Hey Gustavo, would love to send you a copy of my book The Border Simulator (One World/Random House) where I tackle technology and the US Mexico border. I love the fifth column and appreciate the episodes that you’ve been a guest on.
Yo man we’ve been pestering Matt and his accomplices to get you back on the show. Any chance that happens? Also, you really need to stock a few of your books at the restaurant. Pretty please.
Matt knows how to reach me, but I think Megyn Kelly isn't allowing them haha. And my wife does sell copies of my co-book "A People's Guide to Orange County"!
It’s all relative. I can imagine taking it for granted if you live in SoCal but for my once a quarter layover at LAX I’m walking a mile to the one on Sepúlveda
As far as actual journalists, and not just cultural commentators or what have you?
The first name that comes to mind is Jesse Singal. He’s done battle with a lot of the more extreme elements of the left without succumbing to the “I didn’t change, the left did” archetype that so many others have fallen victim to.
There is the sense of a baseline level of competence that can be broken by being a big-enough rube, too. Nicole Hannah Jones still-then at the NYT during COVID lockdowns retweeting a batshit conspiracy theory that the fireworks New Yorkers were hearing were part of an NYPD psy-op to acclimate citizens to the sound of gunfire ahead of mass executions carried out by the government comes to mind.
In Peterson’s benzine-addled case, someone posted some weird bondage pornography and the esteemed professor of Jungian-psycobabble delivered through a Canadian Kermit-the-Frog accent bit on the claim it was some kind of real-life CCP human sperm-milking operation.
If there’s concrete evidence that someone’s bullshit detector is severely damaged and broken, I’m looking elsewhere for news and analysis.
Bret was always fertile ground for conspiracy theories. He just gave off the vibes to me from the first time I heard him talk with his brother about his doctoral dissertation.
Micheal Shellenberger gives similar vibes. Jesse is going at him now. Free speech is the disinfectant. Michael is getting cleansed by Jesse now. I’m curious if Taibbi jumps in the defend his boy.
See I liked Shellenberger a lot at one point, because I thought he had a mostly sane analysis of the dysfunction going on with homelessness and addiction in blue cities (living in one myself), but I’ve since stopped placing so much stock in talking heads just because this seems to be an inevitability with so many!
Yes. Guys like Shellenberger and Weinstein make sense on some issues. They’re smart. But they eventually start connecting dots in more and more outrageous ways.
I used to listen to Jordan Peterson a lot and cringe when people referred to him as right wing.
Then I stopped. I have right leaning friends who even sigh when the man's name is mentioned. For me I think was his losing it at Elliot...(the person from umbrella academy, last name escapes me) and for the somewhat THICC Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model. I just thought "this is exceedingly dumb to get upset about."
I’m in the same boat as you, he went from being common sense to slowly morphing into what he was falsely accused of at first. Now he’s just a caricature of himself.
This is very common among commentators. They start out on a reasonable criticism of a problem. They bang that drum for a while, but then move on to other problems. Soon they run out of problems that they can discuss reasonably and delve into unreasonable problems that require them to come up with new angles. The new angles are often unreasonable.
The news does NOT need to be updated quite so often. Starting with CNN the 24-hour news cycle morphed into the instantaneous cycle. Being FIRST became more important than being RIGHT. Hence our current media climate.
Yes. There are people who can feasibly claim "the left changed, not me" when they have had consistent values the whole time. Some of these people get left behind and then acquire increasingly RW views, to the point that they would be unrecognizable to an earlier version of themselves.
Tim Pool has definitely changed. I used to consider him a credible and honest independent journalist who did good work, and I learned a lot from his coverage. I still think he's honest, despite the recent Russia stuff, I just think he's become way too conspiratorial and also shifted to the right.
I also always hated his hyperbolic clickbait headlines on YouTube, but that wasn't really representative of his content.
And MAPs, and school board stuff, etc. I keep joking they should have a “parenting correspondent” who could provide some input to balance what’s clearly a blind spot.
Everyone gets details wrong- the world is too complicated to understand fully. The question is, do they have a mechanism to correct things over time. This is the basis of journalism and science. Jesse is a good egg even if I disagree with his takes some times.
Reporters are always going to get the details wrong - that's why the Gell-Mann amnesia effect has a name. The critical question is - did their filter allow them to come to the right conclusion on the core truths, even if they got a couple facts wrong? No one is going to bat 1.000 on that, but I think that's the best way to evaluate whether a voice is healthy to listen to, and where the mainstream has failed spectacularly.
I haven't kept a list, so aside from my own personal story, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, I just know that there have been a lot of them. I'm thinking of when they discussed big stories or controversies like Kyle Rittenhouse or Amy Cooper (I'm not saying these ones necessarily) that I've done a deep dive on myself, and know the details very well even years later, I've often noticed errors, sometimes significant ones.
Very unsatisfying answer I know. I'm sure if I went back and listened to a bunch of episodes I could make a list, but I don't care enough to do that.
And again I think he's very honest, and wouldn't hesitate to make a correction if pointed out to him, at least if it was a big enough one.
I suppose this is one of the downsides of going independent, as humans we’re bound to get details wrong here and there and without a team to catch errors (and even they don’t always catch them), some are inevitably going to slip through the cracks.
