TikTok’s one of those things where you party with it for a few minutes on the couch, and suddenly, you look up and it’s 4 a.m. and you need pliers to open your jaw.

And I’ve just got too many books and newsletters to read, albums and NTS episodes to listen to, movies I haven’t watched, etc.

My life got immeasurably better the second I stopped giving randos on Twitter consistent access to my brain.

It’s held universally true that the further I’ve gotten from Twitter, the better my quality of life’s been.

On the one hand, Elon Musk has definitely broken it, it’s now a masterpiece of enshittification.

For whatever reason, I was just reminded of the Jenny Holzer line: PEOPLE WHO DON’T WORK WITH THEIR HANDS ARE PARASITES.

Now, we’ve got so much incredible music in video online, from Boiler Room to Tiny Desk Concerts, The Lot Radio, Tape Notes, Hör Berlin, etc, etc.

Someone once told me that to care about eight different things a day—as bloggers once had to—is a probable sign of mental illness. 

FOSTER KAMER: Alison Roman’s a newsletter and Blackbird Spyplane: Two I’ve subscribed to since Day 1.

Liz Lezkinski’s Burn It All Down makes me laugh.

Philip Sherburne is one of the finest music writers in the world.

Also: as seen on, After School by Casey Lewis, Why is this interesting?, Magasin, One Thing, Feed Me, Schmatta, and the great (relatively new) Reality Test.

Heather Havrilesky, still writing great things, too.

Finally, on weekend mornings, The Very Best of Car Talk and on weekend walks, StoryCorps, for warmth and humanity, and Song Exploder, because it’s Song Exploder. 

Beyond that: I’m doing the one thing you should never do in media (give any encouragement to your colleagues Tweeting), but a writer I work with at Futurism, Noor Al-Sibai, is one of the most consistently funny people I know—even reading her Twitter bio makes me cackle—and she deservingly did numbers on this one (explanation for the uninitiated here).

And it’s hard not to be really impressed with what Kareem Rahma has built. 

I’m a sucker for a great bit, absolutely loved the way Tom Hanks signed off every Tweet ever with “Hanx.” 

Tumblr skipped so Substack could walk.

It’s why so many of the complaints about the flattening of Substack content and the johnny-come-latelys feel a little pat: That happened to Tumblr, too.

It happens to every online community, every community, every band and restaurant and bar you went to first, and the people who believe themselves to be there first (they almost never actually weren’t) start to get territorial.

Case in point: Again, Substack is just nu-Tumblr with a “take money” button. 

I try to Slack as little as possible over the course of the workday; like text messaging, it’s inefficient, requires the energy of divining and conveying meaning through tone, and is broadly just the absolute worst way to get anything halfway important accomplished.

Can we talk about all these media companies signing deals with OpenAI for a second?

Let’s remember: These are often the same companies who leveraged their whole asses over to Facebook and Twitter and Google, built entire strategies around them.

On so many of these deals, media companies got told what to do to make money (longform video, shortform video, Snapchat, etc), chased the money, got screwed over by the platforms when they ended those business initiatives for other, newer business initiatives, and the media companies then chased those instead (after, invariably, firing a bunch of people in the process).

OpenAI—like Amazon, Meta, Twitter, etc, etc—they’re just a platform company.

And these publishers, they’re chasing the shiny new thing again.

If media gets shanghaied by Sam Altman and Co, let’s be clear, it will have been due to the consenting of a small group of people who have made many, many bad decisions in the past, and will probably continue to.

We gotta start putting smarter people in charge of the media business, or at least different ones.

Also, I’ve got friends around the world, and sometimes, it’s easier than trying to talk to them—one friend, in Australia, we’ve been trading 10 minute voice notes every few weeks for the last six years. 

FOSTER KAMER: Strategist for form, Wirecutter for function. 

I just think, all the time, about the first few pages of Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, about how all content creation is intrinsically immoral because it takes us away from nature and other human beings. 

There’s another Jenny Holzer line: “A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS.”