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Militarized Police Aren’t the Answer to Gaza Protests
May 5, 2024
Police in LA arrest protestors after raiding a protest encampment | Matt Baretto I was half-tempted to make this week’s newsletter a recap of the Kendrick...
Campus Protests: Failing the Leadership Test
April 28, 2024
Police presence the University of Texas-Austin | Irisoptical If you find yourself summoning the police to beat and tear gas your own students you've lost the...
The Case of the Missing $64,000 Homes
April 21, 2024
An ad for a mid-century Sears Kit House I want to open with a silly data point. The most clicked link in last week's newsletter was to the WrestleMania...
Cairo's Soccer Data Farms, Zoom Cashiers, and Holes in the Job Market
April 14, 2024
Soccer fans in Cairo | Muhammad Ghafari After a brief health scare, mom is home from the hospital. The Sounders got their first win of the season (although...
The View from Below
April 7, 2024
A woman working in her "Sari-Sari" store | John Martin Perry Last week's newsletter pissed-off the kind of readers who hate when Black people talk about...
The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and American Meritocracy
March 31, 2024
First Officer Carole Hopson, one of the Black pilots at United Airlines | Karston Tannis. It’s spring break here in the Gulf and Hope and I are headed to the...
Experiencing Ramadan in the Gulf
March 24, 2024
Iftar is the meal where Muslims break their fast at dusk | Whaton.ae Ramadan is a holy month, marked by communal fasting and deepened devotion to the Islamic...
Traveling through History in Uzbekistan
March 17, 2024
The Registan, a 1400-1600s era Madrasah complex in Samarkand, Uzbekistan The Republic of Uzbekistan was born in August 1991. It was one of the 15 states that...
A Spoiler-Free Appreciation of Dune Part II
March 3, 2024
Warner Bros Promo Photo for "Dune Part II" As a nerd and a homer, I am contractually obligated to dig Dune. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, grew up in...
Reader Mailbag on the Demise of Utopianism
February 29, 2024
WWI started with dudes from the French countryside, riding horses in Napoleonic uniforms into battle and ended with rat infested trenches, aerial bombing,...
A Requiem for Vice
February 25, 2024
Dearly beloved, we gather here today to say farewell to "Vice" On Friday, Vice closed up shop. That morning, employees found themselves locked out of company...
Where Did All the Utopians Go?
February 18, 2024
Over 65,000 workers took part in the Seattle General Strike of 1919, shutting down the city for five days - University of Washington On Friday, I wrapped up...
The Mortality of Black Men
February 11, 2024
Photo by Rickie Crouch My father died when I was a sophomore in high school. My Vice Principal called me to the office and told me there had been an incident...
The Time Lost to Commuting
February 4, 2024
Photo by Robert So There are a handful of peculiar American institutions: overdraft fees, health insurance tied to your employer, and my topic today—the...
Learning to Not Believe Your Eyes
January 28, 2024
Photo by Cottonbro Studios It feels like deep fakes hit the mainstream this week, with disastrous results. A deepfake is a “video of a person in which their...
Scam AI Deep Fakes are More Popular than that Katt Williams Interview
January 21, 2024
A stressed Phylicia Rashad facing off with online scammers in the film “The Beekeeper” I never thought that a Jason Statham movie could give a fit of...
How I Fell in Love with a Bagel
January 14, 2024
Photo by Lucie Liz Getting eight hours of sleep is extremely underrated. Welcome to perhaps the most jet-lagged edition of the newsletter. I am fully in that...
The Bastardization of Colorblindness
January 7, 2024
Former President of Harvard University, Claudine Gay Greetings from lovely, snowy, and brick cold New York City. I'm in my third timezone this week and...
Merry Christmas, America — I Don’t Know What Else to Say
December 24, 2023
Photo by Rosemary Ketchum Welcome to the first edition of Takes & Typos hosted on Buttondown. If you missed the update midweek about the switch from...
I Refuse To Share Space With Neo Nazis And White Supremacists
December 23, 2023
It's time for me to exit Substack I don't have a lot of redlines in my life. But one redline I do have is that if an institution or business says that “Nazis...
The Bear is the Best Thing on TV this Year and Nothing is Really Close
December 17, 2023
FX’s “The Bear” is the most important thing on television and nothing is particularly close Here in Takes & Typo-stan, we’ve been winding down 2023 with a...
The Most Important Thing I Heard to This Year — Slow Burn, Season 8: Becoming Justice Thomas
December 10, 2023
Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving and arguably most influential member of the United States Supreme Court I am 44 years old. Clarence Thomas has been on...
The Most Important Book I Read This Year: “Poverty, By America” by Matthew Desmond
December 3, 2023
Roughly 1500 US families face eviction each week We live in a neoliberal world. In Thursday’s class, we had a seminar discussion about the concluding chapter...
Napoleon: The Lamentations of a New-ish History Teacher
November 27, 2023
Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon in Egypt This week’s newsletter is coming to you on Monday. We hosted Friendsgiving this weekend and my basketball team had a...
One Year Take-iversary
November 19, 2023
Photo by Elizaveta Kushnirenko on Unsplash Smarter people than me have written volumes about the antics of Elon Musk and the decline of Twitter. However, it...