There is a lot of glossing over important details at times on stories where they act like they did a ton of research and clearly did not actually and instead just sort of did an hour or two of reading.
Also sometimes when things offend his political sensibilities he really gets selective blindness on certain issues/arguments.
On a lot of issues he is more or less a bog standard democratic tribalist and tribalists can never be trusted.
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.
I must second your recommendation of the Financial Times. My go to for many topics. The fact the publication remains quite profitable and steers clear of frequent controversy says a lot. The quality of its staff appears to be outstanding.
I have laughed more often at KDW's newsletters than anything else these last few years. He is one of the reasons I keep my sub to The Dispatch! He is an entertaining writer. His thoughts on Sinead Oconors death were heartbreaking: scroll to the "In Closing" - if this paywalled and you still want to read it I can re-post just that section for you. https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wanderland/the-achilles-heel-of-the-rich-and-powerful/
The Dispatch and Reason. I'm a libertarian with neocon sympathies and find these sources to be factual with high-quality analysis, without foaming at the mouth like many other media orgs.
Food:
Brian Lagerstrom - functional recipes that taste great without turning videos into a slog. Ethan Chlebowski does some of the same stuff with some focus on better nutrition, but his content can be more drawn-out.
Chinese Cooking Demystified - broad exploration of (mostly) Chinese cuisine and how to make Chinese food at home, sometimes with adaptations for those who only have access to western supermarkets. The many videos are divided into categories and the presentation is casual, making it a great entry point.
Cocktails:
Cocktail Chemistry - he's no longer active, but was the main figure in guiding me on the basics early in the pandemic. His calculator is also a useful tool for those who have advanced to developing their own creations.
Kevin Kos - if you want to go all out and put in disproportionate effort to make drinks that rival those of the world's best cocktail bars, look no further. Kevin's creations are rather elaborate, and while he's more of a storyteller than a historian or a scientist, the results are excellent.
I'm glad to see a fellow cocktail nerd! Though I tend to make simpler cocktails.
One of the biggest disappointments of being permanently banned from reddit (over nothing) is that I can no longer participate in the cocktail subreddit.
Though it might be better for my wallet and my liver in the long run..
I just have learned a great deal from that sub, and it's one of the least toxic and most pleasant parts of reddit. And pretty much devoid of any politics or culture war stuff.
There are a few other reddit groups that were pleasant or useful, like the BARPod sub, various tool or trades related groups, and it's sometime useful for finding technical help and even reporting bugs for certain niche software or computer issues.
I was permanently banned for basically saying that I want police to be a bit rough and aggressive when arresting certain types of dangerous criminals. That was considered promoting violence or something (even though violence is a necessary, justified, and unavoidable part of law enforcement..).
I had very high karma and most of the comments and posts on my account were just being helpful and giving suggestions to people in various ways, but none of that matters to the far-left activist moderators.
That site is an absolute cesspool, but it's also an extremely useful and unique source of information for many things.
Is it hijacking the thread to say that, at the end of the day, the thing I trust most is myself? Obviously no one can know everything about everything. One can't even know a little bit about everything. But I feel like I have a decent sense for when a journalist or pundit is being dishonest, or using weasel words, or putting their thumb on the scales, etc. Or just not backing up their claims with decent evidence or argumentation. Because, let's be honest, most are not that sophisticated and they tend to fall back on the same tired techniques.
So I can read a story on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, etc. and walk away feeling like I can separate some kernel of truth from all chaff.
I think this is exactly right, and it is important to always be skeptical of bias-confirming stories - both my perceived bias of the reporter and my own bias. (I don't mean "bias" in a bad way; we should be biased toward our priors...if we weren't they wouldn't be our priors.)
Yes, if I ever find myself reading a story and saying "I KNEW IT", that's a good sign I need to check it. Is any other outlet covering it? Is there a mainstream or opposite-lean source that provides some additional details? How exactly was this story sourced?
I really appreciate this comment. Unfortunately, that kind of media literacy is sorely lacking (at least, outside this community). Given the current landscape, it would be a most excellent idea to begin teaching media literacy at the junior high/high school level. If not sooner!
I trust the reporting of virtually all of them. The NYT, WaPo, CNN, Bloomberg, WSJ, but also NPR, MSNBC, Fox News, etc…if you mean commentary wise then I don’t really trust anyone entirely and it’s more of a case by case basis but I think that’s sort of baked into the whole opinion writing thing. But Barro and Yglesias and Ezra Klein are the three columnists I would generally be most comfortable outsourcing my thinking to.
Trusting the reporting is a bad idea. Even regular “reporting” is absolutely chocked fully of “commentary”, through what they present what questions they ask, who they interview etc.
This is my approach as well: consume everything with a big enough dose of skepticism so as to not just blindly accept what you're reading as fact, while being open minded enough to not immediately dismiss some reporting that cuts against your worldview.
I read NY Post and NYT to see which stories they each aren't covering.
I listen to Advisory Opinions, The Daily. The Times of Israel the Daily Briefing, Honestly, Blocked & Reported. The Remnant, The Gist, Meghan Kelly, The Dispatch.
