The Present Age

The Present Age is reader-supported. Please consider subscribing to the free or paid versions. Thanks!Today, for another edition of You Know, where I introduce you to someone who is starting a newsletter who you should know, I am joined by the insightful Maris Kreizman. Maris is the former host of the beloved podcast The Maris Review, the new head of the recently relaunched newsletter of the same name, and a celebrated cultural critic who bridges the worlds of literature and pop culture. With her extensive experience in book publishing and her sharp commentary on contemporary media, Maris brings a unique perspective to the world.Can you share a bit about your journey from working in the book publishing industry to cultural criticism, podcasting, and now newslettering? What are some of the pivotal moments that sort of shaped your career?Yeah, in my About Me section on my Substack, it starts, takes a long drag on a cigarette because I feel like I've really seen it all. I started out wanting to be a book editor and I did that through most of my twenties. And then I was laid off and had to find work that was more in and around books. So, I worked at barnesandnoble.com and Kickstarter and Book of the Month.And while I was doing all of that stuff, I sort of realized, as we all did back then, that it's nice to have a personal brand. It really is. And it's nice to have one that is not attached to your profession or the way you earn money. And I began to realize that I loved writing as much as editing. So I do some book criticism and some TV criticism and I started freelancing. And I started my podcast for Lit Hub because I was getting frustrated that I couldn't pitch conversations or profiles with authors anymore at most publications now that aren't paying that much attention to books.I figured that was a way to talk to the people I wanted to talk to on my own terms. And this will be kind of a continuation of that. It won't be audio to start, but I get to talk about what I want and when I want to, and that's so freeing.You've been really vocal about the intersection of literature and the broader pop culture. How do you think that relationship has evolved with the advent of digital media and social platforms? You know, “BookTok” and such.Yeah, I have to admit that I am a lurker on BookTok, [but] have not participated. I started out on Tumblr, and that was really my main platform. And since I started out on Tumblr, I think social media in general has gotten more toxic and digital media has gone from an industry that was booming to one that I hope is still around tomorrow. So it becomes really important to have a way to talk about books that doesn't rely all the time on those platforms. … There are so few platforms now to talk about books other than BookTok. BookTok has become so big that you might start thinking those kinds of books are the only books out there. And there is a vast world and it would be so wonderful if there were a platform for all of the kinds of books that I enjoy.Yes. Which brings me to my next question. With so many new books being published every year, how do you decide which titles and authors you'll engage with? Are there any particular trends that excite you?Parker, this one keeps me up at night and makes my apartment a wreck. It's really hard. There are some books that I know are coming and they're written by someone I already admire and that's really exciting. But getting a first novel from someone I haven't heard of is so exciting and I don't have time to read them all. And sometimes it's really just luck of the draw. I pick one and then I'm in it. And that's why book criticism is so important that we need as many people as we can to be picking out those debut novels and small press books and telling people about them. Because I'm not looking at trends.I'm just looking at whatever looks interesting to me, which is specific.Finally, tell me about the Maris Review, the newsletter and how does it differ from your podcast (RIP) of the same name and what can readers expect format wise, frequency, et cetera.I think my main challenge with my Substack is going to be that I have become so disillusioned with the publishing industry and the digital media industry. And I just have to always try to keep my love of books and the excitement around books away from that.And so the Maris Review will be a place where you can see what I'm reading, see what I'm going to read next, hear my thoughts on the latest scandal — scandal's a big word for the book world, but kerfuffle, perhaps. I hope to talk about adaptations because that's such a big way that people find their way into books. I hope to do author interviews and perhaps audio once again.I'm so excited to figure out what my own constraints are going to be. I have so much freedom now and I'm getting ready to kind of wheedle it down.That’s it for me today. Thanks again for reading! Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to read a book called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt. The argument made in the book went like this: with the rise of smartphones and other internet-connected devices, there’s been a massive uptick in mental illness among Gen Z youth and adolescents. Haidt connects these two, arguing that these don’t merely correlate, but share a causal link. I saw a lot of really positive coverage of his book, a lot of really fawning praise for his work, but something about it didn’t sit quite right with me. It all fit too neatly.There was a review of the book published in Nature that tore into his findings, which I recommend people check out. I’ll link that in the notes here. But for today’s newsletter, I’m sharing an audio interview I conducted a couple weeks ago with Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, and one of Haidt’s more vocal critics.In the interest of fairness, I’ll also be linking to the original book, some of the more positive praise it received, and some coverage of the controversy it’s caused. I hope you enjoy this special audio edition of the newsletter. Full transcript included, obviously.Parker Molloy: All right, so it's so great to talk to you. And so I spent the past week reading Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation. And I really wanted to chat with you about it because I know this is a topic on which you've done a lot of study on, and I've seen your social media posts about it. And yeah, so the basic argument that he makes throughout the bookThe book is very repetitive. He repeats his thesis over and over. He makes the argument essentially that the rise of what he calls phone-based childhood, which he refers to as all internet-connected devices, has replaced play-based childhood. And that is primarily to blame for the Gen Z mental health crisis. So I wanted to know what he got wrong here.Siva Vaidhyanathan: Sure, sure, sure. Well, let me start with what he got right. Right. First of all, it's indisputable that young Americans, especially girls and young women, are experiencing higher level of expressed mental distress and emotional distress than we have seen in some time. Right. So that that pretty much tells us that something is happening in this country and probably a few other countries that is creating some combination of suffering we have not seen before and an ability to express and a willingness to express that misery. Right. So, you know, it's a weird thing to look at historically and height doesn't tend to look at things historically, but, you know, life for most people in most of the planet is better than it has been ever in human history.So in the long curve, you know, misery is down, but that shouldn't be a reason to not take seriously the stress, distress and suffering of so many millions of young people. Now, the other thing he gets right is at least in the American context, a steady change in tactics of parenting and the experience of childhood. That's well documented. You don't just need anecdotes to show you this. And it comes in many forms, of course, and it's largely class -informed. So we do see, and we've seen for decades, a sense of parents being both more protective of their children's loose time, right? And this can come from various sources. It can be influenced by the moral panic about drugs or the moral panic about kidnapping or exploitation or any of those things that has been circulating in our media for so many decades, convincing parents that they have to manage children's time precisely.You know, along with the hyper competitive culture that we're seeing among the more privileged classes in the United States where everybody's struggling to get into the same 20 colleges and everybody is trying to sign up for the travel soccer team. You know, all of these things have definitely shifted the practice of parenthood and the experience of childhood. Now, for people who are not privileged,Of course, we've seen the proliferation of demands on parents that take them out of their children's lives, right? So it's not like the free -range latchkey child phenomenon is gone. It's just alive among lower -income families and lower -wealth families, because of course, no one can afford childcare.No one can afford a nanny. No one can afford for one parent to stay home and not work. All of those things that allowed, especially the one parent staying home and not working, which was a luxury long gone in this country, allowed for children to have that space and that security. And so all of these things are long-term changes over four or five decades we've seen. So what happens in the 2000s and what happens to crater mental health among