If You Don’t Open This Email, America Will Be Engulfed in Flames

(Just kidding, it’s the Weekly Dingus email…or am I kidding?)

Welcome to the weekly dingus. The email where we make fun of something that is dingusy in the news or our culture. Then, I share some links, a drink recipe, and we settle in for a nice long weekend of self-care, where we ignore our slowly eroding democracy and the growing trash island in the Pacific Ocean.

This week, the dinguses are all those fundraising newsletters that politicians continue to send to everyone all the time. No, I don’t think the outlook on America looks great, but I don’t think Chris needs to send you five emails a day demanding you send him money and promising that democracy will prevail if he wins a seat in the Wyoming state house.

If you want to donate somewhere, I encourage you to send money to your local mutual aid groups.

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Dear Friend,

It’s your closest and dearest friend, a candidate you’ve never met. But I email you more than that Instagram company you drunkenly ordered a novelty T-shirt from.

I was talking with my gorgeous wife (who is absolutely fine with some light infidelity) the other day when I noticed that, oh hey, I don’t think women have reproductive rights anymore? UNCLEAR. Couple that with the giant trash island in the middle of the ocean and the fact that a lot of people in America don’t have trust in the electoral process made me think: AMERICA IS IN BIG TROUBLE.

WILL YOU HELP?

Send me anywhere from $5–$5,000 right NOW. We need it today. Donating to my campaign for county board of supervisors will not only ensure that America is not immediately engulfed in flames but that everything will once again be all right. 

We need you to act RIGHT NOW. Or America will SPONTANEOUSLY combust.

SEND ME MONEY and you can go back to pretending that our institutions aren’t fundamentally racist. I promise I will absolutely solve AMERICA’S PROBLEMS while working to allocate federal funds for that flood wall we were supposed to build over a decade ago.

I’ve tried running for water commissioner. I’ve tried running for school board. And time and time again, these attempts have failed. And did I accidentally do some light campaign finance crimes? NO. My intern did those crimes.

But I believe in you, friend. We can save America with my campaign.

DONATE NOW or, I swear to god, your cat [insert cat name] will get it.

Your friend,

Politician

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Further Reading: McSweeny’s did a send-up of fundraising emails. Honestly, they went first, so my joke is a rip-off. But so is this guy’s joke, even though it’s hilarious.

Jadrian Wooten @Wootenomics

Emailing my students like politicians email me

Runner-Up: 

Well, it seems as if Elon Musk bought Twitter. Which could be good because we¹ spend too much time on that hellsite anyway. And I don’t think it’s good for us or democracy. As Ryan Broderick wrote over on Garbage Day:

…when you combine a rage-inducing algorithm with a platform that incentivizes and rewards extremely quick and frictionless public posting, you’re going to get absolutely out of control behavior. Twitter wants its users to be as active and engaged as possible and is still trying to find ways to bombard us with as much content as it can. And in the process it reduces everything we post there to viral ephemera meant to be reacted to and torn apart by strangers.

People are leaving and if not leaving altogether, becoming less active and that seems good.

Sheila Dang @Sheila_Dang

NEW: Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - what it calls "heavy tweeters" - engaged on the platform, according to internal docs. It is the most important type of user. They are less than 10% of all users but account for 50% of revenue

reuters.comExclusive: Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents showThe heaviest tweeters, vital to its business, have been in “absolute decline” since the pandemic began, an internal researcher wrote. It underscores a challenge for Elon Musk.

But the real losers here are all those people who will have to actually cultivate a personality when Twitter goes down. Like, what are you gonna do, Trevor, if you can’t crib jokes you saw on Twitter during your Hinge dates? Good luck to you, sir.

Worse still, all those meme accounts that exist solely to grow popular by screenshotting other people’s jokes.

Even worse, all those websites aggregating tweets as if they are news.

RIP to the pundits who use someone’s dumb tweet to build a strawman argument and then fight that strawman in the pages of the New York Times. 

Just kidding. Twitter is an economy of sound and fury built on unpaid labor, and now we rely on it. It will last just as long as the trash-pile island.

This is the only time I’ve rooted for Elon Musk to ruin something. Set it on fire, sir, like those cars of yours.

Last week’s dingus proved to be a prescient pick. This week, during the Fetterman v. Oz debate, there was a lot of pundit hand-wringing over Fetterman’s stroke recovery and I didn’t care for it one bit.

And Now for Something Good:

This thread of good Twitter jokes was hilarious. 

Ben Collins @oneunderscore__

Okay everybody it's Zero Hour for this website, post your favorite tweets and give them a little kiss goodbye.

I’ll be in Des Moines next week on a panel about reproductive rights.

Check in on your friends. 

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What I Am Reading:

• This is an important look at the murder of Iowan Michael Williams. His friends and family say the murder was racially motivated, but police deny it. I think, too, media reporting of this story has been negligent and lazy—too quickly parroting the narrative of power.

• I loved this newsletter from Max Read about the late author Mike Davis. It introduced me to a writer I had never read and who I immediately loved.

• Lucianne Goldberg died. Her legacy as a literary agent and her role in uncovering the Clinton affair was maybe not so great. But I am not here to adjudicate her legacy. I have a story. Once, I wrote a profile of BDG Media founder, Bryan Goldberg, and people kept telling me he was related to Lucianne. So I hunted down her contact info and asked her. Her response was, “Never heard of this person or situation.” I love reporting rabbit holes. And while I was writing that profile, Goldberg called me while I was on spring break with my kids to yell at me about how I was not a good reporter.

What I Am Drinking:

I didn’t drink much this week. Just an apple cider from Wilson’s Orchard on Monday. I am exhausted. I am in the fact-checking phase of a big story I’ve been working on for the majority of 2022. (It will be out next week.) And I am excited to get it published. But mostly I want to fake my death and hide out in a cabin for a week. My friend Anna says that we should all get one free “sick week” where we aren’t really sick but we don’t have to work, and we just sit in bed and drink soups.

Instead of faking my death, I’m going to Dallas to see Maren Morris in concert with my childhood best friend and I am very excited. 

Water is the best drink to pair with exhaustion. But I did try Featherbone Bourbon Whiskey from Journeyman Distillery last weekend. It was entirely unremarkable. But a lot of other people who have better taste than me liked it. And by the time you read this, I’ll be drinking airport wine and napping. Probably at the same time. Are you reading this at 9am? DON’T JUDGE ME.

1. Me. I spend too much time on there.