Back to the Mud

Alcoholism, but not Pinot Noir alcoholism, if you know what I mean.

Want to see a random Substack post? No you don’t, the average Substack post is garbage but go ahead and prove that to yourself if you must with Scrubstack, courtesy of Deep Sea Diving’s Elan Kiderman Ullendorff. One of the most successful email entrepreneurs on Our Regrettable Platform is Culture Study’s Anne Helen Petersen, who went on Sarah Marshall’s podcast You’re Wrong About to talk about email, and they manage to cover both Unix’s “finger” command and *69 without a giggle because they are a lot more mature than I am. Oddly, Petersen never really mentions that she makes a living writing email. I don’t think this was a conspiracy of silence or anything, it just seemed like a strange editorial choice. Another strange editorial choice is technology platforms’ wanton murder of the ~semi-ironic tilde~, which Madeleine Holden laments in Kiwi Korner’s premiere online journal The Spinoff. I guess Slack is a cool place for work though. One good Substack post that you probably won’t find with the random button is New England hiking newsletter Mind the Moss’s Miles Howard on spring mud, and mud in general, which reminded me of “one of the definitive live music performances of the 1990s” and possibly the best mud-soaked performance of all time, Nine Inch Nails at Woodstock ‘94:

“The Quibi of streaming news” CNN+ is heading back to the mud soon. Even Axios’s Sara Fischer couldn’t find a cheery way to report that “investment and projections for CNN+ are expected to be cut dramatically in response to a low adoption rate,” and if that’s the best spin old “OZY hits profitability on $50 million in revenue” can put on a media scoop, you know it’s dreadful. Sure enough, CNBC’s Alex Sherman reported that “fewer than 10,000 people are using CNN+ on a daily basis two weeks into its existence,” which is a smaller audience than… uh, mine? Not to minimize you, the elite Today in Tabs reader, you’re each worth between 200 and 1,000 CNN News viewers, but I never thought of Tabs as a potential CNN competitor. Incoming CNN head Chris Licht was unavailable for comment but confidential sources report constant and deafening axe-sharpening noises from his office.

Olivia Nuzzi’s axe is always sharp, and this time she handed it to former Times columnist and legally non-Oregonian Nicholas Kristof, inviting him to hit himself with it wherever he liked. He graciously obliged:

He also does not think that profiting off the sale of alcohol and lowering rates of alcohol addiction, two of his stated immediate goals, are in conflict. “You know, I’ve lost friends to alcoholism, but I haven’t lost any to Pinot Noir alcoholism,” he said.

“I wouldn’t be in favor of barring alcohol in general. I think that wine can be, or cider can be, a social good and can create social capital. Things that bring people together, I think, are good for society. I think alcohol can do that, and I think that’s true of wine and cider. I take your point that some people start with nice Pinot Noirs and then… ,” he trailed off. “But I think that is much less common, and those who die, the mortality from alcoholism, it’s driven really by working-class Americans, and it’s in kind of bulk hard liquor particularly. I don’t think that good wine and cider add significantly to the problem.”

Yikes, my dude! Meanwhile Isaac Fitzgerald got some butter from the bodega guy and a lot of people on Twitter lost their minds… aka he got baptized by the city! Let the man make his sandwich in peace. The FDA mice would also like a big plastic cup of butter. Speaking of butter, Today in Crabs:

Elon’s Twitter Q&A was canceled but Mike Isaac and Kate Conger A’ed all the Q’s they could (and successfully got “goblin mode into the paper of record”) as did Russell “be random” Brandom in The Verge, who wrote the most representative single line I’ve seen anywhere about Elon’s big Twitter adventure: “anything’s possible. Or… maybe it’s nothing.” Indeed!

Here Are Some Words:

Lonely Ghost Records released an album of SIXTY EIGHT covers of 00’s hits to benefit Coalition for the Homeless, and there’s mathematically certain to be something in there for you.

Today’s Song: New You, covering Jimmy Eat World’s “A Praise Chorus”

~ We sit in the mud... and reach for the tabs ~

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