Firehose #120: The After Party

Also: Martin Gurri at Reason Speakeasy in NYC Monday night!

Sometimes after one of these whole-of-society events, you just need a little perspective, or at least a sunset rooftop view of Lady Liberty. The daylight hours grow dim, the seasonal depressions threaten, breeeeeaaaaaaathe……

* Hey look! Substack threw a fancy party on the Upper East Side, and The New York Times is on it! “Among the guests were the election forecaster Nate Silver, the style writer Leandra Medine Cohen, the investigative journalist Vicky Ward and the chef Clare de Boer. There was also a bounty of politics writers, including David Nir, Ross Barkan and Michael C. Moynihan.” Bolding and hyperlinks added. And nice photo here (by Nina Westervelt) re-posted:

* Speaking of Moynihan, if you liked his conversation with historian Sean McMeekin in M.O. #235 about To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, make sure to dial the clock back three years ago to their discussion in Special Dispatch #89 about Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II. Also: Ol’ Hollywood teamed up Wednesday with frequent Free Press crime-partner Batya Ungar-Sargon (veteran of Episode #451) to interview Aayan Hirsi-Ali about anti-Semitic violence in Europe:

* Then the working class heroes talked about the election results with none other than Teamsters Prez Sean O’Brien:

* Which is a good enough transition to … Scott Lincicome! Glad y’all enjoyed the fast-talking trade-lover on #479! Check out his new Faces of Globalization series over at Cato; here’s the first epi:

* And to complete this initial video run, our friend Mary Katharine Ham (#345 & #430) was on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher Friday; here’s her Overtime segment with Chris Cuomo and Casey Means:

* So, events! There are so many events, public and private, over the next 30 days that I have, in anger more than sadness, pre-emptively dusted off my Calendar Machete and just started hacking the limbs off my involvement in almost anything that doesn’t involve my own DNA. In other words, sorry in advance that I didn’t show! Anyhoo: Nov. 18 in NYC is a Reason Speakeasy in which Nick Gillespie (S.D. #72, #379) cross-examines Fifdom fave author Martin Gurri (The Revolt of the Public), who we talked with on #225. Nov. 19 in NYC is Mark Halperin and our friends at 2Way doing a live version of their “Morning Meeting” show at The Village Underground with regulars Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine. Same city Nov. 20 is a SoHo Forum debate on whether “Free market President Javier Milei of Argentina has been making tangible progress toward improving the Argentinian economy,” argued by Santiago Forster and Agustín Dante Rombolá. Same date different city (the District of Columbia) is the premier of and panel discussion about Reason’s new documentary The Battle Over D.C. Restaurants. Here’s the trailer:

Yep, that just takes us through this Wednesday, but I already need a nap. Please do save the dates Dec. 12 for the Ask a Jew Channukah party in NYC, and Dec. 18 for an undisclosed Reason event in D.C. involving … my own DNA.

* You will hear us talk soon enough about Donald Trump’s special-orders-don’t-upset-us Cabinet picks; for now let’s plumb the archive for our RFK-jay files, in roughly chronological order: M.O. #208, “The Very Strange New Respect for Authoritarian Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” “Did Fox Really Fire Tucker Carlson for Crossing the 'Red Line' of Criticizing Big Pharma, as RFK Jr. Claims?”; #407 (“The Cruelty, the Conspiracist, and the Report w/ Eli Lake”), M.O. #169, #412 (“An RFK Intervention w/ Coleman Hughes”), M.O. #172, this July 2023 segment w/ Megyn Kelly, and M.O. #194 (“2023 Was an Inside Job”).

* Oh hey, I noticed that I never embedded the video for our 2Way-livestreamed-but-not-posted-as-an-episode Second Sunday of Sept. 8, so here that is:

* Omnigraf time: No doubt to the consternation of the sour, political-media-ecosystem generalizers over on BlueSky, Jesse Singal (#111 & #171) this past week took aim at the veracities of Michael Shellenberger in two detailed posts. Yascha Mounk (#124, #195) has a piece with I think particular resonance for Fifth Column listeners: “Dear Journalists: Stop Trying to Save Democracy.” More gleeful was Matt Taibbi (#226, #348): “Ding, Dong, the Cult Is Dead!” Oren Kessler (#425) has a good one up about “When Mencken Came to Palestine: How America’s wickedest pundit – whose views on Jews were ‘mixed’ – became its unlikeliest Zionist.” And beloved listener Cluis decided to grace us with some post-election personal noodlings, “A week of thinking, a day of drinking, and a moment of doubt.” Teaser from that:

So at long last, after a bloodymary, 5 All Day IPA’s, a Corona, and 2 medically questionable neat Macallan’s I grabbed my shit and walked up the block to the church where said performance was to be made.

It was about 2pm I estimate, and I was so hammered, so early, that I think people assumed I was mentally challenged. Which is to say they were incredibly nice and vaguely condescending to me, from what little I could understand.

I did the deed.

* Comment of the Week, doubling here as an exhortation to subscribe to his terrific Substack The Best of Journalism, comes from Conor Friedersdorf:

Every week for many years now I've put together a newsletter of the best stuff I read that week. Among people, the most frequently recurring names in the opinion realm include Megan McArdle, Kat Rosenfield, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Ross Douthat, Yuval Levin, Alan Jacobs, and Matt Yglesias, John McWhorter, Virginia Postrel, Scott Alexander, Jeannie Suk Gersen, Coleman Hughes, the Marginal Revolution duo and The Volokh Conspiracy, Graeme Wood, Caitlin Flanagan, Helen Lewis, Nellie Bowles, Eli Saslow, and Michael Powell. I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of good people. Like Jack Shafer! Etc.

Among publications folks might be less familiar with , the FT is outrageously expensive but really good, the Hedgehog Review, The Free Press, The New Atlantis, Der Spiegel International, Unherd, Quillette... I'm of course partial to The Atlantic. And I assume I needn't tell you about Reason and other stuff with close TFC affiliations.

Walkoff music is a remember it’s never too early to assassinate … certain months: