The 80s and 90s were a strange time for music — studio labels were tightening their stranglehold on pop music, but the world was still bursting with new genres and trends like grunge, hip-hop, and rave music. One of the strangest pop music acts of the era was the British electronic band known as the KLF. The KLF had a string of hits, including the number one single “Doctorin’ The Tardis,” which is basically just the Doctor Who theme mixed with Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll” which you probably re...
Aug 29, 2023•4 min
During the rise of Hitler in Germany, Wilhelm Reich, a prominent psychologist and the coiner of the phrase “sexual revolution,” hypothesized that suppressing sexuality was vital to any form of totalitarian government. His reasoning was that if people learned to trust their own bodies — their urges, their wants, their needs — then they’d also learn to trust their own sense of right and wrong. This internal confidence would make them, if not ungovernable, then at least far more difficult to contro...
Aug 29, 2023•8 min
My favorite internet publication is going out of business this week. The Nib published political cartoons, mostly on the internet, but also in the form of stunning themed magazines which I now own every one of ( you can buy them here ), with the exception of the art I cut out of them and hung on the bulletin board over my desk. The Nib was founded by artist Matt Bors — most famous for the “Mister Gotcha” meme — in 2013, and managed to struggle along through the internet’s worst era for just shy ...
Aug 24, 2023•7 min
At I write this, Ben Shapiro is lighting Barbies on fire because he’s furious about the “woke” movie about a plastic toy. Jason Aldean, a country music star, is currently riding a wave of right-wing joy on the heels of putting out a song that kinda sounds like he’s advocating the murder of leftists. Elon Musk has turned the platform “Twitter” from one of the most vital spaces for journalists and activists on the internet into a right-wing troll hole, which he has renamed X — though the site rema...
Aug 23, 2023•6 min
I spent the bulk of the 2010s working as a “content creator” online for a travel publication. It was meant to be my dream job — I’d fantasized about being a jetsetting journalist since I was a teenager — but after the 500th time I told someone what I did and they said, “That must be so cool!” I finally realized that 90% of what I was doing was writing horseshit listicles in a desperate bid for the only metric that mattered in that world: internet traffic. Ben Smith was the editor-in-chief for Bu...
Aug 22, 2023•11 min
One of my favorite bits in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is when he settles in his hotel room, his body absolutely chock-full of illegal chemicals, and tries to calm himself out of a frenzied panic: By this time the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood. T...
Aug 17, 2023•11 min
Imagine for a second: What do you think your dog experiences when you walk into your home? What strikes it first — the sound of your car pulling into the driveway, the jingle of the keys on your door, your smell wafting in with the outside breeze? Are you imagining the dog basically as yourself, but a few feet closer to the ground? Are its thoughts in English? Is it thinking something like “TREAT!” or “WALK!” or “SQUIRREL!” Ed Yong’s 2022 masterpiece An Immense World deals with this question, an...
Aug 15, 2023•5 min
There’s a lovely moment in the play Hamlet where the title character tells his friends that he has sworn an oath of vengeance to a ghost, and he will now be feigning insanity in order to get to the bottom of the ghost’s claims. His friends, Marcellus and Horatio, are understandably taken aback. HORATIO O day and night, but this is wondrous strange. HAMLET And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. My wif...
Aug 14, 2023•5 min
Look: I can’t say I’d recommend depression. It’s not a particularly fun time. In terms of enjoyability, I’d put it at zero out of five stars. BUT, it has been a weirdly fascinating experience? Without fetishizing it, it has taught me an enormous amount about the world and myself, to the point where I can’t imagine myself without having experienced it, and am skeptical that I would want to. If you are one of my paid subscribers, you’ll know that last week I couldn’t manage to churn out a Book Rex...
Jun 26, 2023•4 min
One of the things I bump up against a lot by posting hopeful content on the internet is anger and scorn at the idea that I’m saying, “hey, maybe things will turn out okay.” One comment on a recent post of mine suggesting that we could transition to something new said, “The world will be destroyed by 2031. 95% of the population will be dead.” I was impressed by this commenter’s confidence, and was tempted to ask about how he arrived at his calculations (not to mention question him on the methods ...
