Workin’ for the Weekend #1: Moynihan Goes TikTok, Welch Fixes War, Root’s "Overruled" Rules

Plus, various people say various nice things

May 07, 2022

In Ye Olde Patreon days, we used to run a Friday night links-roundup dealio, pointing to some of our outside work, upcoming events, news & notes from #Fifdom, and various bits from the then-harder-to-access archive. That tradition, free to all customers, is reinaugurated with this post.

* First, some supplementals to Members Only #117: Glad to see in the comments section that some have already bought guest Damon Root’s indispensable 2014 book Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. Please also do not sleep on his 2020 volume, A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution, which he talked about with us on Episode #206. (Other regular-pod appearances include #106 and #45.) Damon, Twitter-followable @damonroot, last week wrote for Reason on “What the Leaked Abortion Opinion Gets Wrong About Unenumerated Rights,” and will undoubtedly contribute more on last week’s huge news.

* Moynihan apparently works for a living? Watch him single-handedly bring down the NFT market over at Vice News:

And, in a piece I’m much more likely to share with my teenager, here’s a bunch of classic Moynihan-reaction-shot faces as ol’ Hollywood visits a TikTok house in L.A.:

* I, too, have a day job; here’s my cover story for the June issue of Reason: “After the War: In the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it's time for Europe to step up and America to step back.” For those of you who prefer listening to reading, here (per custom) is the audio version over at Paloma Media.

* Speaking of Paloma, a website I highly encourage everyone to visit, recent Fif’ guest Sarah Hepola (#354) has launched w/ Paloma co-founder & Fifdom fave Nancy Rommelmann a terrific new podcast (and Substack!) called Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em, which includes a nicely gooey essay from Sarah about finally finding Her Peeps (TL;DR: it’s you!):

I’d only learned [Nancy’s] name listening to The Fifth Column podcast, which had become something like must-see-TV for me in the turbulent years since the summer of George Floyd. I had crushes on all three guys, each one calling to some different aspect, and I remember the day they mentioned Nancy’s name, plugging her reporting from Portland, a city that once reminded me of Austin and now reminded me of societal collapse. […]
In the summer of 2020, I was listening to Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable as I weeded my little pandemic garden. One day she mentioned her appearance on a podcast called The Fifth Column, and I thought: I do not need another podcast in my life, and I was right, but soon I had one anyway. I plotted my garden on my hands and knees, pulling up roots with a pop of gratification, and I listened to those guys talk about the troubled state of journalism, the troubled state of race relations, you could call that podcast The Troubled State. And when I listened to them, I felt calmer, I felt smarter, I felt grounded at a groundless time. Maybe it was distraction, maybe it was escape, but I liked to think of it as something else.
I’d found my people. […]
The party was the next evening. We smuggled my suitcase into Nancy’s bedroom so the trio from The Fifth Column could record an episode while everyone else chatted outside. The boys invited me to join them, something I wasn’t sure they would do, and I clapped the squishy headphones on my head as I took a seat across from Michael Moynihan and in between Matt Welch and Kmele Foster, three strangers who’d become folk heroes to me, only because the world felt so far away at a time I could carry them wherever I went. We talked about drinking, we talked about Johnny Depp, we laughed hard and often, and it wasn’t so easy to be the fourth leg on very solid three-legged stool, but I still had a feeling, familiar from the bar, that I belonged.

Awww….

* There have been some other sweet comments in this our first week on the ‘Stack, some of which we’ll compile for next weekend’s missive. For now, enjoy The Gist impresario Mike Pesca (#343), tweeting out that, “For me, @wethefifth has become a must-listen.” Grazie, Pesca!

Thank you for rolling with us through this busy & occasionally messy transition. If you’re having any billing/tech issues, please email the responsive folks at podcasting@substackinc.com. Our own email addy is wethefifth@substack.com. And we’ll get you NYC May 18 ticketing news as soon as we are able!