Escape from Slopworld

Greetings from Read Max HQ! On Tuesday afternoon John Ganz of Unpopular Front joined me for an experimental “Substack Live” with only two brief interruptions (one when I fat-fingered an end to the stream and two when John’s internet cut out). Our chat started with a discussion of two expansive essays on the modern internet coincidentally published this weekend: Ross Douthat’s “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive,” in The New York Times, and Jacob Silverman’s “Welcome to slop world: how the hostile internet is driving us crazy,” in the Financial Times. But, as is often the case, we also ended up talking about many other things, among them the imaginary of the tariffs, Parental Advisory stickers, a Canadian guy on Instagram who claims to have re-grown his foreskin, and much more. Check out the full video (stitched together) above, or listen to the audio on the podcast platform of your choice.

A reminder, as always! Read Max exists thanks to generosity of paying subscribers, whose support lets me devote a full-time job’s worth of hours to all the research, reporting, thinking, and procrastinating necessary to put the newsletter together week in and week out. Paying subscribers not only receive an extra paywalled newsletter of (unbelievably good) recommendations of books, movies, links, and music, but also help subsidize the free stuff for the freeloaders, which is the kind of thing that gets you into heaven and further along on the karmic wheel. If you feel like you get roughly one beer’s worth of entertainment, information, distraction, or other kind of satisfaction from Read Max, please consider paying to subscribe.

Get full access to Read Max at maxread.substack.com/subscribe