ever broken up with me certain that she made the right decision. The theme of 2025 is publishing work that I will instantly regret.

Write less

When I publish at all, that is. After all: the internet is full of people resolving to write more this year, and as with all resolutions, most of them are bound to fail. That’s why I’m going in the opposite direction and resolving to write less.

Every year since 2020, I’ve written less and grown more. 2024 was the year I published the fewest pieces, and also the year I gained the most new readers. In 2025, I will continue this trend by writing even less. Some of my pieces will contain only a single paragraph; others, a single character. (It’ll probably be “q.” Or maybe “^.”) Eventually, I will switch from writing new pieces to deleting old ones. At its apotheosis, this newsletter will be nothing but a blank landing page, the shadow where some writing used to be. You’ll email me—“Hey, what happened to your newsletter?”—and like the wizened old man in a horror movie’s ghost town, I’ll deny such a thing ever existed. I never had a newsletter, I’ll say. I’ve never heard of Substack. In fact, I don’t even know how to read.

Happy New Year from Candy for Breakfast, and here’s to a great 2025!

Free time and productivity. Actually, I’ve always hated the word “productivity,” with its associations of mindless ladder-climbing or podcast gurus hocking complex note-taking workflows and unregulated supplements. Call it what you want; I was worried having a baby would make me have less of it. Say goodbye to your free time, they said. You’ll never get anything done again, they said. Of course, many people have accomplished great things while having kids, but an informal survey of the top-of-mind examples suggests that 100% of them were negligent parents.

So far, though, I actually think that having less free time has been good for me. Now that it’s a rare asset, I’m much more intentional about how I spend it. And I procrastinate much less—it’s easy to put something off when you have the whole day stretching out seductively ahead of you; less so when you only have the thirty-minute window before your kid wakes up. I’ve been spending less time writing, but I haven’t actually written any less.

A lifetime supply of worry and suffering. We celebrated our kid’s eight-day birthday with an ambulance ride to the emergency room, over an issue that’s only funny in retrospect: his breathing was impaired by, of all things, enormous boogers. The doctors used a special machine to suction the snot from his nostrils, but there was no such machine to suction the worry from my brain. For many hours after, I understood intellectually that he was fine, but my body was still flush with residual terror; my brain, seeking to make sense of it all, kept generating increasingly preposterous anxieties, like the possibility that my wife might be kidnapped from outside the hospital when she went to pick up our DoorDash1.

By far the worst part of the experience, though, was the dawning realization that this was just going to keep happening. Not this exact thing, of course; as far as I’ve been able to tell, in all of human history there are no documented examples of asphyxiation by booger2. But there will inevitably be many future instances of similar worry. In deciding to have a baby, I unknowingly committed to a life forever punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

The unpleasantness of such feelings is weirdly absent from the endless discourse about whether or not to have kids. When people walk through that “Should I or shouldn’t I” utilitarian calculus, the entries on the cons list are usually things like loss of freedom, or financial worries, or career impact. I’ve never seen someone say, “One reason not to have kids is because you’ll worry about them for the rest of your life, and that feeling sucks.”

Granted, I don’t think you can decide whether or not to have kids with something as simple as a list of pros and cons. (Honestly, I’m not sure you can decide anything that way.) But it’s still a weird absence.

Seeing boobs. In fifth grade, having recently gained access to the internet but having yet to fully grasp how it worked, I sent an email to boobs@boobs.com and hoped for the best. Incredibly, the good people at boobs.com—or at least, their auto-responder—actually got back to me, with, unsurprisingly, pictures of boobs. The most memorable were the two in the boobs.com logo, where they had replaced the O’s in the word “boobs.” (Note: I couldn’t figure out how to prevent email clients from automatically adding links to the URLs in this paragraph. I recommend not clicking them.)

Beginning from this moment in fifth grade, and lasting farther into adulthood than I’d like to admit, seeing boobs was consistently one of my top priorities in life. That goal has never felt more distant that it does today, now that rote, utilitarian female toplessness has become a background hum in the noise of daily life. My wife has her shirt off constantly, and her boobs have been seen (and, in some cases, groped and analyzed) by an unending stream of family, friends, and medical professionals, not to mention by our actual child.

These days boobs are visible all the time, and yet I barely even notice. If my teenage self could see me now, he’d rue the man I’ve become.

