JA Westenberg

Bari Weiss built her brand on being “cancelled” from the NYT. She now runs a media company, appears on every major podcast, and speaks at sold-out events. If this is cancellation, I would like to be cancelled. Please cancel me. I am once again asking to be cancelled.

The Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: 1. Selection Bias 2. Audience Capture 3. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect 4. Thinking you’re immune to the first three…

After years of fucking around, compromising and second guessing, I have settled on 3 principles when it comes to my blog: 1. No analytics beyond whatever is baked into Ghost 2. No sponsorships and no advertising, not now, not ever 3. I will never charge more than $2.50 a month for membership and I will never raise my prices

Looking at you Thomas

The most successful grift of the modern era was convincing the smartest people in the world that 'changing the world' means optimizing the click-through rate on ads for mattresses that ship in a box

Grounded intellectual work, when it happens, if it ever happens again, is uncomfortable. It tells you things you don't want to hear, makes arguments that threaten positions you hold, points out problems you'd rather not see. The public intellectuals of the past, at their best, did this. Our current crop // slop does the opposite.

Westenberg.

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.)  The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest explora...

Charles Dickens in 1843: "what if I wrote a story where a man learns not to be a dick" Humanity: "holy shit" Humanity: makes 400 adaptations Humanity: continues being dicks Humanity: "we should adapt this again"

My conscious brain: 'We should learn linear algebra to better understand neural networks.' My revealed preferences: 'We are going to scroll specifically the parts of Wikipedia that list defunct 19th-century breakfast cereals.'

SaaS is dead. Punk is dead again, for approximately the four hundredth time since Sid Vicious actually died in 1979. Rock is dead. The novel is dead. Cinema is dead. Blogging is dead. Privacy is dead. Expertise is dead. Irony is dead. We have collectively decided that the most interesting thing you can say about anything // everything is that it no longer exists.

Westenberg.

Everything is Dead and We Killed It.

SaaS is dead. Punk is dead again, for approximately the four hundredth time since Sid Vicious actually died in 1979. Rock is dead. The novel is dea...

People keep asking me what my goal is as a writer. The answer should be obvious. I want to develop enough of a niche that I can somehow become an eccentric consulting detective for either the FBI or the NYPD.