I go on the Blocked and Reported open thread to see what people are talking about. Lots of people post links to things I read.
For a quick daily hit of international headlines I listen to the BBC’s Global News Podcast.
For an excellent news aggregator that’s more US focused I go to Ground News. https://ground.news
It balances left and right, lets you know the ideological lean and factual quality of each outlet, and presents “blind spot” stories that are being overlooked by left and right.
For perfectly transparent-about-their-biases center-right reporting on national politics I go to The Dispatch. https://thedispatch.com
They’re so smart and thoughtful. Their up-front-ness about their perspective makes it a lot easier to trust them. But they’re NEVER hack-ish. Just love them. I want to be best friends with Sarah Isgur. Jonah’s controversial I know but love him too.
They actually go the old-fashioned journalistic neutrality route (!) and actually succeed (!!!). Unlike almost any other Catholic news outlet, they actually do investigative reporting as well. Honestly if I had to only read news from one source for the rest of my life, I might choose them and let the rest of the news world burn. I wouldn’t know what was going on in national politics but I sure as hell would know what was going on at the Vatican.
For getting outside of a US perspective I go to RFI. For the purposes of this comment I checked out their English section but unfortunately the content looks a lot different — and much more America-centric, which is exactly what I am trying to avoid — than their French language reporting. To those for whom it is accessible, though, I really like both their international reporting (they cover Africa way more than any American outlet than I have encountered) and also, actually, their coverage of American politics, because I appreciate the total-outsider perspective. I mainly listen to their podcast Grand Reportage for the former, and Washington d’ici (lol) for the latter. https://www.rfi.fr/fr/
Those are my top most trusted sources. I also pay for the Free Press and the NYT, but I find them less valuable because they are both clearly biased and also less up front about their lean. That said, the NYT’s investigative and war reporting is great when not bound up in partisan anything (does anyone have a bigger budget for that kind of reporting than they do?) and the Freep’s TGIF is basically worth the price of admission for making me laugh every week.
Great question Matt - I got into political commentary at a similar time as you in the heyday of blogs, and I'd love to see a revitalization of that link culture and trying to bring people together to flesh out debates. It seems like substack is trying to encourage that - although I'd strongly push back on restricting the views to their app - and Matt, you seem to be doing that to some degree with your link digest emails. But I think you guys would be a great forum to have a loose network of interesting people, and regularly bring a few of them together to discuss issues they care about. It would be important to have folks with different views, but its more of a discussion than a debate.
Sources I respect:
1. Matt Taibbi/Glenn Greenwald - true rarities in sticking to the truth and their core principals even if their "tribe" goes a different direction
2. Matt Stoller/Ryan Grimm/David Dayen - reasonable lefties that have strong opinions on their areas of focus, but don't fall in the trap of being shills for the establishment/team blue
3. Dave Smith - I think he's really good - he seems to be blowing up a bit right now thru his connection with Rogan, but I think he could be an extremely effective way to bring libertarian ideas to a broader audience.
4. Tucker/Rogan/ZeroHedge - I wish they had better message discipline, and you have to have a filter on what you believe, but they're useful for surfacing contrarian ideas
As constructive feedback - where I'd love to see you guys improve is - I wish you'd do a better job taking on the best arguments for ideas you disagree with. I'd say this about Moynihan especially, but for the general group as well, I often don't think that you guys give especially good faith retellings of the other side before criticizing it.
One more to add - Oren Cass has his finger so strongly on the pulse of the "new right" that he's actually influencing policy. It's especially interesting because you guys just did an episode taking on tariffs. I haven't listened to the episode yet, but I won't be surprised if you referenced Oren at some point as a pro-tariff voice.
To illustrate my feedback above, if Oren listened to the episode, would he feel like you gave a good faith description of his views before disagreeing? Since I haven't listened to the episode I'm obviously not offering any opinion on the question, but I'll be interested to listen to it in that context.
During the Brexit vote I had responsibility to monitor the situation as part of an investment strategy. That taught me that the primary media outlets had high level analysis and/or significant desire to present a leaning. Our strategy was able to monitor and synthesise a view far better than the media. The larger the organisation often the worse the information. Since then my trust range is zero for the BBC & Australian ABC. Network news 3/10. Newsletters 7/10. Reason & other Substack like platforms 8-9/10.
Interestingly the Economist for me has dropped off.
Aside from the usual British squeamishness about guns, the biggest problem I have with the Economist is how part of their newsroom seems to have joined tHe rEsIsTaNcE and is unable to treat Trump or anything associated with him with any kind of objectivity in an a-la-carte manner. They just repeat the same drumbeat no matter what the facts are. Which is amusing since they expand every abbreviation and give a short bio for every person in every story, but don't ever bother explaining any of their priors when they reflexively shit on whatever anyone around or near Trump does, almost literally no matter what it is.
This contrasts with their excellent financial, business, and science coverage, and with things like the trans debate, for which AFAICT theirs is about the sanest mainstream media outlet stance.
