What I Talk About When I Talk About Supporting The Newsletter

Hey all. It’s been another quarter. You might be new here. You might be old here. Either way I shake the old tip jar every 3 months, and that’s what this is.

First some notes:

• I’m traveling next week. There might be a newsletter, but there might not. After that, regular weekly programming will resume. How’s that for scintillating?
• If you are new here, you might not know that I have been recapping the TV show LOST. It’s a nice palate cleanse for me from the usual stare into the void. I’ve been on a LOST pause for a few months, but I go off pause this month. Join me for Season 3, or maybe just politely delete the emails, depending on how you feel about them!

OK, back to the shake-shake.

My model is pay what you want, which means that the discount I’m offering is 100%, and it is available year round. You can read the whole rationale here if you like. The short of it is, I really don’t want people to pay if they’re struggling to make ends meet, and I know that this unfortunately the case for many people out there. So if that’s you, I’m extraordinarily honored that you spend your time reading me, and don’t pay, and I mean it.

I write these essays about politics, is I guess the way you’d categorize it. I try to muse about the ways that human beings are art; about the popular and respectable and barbarous spiritual crime of supremacy; about what that crime is doing to human art when its most enthusiastic practitioners take power; and about why we’d do well to not help supremacy stay popular and respectable. And I try to do it in a way that rejects the usual ways of framing it for a … well, a reframe.

I do an essay pretty much every single week, and I do my very best with them. Some of them are pretty good if I do say so myself, and all of them are at least pretty long.

In the last three months, I’ve been pondering our national current of supremacy, and the idea that persuasion is what’s needed in response. Here are a handful that I think came out particularly well:

Way back in June, I wrote this to wrap up a series of American fear: who demands exclusive ownership of it, how those owners use it to justify frightful things, and the ways they seem to believe their ownership means others will do the dying for them.

__

In early August, I wrote this one about how innovation is sometimes confused with ignoring fundamental truths, like the fact that we all live on the same planet, and how physics and nature don’t play at wealth or any of our other forms of make-believe.

__

At the end of August, I wrote about weaponized far-right hatred and those it threatens and kills; about the noxious idea that “the left” shouldn’t refuse friendship with “the right” over “political views.”

—

And then just about a week ago, I hit publish on this one. It’s about how how the only way to keep a bully’s threat of violence from turning real is to push back the margins of permission, and about the fact that nobody has been more persuasive that Republicans are supremacist bullies than Republicans themselves.

And there are lots of others, too. Check the archives if you doubt me.

Yow! It never seems like much when I’m tapping away, but when I look back it’s crazy to see how many words have piled up.

A lot of you have taken the time to tell me that some of those words takes things you feel in your hearts and gives you language for it, and I really appreciate being told that—so much so that I even wrote an essay about why I think that’s a valuable thing, and maybe the most persuasive thing anyone can do.

So maybe you find that valuable, too, and you’ve got a spare buck or ten and some time to ball it up and chuck it in my direction.

Or maybe you’d like to upgrade to Founding level and receive a personalized signed copy of my novel, The Revisionaries, which the Washington Post called “the weirdest novel of the year.”

If that’s you, feel free to mash the button and do the thing.

And if you’d like to pay less, you can get all the coupons here.

If that’s not you, don’t worry, I still love you for reading.

And if you don’t read, you’re not seeing this, so the joke’s on somebody, and it might just be you.

Thanks again, and see you out there.

-Mox