Jun 14, 2023•6 min
I talk a lot about the difference between hope and optimism on Better Strangers, and a big part of embracing hope is committing to making things change for the better yourself . This is opposed to the optimistic stance, which puts its faith in something outside the self. There’s a really lovely Mr. Rogers quote that goes around whenever anything bad happens: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people w...
Jun 12, 2023•5 min
Earlier this week, I published a TikTok that was a riff on my articles “How a different understanding of time can help you cope” and “ Against Forgiveness. ” It’s got us a few new followers, so I figured it would make a good theme for this week’s Jimble-Jamble. Here are some cool books, movies, and shows to check out if you wanna go down the mind-bendy rabbit hole of thinking about what time is and how it works. The Science: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time and John Higgs’ Stranger Than We Can ...
Jun 09, 2023•6 min
I occasionally like to irritate people on the internet by arguing that unsolicited dick pics disprove the Golden Rule. The argument goes like this: The Golden Rule says “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.” People who send unsolicited dick pics are, theoretically at least, saying, “Hey, I’d like to see naked pictures of you. So here’s a naked picture of me.” It is not a popular opinion, and for pretty good reason. There are all sorts of other reasons people send unsolicited dick pics...
May 31, 2023•7 min
If you pay attention to environmental activist groups like the Sunrise Movement or the Extinction Rebellion these days, you’re likely to hear a lot of talk about “growth” and “degrowth.” This comes from the environmentalist diagnosis that climate change — as well as a dozen other ecological problems like ocean acidification, ocean plastification, air pollution, water scarcity, and so on — is caused by the modern capitalist economy’s reliance on growth to function. As writer Edward Abbey put it: ...
May 29, 2023•3 min
Happy Friday, everyone! Here’s some stuff to send you into your weekend. The Power Dynamics of Food My dear friend Kae Lani Palmisano has launched a new podcast, Power Dining , which covers the interplays between power and food. Kae Lani is one of my favorite people to work with, so when she asked if I would discuss the power dynamics of culinary travel — which I covered back in my days as a travel writer — I said yes. My episode’s not out yet, I’ll post it when it is, but here’s a trailer for h...
May 26, 2023•7 min
I am not often jealous of the religious, but I do wish I could believe that bad people like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin would burn in hell for all eternity. From a purely moral and philosophical standpoint, I find the concept of heaven and hell to be repugnant, but, but , it is a neat little trick for bypassing fury at all of the injustices of the world. Someone’s a dick? Fine. They’ll get theirs. Not your problem anymore. I have no such luxury. I think Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will pr...
May 24, 2023•6 min
Nearly every time I’ve told someone they are a pessimist, they’ve replied with something along the lines of “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.” I will admit — this is a superb response. It is not correct, but it is condescending and infuriating, and it makes it very difficult to continue the conversation, which is presumably the point of the response. The idea is that reality is bleak, and that anyone who doesn’t have a jaded, cynical view of the world must be a naive, delusional fool. And the...
May 15, 2023•5 min
Hey everyone! I thought I’d share a common theme in some of the books I’ve been reading lately — how to cope with a chaotic world. I talked about a different aspect of this, coping with nihilism, in the Almost Awakened podcast earlier this week. Listen to that here: The books I mentioned in today’s podcast are: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com...
May 12, 2023•28 min
There was a decade, probably between 1998 and 2008, where I didn’t walk into a public library a single time. This is, I think, probably a common American experience. At some point, you stop going there for Story Time and you can rely on your school library for books, and then you buy a Kindle which is useful for traveling, even if it is made by the worst corporation ever, and you just kinda forget that in nearly every town, there is one building that is just chock-full of free books. You may you...
May 03, 2023•7 min
Last week, on the recommendation of a friend (and a bunch of TikTok commenters) I read A Psalm for the Wild-Built , Becky Chambers single-sitting solarpunk novella. I’m gonna do a quick break here with a photo of the book, and use that gap to warn you that there are mild spoilers below. It shouldn’t ruin your reading of the book, as it’s not that kind of a book, but if you plan on reading it, maybe close out and come back to this article later. The book is set in a future where humanity decided ...