Helen Joyce was an Economist writer, at least until lately. Their news coverage is excellent, especially of long-running stories that don’t generate day-to-day headlines such as Belt & Road, Sudan, as is their explanation of emerging technologies and their potential impact. However, like the FT, they clearly struggle to understand why not everyone thinks like them and don’t see shocks coming. The FT in particular has the pained pious tone of an HR manager or deputy Head reacting to an embarrassing incident - I’m not angry, just disappointed - when events don’t go their way. Janan Ganesh of the FT is a shining exception.
The Mark Halperin 2Way show (which I watch on Youtube) is really excellent source of news and analysis about political events and has (for now anyway) displaced almost all other video sources of political commentary for me.
As mentioned by others, I agree that The Dispatch and Reason are good sources of news. In part, this is because the views of the journalists are so far from those of anyone in power that they are less likely to be corrupted (in the Lord Acton sense) by seeking to please or advance the agenda of those in power.
I would add the following:
-- John Cochrane's Grumpy Economist substack is a really great source of original economic insights
-- The Rational Reminders podcast is the most sophisticated source of personal finance information I have come across
Podsnacks.org is very useful in giving me readable summaries and transcripts of podcasts by email helping me decide what I actually want to spend time listening to.
2Way is great in that Mark encourages different opinions and is respectful. Hope he can continue at this high level. Who knew Sean Spicer was a reasonable human being?
On politics I am a big fan of The Dispatch, The Free Press and Reason which I also like to balance out with some more center-left takes from people like Josh Barro, Yascha Mounk, Ravi Gupta, and Matt Yglesias. The left is definitely having a harder time building institutions in the new media landscape because they are so overinvested in the legacy institutions, so I tend to focus more on individuals than institutions to get those perspectives.
On foreign / military affairs, something I tend to care deeply about as a former army officer, I would recommend the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Modern War Insititute at West Point.
The last thing I would say is that trust in certain media institutions or personalities should always be, just like scientific knowledge, provisional. There's lot of formerly reasonable people (or institutions) that were at one point trustworthy and aren't anymore. Timothy Snyder is one such person that has come up a lot on recent podcasts. I tend to focus more on principles than particular people or institutions and allow my media diet to shift accordingly:
- Do they approach complex issues with nuance and avoid monocausality?
- Do they have intellectual humility and recognize when they just don't know something?
- Are they willing to presume good faith on the part of their opponents?
- Do they hold themselves accountable when they get things wrong?
- Do they address issues / events that are inconvenient for their own views or position?
- Are they willing to change their mind in the face of changing facts?
If I don't feel comfortable answering 'yes' to all these questions, then I would always assume that whatever they are saying is, at best, a partial truth and merits further research. These answers are also always provisional and subject to change as people or institutions prove themselves more or less trustworthy. Sorry for the long post, this is a really fascinating question.
Me, of course — but only on all things Mexican food. And rancho libertarianism. And Orange County. And In-N-Out, which is overrated
Hey Gustavo, would love to send you a copy of my book The Border Simulator (One World/Random House) where I tackle technology and the US Mexico border. I love the fifth column and appreciate the episodes that you’ve been a guest on.
Send to:
Gustavo Arellano
PO Box 1433
Anaheim, CA 92815
Thanks for speaking the truth on In-N-Out. Not bad, but not special.
BOOM #respect
Yo man we’ve been pestering Matt and his accomplices to get you back on the show. Any chance that happens? Also, you really need to stock a few of your books at the restaurant. Pretty please.
Matt knows how to reach me, but I think Megyn Kelly isn't allowing them haha. And my wife does sell copies of my co-book "A People's Guide to Orange County"!
I’m going to have Adrian get me an autographed copy of Ask A Mexican one of these days! Cheers
How is your pal Kevin De Leon doing these days? He still doing his best to exclude you from restaurants he is eating at?
palabra
BOOM
Lies… try living without In-N-Out for a decade
In-N-Out fan Evans are the worst
It’s all relative. I can imagine taking it for granted if you live in SoCal but for my once a quarter layover at LAX I’m walking a mile to the one on Sepúlveda
As far as actual journalists, and not just cultural commentators or what have you?
The first name that comes to mind is Jesse Singal. He’s done battle with a lot of the more extreme elements of the left without succumbing to the “I didn’t change, the left did” archetype that so many others have fallen victim to.
I mean 'I didn't change, the left did' is pretty accurate for many people that hold basic liberal principles..
I'm curious what objection you have to this statement?
The fact that a lot of these people just seem to slide further and further right and become more conspiratorial over time?
The Tim Pools, the Bret Weinsteins, the Jordan Petersons of the world.
There is the sense of a baseline level of competence that can be broken by being a big-enough rube, too. Nicole Hannah Jones still-then at the NYT during COVID lockdowns retweeting a batshit conspiracy theory that the fireworks New Yorkers were hearing were part of an NYPD psy-op to acclimate citizens to the sound of gunfire ahead of mass executions carried out by the government comes to mind.
In Peterson’s benzine-addled case, someone posted some weird bondage pornography and the esteemed professor of Jungian-psycobabble delivered through a Canadian Kermit-the-Frog accent bit on the claim it was some kind of real-life CCP human sperm-milking operation.
If there’s concrete evidence that someone’s bullshit detector is severely damaged and broken, I’m looking elsewhere for news and analysis.
This is why I have a natural aversion to talking heads these days. I think I’m developing antibodies.
