Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

Last week, The Atlantic published “The End Of Reading Is Here,” digging into the literacy crisis that has, apparently, arrived. To say that this piece detonated like a bomb among the pundit class, localized largely on X, is an understatement. Journalist Derek Thompson’s four-point summary of the article went exceptionally viral, which maybe proves the point of the article.

But, as Timothy Noah over at The New Republic pointed out, The Atlantic does this kind of thing a lot. Noah accused The Atlantic of having an “end-ism” fetish, estimating that The Atlantic has written hundreds of stories over the last decade about the end of everything from social media, to sex, to the rule of law, to the entire world, democracy, and even history itself. Noah admitted he used two different AI platforms for research, though. So, again, maybe the end of reading really is here.

The Atlantic might be right to use the same frame for reading as they do for sex, however. If only because both are topics that we are terrified that young people aren’t doing anymore. If I had to describe post-pandemic culture in America, I would say it was a borderline pathologic anxiety about what other (usually younger) Americans are doing — or not doing — with themselves and each other behind closed doors. And outlets like The Atlantic tend to oscillate between fear-mongering about sex and literacy whenever they want to frighten those of us who still do either. And, of course, it gets a lot of attention.

Fears of the “literacy cliff” have been growing louder and louder for the last few years. The New York Times recently said their newest pivot to video is a literal “race against time,” with assumption being that if they don’t capture the current transitionary audience who likes to both read and watch, they’ll lose out on a future audience who can only watch. And I’ll admit, I’m worried about it too! I also see all the panicked posts and articles about kids not reading in schools, people not reading words online, and just simply not knowing things from books.

Funny enough, former Bloomberg writer, Noah Smith, who is now one of the top writers on Substack, attacked the literacy problem from a different direction last month, writing a piece titled, “Does anything I write matter anymore?” I don’t totally agree with Smith’s entire diagnosis about what’s affecting his own perceived relevance, but I do think it’s worth mentioning here. He’s an abundance centrist, so he blames the rise of populism “on all sides of the political spectrum,” along with Substack as a platform incentivizing direct-to-audience punditry and, of course, AI. Because he’s a centrist, he doesn’t seem to think that he, himself, and, by extension, his writing, may be getting radicalized by the populism of the direct-to-audience platform he’s publishing on. Oh well.

As neurotic as I find all of this, I do think something has changed with regards to reading and culture. And I’ve tried to work it out exactly what it is here in Garbage Day and on my podcast Panic World over the last few years. My most reasonable theory is that simultaneous arrival of COVID, short-form video, the collapse of broadcast and cable TV, and, maybe, to some extent, #MeToo, due to it rightfully going after existing cultural power centers, scrambled a generational handoff that was meant to happen between 2018-2022. America got shotgun-blasted into a distinctly new era, full of new young adults, and now no one can agree on the rules.

All these pieces — from The Atlantic and elsewhere — about “the end” make this seem like a problem because of how they’re framing it, and who they’re framing it for. Maybe kids aren’t reading the classics, but look at the romantasy moral panic stewing in the background of social media. It’s a whole bunch of mostly men — who, demographically, do not read or buy books at all — declaring it the death of literature even though women and queer people are reading a ton of it. Again, like sex, it seems as though Americans have decided that the amount and kind of reading they personally do is normal and someone else doing it any more or less or differently than them is a social emergency. We may be seeing the end of certain kinds of reading, or certain kinds of intimacy, or certain kinds of culture, but that also means that something is replacing it. And good God do we need to replace a lot of it. If only to break up the corporations that dictate how it all currently works.

Towards the end of my interview a few weeks ago with Onion CEO Ben Collins we both sorta had a breakdown over nostalgia. We admitted to each other that we — two guys who have spent the majority of our lives writing and thinking about the internet — have completely lost interest in thinking about the past, or at the very least, holding it up as if it was somehow better. Things are bad now, of course, but things have always been bad and our work over the years kind of proves that. We are both desperate for newness.

I reached my personal millennial nostalgia limit in Portland in 2024, while attending the last XOXO Fest. The festival itself was wonderful and I had a terrific time, but sitting at a picnic bench on the last day, after a weekend talking about the internet, I came to the realization that every time a millennial delivers the sacred prayer of our generation — “when I was growing up things were better, we had AOL Instant Messenger and Neopets and Club Penguin and” — we were basically deploying our own version of Make America Great Again. You can only talk about the end of things so much before you have to eventually ask, “what’s next?” And that’s always a more interesting question.

