January 1, 2026

Jan 01, 2026

Good morning. At some point in the last six years, you made one of the many decisions of your life and subscribed to this newsletter. Great choice.

If you’ve been an avid reader, you almost certainly noticed that I took a break during the final couple months of 2025. That’s because my wife and I had a baby. Both are healthy, and we’re as happy as we are tired. So: Extremely, dangerously happy.

I believe that living, breathing, crying, laughing, being with others, being by yourself, being scared, being helpful, being angry, being annoyed, being honest, being happy—being, as a whole entire person, is core to the creative process. In that sense, I never stopped writing. I just stopped writing things down.

That’s not entirely true. I’ve kept a journal. Sporadic, inconsistent, and with chicken scratch handwriting, but as Calvin Tomkins puts it, “I’m starting a month and a half in, because the journal idea didn’t come to me until yesterday.”

What a year. Can’t believe we have to do it again.

This newsletter (the one you’re reading, thank you) has taken a few forms over the years. For the most part, though, I’ve sent you satire. 2025 was no different:

I started off the year, of course, with a reminder that fact-checkers are biased against the things I keep making up.

Then I did my part to prevent the authoritarian tide by telling the world that somebody needs to do something—not me, but somebody.

Next came my first piece for The San Francisco Standard, about a brand-new way to put people out of work. I lasted two columns (widely read, my editor said) before upper management realized they were publishing satire.

Then I explained that JD Vance almost definitely didn’t kill the pope, which ended up being one of the most-read pieces of the year over at McSweeney’s.

A few pieces were sighs of relief, like when I pointed out that finally, the right people control our money: a person. Chris Duffy kindly put that one on his list of 51 Things That Made Me Laugh in 2025.

Some newsletters weren’t even satire at all, like my commentary on the myth of migrant crime. Others responded to those ideas and their fallout, like this list of ICE job postings for The New Yorker—apply here, bootlicking scum!

Of course, I invited everyone to my own military birthday parade.

I got to collaborate with the wasteland’s finest satirist Dennard Dayle on a look ahead at upcoming Supreme Court cases which was meant to be satire and increasingly looks more like soothsaying.

I even made it back into The New Yorker’s print magazine with my updated Elements of Style, 2025. If I manage to do that every single week this coming year, I can make a living out of it. Wish me luck.

What’s next? Seriously. What is next.

I’m going to keep sending you newsletters, sometimes satire, sometimes commentary, sometimes both—all when Baby permits. I’m also working on my first passion: stories, short and long. I don’t know if those will appear here, or if I’ll just write about writing them.

Maybe I’ll keep up the new subject line format, so you never know what’s coming. All you’ll know is that it’s today.

Or maybe I’ll turn this into some kind of lifestyle-influencer-tradhusband blog and write exclusively about cast iron restoration and the best ways to grind your own oatmeal.

No matter what, it’ll be something. Come along for the ride.