Bret was always fertile ground for conspiracy theories. He just gave off the vibes to me from the first time I heard him talk with his brother about his doctoral dissertation.
Micheal Shellenberger gives similar vibes. Jesse is going at him now. Free speech is the disinfectant. Michael is getting cleansed by Jesse now. I’m curious if Taibbi jumps in the defend his boy.
See I liked Shellenberger a lot at one point, because I thought he had a mostly sane analysis of the dysfunction going on with homelessness and addiction in blue cities (living in one myself), but I’ve since stopped placing so much stock in talking heads just because this seems to be an inevitability with so many!
Yes. Guys like Shellenberger and Weinstein make sense on some issues. They’re smart. But they eventually start connecting dots in more and more outrageous ways.
I used to listen to Jordan Peterson a lot and cringe when people referred to him as right wing.
Then I stopped. I have right leaning friends who even sigh when the man's name is mentioned. For me I think was his losing it at Elliot...(the person from umbrella academy, last name escapes me) and for the somewhat THICC Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model. I just thought "this is exceedingly dumb to get upset about."
I’m in the same boat as you, he went from being common sense to slowly morphing into what he was falsely accused of at first. Now he’s just a caricature of himself.
This is very common among commentators. They start out on a reasonable criticism of a problem. They bang that drum for a while, but then move on to other problems. Soon they run out of problems that they can discuss reasonably and delve into unreasonable problems that require them to come up with new angles. The new angles are often unreasonable.
The news does NOT need to be updated quite so often. Starting with CNN the 24-hour news cycle morphed into the instantaneous cycle. Being FIRST became more important than being RIGHT. Hence our current media climate.
Bret Weinstein has definitely become extremely conspiratorial, I don't think he's a good example of this.
Yes. There are people who can feasibly claim "the left changed, not me" when they have had consistent values the whole time. Some of these people get left behind and then acquire increasingly RW views, to the point that they would be unrecognizable to an earlier version of themselves.
Dave Rubin is the poster child of this phenomenon
I wanted to say Dave Rubin but I was working and forgot to mention him by the time I responded.
Was Jordan Peterson ever on the left?
Tim Pool has definitely changed. I used to consider him a credible and honest independent journalist who did good work, and I learned a lot from his coverage. I still think he's honest, despite the recent Russia stuff, I just think he's become way too conspiratorial and also shifted to the right.
I also always hated his hyperbolic clickbait headlines on YouTube, but that wasn't really representative of his content.
100 percent on Jesse. Trust him completely.
I deeply respect Jesse (and Katie), I think he's honest and has tremendous integrity, but he gets details wrong, a lot.
I say that as someone who wad once covered (in a very small way) on a BARPod episode.
But I've also noticed many when they discussing stories that I'm familiar with on the podcast.
Granted a free-formpodcast discussion is not the same as a carefully reviewed and edited written article, so perhaps I'm being unfair..
And many such errors are small and trivial, and perhaps he's no worse than average, but still.. Take what you hear with a grain of salt.
I trust Jessie when it comes to science reporting. His political stuff is at best meh
I think the fact that they aren’t parents affects their views on the trans insanity in schools.
And MAPs, and school board stuff, etc. I keep joking they should have a “parenting correspondent” who could provide some input to balance what’s clearly a blind spot.
Everyone gets details wrong- the world is too complicated to understand fully. The question is, do they have a mechanism to correct things over time. This is the basis of journalism and science. Jesse is a good egg even if I disagree with his takes some times.
Reporters are always going to get the details wrong - that's why the Gell-Mann amnesia effect has a name. The critical question is - did their filter allow them to come to the right conclusion on the core truths, even if they got a couple facts wrong? No one is going to bat 1.000 on that, but I think that's the best way to evaluate whether a voice is healthy to listen to, and where the mainstream has failed spectacularly.
What are some examples of things he got wrong? Honestly just curious!
I haven't kept a list, so aside from my own personal story, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, I just know that there have been a lot of them. I'm thinking of when they discussed big stories or controversies like Kyle Rittenhouse or Amy Cooper (I'm not saying these ones necessarily) that I've done a deep dive on myself, and know the details very well even years later, I've often noticed errors, sometimes significant ones.
Very unsatisfying answer I know. I'm sure if I went back and listened to a bunch of episodes I could make a list, but I don't care enough to do that.
And again I think he's very honest, and wouldn't hesitate to make a correction if pointed out to him, at least if it was a big enough one.
I suppose this is one of the downsides of going independent, as humans we’re bound to get details wrong here and there and without a team to catch errors (and even they don’t always catch them), some are inevitably going to slip through the cracks.
To quote Thomas Sowell,
“There are no solutions, only tradeoffs”
I think your point that he makes mistakes, but they are typically honest mistakes captures Jesse well.
There is a lot of glossing over important details at times on stories where they act like they did a ton of research and clearly did not actually and instead just sort of did an hour or two of reading.
Also sometimes when things offend his political sensibilities he really gets selective blindness on certain issues/arguments.
On a lot of issues he is more or less a bog standard democratic tribalist and tribalists can never be trusted.
Don’t 100% trust anyone. I like Jesse a lot, but he is totally not worthy of even 80% trust, I hope even he would say that.
