Here’s A Fake Profile Of Me To Go With The Real One UnHerd Just Published
I’M A GOOD GUY I SWEAR
UnHerd just published a profile of me. It feels weird having a profile published of me, and even weirder that it’s so laudatory. I don’t do well with praise, and in my defense I suggested that the author, Valerie Stivers, reach out to my critics. (Setting aside my discomfort, I thought she did a good and fair job.)
That being said, I also have an ego, so I wasn’t going to not share this around. I struck what I think is a reasonable compromise with myself: I wrote a fake profile of myself this morning that comes at me from a very different angle. It’s pasted below for premium subscribers.
I hope you’ll read both. The truth, as is often the case, likely lies somewhere in the middle.
Sofritas, Laundry, and “Just Going Nuts”
My strange day with Jesse Singal, the most blocked man on Bluesky
By Lisa Dimpleberg
May 17, 2025
When I met Jesse Singal — podcaster, journalist, “heterodox” thinker, bête noire of certain trans activists — things almost immediately started going wrong.
Our first meeting, naturally, was in a Brooklyn coffee shop. He arrived at our table with an iced coffee, I turned on the recording app on my phone, and I asked him about his childhood in suburban Boston.
“No, no, no,” he said, looking down at his coffee. “This won’t do at all.”
He returned to the counter. “This is far too much ice,” he said loudly to the barista, who appeared to be juggling five as-yet-unmade orders. “Could you replace it with an iced coffee with less ice?” he asked. “Less ice, not more. Not like what happened last week, when I said, ‘This is more iceberg than iced coffee. How am I supposed to drink this?’ Surely you recall when I said that.” The barista looked at him with tired eyes. “Can I just take some of the ice out and replace it with coffee rather than remake the whole thing?” she asked. “No way,” said Singal.
He soon returned to the table with a freshly made, less icy iced coffee. I asked him about the earliest writing he did for the public, as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan’s The Michigan Daily. There, his weekly column consisted predominantly of liberal red meat. What had changed?
“So when I started writing, I—I’m sorry, but this is just. . . I’m freaking out here.” Singal was looking at the coffee again, and again he got up. “Hey, man,” he said to the clearly female barista. “This isn’t nearly enough ice. The caffeine is going to dominate and I’m going to be all jittery in front of my lady friend.” Lady friend? I tried to ignore the comment. Singal settled for a separate cup of ice and returned to the table. He seemed agitated and was starting to sweat, so I tried to refocus him. What were his first columns about, back at The Daily? What inspired him to want to write for the public?
First, he needed a bathroom break. Then, when he got back, I repeated my question. He began to answer. Sort of. “Girls really didn’t understand me,” said Singal, fingering the cup of ice. It seemed like a non-sequitur but I listened patiently, assuming that his recollections of postadolescent romantic longing would eventually circle back to the subject of his writing. Perhaps a particularly embarrassing interaction with a woman spurred in him a desire for status that led him to become a columnist? Perhaps he had a memorable argument with a young female College Republican that first politicized him?
As the story droned on, I realized that he really was just complaining about girls not understanding him in college. And yet there was a strange absence from his story: any actual, real-life interactions between him and the fairer sex. Most of the stories involved him going to a party, becoming entranced by some girl there (“She was like a princess,” he said of one. “Or more a queen, perhaps. Definitely regal, that’s for sure. Or a hot assistant to the queen”), and then standing in the far opposite corner from her, waiting for her to come over to talk to him. They never did, said Singal, not once — and that proved that he was, in college, a deeply misunderstood soul.
“It’s hard for me to even talk about,” he said. “Especially when I’m all jittery like this.” He shot a disgusted glance at the barista, who was too busy to notice him.
***
Singal juggles several different jobs: He co-hosts the successful podcast Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog, a fellow journalist who declined (rather vehemently) to comment for this story, he authors a mid-tier Substack named Singal-Minded (“Yes, I came up with that name all by myself,” he said with some pride at the coffee shop), and he is working on a book about the youth gender medicine debate that first caused him to become controversial in some circles. I was hoping to both paint a portrait of a polarizing, C-list, internet-famous pundit trying to build something new out of the ashes of legacy media, and to better understand how the criticism he has received — some of it very harsh — had affected him. Unfortunately, I found myself repeatedly stymied by his sheer oddness as a human being.