The meaning of life Ponzi scheme. Here’s a thought I had at 5 am that’s probably stupid. (I’ve had hundreds of these over the past few weeks; you’re lucky you’re only getting one.)

Lots of people say they want to have kids to add a source of meaning to their life. That’s not why I did it, but I’ve felt the effect nonetheless—having a baby automatically gives you a long list of reasons to get out of bed in the morning, though admittedly a disproportionate amount of them are poop-related.

But if the problem is a lack of meaning in your life, are you actually solving that problem by having a baby, or are you just passing it on to the next generation? After all, one day your kid is going to grow up and start looking for meaning in their life. So it’s basically just an endless game of hot potato.

Self of Theseus. I don’t know that I ever really thought that having a baby would transform me into a completely different person, at least not right away, but the possibility had certainly occurred to me. So I’m relieved, and perhaps also a touch disappointed, that so far I seem to be pretty much the same as I’ve always been.

While my wife was in labor, my other piece about having a baby started to become one of my most-read essays yet, and every time I checked my phone my inbox was full of new likes and subscriber notifications3. Perhaps such superficial pleasures will no longer hold their former appeal, I thought, now that I’m knee-deep in the miracle of life. But no: that shit felt just as good as it always does. Our selves are tenacious bastards, not so easily eradicated.

Then again, looking at my child, it becomes obvious that change is life’s only constant. Was I myself really a baby as well, way back in the day? The prospect seems impossible, yet all available evidence suggests it’s true. Maybe in another 34 years, my current self will seem just as distant as my newborn self does now.

Now that I know the joys of my child’s unconditional love, adulation from internet strangers means nothing to me, so I don’t even care whether or not you click the like button underneath these footnotes.

Okay, yes—the year isn’t quite over yet, but given that I just had a baby, I probably won’t be reading much in December, unless you count ChatGPT’s responses to my parenting questions. So, here are eight pieces of writing that stuck with me this year, in no particular order.

The Universe in Miniature in Miniature (short story collection by Patrick Somerville)

Re-reading a book you once loved is kind of like sleeping with an ex. Occasionally it’s better than you remembered, better than you could even imagine remembering, and the experience is almost like time travel, connecting you with your half-forgotten past self. More often, it’s a grim disappointment. How did I ever think this could be a good idea, you wonder, having forever sullied what was once a beautiful memory by futilely attempting to relive it.

I first read this collection of short stories in 2017, and I couldn’t understand why its author wasn’t more famous. Then he moved to TV, where he created Netflix’s Maniac and become the showrunner for HBO’s adaptation of Station Eleven, so I guess he’s more famous now. Thankfully, this book actually was just as good the second time around.

Notes on perverts I've encountered over the years (by me, a very wholesome lady) (essay by )

Other than easy access to pornography, the best thing about the internet is the way it lets you stumble upon interesting work by mostly unknown writers. There’s an extra thrill when you find something great by someone who isn’t well-known. (Is this how I hope people feel when they find this newsletter? Maybe…)

is the anonymous author of a sporadically updated newsletter about… well, I don’t know what it’s about. Tales of being young and dumb in New York in the 2010s, I guess? Her stuff reminds me of the 2000s era of personal blogs I was an avid reader of as a teenager. Did you know there are three different people in New York who identify as human carpets? You do now.

Ubik (novel by Philip K. Dick)

Speaking of revisiting things from the past: I read a bunch of Philip K. Dick’s stories in high school, during a science fiction phase that, like all respectable young boys, I quickly grew out of. Somehow, I’d had him pegged as one of those old-school sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, whose influence I respect but whose wooden prose and even more wooden female characters render them basically unreadable today.

Turns out that was totally wrong. I don’t remember what inspired me to revisit PKD after a ~20 year break, but his work is so much weirder than those other writers’. Ubik is, I think, his best book—less a science fiction story and more a work of eerie, existentialist quasi-horror, full of memorable images like objects “decomposing” to earlier forms (TVs to radios, cigarettes to loose tobacco) and a character’s face suddenly appearing in place of the presidents on all his friends’ money.

After Ubik, I went on a bit of a Philip K. Dick spree, and was disappointed by a lot of his later, more spiritual novels, like VALIS and The Divine Invasion—I don’t know if he was doing too many drugs or not doing enough drugs, but whichever it was, he needed to try the opposite. Skip those, but definitely read this one.