young people? Well, I think it's important to remember that when you're talking about, first of all, as diverse a population as the United States and as complex a question as mental health is thatYou should resist looking for one factor or even trying to isolate variables to find the main factor, the universal factor, the contributing factor. That is what leads us astray. Right. So this is what I think he does wrong. What I think he does wrong is he starts out with a very poor archaic theory of technology. And he starts out with an ahistorical approach to what has changed in American life in recent decades. But he still has this phenomenon that does speak to his thesis, which is that there is a demonstrable drop -off in well -being starting around 2010 or 2011, which is four years after the iPhone is introduced. And just as we start to see younger and younger people get smartphones or get mobile phones at all. And look, every child who has a mobile phone, everybody under 18 who has a mobile phone or has a smartphone has so for a particular reason. There was a conversation, they're expensive, there was a commitment, there were rules set down, there are reasons for it and there are often very good reasons for it. But collectively you do have this change.So he sees a correlation here and it's irresistible to him because of course if he can spark panic about this, then he can create a tremendous amount of attention and then he can be the one stepping forward to try to, you know, prescribe a problem. But this isn't going to help, right? This isn't going to help because the problem is complex.Let's concede that moving one's eyes from the park to the phone is not healthy. I think it would be hard to argue otherwise, right? We experience in our daily lives, it's just so obviously not as healthy as running and playing and playing kickball and softball and street hockey and all of those things, right? So at the same time, let's concede that people do engage with these screens and the apps on them for reasons that are important to them. It's not a default. People have particular uses and needs that they're satisfying by moving to these phones. So again, let's concede it's not great. But that leaves us a huge gap between not great or even bad on balance, and being the chief cause of this high level of distress. When a much more reasonable explanation, and I think a richer explanation, is that a number of factors work synergistically to affect not only an individual's mental health state, but collectively a population's mental health state. It's safe to say that there are people in our country in our communities who are better off because their screens, their phones, the apps on their phones allow them to build community, allow them to find people who have gone through similar experiences to whatever stress or distress they're experiencing, right? People who find mentors, people who find guides. This has been well documented among queer youth for many, many decades, right? Thatthat the ability to reach out beyond your immediate surroundings and find stories and role models and gu… Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

Parker Molloy: My guest today is Matt Negrin, a senior producer for the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. And just about the only person on the planet, I know who gets more irritated about the way politics gets covered in the media than I do. Matt, thank you so much for joining me.Matt Negrin: No, I'm obviously happy to have a contest with you about who is more angry at the media on a daily basis. It's a contest in which we both lose so full in on it.Well, I was thinking about this. So this is going to be the first episode of my podcast for the new year, because I had to take a month off because I was just like, “Why am I doing this?”I take a month off because I celebrate January 6th privately. And so I really just a full-on month of just remembrance.Yeah. Well, I mean, if Christmas starts in November, January 6th starts in December.January 6th creep is a real issue that we need to address, people are putting up their January 6th gallows way too early.So I feel like the two of us started the Trump years as relatively sane individuals who just happened to consume a lot of news media. What happened to us?The question is how did we become totally crazy while also feeling that we're the only sane people in a world in which everyone else is crazy, right?Yeah. Pretty much.To me, it feels like the beginning of the Trump years, or the beginning of the Trump term was like, okay, obviously this is a catastrophe, but maybe, just maybe our trusted news media will do the right thing and we'll hold this guy accountable. We'll check him, we'll provide a level of accountability that you and I haven't seen in our lifetimes really. And obviously, that didn't happen. So I think the ongoing frustration with that is what has, at least for me just made me question what is going on with this industry that I was a part of? That I spent almost a decade in, how did I not see that this was kind of inevitable? And then when I left the industry, I was like, all right, now I feel like I can talk about this stuff freely, which is kind of a bad sign that people in journalism can't talk about what's really happening.And that's been kind of the undertone I think of journalists will tell you privately in the DMs that they agree with what you're saying, but will never say it publicly. And that's bad.The Present Age is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.Yeah, well, on that sort of the same kind of thought, I get a lot of people who will text me or DM me to say they liked something I wrote and I'm like, "Cool. I would appreciate a retweet." And they're like, "Sorry, I can't."It's just, "I'll get in trouble if I do that." I've heard from so many people at newspapers and TV networks who say the same thing. And they're like, "God, you're so right. Thank you for doing this. This really needed to be called out." And my response is always, "You are totally in a position to call this out yourself." And they all say, "Ah, you know I can't do that." And it's like, “ha ha.” Yeah. Well, that's fun. Thanks for your help. But I'm just going to sit back and let this profile of Greg Gutfeld just kind of go out and get tweeted about, and I won't do anything about it.Yeah. “I won't criticize it because I don't want to get in trouble with the bosses.”Exactly. I don't want to mention how we gave a platform to Josh Hawley. I don't want to be the person who does that. It's not my role. Yeah.So speaking of giving a platform to Josh Hawley and giving a platform to Ron Johnson and giving a platform to Roger Marshall and Rick Scott and Mike Ron, and all of those. So is Chuck Todd your nemesis? And does he know that he's your nemesis?Okay. The word “nemesis” requires the person to acknowledge your existence. So I think the answer is no, I don't think he has ever once acknowledged at least explicitly, any of the good faith. I would say criticisms about Meet the Press, but I've heard from enough people to know that like yeah, he's aware of it. They're aware of it. They're all aware of it. And one of the NBCPR guys, Richard Hudock has engaged with me on Twitter. So has another producer for Meet the Press. So yeah, they're aware, but they do not respond anymore and I think part of it is because they probably know it's not a good look to be fighting on Twitter. But also I think they know that some of these things are indefensible.So you can't defend Chuck Todd for putting Roger Marshall, who is a Senator who voted to overturn the election on Meet the Press. You can't defend that. It's an obvious message that Chuck Todd thinks it's okay to give a platform to people who tried to overturn the election. And that's simply something that if you're a good faith journalist, you probably don't agree with. So I don't relish the idea that there's a guy on TV who is my nemesis, but at the same time, why aren't more people talking about this? It seems very dystopian. I don't know. What was your feeling after January 6th? I feel like there were a bunch of us on the left who were saying we have to hold these people accountable by not giving them platforms or at least by branding them explicitly every time they're mentioned or on the air with a reminder that they did this thing. Right. Do you remember that feeling?Oh yeah. I mean, I wrote an article for Media Matters in December 2020. So it was before January 6th where I was just like, “What they have done is an unacceptable attack on democracy, et cetera, et cetera.” And yeah, so then of course, then January 6th happens and the-You brought up Mike Braun, that's a triggering person for me because I remember in December, I think it was December 6th, I hope I'm right about that. I'm going to Google it real quick because I'm pretty sure I'm right. I've just ingrained all this stuff into my f*****g head. Yeah. December 6th, 2020, Mike Braun was on ABC's This Week and he floated this conspiracy theory that boxes of ballots were being hidden under a desk in some state and that there was a video showing how the Democrats were trying to steal the election. So this is a month after the election. It's, I guess three weeks after Biden was declared the winner. And you have a sitting senator on ABC talking about this conspiracy theory. That is at the time, the media was feeling out this world, right?