Despite technically having three jobs, the day we met Singal seemed to have trouble accomplishing basic tasks, including clothing and feeding himself without incident. For example, halfway through our coffee meeting, a panicked look streaked across his face. “Shit,” he said. “Fuck. I forgot my fucking laundry. Let’s roll.”
And with that, he was headed toward the door. “Come on,” he said, gesturing to me and holding the door open. “You can keep recording.” We walked briskly down Metropolitan Avenue, eventually breaking into a jog. His sweat problem was only getting worse. “I kept forgetting to pick up my laundry because they never remind me to like I ask,” he said as he jogged alongside me, increasingly out of breath, “and they actually called me this morning and said they would throw it out if I didn’t finally grab it by noon today.” He panted a bit and swallowed. “And I knew they were serious because of what happened last time. Idiots.”
After the laundry stop, Singal decided it was time for lunch. “I know this great Mexican place,” he said, hugging his giant bag of clothes to his chest. “Classic old-school Brooklyn, before the gentrifiers ruined everything.”
Singal’s order at Chipotle surprised and disturbed me. He asked for — and I’m pulling this verbatim from my recording app — “two bowls of sofritas, all the sofritas you got, seriously fill the entire bowls up with nothing but sofritas, so there’s no more room. Also guac and sour cream, not on the side.” The confused teenager in the Chipotle uniform did as he was asked, or tried at least.
Sofritas, according to one online copycat recipe, is “made up of crumbled, meaty tofu in a lightly spicy chipotle pepper sauce.” As I watched Singal consume his lunch — a spectacle that would grow increasingly obscene as he picked up momentum — I played with a metaphor in my head. Chipotle, after all, is perfectly solid food, but it’s no one’s idea of top-tier Mexican. Similarly, sofritas might be an excellent vegan alternative (Singal is, in fact, vegetarian), but it’s no one’s idea of a truly fiery, authentic Mexican dish. People go to Chipotle and eat sofritas out of convenience and habit and because the food is pretty good. No one was really excited to be there.
All of which raised the question: Was Jesse Singal the Chipotle of liberal punditry?
But it was getting increasingly hard to think about this metaphor, or this article, or anything else: What was going on across the table from me was unlike anything I’d ever seen. First, there was Singal’s pre-meal ritual. Before he took a single bite, Singal rubbed his hands together, licking his lips over and over and over. “Oh, baby,” he said to the sofritas. “Oh, mama.” Then he looked up at me and nodded. Then another round of hand-rubbing, lip-licking, and strange, almost sexual commentary. I wondered if he would ever get around to eating the food.
“And now, for the final step before I board the train to Flavortown1,” he said. He reached for his wallet, which looked like it had been purchased at a Hot Topic in 1995 and which was so stuffed with God knows what that I was worried it would explode everywhere, and held it open to me.
“Check it out,” he said. I didn’t know what I was looking for and he rolled his eyes. “Come on,” he said. He produced a half-dozen battered packets of ketchup. “Just like Beyoncé — remember?” Before I could tell him that it wasn’t ketchup, but rather hot sauce, that Beyoncé said she carried around with her in her chart-topper “Formation,” he quickly added, “It’s not appropriation because I’ve always been doing this, ever since I was a little kid. Way before Beyoncé. No matter where I was, I would hoard ketchup. Even before I could talk. My parents said it was probably because of the Holocaust.”
After applying the ketchup to his sofritas and mixing it in with a pair of noticeably dirty chopsticks he produced from his rear jeans pocket, Singal began to eat. Except “eat” doesn’t capture what I saw there that day, what he did to those two bowls of innocent food. I would later wonder if the sheer violence of his actions meant my recording might someday be subpoenaed by authorities or, worse, if I’d be forced to testify before The Hague. Imagine the Tasmanian Devil on a very high dose of PCP and you will start to understand, although only just barely.