The funny thing is Jesse rejects the "I didn't change, the left did" meme, but it definitely applies to him.
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.
I meant to mention this, and sorry I did not!
I trust Conor Freidersdorf.
But I can’t trust my spelling.
I must second your recommendation of the Financial Times. My go to for many topics. The fact the publication remains quite profitable and steers clear of frequent controversy says a lot. The quality of its staff appears to be outstanding.
Quillette is good and The Hub, leaning right, but gives interesting CN point of view.
+1 for Alan Jacobs
I trusted the Atlantic until Kevin Williamson.
I have laughed more often at KDW's newsletters than anything else these last few years. He is one of the reasons I keep my sub to The Dispatch! He is an entertaining writer. His thoughts on Sinead Oconors death were heartbreaking: scroll to the "In Closing" - if this paywalled and you still want to read it I can re-post just that section for you. https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/wanderland/the-achilles-heel-of-the-rich-and-powerful/
Seconded on the Hedgehog Review!
The Dispatch and that’s about it.
Politics and "serious" issues:
The Dispatch and Reason. I'm a libertarian with neocon sympathies and find these sources to be factual with high-quality analysis, without foaming at the mouth like many other media orgs.
Food:
Brian Lagerstrom - functional recipes that taste great without turning videos into a slog. Ethan Chlebowski does some of the same stuff with some focus on better nutrition, but his content can be more drawn-out.
Chinese Cooking Demystified - broad exploration of (mostly) Chinese cuisine and how to make Chinese food at home, sometimes with adaptations for those who only have access to western supermarkets. The many videos are divided into categories and the presentation is casual, making it a great entry point.
Cocktails:
Cocktail Chemistry - he's no longer active, but was the main figure in guiding me on the basics early in the pandemic. His calculator is also a useful tool for those who have advanced to developing their own creations.
Kevin Kos - if you want to go all out and put in disproportionate effort to make drinks that rival those of the world's best cocktail bars, look no further. Kevin's creations are rather elaborate, and while he's more of a storyteller than a historian or a scientist, the results are excellent.
The Dispatch has acquitted itself quite well in this cycle.
For Chinese home-style cooking, I'm a giant fan of Fuschia Dunlop's cookbooks. I'll check out Chinese Cooking Demystified!
I co-sign your recommendations of Reason and The Dispatch.
+1 for The Dispatch. The "Quick Hits" from the Morning Dispatch newsletter is a great overview of the day's major stories.
I'm glad to see a fellow cocktail nerd! Though I tend to make simpler cocktails.
One of the biggest disappointments of being permanently banned from reddit (over nothing) is that I can no longer participate in the cocktail subreddit.
Though it might be better for my wallet and my liver in the long run..
I've never participated there tbh, it was more of a solo endavour. What did you like about it?
I just have learned a great deal from that sub, and it's one of the least toxic and most pleasant parts of reddit. And pretty much devoid of any politics or culture war stuff.
There are a few other reddit groups that were pleasant or useful, like the BARPod sub, various tool or trades related groups, and it's sometime useful for finding technical help and even reporting bugs for certain niche software or computer issues.
I was permanently banned for basically saying that I want police to be a bit rough and aggressive when arresting certain types of dangerous criminals. That was considered promoting violence or something (even though violence is a necessary, justified, and unavoidable part of law enforcement..).
I had very high karma and most of the comments and posts on my account were just being helpful and giving suggestions to people in various ways, but none of that matters to the far-left activist moderators.
That site is an absolute cesspool, but it's also an extremely useful and unique source of information for many things.
I was just stumping for KDW above!
For cocktails, you should check out Cocktails with Suderman. Great recipes and pictures off his dog
Is it hijacking the thread to say that, at the end of the day, the thing I trust most is myself? Obviously no one can know everything about everything. One can't even know a little bit about everything. But I feel like I have a decent sense for when a journalist or pundit is being dishonest, or using weasel words, or putting their thumb on the scales, etc. Or just not backing up their claims with decent evidence or argumentation. Because, let's be honest, most are not that sophisticated and they tend to fall back on the same tired techniques.
So I can read a story on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, etc. and walk away feeling like I can separate some kernel of truth from all chaff.
This is the correct answer. Learn how to read this stuff for its underlying agendas and you can take away *something* from almost literally anything.
I think this is exactly right, and it is important to always be skeptical of bias-confirming stories - both my perceived bias of the reporter and my own bias. (I don't mean "bias" in a bad way; we should be biased toward our priors...if we weren't they wouldn't be our priors.)
Yes, if I ever find myself reading a story and saying "I KNEW IT", that's a good sign I need to check it. Is any other outlet covering it? Is there a mainstream or opposite-lean source that provides some additional details? How exactly was this story sourced?
I really appreciate this comment. Unfortunately, that kind of media literacy is sorely lacking (at least, outside this community). Given the current landscape, it would be a most excellent idea to begin teaching media literacy at the junior high/high school level. If not sooner!