“How many senators are going to help Trump try to overturn the election? What is the line?” And Mike Braun was seen as a non-crazy Republican by a lot in the media. And then he goes on This Week and pushes this thing out. To me as a producer or as a host or as a person at ABC that should have been the cutoff line, like okay, we're ending this interview. And it just went on for six minutes. They didn't even talk about the thing they were going to talk about, they just talked about voter fraud and that's millions of people who are seeing that and thinking what is this video? What is he talking about? Maybe there is something to this. That to me was like, Mike Braun is not Josh Hawley, he is not Ted Cruz and that's kind of the point.They can all be pushing this conspiracy theory or different versions of the conspiracy theory. And the media is going to accept them because they don't have this outwardly crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene-ish stain on them. Mike Braun looks like an honorable person, but if you look at what he really does, he goes on Newsmax and talks about the same thing. So that's why that guy is very triggering for me. Months later you have Donie O'Sullivan, who I think is a really sharp reporter at CNN going to these QAnon rallies, interviewing people who are saying the election was stolen. And they specifically cite the thing Mike Braun talked about. So, this is how misinformation spreads. It spreads on mainstream media. And the fact that these networks keep putting these people on, to me, indicates they either don't know their role in it, or they're just totally fine with it. I don't know what another option would be.Yeah. I… Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

This is part 2 of 2 of my conversation with Matthew Sheffield. If you haven’t checked out last week’s episode, you may want to do that here:Parker Molloy: A lot of criticism of Democrats seems to ignore the asymmetric nature of partisan media. There's a massive right-wing infrastructure in place that can keep the same topic and headlines for an indefinite amount of time. This makes it easy to pick a topic re-alert invented to hammer away at for their own political goals, and I think we saw that recently in Virginia about critical race theory and all of that. And you have people like James Carville offering advice like stop the wokeness, but what he seems to miss is it's not Democrats who are pushing these narratives. If Fox News wants to spend every night between now and the next election claiming that Biden quadrupled everyone's taxes or made it illegal to breathe oxygen, they can, and some people will believe it and they'll repeat it.The Democrats who lost these recent elections, they didn't run on critical race theory or defund the police or anything like that, or LGBTQ issues, which, trust me, I wish the Democrats were as pro-LGBTQ as right-wing media make them out to be. But I don't know what they're supposed to do, or even more importantly, what legitimate news outlets are supposed to do to counter this. If Democrats weigh in on every nonsense issue that comes up... As we're recording this, we're in day two or three of them freaking out about Big Bird. There's a new target every day that gets thrown out there. If they weigh-in, they lose because they're weighing in on something as trivial as Big Bird. If they ignore it, it just builds up and so all of it's a long way to ask you what... How do you fight back against that when the infrastructure is so... It's a very strong infrastructure that right-wing media has built. You have Fox and Gateway Pundit and Daily Caller and Daily Wire and all of that; they keep bouncing the same ideas back and forth. Oh, commentary from a Daily Wire contributor turns into a Fox and Friends segment with that person, which then gets put on Daily Caller. It's this very incestuous, basically. It's an echo chamber. And people often talk about there being, "Oh, the liberal bubble, get out of your liberal bubble." That was something we heard over and over and over after 2016, and then after 2020 there was a big push to, "People have to get out of their liberal bubble," again. The answer is always people on the left need to do this. It's never people on the right need to get with reality. That's never something that gets brought into it, and that's one way I feel like mainstream outlets are failing us is that they don't realize, or they refuse to urge people on the right to maybe be less extreme. You hear after the recent elections, there's been this push, hey, oh, does Joe Biden need to move to the right? Has he been too extreme? He hasn't really done anything extreme. The policies he's proposed have generally been pretty well supported. There's nothing crazy in there, especially when you consider that when Republicans passed the tax bill in 2017, it had something like a 30% approval rating. It was super low and they passed it anyway. And it remained unpopular, but they didn't care.Matthew Sheffield: Well, there's a lot to unpack there.Oh yeah, I'm sorry. That went on forever on my end. The first thing I would say is that after Republicans lose elections, they don't think, well how can we move to the center? What is the message that we can say that will make people like us? They don't do that. They never do that. In fact, what they do is to say, "How can we change the environment so that our ideas can propagate better?" And nobody on the left does that. And part of that is why I started my website, Flux, to try to focus on some of these larger issues and larger trends. In terms of Christian nationalism and the Republican mind, I just did a long interview and discussion about how this works. The Left Behind novels. People have heard of them but did you know that they were written by the... from one of the co-founders of the Council for National Policy? No, I didn't.Which is a right-wing networking organization. The Left Behind novels are designed as political propaganda. That's what they're for; that's the point of them. But people just think, well look at this stupid moron Kirk Cameron movies and whatnot. Of course it's done. Whatever. Understand-Yeah, that God's Not Dead; that whole series of movies, too. It's all the same.Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, of course it's dumb, but you have to go to the next step which is what is the point of these things? Why do they exist? How many people are reading them? And in the case of the Left Behind, those things have sold over 100 million copies.Yeah. Which, in fairness, it's a cool premise for a book, but it's definitely... I feel like it's a cool premise that could've been done in a less super propaganda type way, which I guess that just becomes the Leftovers.Yeah, the end of the world, Satan trying to kill everyone or the demons or whatever. Hell, that's every f*****g superhero.Yeah, it's true.Marvel literally has a god character, Thor, in its pantheon of superheroes. Yeah, it is a cool premise, for sure, but people have to understand what does it... The way that it's executed is designed to tell the audience who reads the books or watches the films or whatever that Democrats are the literal, not metaphorical, literal servants of Satan. Yep, that's... Yeah.And that reality that there are 10s of millions of people who think this. Have you ever seen that discussed on cable news? No.I don't think ever.No. And if it was brought up, people would get slammed for, "Oh, your generalizing," which, okay, but if one Democrat somewhere saying, "We should defund the police," gets turned into, "This is what Democrats believe," there's no... No one goes, "All Republicans believe that forest fires are started with a Jewish space laser," like Marjorie Taylor Greene said, but that's kind of how things are when it comes to you find one fringe-type character on the left and that becomes this is what Democrats believe, this is what the left believes.Yeah, or even in the case of Black Lives Matter, there were some acts of arson or criminality that were conducted, but if you act... I actually was watching the... I live in Long Beach, California; I was watching some webcam footage that people had, the public webcams, and I saw the protests. They were in an area and then they left, the protesters left. And then some people drove in from who knows where and then broke into a store. They had nothing to do with these protests, they were just looters and were not affiliated with the groups. But nobody reported that.Yeah. Well, and also with that, there was this narrative last year as that was happening, "Oh, Democrats support riots and mobs and violence and looting and burning," but I don't know, there might have been a couple who were outspoken on the more extreme ends of whatever was happening, but for the most part, Democrats were like, "Violence is bad, violence is wrong. No violence. Stop it." That sort of thing. But it's-Well, and then, yeah... Oh, sorry.There was this idea that Joe Biden was... these were Joe Biden fans. No. No one who goes and calls themselves an anti-fascist is a Joe Biden fan.They hate Joe Biden.Yeah. Joe Biden, he's the middle of the road. I don't know. He's, "Is Pepsi okay?" as a person, you know?Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.That sort of thing. He's no one's first choice. Yeah. But I would say, though, that, yeah, I don't think, though, that the mainstream media is adequately positioned to cover this. And Democrats and democratic leaders and funders and activists need to understand that the mainstream media will never be up to this task. There is nothing that you can say to them because most of them operate... Their training is basically show up in a building and try to find peopl… Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

