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3 days ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
At this point my feelings on AI, or “AI,” are pretty plain.
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4 days ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
This is the kind of piece a certain slice of my readers loves to complain about, calling it of interest only to overeducated people in a small sector of the economy.
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1 week ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
I think I’ve told this story before, but it’s a useful one, so here goes again. My early-to-mid 20s-era girlfriend was from the northern section of a seaside town here in Connecticut. Her parents, who were affluent but not rich, lived in a lovely little house by a lake.
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1 week ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
Essayists are pack animals; journalists move in herds. There’s a reason that, for example, the mid-2000s saw the publication of a truly exhausting number of pieces that took the thesis “Selling out is good,” all of which were written as if to imply that their authors were the first to settle on that little pearl of wisdom. (It didn’t help that they were wrong; selling out is in fact still bad.) There’s a reason that “Is monogamy realistic???
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2 weeks ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
Somebody sent me this video clip of a Semafor podcast where Ben Smith and Max Tani interview GQ staff writer Chris Black, in which Black assures our hosts that institutional media is still very punk rock. I’m afraid though that Substack isn’t cool, or so says Black. It happens that I agree - Substack is many things, but cool is nowhere on the list - but then again perhaps Ben Smith’s media insider grabass podcast is not the glass house from which one should throw such stones.
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2 weeks ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
Preordermyforthcomingnovel, or die. There wasn’t a formal call for this roundup of reader questions, or anything. It’s just that I’m averaging about two hours of sleep a night right now and I’m struggling both to find time to write and to process anything with this addled brain, so I went through the old inbox and found some questions I felt like answering to make life a little easier on myself today.
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3 weeks ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
I spend a lot of time arguing that the American left is too concerned with symbolic and artistic victories and insufficiently devoted to basic material needs. It’s not like I don’t value those symbolic and artistic victories at all; it’s just a matter of proportion and strategy. One reason that left-leaning people tend to be fixated on industries like Hollywood, academia, media, the nonprofit sector, and similar is that those are the areas where they exert an unusual level of control.
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3 weeks ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
Hello folks! Here’s the latest bimonthly roundup of writing written by subscribers, for the month of May 2025. Readers, please take a little time and see if any of these descriptions appeals to you. I’ve discovered so much great writing through these roundups, and many who submit things report that they’ve gotten a lot of readers this way. If you aren’t a subscriber and you want to take part in this opportunity in July, you know what to do.
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3 weeks ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
This weekend I read Jamie Hood’s new book Trauma Plot: A Life. The book combines memoir and literary criticism, using real horrific experiences to examine how we should think about the deployment of such experiences in our narrative art and criticism.I struggle to define exactly how I feel about it, as a book, because it’s so openly meta-discursive - that is to say, it’s a book written to be in conversation with the culture, in part by being about the conversation.
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1 month ago | 
freddiedeboer.substack.com | Freddie deBoer
I recently appeared on the podcast of the excellent addiction & recovery newsletter The Small Bow, check it out. Awhile back a reader sent me this commercial for Parkinson’s disease. I know that sounds weird, a commercial for Parkinson’s, but it honestly plays as exactly that, an advertisement fora devastating, degenerative neurological condition that not only robs people of their mobility but also is known to induce dementia and severe depression.