Everything, Everywhere. All At Once. [#157]

On managing the hellscape firehose.

Buenos dias from Mexico City,

I never want to leave.

I realize this is a newsletter of links, and many links these days feature just the worst news imaginable. Going forward, I’m going try and maintain a balance in Hu’s Letter between enjoyable links and the hellscape firehose.

At the same time, I think it’s vital to vote with our attention, and let me just recommend tech reporters as the sherpas for whatever constitutional crisis or death spiral era we’ve entered. Tech reporters have the firmest grip on what’s going on, because, as Delia Cai observed, “We’re seeing the whole “online is real life” paradigm play out in a near-total blurring of tech vs. political coverage.” Sources to read up on the horrors of this period are Charlie Warzel, Today in Tabs, Garbage Day,

User Mag

and Wired.

One more must follow: The one essential piece of writing about Donald Trump during his first presidency came from Defector’s David Roth. He penned “The President of Blank Sucking Nullity,” an exegesis on the one you need to understand about the man (which is that he’s an asshole motivated only by self aggrandizement), and such great lines like “his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude.”

We are not even a month into the new administration and the world’s richest man has been entrusted to enact all the pain on the world’s poorest people. Thankfully, David Roth’s sharp observation and perfect prose is back, to give the most cogent picture of Elon Musk’s unilateral takeover of American government. His new opus, “Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government” should be read in full. An excerpt:

The two capitalists currently working in tenuous harmony to replace the republic each have their own visions of how a state notionally run by and for the people might be made more like a business run by and for their own personal benefit. Trump's vision is the government as Mar-a-Lago, a gilded ballroom accessible only to dues-paying members within which those rich dummies gossip and feud and poke inedible food around their plates, pausing only to roar with applause whenever Trump himself does anything. Musk's vision of the state is more along the lines of the wreck he made of Twitter when he tried to start it over—a machine that exalts and serves only him, where service declines and subscription prices climb in tandem forever and any public questions receive an automated reply in the form of one grinning poop emoji.

The difference, this time, would be that no one can ever really leave.

Additional Reading

This reply all mess brought me joy. We think Elon’s teenagers are out of the Treasury payment systems now. Tariffs brought on an extinction level event for Shein and Temu. This stain removal hack actually worked and now I'm gonna do it all the time. Book on my nightstand: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Werk Werk Werk

The Japanese version of Flawless is out on Monday! And it’s delightfully retitled as: There are 1000 steps to being beautiful and I’m about to be crushed but I still believe in this face mask. The Japanese, as

Sable Yong

said, have a way with words.

We completed the sizzle reel for our fire aftermath documentary, which I may never be able to share if we don’t get the thing financed. But it’s SO MOVING! Trust met. Really hoping we can find the right financing for the film over the next couple of months so that my co-director Rufus Lusk and I can keep following our teenaged subjects.

My TED Talk, How Digital Culture is Reshaping our Faces and Bodies, is out on YouTube now. If you missed it on TED.com, now it’s in a more ubiquitous place. Please share with anyone who might get something out of it!

For the How Stories Happen podcast, I sat down with coach and writer Jay Acunzo to unpack and dissect the preparation, writing and behind-the-scenes nuggets of the talk itself. We had so much fun together, here’s the full episode.

IRL

• Houston, February 26: Launch celebration for The Bentsen Blueprint, a new podcast commissioned by the Bentsen family and produced by our production company, Reasonable Volume

• Dallas, March 4: Southern Methodist University, to give the O’Neil Lecture in Business Journalism. The event is free.

• LA, March 28: AWP Conference and Bookfair, for a panel on book promotion and marketing

And A Reminder…

Monday is my birthday, which is why a few friends and I are in CDMX eating our weight in tacos right now as we take in one of the world’s greatest cities. And just a reminder that I’m sharing my birthday this year with displaced and homeless children through The Birthday Party Project. The mission is just throwing birthday parties for kids experiencing homelessness. So instead of getting me a drink (aka, a $35 cocktail in LA), chip in to support the kids. THANK YOU to all who have already donated. Love y’all very much.

Hasta luego,

E