This week’s podcast guest is Matthew Sheffield, the founder and editor of Flux, a new online community for progressive writers and podcasters. I was interested in talking to Matthew about his earlier life experience as someone who was present when right-wing media really started building the echo chamber. The interview went pretty long, so this is part one of two. The second portion will be posted next week.The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter. Please subscribe. Thank you!Parker Molloy: Joining me today is Matthew Sheffield. One of the first things I wanted to ask you is can you tell me a little bit about your connection to right-wing media? How it started, what you did, how your views changed over time, how your involvement changed over time. You offered to share the tale of your exit from the world of right-wing media and I would absolutely love to hear it.Matthew Sheffield: Okay, all right. Well, my background is I was raised as a Fundamentalist Mormon, and Mormons basically, a lot of people don't know, but Mormons actually are the original Christian Nationalists. Mormonism was founded on the idea that America was the choice land above all other lands. That's literally in the Book of Mormon. And that Christopher Columbus was moved upon by the holy spirit to discover America even though he never came here, but... And so Mormons, to some degree, kind of created the environment then rubbed off on a lot of people. I was brought up in that environment very much to a large degree. I have seven siblings, and my family and I, we traveled all over America doing an informal ministry because Mormons don't actually have ministries; they're not allowed to have them by their church. It's a very centralized bureaucratic church, and so I was in that. Part of it was that we were so disenchanted with the regular Mormon church. It wasn't fundamentalist enough for us. But luckily, we were not into polygamy, so that was at least good for us in that regard.But I didn't want to go on a regular Mormon mission because when you turn 19, that's what young men are expected to do. But I was so disenchanted, I was like, "No, I want to do something else." And it was, unfortunately, a really bad idea in retrospect, but in any case, we started traveling around America playing classical music on the street, literally. That was my misspent youth. We did that, and in the course of doing that, for whatever reason... This was the pre-internet days. We actually watched the evening news on TV, and our family watched the CBS Evening News. During the imbroglio over Bill Clinton's impeachment, we decided that we thought Dan Rather... One of my brothers and I decided we thought Dan Rather was unfair. In retrospect, he's obviously shown he's a fairly progressive guy. But anyway, we decided we were going to start a website called ratherbiased.com, and it basically was blogging before there was even a word for it. We got picked up all over the place. I guess people liked it, or some people liked it. We did that for a few years until we got thoroughly and utterly sick of talking about Dan Rather, and so we quit the site in 2002 and we got so many requests to bring it back for 2004 from our... Because we left the site up but we didn't want to do it. But so many people were like, "Please, please bring this site back." And so we said, "Fine, we will." But we had decided at that point we're definitely going to stop no matter what after the election's over. Well, after the election was over, we actually kept going because Dan Rather had gotten involved with that document scandal where he used fake documents to say that George W. Bush had avoided the draft in the Vietnam War. I think that's probably true that Bush did that, but when you're using documents that were typed up in Microsoft Word and you're presenting them as if they were made on a typewriter, that's pretty embarrassing. Anyway, that just exploded in popularity. We thought, my brother and I, we were tired of our family ministry by that point but we had no way out to go and do something on our own. None of us had ever had an internship, none of us had any friends because we lived basically a nomadic lifestyle. We grew up in trailer parks and tents, so yeah, we had no network. I went to I think eight different colleges, and I have two other ones from my high school years, so I've got 10 universities on my transcript. Originally, we thought, well what if we had a website that brought together left and right-wing media criticism? We actually started recruiting a bunch of people for it, and there was a ton of interest for it and people liked this idea. We actually found... before they had signed on with anyone, we found Matt Yglesias. We also found Ezra Klein while they were in college and a bunch of other right-of-center people, and so a lot of people wanted to do this but then we got to the point where we realized, oh, we don't have any money. We can't pay anybody to do this stuff and we have no way of raising money. We're like, f**k, I guess we'll have to just go into right-wing media because we have no other options. It was a weird moment because I remember I applied... I had never even applied for a job before, and so I went up and applied for, I think it was Nordstrom Rack or something like that and they never got back to me, and I was like, man, I don't know. I have no idea what to do. My university people had no interest in helping me, and so we're like, all right, well I guess we'll team up with a media research center and start News Busters. News Busters was basically like a large format version of what we had been doing at ratherbiased.com, and they had apparently seen what we were doing. Actually, we ended up getting more publicity for our stuff than they did, and so we started News Busters. After that, it was basically the first-ever think tank blog publication out there as far as I know. And then a bunch of people started trying to get into that business as well and Heritage Foundations did it, and actually, Media Matters, as I understand, was inspired by what we were doing to some degree. And then I started a business basically sort of duplicating that idea. Had only Nordstrom Rack gotten back to you, this could've all been avoided. Apparently yeah, yep. We did that for a while and then I actually tried to do that... After we started working with them, the first day after we moved out... My brother and I actually had money, we could move out so we did as soon as possible. And I was 27 at the time, and we both... The first Sunday after we left, moved out, my mom had put up a paper on our kitchen because we were living together, actually. She put a paper on it for the address of the local Mormon church, and my brother and I, we got up on Sunday morning with enough time to go to it, but then I looked over and him and I said, "I don't want to go. Do you want to go?" "No," so we didn't and we never did. We never went again after that. Anyway, long story short, our faith in Mormonism and religion generally collapsed after that, but not our interest in right-wing activism. I, for a number of years, tried to make space for non-Christians in the Republican party. And, well, ultimately that was a fool's errand as I soon discovered. Well, not soon, I eventually discovered. I guess the big catalyst for that discovery... Well, there was a couple of things. One was that I kept noticing how people were stealing my ideas on the right. I would go to an organization and say, "Hey, I've built these things here that have millions of readers that are nationally known. I could do that for you." And then they would say, "Well, I don't know, I don't know," and then a few months later big fundraising campaign: We're doing this large website and we need your money. Of course.Yeah, and so that kept happening to me. At first, I thought, well maybe it's just because I'm not... I don't know. Because I grew up in a trailer park and I don't know… Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

Parker Molloy: Hello, hello. My guest this week, today, whatever, you're listening to this podcast is Michael Ian Black. Hey.Michael Ian Black: Hey.How's it going?That was quite an introduction.It was. I'll record something. I'll record something before this, talk about... I'll be like—You're making a big assumption that people are going to know what that means or who I am.No, no.That's just a giant leap that you're making.I'm going to be like, “He's the guy from that show Ed.”“He's that guy that maybe you saw on TV several years ago.”“Did you have VH1 in the early 2000s?”