I trust the reporting of virtually all of them. The NYT, WaPo, CNN, Bloomberg, WSJ, but also NPR, MSNBC, Fox News, etc…if you mean commentary wise then I don’t really trust anyone entirely and it’s more of a case by case basis but I think that’s sort of baked into the whole opinion writing thing. But Barro and Yglesias and Ezra Klein are the three columnists I would generally be most comfortable outsourcing my thinking to.
NORMIE-CORE
who stole Ben's phone? This isn't nearly mental enough
Trusting the reporting is a bad idea. Even regular “reporting” is absolutely chocked fully of “commentary”, through what they present what questions they ask, who they interview etc.
This is my approach as well: consume everything with a big enough dose of skepticism so as to not just blindly accept what you're reading as fact, while being open minded enough to not immediately dismiss some reporting that cuts against your worldview.
Small potatoes but there’s a little bit of a resurgence of good local journalism using novel business models or even setting up as non-profits
Texas Tribune
Nevada Independent
Bangor Daily News
I’m sure there’s other ones. Localism is the way (at least most of the time)
It made me happy to see a localism comment in the wild. That doesn’t happen often!
I think Reflector is doing really good stuff these days.
I'll contribute some science nerd stuff to this space:
Scott Aaronson's blog Shtetl-Optimized: ignore the politics stuff, read the stuff on quantum computing, AI and computational complexity theory.
Razib Khan's substack. So much good stuff on paleogenetics.
I read various other science writers, most of whom actually do science since the middlemen of science journalism tend to get things wildly wrong.
they need to get Razib on to discuss HBD with Kmele!
100%, he’s a no-brainer
Razib!
You mean SciAm isn't high on your list (haha)?
It actually makes me sad the state of SciAm these days.
Agreed. I love science, but unfortunately, communication of it has been appropriated by The Science.
1000000%. What happened over there?!
It was already pretty activist 15/20 years ago and since then has become hyper activist.
Movie reviews - Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending and Sonny Bunch at The Bulwark, plus Sonny's podcast with Alyssa Rosenberg and Peter Suderman.
Economics - Scott Lincicome
Supreme Court - Damon Root
Florida - Dave Barry, Charles CW Cooke
Being a damn good writer to the point where every sentence he writes makes me go "I wish I had written that" - Kevin D. Williamson
I read NY Post and NYT to see which stories they each aren't covering.
I listen to Advisory Opinions, The Daily. The Times of Israel the Daily Briefing, Honestly, Blocked & Reported. The Remnant, The Gist, Meghan Kelly, The Dispatch.
I go on the Blocked and Reported open thread to see what people are talking about. Lots of people post links to things I read.
This is a good point--what stories does an outlet choose to ignore?
Which is why the tabloids and Tucker (!) were so necessary when the trans stuff was at its peak
For a quick daily hit of international headlines I listen to the BBC’s Global News Podcast.
For an excellent news aggregator that’s more US focused I go to Ground News. https://ground.news
It balances left and right, lets you know the ideological lean and factual quality of each outlet, and presents “blind spot” stories that are being overlooked by left and right.
For perfectly transparent-about-their-biases center-right reporting on national politics I go to The Dispatch. https://thedispatch.com
They’re so smart and thoughtful. Their up-front-ness about their perspective makes it a lot easier to trust them. But they’re NEVER hack-ish. Just love them. I want to be best friends with Sarah Isgur. Jonah’s controversial I know but love him too.
The Pillar is hands down bar none the best source of Catholic news. https://www.pillarcatholic.com
They actually go the old-fashioned journalistic neutrality route (!) and actually succeed (!!!). Unlike almost any other Catholic news outlet, they actually do investigative reporting as well. Honestly if I had to only read news from one source for the rest of my life, I might choose them and let the rest of the news world burn. I wouldn’t know what was going on in national politics but I sure as hell would know what was going on at the Vatican.
For getting outside of a US perspective I go to RFI. For the purposes of this comment I checked out their English section but unfortunately the content looks a lot different — and much more America-centric, which is exactly what I am trying to avoid — than their French language reporting. To those for whom it is accessible, though, I really like both their international reporting (they cover Africa way more than any American outlet than I have encountered) and also, actually, their coverage of American politics, because I appreciate the total-outsider perspective. I mainly listen to their podcast Grand Reportage for the former, and Washington d’ici (lol) for the latter. https://www.rfi.fr/fr/
Those are my top most trusted sources. I also pay for the Free Press and the NYT, but I find them less valuable because they are both clearly biased and also less up front about their lean. That said, the NYT’s investigative and war reporting is great when not bound up in partisan anything (does anyone have a bigger budget for that kind of reporting than they do?) and the Freep’s TGIF is basically worth the price of admission for making me laugh every week.
Great question Matt - I got into political commentary at a similar time as you in the heyday of blogs, and I'd love to see a revitalization of that link culture and trying to bring people together to flesh out debates. It seems like substack is trying to encourage that - although I'd strongly push back on restricting the views to their app - and Matt, you seem to be doing that to some degree with your link digest emails. But I think you guys would be a great forum to have a loose network of interesting people, and regularly bring a few of them together to discuss issues they care about. It would be important to have folks with different views, but its more of a discussion than a debate.
Sources I respect:
1. Matt Taibbi/Glenn Greenwald - true rarities in sticking to the truth and their core principals even if their "tribe" goes a different direction
2. Matt Stoller/Ryan Grimm/David Dayen - reasonable lefties that have strong opinions on their areas of focus, but don't fall in the trap of being shills for the establishment/team blue
3. Dave Smith - I think he's really good - he seems to be blowing up a bit right now thru his connection with Rogan, but I think he could be an extremely effective way to bring libertarian ideas to a broader audience.
4. Tucker/Rogan/ZeroHedge - I wish they had better message discipline, and you have to have a filter on what you believe, but they're useful for surfacing contrarian ideas
As constructive feedback - where I'd love to see you guys improve is - I wish you'd do a better job taking on the best arguments for ideas you disagree with. I'd say this about Moynihan especially, but for the general group as well, I often don't think that you guys give especially good faith retellings of the other side before criticizing it.
One more to add - Oren Cass has his finger so strongly on the pulse of the "new right" that he's actually influencing policy. It's especially interesting because you guys just did an episode taking on tariffs. I haven't listened to the episode yet, but I won't be surprised if you referenced Oren at some point as a pro-tariff voice.
To illustrate my feedback above, if Oren listened to the episode, would he feel like you gave a good faith description of his views before disagreeing? Since I haven't listened to the episode I'm obviously not offering any opinion on the question, but I'll be interested to listen to it in that context.
During the Brexit vote I had responsibility to monitor the situation as part of an investment strategy. That taught me that the primary media outlets had high level analysis and/or significant desire to present a leaning. Our strategy was able to monitor and synthesise a view far better than the media. The larger the organisation often the worse the information. Since then my trust range is zero for the BBC & Australian ABC. Network news 3/10. Newsletters 7/10. Reason & other Substack like platforms 8-9/10.
Interestingly the Economist for me has dropped off.
Aside from the usual British squeamishness about guns, the biggest problem I have with the Economist is how part of their newsroom seems to have joined tHe rEsIsTaNcE and is unable to treat Trump or anything associated with him with any kind of objectivity in an a-la-carte manner. They just repeat the same drumbeat no matter what the facts are. Which is amusing since they expand every abbreviation and give a short bio for every person in every story, but don't ever bother explaining any of their priors when they reflexively shit on whatever anyone around or near Trump does, almost literally no matter what it is.
This contrasts with their excellent financial, business, and science coverage, and with things like the trans debate, for which AFAICT theirs is about the sanest mainstream media outlet stance.
Helen Joyce was an Economist writer, at least until lately. Their news coverage is excellent, especially of long-running stories that don’t generate day-to-day headlines such as Belt & Road, Sudan, as is their explanation of emerging technologies and their potential impact. However, like the FT, they clearly struggle to understand why not everyone thinks like them and don’t see shocks coming. The FT in particular has the pained pious tone of an HR manager or deputy Head reacting to an embarrassing incident - I’m not angry, just disappointed - when events don’t go their way. Janan Ganesh of the FT is a shining exception.
The Mark Halperin 2Way show (which I watch on Youtube) is really excellent source of news and analysis about political events and has (for now anyway) displaced almost all other video sources of political commentary for me.
As mentioned by others, I agree that The Dispatch and Reason are good sources of news. In part, this is because the views of the journalists are so far from those of anyone in power that they are less likely to be corrupted (in the Lord Acton sense) by seeking to please or advance the agenda of those in power.
I would add the following:
-- John Cochrane's Grumpy Economist substack is a really great source of original economic insights
-- The Rational Reminders podcast is the most sophisticated source of personal finance information I have come across
Podsnacks.org is very useful in giving me readable summaries and transcripts of podcasts by email helping me decide what I actually want to spend time listening to.
2Way is great in that Mark encourages different opinions and is respectful. Hope he can continue at this high level. Who knew Sean Spicer was a reasonable human being?
On politics I am a big fan of The Dispatch, The Free Press and Reason which I also like to balance out with some more center-left takes from people like Josh Barro, Yascha Mounk, Ravi Gupta, and Matt Yglesias. The left is definitely having a harder time building institutions in the new media landscape because they are so overinvested in the legacy institutions, so I tend to focus more on individuals than institutions to get those perspectives.
On foreign / military affairs, something I tend to care deeply about as a former army officer, I would recommend the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Modern War Insititute at West Point.
The last thing I would say is that trust in certain media institutions or personalities should always be, just like scientific knowledge, provisional. There's lot of formerly reasonable people (or institutions) that were at one point trustworthy and aren't anymore. Timothy Snyder is one such person that has come up a lot on recent podcasts. I tend to focus more on principles than particular people or institutions and allow my media diet to shift accordingly:
- Do they approach complex issues with nuance and avoid monocausality?
- Do they have intellectual humility and recognize when they just don't know something?
- Are they willing to presume good faith on the part of their opponents?
- Do they hold themselves accountable when they get things wrong?
- Do they address issues / events that are inconvenient for their own views or position?
- Are they willing to change their mind in the face of changing facts?
If I don't feel comfortable answering 'yes' to all these questions, then I would always assume that whatever they are saying is, at best, a partial truth and merits further research. These answers are also always provisional and subject to change as people or institutions prove themselves more or less trustworthy. Sorry for the long post, this is a really fascinating question.