Substack recruited me and gave me an advance based on my unpaid newsletter subscribers and my open rate. They had an idea of what my subscriber income would be, and they offered significantly less. In other words: people who take the advances make significantly less money
This is something that is absolutely getting lost in this conversation — which is a very important one. Substack has bungled the messaging at every turn. They missed an opportunity to come down very clearly on hate speech on the platform.
They have also missed an opportunity to highlight all of the people they've given money to who are not Greenwald et. al. *through their public fellowship programs.* This is not private information. It is all right here:
I am going to continue to pressure Substack to do better on all of these fronts, from recruitment to hate speech and anti-trans rhetoric in particular. But if you keep focusing *exclusively* on these dudes you're eclipsing all of the other work.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
"Sex addiction" within the Evangelical context = he looked at porn and/or masturbated. It doesn't mean he went to or knew these women. It means that they represented an evil within his mind, something that felt impossible to control and yet damned him if he didn't
Every Evangelical/Xvangelical woman has a memory of "don't tempt your Christian brothers" with....your spaghetti string tank tops. The fault in this scenario is on the "temptress" for leading men astray. You can very easily see how this understanding could escalate.
the person who wrote this is the *personal health columnist* for the new york times
the responses to this remind me that this attitude towards eating is *so* familiar to many of us b/c it was/remains the dominant attitude towards "health" aka "maintaining your figure" for a certain generation of (mostly white) American women
i like to think of it as the "oh i quit smoking so i should probably eat like a bird and passive aggressively judge everyone else around me for their choices & aggressively judge my own family" approach to health
The answers to this tweet are the answers to every other "passion economy" job query: it will use your love for the vocation as a means to exploit you; it will acquaint you with white (and male) privilege in ever-more alarming ways; it will disillusion you & radicalize you
Scandal, historically speaking, occurs when there is a rupture in the status quo and attempts to immediately repair or narrativize it fail. The monarchy has been able to absorb & withstand massive scandals in the past but I don't know if it has the fortitude to absorb this one
There are no new romances, no new babies, no deflection. There is only an ailing Great-Grandfather. I'm not trying to be callous; I'm just thinking of how these narratives actually function
Also worth thinking through the fact that Oprah is maybe the only nationally trusted "confessor" (I mean that rhetorically, Harry and Meghan had nothing to atone for) and there doesn't seem to be successor, at least not at this point
Wrote about the bewildering mix of excitement and hesitancy as we start to make plans (plans!) again for the not-so-far future — and making room for all the unexpected ways grief is going to come for us in the months to come:
How do I articulate unspeakable excitement to gather again *and* having no idea how my mind and body is going to react to a social life? The closest I can get = being so so so excited for the first day of school but we pull up to the front door & I can't get out of the car
Someone just commented that they feel ready to lick their friends, which is a perfect encapsulation of how weird we're all going to be for, like, at LEAST six months