“That's right. Then you know my next guest.”Yes. That will be the intro I'll record. Yeah. So thanks so much for taking the time to chat with me for this podcast, which will be listened to by tens of people. Maybe hundreds if we're lucky.Well, that's more than come to my comedy shows lately, so I'm thrilled.Yeah. Which kind of leads me into what I wanted to chat with you about. So my podcast and newsletter are both about communication. That's just the general idea, which is great for me because it gives me the opportunity to talk about pretty much anything, because pretty much anything falls under the category of communication. But specifically I have been really interested in stories about how the pandemic has forced people to change how they communicate. For instance, pandemic's caused a lot of people to recalibrate how they interact with the world. You've got bands forced to put off touring and instead trying to sell tickets to livestream concerts, reporters had to rethink news gathering to account for a world where people isolated themselves away from society and just ate up whatever the Facebook algorithm gave them that day. How has the pandemic affected your work, and your ability to work, for that matter?Well, it devastated it. My main sources of income are acting, performing, and I guess those are my two main sources of income. So showbiz shut down, venues closed, and so there was a year and change where it was very, very difficult for me to make any money whatsoever. I joined Cameo. That was helpful. I made Cameo videos for people. That was my main source of income for 2019 and 2020, which, you know, that's not great, but it was a help.Cameo is interesting to me because half the time it's like, oh, that's really sweet. You got that celebrity to wish so and so a happy birthday. And then the other half of the time it's “haha, you tricked such and such celebrity into saying something coded and really weird.” And “tricked” is questionable, as it is, because some people just might be like, “Sure, I'll say whatever you want.”That's me, I'll say whatever you want.Anything.If you want to pay me 85 bucks to say, “You know what? Hitler had some good ideas,” I'm happy to do that.Cool.Whatever you want.That right there is just going to be my promo for this episode, just you saying...I'm service-oriented, I just want to make people happy.Yeah, I'm like, how can I get more people to listen to my thing? I'll let Michael come on and talk about—I'm not saying it's my opinion. I'm just saying you paid me to tell you, and I'm fine with that.But yeah, that's kind of the general vibe is just this idea that... Especially people involved in performing, whether it's comedy or acting or even writing. Your book came out last year, right?Yeah. My last book came out in September 2020.Yes. It was called A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to my Son, which you sent me a copy of that, and I read it, and it was great. And it was mostly serious, but also funny. One thing I found interesting about it was really just the fact that you focus on a lot of darkness in that book. I think you opened it with talking about mass shootings, right? Or something like that. How challenging is it to be funny in a world that is not funny, that has so much darkness; climate change and the pandemic and mass shootings and all of that stuff?Well, I'll take the question generally speaking first. Which is, I'll say it's... Humor has always been the way that people cope with terrible circumstances. Humor will always find a light through the cracks. It's just a coping mechanism, it's genetic, it's just who we are. The way you alleviate suffering often is just to make light of it, just to make a joke of it, just to flip the awfulness on its head, even if it's just for a second. So I think that's just who we are as a species. Specifically, with this book that I wrote, which does start with school shootings, I gave myself permission to not try to be funny. I gave myself permission to just say what I thought about stuff, and if there were jokes along the way, so be it. But I definitely wasn't trying to make it a funny book in any way, shape, or form, which is why the subtitle is A Mostly Serious Letter to my Son, because that's what it was.Yeah, yeah. Yeah, If someone bought that thinking they were going to get a lively romp of happiness, that's not-A lively romp of school shootings and the problems with contemporary masculinity, this wasn't the book.Yeah. That's not the book for you. Yeah. So that's interesting, just kind of how comedy as sort of a release valve to cope with things outside of our control.So comedy is just a form of creative expression. All art is just... I think it's all the same thing. It's all how we deal with the condition of being a human. It is just our natural impulse to create. We don't have a choice. It's just part of who we are as a species. So it's going to express itself as art or music or comedy, or whatever else. I was going to say architecture, but I don't think it really will express itself as architecture.I mean, it could. Did you hear that there was a recent that article about the billionaire who was like, I'll give you $200 million if you let me design it?“If you let me make a giant coffin for your students.”If I was really rich, that is exactly the kind of thing I would want to do. I'd be like, yeah, I'll give you money, ... if. And then just put one really strange condition on everything.“No, it's going to be a state... Look, guys, it's going to be a state-of-the-art dorm. I'm going to pay for the whole thing. The only thing that's a little weird about it is to get up and down it's chutes and ladders, and the chutes are all water slides, and they all end in a vat of hot chocolate. Can we just agree that that's okay?”I want to build Willy Wonka's factory. We can house people in there. Yeah, that's totally what I would do.One thing that I also wanted to ask you about, because you are so much better at this than I am, is you listen to people a lot on Twitter when it comes to... Because your comedy isn't necessarily political, but that doesn't mean that you're not involved in the world around you or anything like that. And I've watched some really interesting interviews that you've had. You went on Dave Rubin's show five years ago, or something like that, and had an interesting conversation with him. You went on Adam Corolla's podcast last year, which I mean, he's a comedian, but he's also extremely political. And you have these really interesting conversations where you're able to kind of diffuse, cause them to put down their defenses for a little bit, to have honest conversations, which is honestly lacking in now.Because half of the time if you watch Dave Rubin, he'll be going on some rant about how trans people are bad or something like that [Ed. note: in the off chance that Rubin or his fans see/hear this, before they respond, “Uh, he’s never actually said ‘trans people are bad,’” understand that I am speaking generally about his tendency to invite anti-trans people on his show to give them a supportive space to argue against basic legal protections for trans people — with virtually no pushback from Rubin; additionally, while he’s had a couple trans people on, they’re “pick me”s who’ve essentially adopted the right-wing stance on whether or not trans people should be legally protected from … Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

Parker Molloy: So you've been writing this awesome newsletter over on Substack, called The Sword and the Sandwich. Can you tell me a little bit about that?Tal Lavin: Yeah, so I launched, actually, this month, October 4th, and it's a really odd... It is an odd mix. Like, I recognize it's an odd mix. The sword is first of all, because I own a bunch of swords, and love them, but also, it sort of symbolizes like I'm writing about the American right and far-right, and then the sandwiches are very literal. Like, for a really long time, I have been obsessed with Wikipedia's list of notable sandwiches, which has hundreds of sandwiches on it, from all over the world, and I have wanted to address this in some systematic way. I love projects that have structure that I can f**k around within, like a sonnet.So the premise is I'm going through every sandwich on that list. It's very arbitrary, you know? Obviously a Wikipedia thing, so it's... But I'm treating it almost like a sacred text, and then going through it and writing essays, or interviews, or recipes, or stories about each sandwich. We've covered the American hero, the bacon sandwich, and bacon, egg, and cheese, and now this week, we're on to bagels, which is exciting for me, so yeah, this week's content is harrowing tales of child abuse and bagels.That's just such an interesting combo. And just to be... Like, those are separate posts. They're not-Oh, yeah, it's not-They're not one in the same.Yeah, so it's like Monday is the s**t that will horrify you, and then Friday, we're riding into the weekend--is the stuff about the American right.No, Friday is the-Horrifying bagels.No, I really aim not to traumatize anyone with my sandwich posts. These are nonviolent sandwiches. It's like I need the break, psychically. Maybe readers do too. Sometimes, it's really hard to shift moods, when... Like, the current series is about corporal punishment in evangelical households, and the sort of ways it impacts people as adults. So it's really hard for me sometimes, to switch modes. I almost resent it. I'm like, "Ugh, now I have to write about bagels," but then I spend an hour researching and writing about bagels, and I feel better, and then dive back into hell.Yeah. Well, as you mentioned, you published the first of a three-part series on corporal punishment, evangelicals, and the "doctrine of obedience," as you write in the piece. I found it fascinating because I honestly didn't... I've never really thought about the history involved in all of that. I'm used to people on Twitter being like, "I don't think it's wrong to hit kids. I got hit, and I'm fine," and then you look at them, and you're like... They're not fine.No. Yeah.No, it's like, "Oh, you think you're fine. But are any of us, really?"I'm not.I'm definitely not.I'm so not fine, and I wasn't raised evangelical. I'm a Jew, and I'm a childless Jew even, so it's not... I can keep some distance from the material. Well, obviously so many people shared their pain with me for this series, lots of different facets of their pain, their stories, how they're coming to terms with it, how they're healing, and to me, not to be melodramatic, but it felt like, "Oh, this is why I became a journalist," and like, I have to hold this pain gently, and treat it well, and