May 01, 2023•6 min
Hey all! Today I discussed the history of the Situationist International, and their impact on modern culture in the form of graffiti, punk rock, and modern protest. I mentioned having a list of books on Psychogeography, you can find that here . Otherwise, here are the books I mentioned: I also mentioned Higgs’ book The KLF: Chaos, Magic, Music, and the Band that Burned A Million Pounds. I don’t have other affiliate links set up, but consider using Thriftbooks or BetterWorldBooks (or your local b...
Apr 28, 2023•25 min
The story I’m about to tell you is true. You can look it up — the CIA’s “Acoustic Kitty” project. If you have 5 minutes, though, I highly recommend listening to this story on Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace podcast: In the 1960’s, the CIA wanted to better spy on the Russian embassy in Washington, DC. But the Soviets knew that their offices were thoroughly bugged, so if they needed to have a conversation about something they really didn’t want the Americans to get their hands on, they would go for...
Apr 26, 2023•7 min
In last week’s column about how misanthropy is a choice, I mentioned the existence of a subreddit page called “Thanos Did Nothing Wrong,” in which hundreds of thousands of people joined and enthusiastically agreed with the genocidal villain from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It occurred to me that Thanos vs. The Avengers actually nicely illustrate the two most popular — and most castrophic — approaches to climate change and ecological collapse in the modern world. Thanos, if you haven’t seen th...
Apr 19, 2023•12 min
Happy Friday, guys! This week’s podcast is a deep dive into John Michael Greer’s 2008 book The Long Descent. I did a text-only version of this a while back, so if you prefer reading to listening, find that here: Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.co...
Apr 14, 2023•18 min
This is going to sound bad: My wife works in politics, and occasionally, I tag along with her to fancy events where local politicians are gladhanding with donors and constituents. I sometimes go to activist events where fairly powerful people show up to speak and listen to what we have to say. And there’s one thing that always crosses my mind: I got in here and NO ONE patted me down… It’s crazy there aren’t more political assassinations in America. I know! I know! I know this puts me immediately...
Apr 12, 2023•8 min
I was going to publish something different today, but then my video last week about disaster utopias on TikTok got a quarter of a million views in 24 hours, sooo… welcome new followers! For older followers, here’s the video: That was a short video! I feel like delving into the book it was based on would be helpful for fleshing out some of the questions people had in the comments. So without further ado, let’s discuss Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell . Solnit’s book is based upon the wor...
Apr 10, 2023•7 min
There is a single person on the internet whom you do not want to negatively engage with your content, and that is Greta Thunberg. If Greta Thunberg owns you, you will literally go to jail. That story, if you missed it, came at the end of 2022, when “Manosphere” personality and general all-around douchebag Andrew Tate attempted to troll Thunberg by bragging about his car emissions. Thunberg responded. Tate did not handle her response well, and filmed an angry response in which he insisted that th...
Apr 05, 2023•6 min
Juan is a medium. He can see ghosts and he can summon an eldritch entity known only as “the Darkness” from other dimensions to ours. Because of this ability, Juan has been forced into becoming the unwilling servant of an occult coven of brutal, wealthy dark art practitioners who collude with the right-wing Argentine military junta of the late 1970’s to throw “disappeared” victims as a sacrifice to their dark god in exchange for hints at how to achieve immortal life. Though Juan is virtually ensl...
Apr 03, 2023•5 min
I am not in any sort of marginalized group, but I try to be an ally. I don’t really have the ability to speak for trans people or people in the LGBTQ+ community, but I can speak to my own struggles with both toxic masculinity and trying to develop something better. So that’s what today’s podcast is about. Consider donating to the Trevor Project , which supports LGBTQ young people. I’d love to hear anyone’s take on how straight, cis dudes can be better allies, get more vulnerable, more capable of...
Mar 31, 2023•22 min
One of the things that irritated me most when I worked as a librarian was that if there was an outcry about a book, it invariably had something to do with sex or just the existence of certain bodies — usually trans or queer. The books people objected to were often comics, as text-based books have to be read in order to object to them, whereas comics require only a glance. This irritated me because my comics shelf was absolutely drenched in blood and gore. Sometimes it was stylistically drawn, so...
Mar 29, 2023•6 min