Going for a Beer (short story by Robert Coover)

I often hear about an artist for the first time when I read their obituary. (Death: the ultimate growth hack.) I was surprised I hadn’t heard of Robert Coover before, as I have a thing for fictional accounts of Richard Nixon, and word on the street is Coover created one of the all-time greats.

Going for a Beer, a surreal short story originally published in the New Yorker, is one of the best stories I’ve ever read and is, at just over 1,000 words, brief enough that you should really just take a break from this newsletter and go read it right now. I mean, just look at these opening lines:

He finds himself sitting in the neighborhood bar drinking a beer at about the same time that he began to think about going there for one. In fact, he has finished it. Perhaps he’ll have a second one, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third. There is a young woman sitting not far from him who is not exactly good-looking but good-looking enough, and probably good in bed, as indeed she is.

Malfunctioning Sex Robot (essay by Patricia Lockwood)

Patricia Lockwood is my favorite living writer who isn’t Sam Kriss. If every piece of literary criticism rocked as hard as “Malfunctioning Sex Robot,” her look at John Updike, then literary criticism would actually be a popular genre, instead of having an audience limited to disaffected former English majors and the people who skim book reviews to feign intellectual depth at dinner parties. Forgive me for once again quoting a full opening paragraph:

I was hired​ as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.

Everything by

is my favorite living writer who isn’t Patricia Lockwood. I don’t think I’ve ever read an essay by him I didn’t like. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever even read a sentence by him I didn’t like. What I admire so much about Kriss is that he’s consistently, deeply weird, but in a way that’s highly readable and never comes off as affected.

His newsletter is so reliably good that I struggle to recommend just one piece, but I can definitely recommend one paragraph—this one, from part one of his (paywalled) series about India:

One thing the Empire did, though, is tie the histories of Britain and India together, possibly forever. I just don’t think the colonial relation is the enduring part of it. India is a big, young, growing country. Britain is small, and slowly shrinking out of history. In the future, I think the entire history of Britain, from the Saxons crossing the sea to Alfred at Ethandun to the Arthurian cycle to Chaucer to Shakespeare to the first stirrings of liberalism and the scientific method to the ships out across new seas and chasing new worlds, the flying shuttle, the dark Satanic mills, the huge industrial cities, the labour movement, the summer of empire, the trenches, the last stand against Hitler in Europe, the electronic computer, the Beatles, the Stones, the Sex Pistols—all of it will ultimately be remembered as a minor episode in the history of India. Did you know that the English language doesn’t actually come from India, but originally developed on a cold island thousands of miles away? Did you know that the Indian system of parliamentary democracy was actually brought to the country by foreign invaders? Did you know that the sport of cricket was invented by—oh, the Mughals, or the Timurids, something like that.

All Fours (novel by Miranda July)

Miranda July is one of those people with an unfair, jealousy-inducing level of talent—she’s a great filmmaker, an amazing writer, a good dancer, and she’s attractive. Plus she has a cool name1. I was hesitant to include All Fours on this list because everyone has already heard about it and there’s really no need for me to add to the chorus of voices saying that it’s very good, but whatever, it really is very good.

Bible App (subway ad)

I don’t know if this counts as something I “read,” exactly, but this Bible app ad I saw on the subway is a master class in concise copywriting:

That’s it for this year! If you liked this, I made similar lists in 2021, 2020, and all the way back in 2016. I also review the books I read on my Goodreads, though those are mostly just intended as notes to myself. Give the heart button below a tap if you enjoyed this; if you hated it, forward it to ten friends with angry commentary.

1

Admittedly, it’s one she made up for herself—she was born Miranda Grossinger—but still.

Hey everyone,

On Tuesday night, as I was frantically watching one set of numbers on my phone, a very different number came in: this newsletter officially crossed 1,000 subscribers.

I guess humans are suckers for nice, round numbers, because somehow 1,000 of you feels like a much bigger responsibility than 999. If it takes ten minutes to read one of my essays, then every time I hit publish, I’m potentially wasting almost seven days of cumulative reader time1.

It’s not the biggest audience in the world or anything, but it’s enough that I can feel myself starting to stress about each piece more—to make sure everything is polished, without too many typos or poorly thought out opinions I’ll later regret.