treat it as the sacred trust it is. I mean, I don't believe in any god, but whatever. Sometimes I think of things as holy or sacred, as just a stronger word for like really important. Feels necessary.I've been astounded at the response. I mean, I tried to... I have a tic about historical research. Like, almost every piece I've ever written has some element of history in it. I also dove a ton into primary sources for this piece, which in this case was Christian parenting guides, of which I read big swaths or the entirety of like three or four books, and then tons of people's testimony about how these doctrines affected them.And then, I looked at what's the historical context? Like, why did all these books start getting written in the '70s and updated in the '90s? I mean, corporal punishment obviously has been around forever, but like, corporal punishment as sort of a political necessity and as a theological doctrine really arose as like... and the evidence is pretty clear, in the books themselves, and also in like the historical record, that they arose as basically a backlash, both to the work of Dr. Spock, who wrote Baby and Child Care, and he was super popular, and everyone loved him, and he was also an antiwar activist in his later years, and got arrested protesting Vietnam. And he said don't hit your kids, right?It's hard to overstate how much these authors hate Dr. Spock. Like, they hate him. They think he sucks, and he's the reason everything's wrong, but anyway, you have this Dr. Spock influence telling you not to hit your kids, and then essentially what these books posit, or what they feel they're reacting to is like, a lot of the movements in the '60s were student-led. The antiwar movement, the gay rights movement was a youth-led thing in many cases, or perceived as a youth-led movement, the feminist movement was really led by young women, and the sort of curative, the corrective force is writing these books.James Dobson, of Focus on the Family fame, his first book was called Dare to Discipline, like he's like, "We're fighting against this godless heathens that tell us not to hit our kids." So basically, they're saying chaos and social disorder starts in the home, and you have to hit your kids to get them in line.I cannot wait to read the second and third piece of this, because the first one is great. It really starts to get into Dobson, and The Pearls, and all of that stuff, and the responses have been heartbreaking, that I've seen from people, where they are talking about how it affected them on a personal level, and on one hand, it's amazing that the story has resonated with that many people, and that that's clearly captured what they're feeling and what they're going through, and I mean, that's just you being a great writer, and interviewer, and researcher. I mean, beyond that, it's just so profoundly sad that there are so many people in this world who have been hurt in that sort of way. They haven't felt able to express these ideas themselves, for fear of backlash or for fear of coming off as weak. That was another thing that I saw in some of the replies here, but-Or because they were taught that it was holy, that it was ordained by God, and a lot of the people, the people who spoke to me, have left evangelicalism. There's a process, it's like a very common term, and sort of ex-evangelicals. Basically, it's just calling it deconstruction, sort of tearing down the doctrines you were raised up with and figuring out a new way forward, and I really applaud people who are doing that work. It's very difficult. It's very painful.My Substack's really new. Like, I have 3,000 subscribers. It's small. The post, as of now, it's been out for less than two days, and it's gotten 50,000 views almost. I think to me, that's just an indicator of how it resonates, how people... I mean, first of all, I think there are a lot of outsiders who are sort of horrified, and then there are a lot of people who are like, "This was my childhood. I've never heard it discussed this way. I've never connected these dots." And the heartbreaking thing is like people are so grateful, grateful, that someone cares, anyone, about what happened to them. Generations of kids, generations. Like, the people who talked to me ranged from 22 to 65. It's very much a live issue, and it's still happening, although spanking is, thankfully...I hate the term spanking, actually, because spanking, I think has a lovely place in kink, but when you're talking about it in child-rearing, you are talking about hitting kids, so I've actually sort of very consciously, in my public speech about this stuff, stopped using that term, because it feels like a euphemism to m… Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

Parker Molloy: Joining me this week is Pete Croatto. Hey Pete.Pete Croatto: Hey Parker. How are you?I'm doing okay. I'm hanging in there. I'm surviving. It's becoming fall. It's getting cold outside. I love it.Me too.It's rainy right now. It's fine.Matches my mood. I love it.So you wrote a book about the NBA and how it became so entwined with pop culture. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and your book?Certainly. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I'd consider myself to be a sports writer. I mean, I've written about sports for years and for Slam and the old good Deadspin and Grantland and various outlets. But I've always been driven kind of by my curiosity about certain topics and yeah, and that's kind of kept me afloat, but I've never really been a beat reporter or a sports reporter. And I'm pursued by my curiosity more than anything.So about eight years ago... Wow, it seems like a long time ago, I wrote a piece for Grantland on Marvin Gaye's National Anthem at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game. And that piece was about... I interviewed 25 people and it was 2,500 words and it was a piece I'm very proud of and it's still on the Grantland site. But in writing and reporting that story, there were just a lot of unanswered questions. And the one thing that I kept going back to was how did the NBA get to a moment where Marvin Gaye went from being this scandalous choice, who does this rendition of a national Anthem that is soulful and R&B flavored and really is unlike anything anyone has ever heard before, where that becomes normal, where that becomes like where someone like Fergie singing the National Anthem is normal or...How did the NBA become the cool sport? That whole point in the market transition between the old stodgy NBA and the NBA that we see today. And I couldn't really explore that in a 2,500-word piece. And I kind of became convinced that this was a book. So through several years later and a lot of false starts and a lot of questionable decisions on my end, I wrote this book. But yeah, never really been a sports writer. I've been a freelance writer for 15 years now. I started off in newspapers and just by happenstance and good fortune, I got into sports writing.Well, that's cool. Yeah. I mean, I really liked your book because it- It really took this... Which, up until I've moved a few months back I had it next to my desk, but now I don't. It's a good book it's called From... I don't want to get it backwards. From Hang Time to Prime Time, right?There you go. Yeah.Yes. From Prime Time to Hang Time, to whatever time to... Yeah.The orange book. That's what I call it.It’s the orange book with the TV head and the dunking. I'll be sure on the transcript of this to include a photo of the book cover so people will know what the hell I'm talking about. But yeah. The book is filled with a ton of really interesting stories and it's something that I kind of thought about, but haven't necessarily put in much research trying to look some of the stuff up. Because I mean, I remember it was just... I mean, it seems like it was just a few years ago, but it's possible it was longer, where players would be fined for not wearing the proper attire to the pre-game stuff. It was very uptight and fairly recently, and now it seems like it's gotten to this point where the players have really taken it upon themselves to express themselves and to kind of ease out of that sort of era. What do you attribute to that?That's a good question. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that if you look at the NBA's demographics now, it's mostly African American. And I think as time has gone on hip hop culture has really become mainstream more so. With each year that passes by, it becomes more and more ingrained into the culture. And that's really what you see now is you see things that would've been, again, dismissed 15, 16 years ago are now just sort of... It's normal. It's the way things are. I mean, it takes a long time for things to become embraced into the culture. And I think what you're seeing now, again with the whole fashion element of the NBA becoming a very hip hop league, a league that isn't very suit and tie like the NFL. That I think that's a very much a reflection of who's in the league and also how the culture's changed.You made a good point just now with the dress code. I really think that had everything to do with David Stern being the NBA Commissioner at the time. And David Stern is a key figure in this book, but at the time of the dress code ban, I think he was in his mid sixties, early sixties. And he was at a time in his life, like a lot of people where you get older and you don't understand things. And when you don't understand your first reaction is to chastise or to ban, or to make a rule, instead of asking questions and understanding what the intentions are. To me, David Stern's failings as a commissioner kind of came to light as he got older. And he got older and the players kind of stayed the same age, they're all still men in their twenties and thirties for the most part and younger as the NBA draft became more about getting high school kids in there.Yeah. Definitely. For some reason when you said that, the first thing that popped into my head was David Stern doing Matthew McConaughey's line from Dazed and Confused. He's getting older, they stay the same.Yeah. I'm not going to even adventure to do impression of David Stern doing Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused. I have so much collateral as a public person. I'm going to make sure to stop right there.Yeah. You don't want to become known as the guy trying to do David Stern as McConaughey.No, nobody wants that.But yeah, I mean, so one thing that I do is I... A few years ago I started to get into video games again. Because that's the thing, whenever the world gets crazier, I pick up a hobby that seems to be from my childhood. I was just showing you earlier. Baseball cards, that's my new one. Picking up baseball cards. So a few years back, I just kind of on a whim was like, "I'm going to buy a Nintendo Switch because that way I can play games" because I was playing a lot of games on my phone and what would happen is I'd get popups that were always terrifying. It was always like, "Hey, Trump just did this crazy thing." And it was like, "oh no, that is not relaxing. I can't relax when I'm holding this thing that constantly tells me what's happening in the world."I bought a Switch. And then from the Switch, I ended up getting a PlayStation. And once I had the PlayStation, I started buying all the sports games as they came in. Madden and MLB: The Show and NBA 2K, that series. And so in the latest one, latest NBA 2K game, which came out just, I don't know, like a month or two ago. It's really interesting how the cultural elements plays into the whole thing. If you do the MyCareer mode. Yeah. There's this thing where you can do certain things and get points toward becoming a music mogul. Or you can do something else and, and start your own fashion line.And it's really interesting how much non-basketball stuff plays into it. But it seems to work. I mean, a while back, I was tweeting about playing it where I'm like, "there is basketball in this game at some point." But the player that you are in the MyCareer mode, it's like a guy who made videos and he's a YouTube star and now he's basketball star. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense because it's not actually a path to the NBA that you actually seem to take, but it's a lot of fun. And I thought that it was really interesting to see how that kind of worked in. One thing I have been thinking about, which is also kind of represented in the game in the sense that there are a lot of, really not so subtle, advertisements built into that like the dude who plays Jake from State Farm.I saw that. That was crazy.He's in the game. And he shows up several times. At one point he's in your apartment. You come back from a game and he's like at your table. It's… Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

On this week’s edition of The Present Age podcast, I chat with writer Thor Benson about some of his recent work covering mental health and the pandemic.Parker Molloy: Hey, joining me is the Thor Benson. Hello.Thor Benson: Hi. Thanks for having me.Yeah. Thanks for taking the time to join the podcast. I am very interested in some of the things you've been writing over at... I read the two pieces you wrote for NBC. Can you tell me a little bit about those and how they work into your larger work basically? Also, let people know who you are.For sure.I'm an independent journalist. I've been doing this for about a decade now. Started as a freelancer, have been a freelancer most of the time, but I've had staff jobs here and there. I've written for Daily Atlantic, Rolling Stone, NBC, Business Insider, all kinds of people. And during most of the time I've been writing, psychology has been a pretty big focus of mine, all kinds of science writing and tech writing, and neuroscience also interests me. And when the pandemic started, I was very worried about how it was going to affect people mentally in terms of being quarantined, and isolation is not good for people. It was necessary, of course, because it was God damn pandemic happening.So I was thinking about that a lot and I started researching it and talking to experts and writing about it here and there and then I connected with an editor at NBC at some point, and we were talking about different ideas or what articles we could do together. And I was like, "I've been really wanting to write this big all-encompassing article about the psychological effects of the pandemic, and I feel like we've been in it long enough now that we can have some observations." So I reached out to a ton of psychologists and finally found some that actually had data and stuff to share about how people are dealing with things, and it's really interesting. And then we parlayed that one into another one about people were being crazy on airplanes, they're still doing it, because of mask rules and I think just from being cooped up with each other and being stressed. And so I did an article about that too.Well. That's cool. So what kind of stuff did you find when you were talking to these people? Was there anything that surprised you or was it what you expected?I would say the effects of it were expected, that people would have anxiety and depression and maybe even PTSD from these experiences. What was shocking was how confident everyone I talked to was about if these effects would be long-term and they all seem to think for a lot of people there are going to be long-term effects that won't go away when things go back to, quote-unquote, normal.Well, that's something that when we were first chatting about this, about doing the podcast, you sent over your articles and I thought this is perfect because my mental health has been absolute s**t since the pandemic started. It wasn't great before the pandemic, but that's a different story for a different day. I don't know, there's something about just the whole world having similar issues that make me feel slightly better, but also really worse. It's that weird oh, I'm not alone. Oh no, the whole world is falling apart, that sort of attitude.Part of the reason I was inspired to write about this and why care about these things is because I've dealt with anxiety and depression in my life, so I get it. And so I wanted to hear what other people have to say about it and what you can maybe do about it. I don't know.So what can people do about it? Is there anything to keep themselves from stressing out too much?I could give my personal advice based on what I know of psychology. I think it's good to make sure you're not isolating. Don't constantly be ingesting the news and just try to have some perspective. I feel like things are better now than they were the worst of the pandemic. At least I'm vaccinated now, I can see people and not be so worried.I don't know about you, but I'm still terrified of catching COVID.Yeah, I definitely don't want to.I don't know. I see people post online, Twitter, being like, "Oh, got a breakthrough infection, this sucks." And then there'll be like, "Well, I was really sick for three days, but I didn't go to the hospital." Great. That's good. But also I'm going to do whatever I can to not get sick for three days, just generally speaking. In normal times I'm not going around licking doorknobs or whatever, just being like, "Well, what's the worst I'm going to catch? The flu? Meningitis?" That would be bad, but that sort of idea. And I understand that I'm lucky in a sense that I live with my wife and my dog and my cat, I have not been alone as so many people have been.And I even begin to imagine how frustrating and bad for my mental health it would be if I were alone. And it's something that I'm trying to understand, trying to understand how we communicate in times where we're apart. And that's one of the general ideas of the newsletter that I'm doing, the podcast, that sort of thing, how we communicate in times of hyper-connectedness where we're not in the same room, we're not in the same city, that sort of thing. And so can you tell me a little bit about what's happening on airplanes?So I've often been called overly empathetic. When I see people acting this way I'm like these are douchebags, but I feel bad for them because obviously, something's not going right with them. And so I was like, "I'm not going to excuse any behavior, it's wrong to be aggressive on airplanes, but I'd like to figure out if there's maybe a reason they're behaving this way."Reminder: The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter. If you enjoy this or other posts, please consider becoming either a free or paid subscriber:And so I found these two psychologists who had done a lot of research into how the psychological effects the pandemic were playing out in people's behavior and they said that, "Yeah, essentially when the pandemic started, it was really stressful and we didn't know what's going to happen and then it just kept going, and so we just had this acute stress response all the time, chronic stress. And so you're always on alert. You're always a little stressed out, even if you don't notice it. And when that builds up over time, people just start lashing out, especially when things like masks have been so politicized and everyone's it's us versus them. It's not surprising that people, when