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People spent the weekend waiting for confirmation that Sen. Mitch McConnell was actually dead only to be surprised on Sunday with the news that Sen. Lindsey Graham died. There are lots of good posts about Graham flying around — along with a lot of sex workers claiming they’re going to really miss his patronage. I’ll let you seek those out if you so choose. Here’s my personal favorite from yesterday:

A few hours after Graham got sent to hell, McConnell’s team posted a proof of life photo of him from the hospital. Which is very strange thing our aging politicians keep having to do that we’ve all seemingly just accepted about living in a gerontocracy! But because we live in 2026, there are also a whole lot of folks who think McConnell’s photo was doctored in some way.

The two main conspiracy theories circulating about the photo are that it was either AI or that it was a repurposed photo from 2023. Reporter Michael Rusch over on X did some digging and put together some pretty compelling evidence that the photo is real, however. Sorry to burst everyone’s bubble. The newspaper in the photo matches The Washington Post’s sports section from yesterday.

Again, it’s weird that we keep having discussions about whether or not our politicians are actually alive!

Decent-looking AI video has been around for a few years now and I think it’s interesting that so little of it is actually about anything. If I had to organize AI video slop into categories, I’d say there’s basically three kinds: There’s pure audiovisual slop, like Fruit Love Island, which is just meant to hypnotize people in their feeds. Then there’s what I’d call newsbait, or AI-generated topical content that’s basically the 2020s version of those old JibJab videos people were email each other. And then, finally, there’s AI content about AI. It’s oftentimes hard to figure out who’s making this stuff, but based on the research I’ve done, I’d say the audiovisual slop is made by content farms in the Global South and the other two are made by striver-capitalists and Elon Musk reply guys on X.

The most popular newsbait account around right now, not counting anything made by the Iranian military lol, is probably PsyopAnime, which makes anime trailers out of news stories that the most racist middle managers on LinkedIn would care about. And the new film starring AI ”actor” Tilly Norwood is supposedly about being an AI.

So far, the only AI video creator I could say is consistently making something interesting is Gossip Goblin, real name Zack London, who has been pumping out an ongoing web series that’s kind like of Guy Ritchie directed a Warhammer 40K adaptation.

What I find so fascinating is that this supposedly creative tool isn’t really being used for anything creative. I know many of you are shouting at your screens right now, saying, “yeah duh, Ryan,” but I think it’s important look into this stuff!

I just came back from London and while the Brits would loathe to ever be so optimistic, it does feel like they’re experiencing a bit of the same magical summer that New York is getting this year. Though, with some classic UK weirdness. Last weekend, London was cleaved into four spheres. England’s team beat Norway in the World Cup, London Pride exploded out across the city, My Chemical Romance played a massive three-night residency at Wembley (I was there for that lol), and the rapper Pitbull played in Hyde Park, where the Guinness World Record was broken for most Pitbull cosplayers in one place. The spirit of the early 2010s is alive and well in London, folks.

The UK is experiencing another Prime Minister resignation, but there is one ray of sunshine in British politics. Long-running joke candidate Count Binface — a comedian named Jon Harvey who wears a trash can on his head and runs in local elections — is running against far-right politician Nigel Farage in a special election in the town of Clacton-on-Sea. If you want to read more about why Farage has done this, CNN has a decent explainer for Americans, but he’s basically trying to get ahead of an alleged financial scandal. All the major parties dropped out of the special election, leaving Farage and Count Binface as the only two candidates. And Count Binface is doing quite well in the polls! Which makes sense, I personally love his promise to move the hand dryer in the men’s urinals of The Crown & Treaty Pub to a more sensible position.

I hate to suggest that you watch an Andrew Tate video, I really do, but there is a guy walking around in the background who’s hands and head have been completely edited out. Tate’s fans (who are almost certainly bots that he pays for who do not watch his content) didn’t notice, but the video escaped containment because his shirt is so ugly and now normal people are pointing it out. They’ve dubbed the mysterious figure “the headless hustler.”

While we’re talking about the manosphere, Clavicular went to Israel last week, where he was warmly embraced. That is, until he had a meltdown on Israeli TV and walked out of the interview, after the host asked him to apologize for listening to Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler.” Oh, also, an Israel Defense Force soldier named Shira Braun was reprimanded and demoted after appearing on Clavicular’s livestream in Tel Aviv.

And, finally, to tie a couple threads together, British livestreamer HSTikkyTokky, star of documentarian Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere, was chased out of a London pub over the weekend after the group of women he was harassing recognized him from the film. He insisted he wasn’t actually a bad guy and that the documentary was edited to make him look bad, and then started shrieking at the women about how fat and ugly he thought they were until they had to call the police on him.

P.S. here’s a pizza crime.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***