Actually, though, I want to push in the opposite direction, and make sure this newsletter remains loose and experimental. One thing I want to play around with more is sending some posts that are a bit more casual and less polished than what I usually write—less “here is an essay I revised many times” and more “hey guys it’s me writing you an email.”

In that spirit, I thought that rather than writing my own take on the election—because honestly who needs that—I’d share some of the most interesting and helpful stuff I’ve been reading over the past few days

The second COVID election. If you want a simple, clear take on the results, so far I like The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson’s the best:

Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.

It’s a cliché to link to him at this point, but Ezra Klein’s is pretty good too, especially the analogy to 2004.

Relatedly, via the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, this is the first time since WWII that every governing party facing election lost votes. Politics are globalized too now.

If you want a more cynical opinion, read this one from by far my favorite person on Substack, . I don’t fully endorse this take—I’m not even sure Sam himself fully endorses it—but damn if it isn’t entertaining:

The reason Kamala Harris lost is the same as the reason she was the candidate to begin with: the Democratic Party is allergic to democracy. It’s the instrument of a particular form of class power; its role is basically disciplinary. When it comes to an actual crisis, all it knows how to do is coil in on itself, breathe in its own fumes, suck itself off until completion. The party knew that Joe Biden’s brains kept running out of his nose and into his morning coffee, but they kept pretending until it was far too late that he was running laps around the White House lawn and solving new problems in theoretical physics in his spare time.

Trump’s luck. Back in July, I wrote:

This summer has seen Donald Trump hit a string of lucky breaks so unlikely that I’m starting to wonder whether we’re all just NPCs in his simulation. Either that, or God is real, and he’s a Trump fan. We’re speedrunning that famous Marx quote, with history repeating itself as both tragedy and as farce at the exact same time. If he somehow manages to lose this one, he’ll be the Republican nominee in 2028, 2032, and every four years thereafter until he dies. If he dies. At this rate, he’ll probably be the first person to live forever.

And that was before he survived two assassination attempts and won re-election. In retrospect, his losing in 2020 was actually its own form of lucky break. His political legacy is now more far more impressive than if he’d just won a regular reelection, and as RFH points out, he skipped over the bad part of the post-COVID economy and is poised to inherit the good part:

Then again, part of the reason Trump seems so lucky is that he continually creates opportunities for new lucky breaks by squandering the previous one. So we’ll see.

Tech & Trump. The PayPay mafia is a group of PayPal founders who have since become disproportionately successful in the tech industry. With Elon Musk in Trump’s ear and Peter Thiel’s protege JD Vance as VP, they have now become disproportionately successful in politics as well. (The right-wing ones, at least—the left-wing ones, like Reid Hoffman and Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman, are shit out of luck.)

To Substack cofounder , Elon is an amped-up version of the news tycoons of the early 20th century, who craved power and made no pretense to editorial neutrality—“Rupert Murdoch and William Hearst on amphetamines.”

What are Elon and Trump’s other Silicon Valley supporters thinking? I like Rippling founder Parker Conrad’s take:

My personal view is that a lot of smart people are being very stupid and believe that Trump is going to do THEIR thing. Tech people think he will usher in a new, tech-forward, business friendly environment. Kooky fluoride conspiracy theorists think he’s gonna take care of that thing. Etc. I think they will all be disappointed when their faces get ripped off. It’s weird because Trump being elected feels like the end of the world but there are all these very smart people who I like and respect who think it’s gonna be the best thing ever. So, 🤷. I hope they are right.

The past eight years have taught us all not to make overly-confident political predictions, but there is one prediction I feel very confident registering here: Trump and Elon will have a full falling out by 2028.

Facial hair in the White House. Speaking of JD Vance, he’s the first president or vice president to have facial hair in almost 100 years, since Herbert Hoover’s VP Charles Curtis. (Harry Truman briefly grew a goatee on vacation, but shaved it off before returning to work.)

Beards may be back, but as Eric Hovde’s loss to Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin proves, mustaches are still electoral poison everywhere but Maine.

Actually, I take back everything I wrote earlier. The only election commentary you need is this tweet:

Alright gang—that’s it for today. If you want more of this kind of thing (casual, tossed-off posts, links to stuff I’m finding interesting, etc), let me know with a like or a response. And a huge thank you to all 1,001 of you for reading.

Good luck with the next four years,

Max