“I’ve had better,” he said when he was done, leaving a giant pile of trash on the table. “But I’ve also had worse.” He laughed quite loudly. “Nice talking to you, Lisa. See you tonight.”
***
We’d agreed that that evening, we’d have a happy hour drink with Singal’s self-described “best and closest friend,” an investment banker named Danny Chung, at a cocktail bar in FiDi. Chung was very, very late, and the later he got, the more Singal talked about him, about all the fun times they’d had together.
“This one time, Danny had, like, four beers, and he’s just going nuts,” said Singal. “I’ll never forget it.” I was coming to learn that Singal’s mind worked in a very distinct way. For example, usually someone telling a story like this would provide details to flesh it out, like what Danny did or where the nutsiness occurred. Singal seemed to think that the stories he told and the arguments he made were self-evident, that he didn’t need to engage in these normal human acts of communicatory clarity.
Chung walked in, wearing a smart suit and looking very tired. He was everything Singal was not: He looked successful, well-put-together, and like someone who had long ago adapted to the responsibilities and expectations of adulthood. This was not someone who had been to Chipotle recently. What he didn’t look like, I quickly noticed, was someone who seemed happy to be there.
Singal, on the other hand, was elated. He leaped up and sprinted over to Chung, who had barely crossed the threshold of the cocktail bar. “My man!” said Singal. He tried to “dap” Chung. Chung opted for a firm handshake — a bit formal, I thought — and said, “Nice to see you, Jesse.” He shook my hand as well and sat down.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “We just got back from the pediatrician. Apparently there’s something wrong with my kid’s heart and — ”
“Danny, Danny, Danny,” said Singal, apparently overwhelmed that his best friend was now with us. I got the sense he wanted to show off their relationship. “Remember the time you drank all those beers?” Danny blinked a few times. “Well, I haven’t seen you in awhile. What has it been, like, five ye—”
Again, Singal interrupted. “You were sloshed.” He rapped my shoulder with the back of his hand, as if to get my attention, despite the fact that we were all sharing a small table in a quiet bar. It actually hurt a little. I thought of Lenny from Of Mice and Men. “This was Danny that night,” said Singal. He jerked his arms around wildly, in what was apparently his idea of an impression of a drunk person but which looked more like one of the inflatable figures one sees outside of a used-car dealership. “It was nuts.”
I exchanged numbers with Chung to help me finish this story, and later that night I got home to an apologetic voicemail from him asking if we could speak a bit more that night. He asked for most of the conversation to be off the record, so I’m going to leave out some of the specifics, but suffice it to say Chung did not describe his relationship with Singal in the same terms Singal described his relationship with Chung.
They’d met when they found themselves on the same co-ed recreational basketball team back in 2018, said Chung (“He was. . . a fairly solid rebounder”), and the group usually grabbed a beer after their Tuesday-night games. Singal, recalled Chung, had regularly tried to hang out one-on-one during other nights of the week, reaching out to Chung via text message, Facebook, WhatsApp, and even his company email address. He seemed to really want to hang out. Life had quickly gotten too busy for Chung, though, between his demanding work, his marriage in 2020, and the two kids that followed (it would later turn out the heart concern was a complete false alarm, by the way).
Chung came across as a decent man thrust into a strange situation, and I could tell he hoped simply to leave as little an imprint on this article as possible and get on with his life. “He’s a very interesting guy,” said Chung of Singal, his toddler screaming in the background. “Can’t say I’ve had time to read his work.”
Lisa Dimpleberg is a writer, editor, and translator living in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, The Farmhouse Review, The Wheelhouse Review, and other outlets. Her last piece for this magazine, a profile of Itamar Ben-Gvir, was published in 2023.
Shortly before this article’s publication, Singal sent an angry email to the fact-checker assigned to this story: “I did NOT say Flavortown. I said Tastytown.” We listened back to the audio and he definitely said “Flavortown.”
Was Jesse Singal the Chipotle of liberal punditry?
I don't understand why you didn't just have Katie write a profile. She would have torn you apart. :)