they're asked to put on a mask or something, if they have these views would get really aggressive maybe in ways that they wouldn't otherwise through a pandemic."And I understand that to a certain extent. I don't think anyone likes wearing a mask. Some people might not mind it. Personally, I don't mind wearing a mask because I've always worried about how my face looks when I'm in public.Try having a beard. It looks so weird with the beard.I like wearing sunglasses too, because I like people not being able to see my eyes. It's very strange, but the combo is perfect. It's basically being totally in disguise. I was thinking back to a few years back, I remember there were some cities responding to protests about... I can't remember what the topic was. I think it might've been Confederate statues possibly. I don't know. It sounds like a thing people protest, but there were some cities around the country they were implementing these rules that banned people from wearing masks for a while, which is funny in hindsight where it's now we're like, "No, no, no, please wear a mask. Please cover your face, please don't let us see who you are." But that's interesting.And one thing I've also been thinking a lot about when it comes to the pandemic and how we're adapting to all sorts of things, even just on my end, we got a puppy in January 2020, and so it wasn't the plan for us to be constantly around. And now he has these extreme separation anxiety issues where we have to make a point of leaving… Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe

My guest on this week’s podcast is singer-songwriter and [checks notes] king of Halloween Nick Lutsko. I’m really excited for this episode, and I highly recommend checking out the audio version if you can, as there are a few song clips in there (as well as a live/acoustic version of one of Nick’s songs at the very end).You can follow Nick on Twitter at @NickLutsko. His Patreon can be found here, his Bandcamp here, and his YouTube channel here.As always, if you enjoy the podcast and/or the newsletter, please consider subscribing and sharing my work on social media. There are free and paid subscriptions available. The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter, and I appreciate your support!Parker Molloy: Nick Lutsko! Thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it.Nick Lutsko: Yeah, thanks for having me.So you just released the third installment of your Spirit Halloween trilogy, I guess.Yes.So how'd that come into existence for people who are familiar with the first two, but not the third?So, I did the first one mid-September of last year, unsolicited. This is the Spark Notes version. And the whole, I guess, kind of joke about that song was it's a theme for Spirit Halloween, but really it was more just a ploy for them to pay me for writing. The song was about my payment for the theme.Right.So, they reach out and they actually did pay me some money and they were really cool about it. And then they got in touch, said they wanted to do another one. So then after the unsolicited first entry, I did a sequel that they paid for. I guess technically they own it. And then they reached out early this year and made it pretty clear they wanted to do something again this year and they wanted to up the stakes. I think the language they used was, "How do we top last year?"Yeah.And my response initially was like, "If we're going to top last year, I think we need to get a significantly bigger crew." And when I say significantly bigger, that's more than me and my little brother who shot it. The first one was just me on my cell phone. The second one was me and my little brother in my house. And then for this one, I was proposing like, let's get a crew and a production team that can actually work on this thing and make it legit and cinematic and all that.And their response was sort of, "We don't want to lose the weird guy in his basement vibe." Which is fair. It might have also been a, "We don't want to spend way more money on this." So it just kind of forced me to get creative. At that point, I think I'd already kind of had the idea that I wanted to set the song as like, "We're coming out of the apocalypse," and like, "Things will return to normalcy," or not even that, "It'll be a utopia because Spirit Halloween is back."Yeah.And that was kind of the gist of what I was pitching to them. And I really didn't know how I was going to be able to shoot an apocalyptic wasteland in my basement, or I really dug myself into a hole because I wrote the song and I was happy with the song and then I had no idea how to shoot it. And I reached out to Brielle Garcia, who has been a follower of mine on Twitter.And it's kind of funny because she pulled my own card of me making stuff for Spirit Halloween unsolicited and she started doing unsolicited Snapchat filters for this dumb, fake gremlins movie that I made. And so I knew that she was way more technically savvy than I am. So I reached out to her and said, "Could you help me out with some of these visuals?" And I had no clue what I was getting myself into because she was able to do things that I could have never done in a million years.Sounds cool.So, yeah, yeah.How long did that take you guys to film and because it definitely seems like a larger production than anything else you've put out.For sure. Yeah. Well, I shot it all in my garage. My wife shot me in my garage as our baby was like chilling in a playpen in the corner. It felt very silly because I'm supposed to be interacting with this apocalyptic world, but I'm actually in my garage.And I have no idea if she's going to be able to do the things she says she's going to do because usually that stuff's done on a green screen.Yeah.But yeah, I think it was all done in about a month. I shot the footage in my garage. I sent it to her and yeah, it was insane, the amount of work that she did and how quickly she did it.That's cool.The way she explained it to me is, I think she uses video game engines maybe.Technology has just really advanced to where people are capable of doing things out of their bedrooms. It would've cost millions of dollars and tons of time, just a few short years ago. And I guess a lot of people haven't even figured out how to do some of these things and she's just on the cutting edge and yeah, it's pretty crazy that it was only her and I working on it and opposite sides of the country. She's in Seattle, I believe. And I'm in Chattanooga, Tennessee. So it was a cool project.Yeah, definitely. And I think that, because I was going to say, the first time I heard your music was all the Super Deluxe stuff that you did.Yeah.I guess, one of, sort of the benefits of Super Deluxe kind of disappearing or going away or whatever is the fact that then you kind of like, you were not just hidden behind the sort of the curtain there.Right.It was like, "Oh, hey, this is the dude who did the emo Trump songs or the Alex Jones thing."Yeah. Exactly.Because that was the thing. And I think it, that stuff resonated with me because it's like, so I'm 35, so the early-mid 2000s were high school. And at the time I was really into bands like Taking Back Sunday and Thrice and Thursday and all that. And there was this sort of holy s**t moment for me, where it clicked for me that Trump's tweets and sort of self-pitying statements were about being unfairly attacked and whatnot really read the type of the bands that were trying to make music like that, not them but the weird knockoff where it's like, "Oh man, you're trying too hard." You know?Right. Exactly.And from that moment on, anytime I'd see something stupid he said, I'd be like, "Oh man, this is like some kid with Hawthorne Heights lyrics as their AOL instant messenger way thing." You know? So I'm glad that that made it into my timeline because then that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole where-Nice.Then I was checking out your other music that is not comedy and-Cool.... so I was kind of, can you kind of tell me what are some of the differences between Nick Lutsko serious singer-songwriter and Nick Lutsko, weird guy in his basement singing about Spirit Halloween?Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question that I feel like the lines become a little more blurry all the time. Especially as we're planning live shows and it's like it's a smaller set of people, but there are definitely people who were into my stuff before I started doing these sweaty frantic songs on Twitter. And there's a subset of people who are going to come to the show expecting to hear that. And there's going to be people who are coming essentially only expecting a comedy show. And then there's a lot of people who've reached out a bit similar to you that said, "I really enjoyed your comedy stuff and I dove deeper into your other albums and I really enjoy that as well." So it's like trying to figure out how to frame both of these things and I wish I had a better answer. I think once we start playing shows, I'll get a better feel for how those two worlds can kind of coexist.I did this Vulture article. They did the premier of the Spirit 3 song and I said something like, "The shiny sheen of sweat on my face is like my Spiderman suit to my Peter Parker." And it's obviously just a dumb joke, but it's interesting in that, like even though I've done albums that are not comedic whatsoever. And even this goes for my Super Deluxe stuff as well, I think it all kind of comes from the same place. And it always comes from my frustrations with the absurdity of the world. And especially the last albu… Get full access to The Present Age at www.readtpa.com/subscribe