A Couple Announcements And A Request

Big things coming

Greetings from California. The photo above is from a dusktime beachside run I went on last night in Santa Barbara. This place is amazing. Alas, by this time next week I will be back in Brooklyn.

I’m writing with some news and a request.

The News

As I’ve mentioned previously, the success of this newsletter, particularly its surprisingly strong growth in 2021, has made me want to get a little bit more ambitious. So I’ve got a couple announcements that I’m very excited to share.

First, please welcome aboard Singal-Minded’s first-ever assistant editor: Troy! Troy is presently in academia so I asked if he wanted to go first-name-only for now, and he said that would be best. He’s a psychologist and professor in the Midwest with a long history working in the criminal justice system. In his application, he wrote, “I want to put my expertise, training, and experience to use in improving honest, impartial, empirically-driven discourse around the social and behavioral sciences and contribute in a meaningful way to loosening the strangle-hold a handful of hyperactive Twitter users have somehow taken of these disciplines.” I’m very grateful to have Troy on board. My beleaguered brain is going to benefit greatly from having another person helping out with research and everything else.

This was such a difficult position to hire for. I got so many excellent applications, and was honestly torn about how to best evaluate them, how much weight to give to X versus Y versus Z, and so on. Hiring someone is a weirdly interesting and fraught and complicated process and maybe I’ll write more about it at some point. But overall, I hate it, because there will always be far more qualified candidates than there are positions, and it really sucks having to say ‘no’ to people. Thank you to everyone who applied, and I’m sorry I couldn’t hire more of you.

Second, please welcome Singal-Minded’s first-ever contributing writer: Yassine Meskhout. Some of you may recognize that name, as Katie interviewed him for an episode we did about Andy Ngo that I was quite happy with. Yassine struck me as a fascinating guy and a careful, good-faith thinker who doesn’t take any shortcuts. Recently a link to one of his own Substack articles popped up on the Blocked and Reported subreddit. I read that piece and was impressed, and then I read a bit more of his work and was impressed by that as well, so I figured why not reach out to him to see if he wanted to write for me? I was very thankful when he agreed to do so. 

Yassine is a busy guy so he’ll write when he can — hopefully twice a month or so. His articles will be for premium subscribers only, and the first one will likely get sent out sometime later this week. 

Which, hey, great opportunity to remind you:

Yassine’s stuff will be published in addition to the seven posts I write a month for premium subscribers — consider it a little thank-you bonus. 

I got lazy and asked him to write his own bio and here’s what he came up with, with links added by me:

Yassine Meskhout was born and raised in Morocco before moving to the United States, where he was corrupted into abandoning Islam. He was instead indoctrinated by the economics faculty at George Mason into hating the government. After graduating from a T14 law school (the specific rank is NOT relevant), he compounded his apostasy serving as an abortion rights attorney for the ACLU. The path to Allah's forgiveness was eventually permanently foreclosed when he also chose to DJ gay pride parades. He maintains his presently unimpeachable street cred by working as a public defender. He likes guns, yelling at cops, and bicycles. He dislikes hierarchy, authority, and coffee. He has Substack and also hosts the podcast The Bailey. 

Like I said, an interesting guy!

Yassine is also on Twitter here, and is one of the mods of The Motte, a subreddit dedicated to — get this — good-faith argumentation and attempts at understanding differing perspectives (I’m as baffled as you are). If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of a motte-and-bailey argument, do yourself a favor and click here, as once you find out about this you’ll see it everywhere. Genuinely one of the most useful concepts about argumentation I’ve come across.

The Request

To change the subject a bit: My feelings on the culture wars are complicated and not easily summed up and maybe I’ll do some sort of zoomed-out essay on all that at some point. What I do know is that there is a ton of gravity pulling me toward culture-war stories. To temporarily oversimplify and imagine we can put all story ideas into a Culture War or a Not Culture War bucket, it’s undeniably the case that, relative to non-culture-war stories, culture-war stories are more likely to draw in new readers and subscribers, and I’m much more likely to get emails from folks informing me about or asking me to write about them. These days, the ratio of interview requests I get from podcasts and radio stations asking me to talk about culture-war stuff versus other subjects is very high, too, despite the fact that I’ve written plenty of non-culture-war stuff, including an entire book. 

The market demand is undeniable, and there’s nothing wrong with writing about the culture wars, per se — I think I choose my spots pretty carefully and am good about avoiding demagoguery or demonization or oversimplification. No one could accuse me of being just another screaming voice ranting about those damn cultural Marxist SJWs (or whatever). There really is some very weird stuff going on in liberal spaces and I am happy to call it out and explore it. 

But I’m getting a little bit burned out on this front, to be honest. A lot of these fights don’t go anywhere, and people tend to make the same (often logically broken) arguments in 2022 that they were making in 2019 or 2016. There’s also a level of viciousness inherent to the culture wars, mostly of a lefty-on-lefty nature, that makes you want to smash your laptop, cancel your cell phone and social-media subscriptions, and go live in a monastery somewhere (ideally in the mountains overlooking Santa Barbara, at a monastery with a free shuttle that takes you down to the beach whenever you want, and the monastery provides surfing lessons).

So I could use a bit of a nudge away from culture-war stuff. What non-culture-war subjects would you like to see me write about? I’m opening comments to everyone, premium subscribers and free subscribers alike, so as to best tap the hivemind. Or feel free to email me if you’d rather suggest something in a private venue.

If this suggestion makes you unhappy, I wouldn’t worry too much. The culture wars aren’t going anywhere, and of course I’m not going to abandon them entirely. I’d just like to refill my store of other ideas, and I figure since there are thousands of you I should capitalize off of your combined expertise and interests. Thank you in advance.

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Questions? Comments? Sweaty denunciations of cultural-Marxist SJWs? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal.