So, I’m going to open with the obvious: Nader, Stewart and Noah are scarcely apolitical.

I enjoy Seth Meyers’ A Closer Look segments but rarely care for much more. I’m also going to violently reject your prohibition on finance by suggesting Patrick Boyle, just because he knows enough to keep me abreast of underlying trends internationally. Miniminuteman is usually a good time, but he can be a bit hit-or-miss. I like Mentour Now/Mentour Pilot to learn about aviation. For video games, I like The Geek Cupboard, OrbitalPotato and Real Civil Engineer. Tom Scott, GamersNexus are also at the top of my subscriptions. And if you like watching middle-aged men solve sudokus, Cracking the Cryptic is perfect for a certain mood.

That’s nice and all, but don’t you have anything longer? 🤣

I never got into podcasts. Are you open to suggestions about YouTube channels?

(also, how’d my print recommendations a few months back end up working out for you?)

While I appreciate the sentiment, I hung up The Powderhorn as a column after a particularly bitter 2006 layoff at a paper where I was the news editor and the opinion editor. My only connection to Texas at the time was choosing to run Molly Ivins when I had the opportunity to shake up the entirety of our syndicated content.

Having decided which letters to the editor run in full, which ones need heavy edits to make any plausible sense, and which were simply useless in their form, I don’t really like the process from the other end. I think the last time I was published in a letters section was about the same time as the layoff … I wasn’t yet willing to give up my voice, and Fareed Zakaria had just written a piece in Newsweek that really rubbed me the wrong way.

I’d told my then-fiancee I’d sent off the letter, and she made sure to pick up a copy the following week, exclaiming “It ran!” My take was a bit more subdued, akin to “Of course it did. You did fall in love with a guy who’s been in journalism for nearly a decade – and started as a fucking columnist.”

But life looks far different 20 years later. Being published yet again is a nothingburger for my ego, and while I still have very strong political beliefs and am not afraid to write about them, I’m content to leave my reach at those I know personally and the very small tranche of parasocial online followers. Also, the pay for a letter to the editor fails to make the juice worth the squeeze.

I’m sure someone with more vigor will make the point better than I could, and unlike anyone in Congress these days, I can sense when my time is over, and it’s the next generation’s turn.

Left to my own devices, it’s fucking prosciutto. I do not do well left to my own devices.

Haley makes Trump’s own-goals look like fucking amateur hour.

This isn’t particularly surprising. In Temple, Texas, data centers are a thing, and people are like “I would like to have cheap electricity and water. Who the fuck are these folks?”

Hot Wheels does love calling the Lege into special session to make liberal policy at the local level illegal at the state level. We aren’t quite done with the bullshit yet.

I would imagine Austin will be far more jubilant than Temple, Texas. I do know that my home will be thrilled.

I am much happier to fly into Austin tomorrow. I was sick of the same fucking people running the state for the entire 11 years I’ve lived there. “Here” returns tomorrow.

This is a sufficient blowout that there’s no need for tick-tocks.

I feel far better flying home tomorrow. To Austin. Where the state government hates us.

Democrats poised to sweep Florida congressional districts redrawn by Republicans

Oops.

It’s a little weird not to have the firehose, I have to admit. The raw wire was nice on election night.

Democrat Annie Andrews flips South Carolina Senate seat held by Republicans since 1998

https://apnews.com/live/midterm-election-2026

This is a good thing to be following.

Republicans underperform as first midterm votes are counted

That’s a popular view, but it’s rarely grounded in reality. My mom told me today that she pays for the NYT and WaPo, and my immediate answer was “why the fuck would you throw money at those people?”

This is why I’m living with people planning a commune.

I put a Biden sticker on my bumper in 2020. It was the first time I was allowed to, as working in a newsroom removes some rights most take for granted. Simple as: “We can’t have people driving past the paper and seeing political opinions on the cars.”

Within the newsroom, we were political as hell, but not all in one direction. Sports and the top editors were solidly Republican camps, but the rabble (you know, the expendable idiots like reporters and copyeditors) tended left of the Overton window.

I’m not sure what modern newsrooms look like, but I have for decades seen how we’re somehow held to an apolitical standard.