Rejecting Brain-Dead Neutrality and Censorship
November 12, 2023
Photo by Şeyma D. As I mentioned last week, this upcoming Sunday will be the first anniversary of Takes & Typos. I am planning to publish a reader mailbag to...
No, Markets Aren't Self-Correcting — Corporate Consolidation Part III
November 5, 2023
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood From time-to-time, the newsletter does an unintentional or unplanned series. We are in one such triplet (see: here and here) about...
Monopolies and Corporate Consolidation are Neither Natural nor Inevitable
October 29, 2023
Photo by Suzy Hazlewood Happy Sunday, This week’s newsletter is a continuation of our conversation from last week about the causes of the diminishing...
Consolidation and Near Monopolies Are Making Everything Terrible
October 22, 2023
Andy Rooney was a national treasure. We need truth tellers like him for the busted moment we’re all trapped in. This may be the edition of the newsletter...
Armenia: An Ancient People with a History Marked by Tragedy
October 17, 2023
The Goshavank Monastery in Gosh – Photo by Hope Barev dzez (Hello in Armenian), This week’s newsletter is coming on Tuesday because I was in transit back...
An AI in Every Email, DM, and Groupchat—Zuckerberg's Vision for the Future of the Internet
October 8, 2023
Subscribe now Today's newsletter is my attempt to triangulate two points of view articulated by people with very different takes about the future of the...
The Trial of the Tacoma Police Officers who Murdered Manuel Ellis
October 1, 2023
Happy Sunday, Over on the podcast this week, we have a conversation with Brian Lettinga from Search Associates. He’s a recruiter/matchmaker for educators...
When Schools Grieve
September 24, 2023
Subscribe now The typical American high school is the size of a small town. My old school, Lincoln, floated between 1500 and 1800 students in my decade...
There’s a Wave of Hacks Coming, Thanks to LastPass
September 17, 2023
Photo by Franck on Unsplash Today we are touching on a topic I wrote about in March, online security. There’s been some developments this week that warrant a...
Losing Friends: Reader Mailbag Edition
September 10, 2023
Someone put this sign on my door at work this week. Oh, y’all got jokes. I felt seen this week. In last week’s newsletter, I opined about what it feels like...
Losing People to Nuttery and Conspiracies
September 3, 2023
The emotional labor of caring for other adults is real and taxing | Photo: Pexels Hey folks, A warm welcome to new subscribers. This week’s edition is a...
Finding Time and Balance, Far from Home
August 27, 2023
Hope and I served as emcees for the schools Spirit Night last week, a giant grade-level scavenger hunt throughout the campus (Photo: Tony Murray) Friday...
AI is Democratizing and Democracy is Famously Messy
August 20, 2023
This is an AI image I created using Night Cafe, depicting people working in a call center. Subscribe now I am not going to pretend to be an expert in...
Signal vs Noise, American Serial Outrage, and the Law of Large Numbers
August 13, 2023
Hey folks, thanks for making July our most popular month since we started the newsletter. We had more readers and more new subscribers last month than ever...
There and Back Again - A Final 2023 World Cup Dispatch
August 6, 2023
Our view of the tournament opener in Auckland, where the host Football Ferns upset Norway I really hate when I am right when I wish I was wrong. I ended last...
These Sheep Ain't Gon' Shear Themselves - A 2023 World Cup Dispatch
July 29, 2023
The Running of the Sheep I bring you greetings from a rented farmhouse in the sheep shearing capital of the world, Te Kuiti, New Zealand. Te Kuiti used to be...
You Owe it to Yourself to Watch Women's Soccer and the World Cup
July 20, 2023
Trinity Rodman is a player to keep your eye on this tournament Jet lag is real. At some point yesterday, I looked at Hope and realized I had no idea what day...
The Myth of the Great Wealth Transfer
July 5, 2023
“Succession” was four seasons of prestige television about four terrible people seeking to inherit their father’s empire - Photo: Warner Bros Pressroom...
The Able-ism of Our Aging Infrastructure
June 24, 2023
They see us rollin', they hatin' In the summer of 2018, I nearly came to blows with a TSA agent. My dad was a disabled Vietnam veteran. He had lupus and the...
The Case for Banning Phones in School
June 17, 2023
This week’s newsletter will be brief because your boy has a flight to catch. If you’re a Tacoma based reader, you may see me around town for the next few...
Taking Notes on Criminal Crypto Conspiracy
June 11, 2023
Stringer’s sage advice to “never take notes on a criminal conspiracy” is worth heeding, especially if you’re knowingly running an unlicensed securities...
The Lack of Housing is a Generational Crisis
June 4, 2023
The US spent the last forty years building less housing than the prior forty years and the consequences are predictable and dire I've been baffled by the...
Sorry, Wrong Number: the Lowdown on Pig Butchering Scams
May 28, 2023
The most prominent form of SMS text spam is Pig Butchering, a social engineering con targeting the 55+ crowd Off the top, I want to welcome aboard folks that...
For My Friends in Media: How Not to Cover Hate Groups
May 21, 2023
Richard Spencer and his followers celebrate the election of Donald Trump on election nigh while shouting “hail victory” which translates to “sieg heil” and...
Fighting the Klan in the Ozarks and Teacher Bias in Grading
May 14, 2023
I spent some of my favorite summers as a kid here in Camden, Arkansas Happy Mother’s Day, If you’re not a mother, I hope you handled your business for the...
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