Ryan Cooper

Sorry for missing the newsletter last week! I've been working on my next Youtube project, for some reason I find fiddling with video stuff very compelling. That should be done in another week or so, and I am actually going to try to film myself this time. In that vein,

There are some whiffs of labor militancy in the crisp autumn air. John Deere workers just rejected a recommended contract from their union leadership by about 9-1, and unless management drastically upgrades their offer it seems a strike is imminent. Mine workers have been on strike for months in Alabama.

Apologies for missing last week, I left early on a quick camping trip up to Vermont and didn't have time to get the newsletter out. However, the video I was talking about some time ago is now finished. It's about how Lord of the Rings contains a vision of conservatism

One of this week's articles makes the obvious comparison between the 20-year frenzy of imperialist aggression in response to a terrorist attack that killed 2,977 Americans versus the grudging response to a pandemic that has killed nearly 660,000 officially and probably over a million people all told. It

The New York Times published a useful article on how a town in Montana fought back against a neo-Nazi hate campaign: WHITEFISH, Mont. — Richard B. Spencer, the most infamous summer resident in this town, once boasted that he stood at the vanguard of a white nationalist movement emboldened by President

I'm strapped for time and can't really think of anything for a snappy intro this week. Perhaps that's because the phrase "horse paste" has been bouncing around my skull like a handful of ball bearings. It's like every insane part of the pandemic compressed into one nutball story – the conspiracy

Without the Bernie Sanders campaign to give everyone something to focus on, I notice that factionalism and infighting on the left – a pretty bad problem at the best of times – is on the rise. The latest drama is over Twitch personality Hasan Piker buying himself a $2.7 million house

Matt Yglesias stirred up a good old-fashioned bloggy firestorm with a post snidely hectoring the left about crisis-mongering: "I think there are a lot of writers around these days propagating a fundamentally false and unsubstantiated notion that we are living through some acute 'global social, political, and economic crises,'"

The U.S. is once again in a strange place with the pandemic. Vaccinated states are experiencing something similar to what is happening in Western Europe – a significant wave of Delta infections, but with only a modest increase in hospitalization and few deaths. But in conservative states where right-wing media

I have some unfortunate news on the book front. It turns out that there are severe materials and staffing problems at the printing company that assembles the physical books for my publisher, and as a result the publication of How Are You Going to Pay for That? is being pushed

John Ganz and the Know Your Enemy podcast have discussions of the legacy of the January 6 putsch that are worth checking out. A good background for the discussion is this New York Times video that I've screenshotted above. Ganz, who knows French history a lot better than I do,

I've been down on a small peninsula on the Alabama shore across the bay from Mobile for the last week. It's been a great time despite an initial torrential downpour that put a foot of water over the roads in some places. It doesn't seem like a place that is