Matt Taibbi’s Ambitious Substack Adventure

I subscribe to Matt Taibbi's new Substack column and I'm a proud supporter of his excellent investigative and opinion articles. Today he announced that his Substack presence will be far more expansive than these columns. I invite you to take a look at what he proposes and to join me in supporting excellent journalism. Here's an excerpt from today's announcement:

When I first switched over to Substack, I had a vague thought of expanding. Ideas included hiring younger reporters to contribute investigative features, adding a video or multimedia component, and finally, using Substack to create a magazine-like structure in which the longer articles would be buttressed by weekly or monthly columns, cartoons, Q&A sections, and other (hopefully) funny or interesting items.

Beginning this week, I’ll be introducing most of these elements through a new newsletter called TK Weekly (which will probably be more like a bi-weekly, but call that part of the joke). Subscribers will receive this regular editor’s note in addition to the essays and reported pieces already being published on this site.

I’m not at the stage of hiring full-time reporters yet, but I’ve begun bringing in outside help on a few projects here and there, with the aim of eventually making this a space for writers, researchers, cartoonists, etc., to contribute material that might not have a home in mainstream outlets.

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Andrew Sullivan: People are Far More Diverse than Colors

Andrew Sullivan identifies one of the main problems with Wokeness in his article, "The Minorities Within Minorities: And how they can help us revive liberal democracy." This excerpt is from Sullivan's excellent independent Substack column, The Weekly Dish:

I see much of the woke left as deeply threatening to some of my core identities: their hostility to religious freedom, their redefinition of my sexual orientation into a gender preference, their instant judgment of a person by the color of their skin or their maleness. . . . Once you see everything through the prism of crude identity, and reduce everyone to socially constructed molecules in racial hierarchies of various kinds, this is the kind of analysis you get. But what these left and right-tribalists obscure or cannot see is we’re talking about a spectrum of countless, unique human beings here, with individual identities and views formed by a cascade of different life experiences and backgrounds. Things are far, far more complicated and interesting than these crude ideologies can explain.

After publishing the above I spotted Andrew Sullivan's tweet summarizing his article:

Minorities add complexity to America but America adds complexity to them in return. That's why many Americans of countless complicated identities voted this year as individuals and as unhyphenated citizens.

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The History of the Green Bean Casserole Using Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. And what about Jello Pretzel Salad?

Green Bean Casserole is standard fare at my extended family gatherings. I've wondered how it originated, and I now know:

The Campbell’s Soup Company had its own kitchen, in Camden, New Jersey, dedicated to pumping out recipe pamphlets. A home economist named Dorcas Reilly worked at the Campbell’s kitchen, and in 1955 she successfully devised and tested the infamous green bean casserole recipe. . . . Campbell’s now estimates 40% of the Cream of Mushroom soup sold in the US goes into making green bean casserole.

A friend of mine recently offered me a "healthier alternative" to the standard recipe for green bean casserole.

Next investigation based upon a tradition in my family: Jello Pretzel Salad. Here's what I found, from an article titled: "Why strawberry pretzel salad is the queen of all Jell-O salads":

In 2018, surrounded by full plates of lettuce, it is hard for us to image that congealed sugar and flavoring could ever be considered as a salad. However, these dishes continue to be a mainstay of holiday meals, barbecues, showers and potlucks alike. We have the Jell-O corporation to personally thank for decades of congealed and molded fruits and sometimes vegetables.

BON APPÉTIT!

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Trump Baseless Claims of Vote Fraud Constitute an Existential Threat to the United States

Eric Weinstein has never supported Trump. In a recent Tweet he has stated: "I couldn’t vote DJT because of the daily negative effect he has on our national culture." That said, some Trump supporters are among the many people who follow Weinstein (through his writings and through his excellent podcast, "The Portal"). Today Weinstein wrote a series of Tweets to Trump supporters. I don't know that Weinstein's fear about the football is substantiated, but it is something that occurs to me repeatedly and makes me nervous.

Even if misuse of the "football" is not a legit fear (yet), I do think that the delta between Trump's vote fraud allegations and proof of such a fraud is a well-substantiated existential threat, proof that Trump is willing to put his enormous fragile ego ahead of the safety of the United States. Trump is recklessly trying to stir up (through misinformation) a mob of 70M people in an attempt to circumvent the rule of law. How are Trump's lies on "election fraud" not treasonous, especially given that MIT studies have shown that lies spread much fast than the truth on social media?

I write this article knowing that many people on the political right are passionately seeking the reelection of Trump or at least they are passionately opposed to Joe Biden and the political left. I'm firmly convinced that most people don't support Trump because he is a "racist," as many of the left claim (any of us who actually personally know even a few Trump supporters know this). There are many reasons to be apprehensive about Joe Biden (I write this having voted for Biden over Trump, who I also see saw as an existential threat to the United States based on many things he has done over the past 4 years). Those legitimate fears about Biden (see below) are dry tinder that Trump is exploiting through his baseless claims of election fraud. This is a precarious moment for the United States.

Here is the dry tinder that could ignite the "mob" of 70 million. There are dozens of reasons other than "racism" that convinced millions of people to vote for Trump (or to vote against Biden):

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About Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in Eb Major

I just finished listening to Mozart's Symphony No. 1 in Eb Major for the first time. It's a very nice piece of music with some notable flourishes. Oh . . . and perhaps you don't know this (I didn't): Mozart was 8 years old when he wrote this symphony. This leads me to ask myself: "How is this possible?"  I have no answers.  It seems impossible. Here's the first page of the handwritten manuscript written by 8-year old Mozart:

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