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Max Read
@maxread.info
13K followers 240 following 630 posts
http://maxread.substack.com
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maxread.info
never thought i would pine for skyrizi ads
February 9, 2026 at 1:04 AM
maxread.info
the "mac vs pc" consumer-ideological forumwars of the 90s should return with ai companies. i dont mean justin long and john hodgman, i mean bootleg "sorry i dont do chatgpt" shirts, freeware games where you can shoot dario amodei, that sort of thing. would be good for morale
February 6, 2026 at 4:01 PM
maxread.info
live with @lioneltrolling.bsky.social right now ! open.substack.com/live-stream/...
LIVE NOW: Read Max x Unpopular Front
Max Read on Substack
open.substack.com
February 3, 2026 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Max Read
jaspercwang.bsky.social
It's been really lovely reading all the tributes to Dan. Many people have asked if they can contribute to support his wife and son. You can do so here: everloved.com/life-of/dan-...
February 2, 2026 at 9:32 PM
maxread.info
one funny consequence of educational polarization is that dems become the party of sober experts and GOP the party of wacky cranks. this has been electorally bad for democrats but crucially i think it's also substantively politically bad. many experts are wrong! many conspiracies are in fact true!
seva.bsky.social Seva @seva.bsky.social · 6d
I'm convinced one of the reasons epstein was able to coast for so long is that for many sensible people including and especially educated liberals, viewing the world through a conspiratorial lens was always seen as vaguely distasteful and rube-coded
cajohnson-craig.bsky.social Craig Johnson @cajohnson-craig.bsky.social · 6d
as someone who pushes hard against conspiratorial thinking in my professional and political life, it is deeply irritating when, on top of the untold human harms Epstein caused, it turns out he was at the center of at least half a dozen actual conspiracies
February 3, 2026 at 3:32 PM
maxread.info
need to defend tooze here--all evidence suggests he is NOT a "treatler" but rather "upper west side guy who has never actually grocery shopped in his entire life," a well established NYC archetype which predates doordash by decades
surcomplicated.bsky.social Zoomer Antimillenarian @surcomplicated.bsky.social · 7d
Treatler-Stalinism is a real ideology and an actual, tenured crackpot historian (who used to be a quite good historian) is a true believer in it.

We live in some goddamn interesting times.
February 2, 2026 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Max Read
sarahweinman.com
Will be thinking about Max Read's essay (maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...) for a VERY long time.
January 30, 2026 at 9:39 PM
maxread.info
admittedly not the most important question, but what was the process by which epstein's emails were archived/published? lots of the weird typos look like OCR errors--were they scanned from documents?
February 1, 2026 at 3:08 PM
Reposted by Max Read
ryanlcooper.com
"the Trump administration is, as always, happy to make the subtext text: The penguin rocks because it’s killing itself in beautiful full-color video. Just like us." maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...
'Suicide rightism' and the penguin
Is it based or soy to kill yourself?
maxread.substack.com
January 30, 2026 at 7:32 PM
Reposted by Max Read
maxread.info
on the right's new pantheon of heroes: "sky king," killdozer, and that penguin maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...
I wouldn’t personally endorse it, but “The Flight 93 Election” has been useful over the years for understanding a rational core of MAGA. For people like Anton, voting for Trump is a logical, justifiable, even sane choice: the high-risk unknown outcome over the guaranteed bad one. I’ll admit, as an argument, it’s overwrought and hysterical, and in real life Flight 93 did crash and kill everyone on board. But it’s a metaphor, right? The point is that Trump offers a high-risk alternative to a deadly flight path, not that it would be cool and heroic to crash a plane in the middle of a field and die… … Right? Between Flight 93 and Sky King, the Republican Party now enjoys in circulation two prominent and horrible plane-crash tragedies as allegories for its politics, which seems like too many deaths by plane crash for a political party? And where “The Flight 93 Election” is legibly rational and defensibly logical, offering up “likely suicide” only as an alternative to “certain death,” the Sky King mythos reduces to no such rationality: It takes spectacular suicide as a heroic act in and of itself. The “Nietzschean penguin” wants 🫵 you to kill yourself Online, among the tech right and groyper true believers, Trumpism in its late stages has devolved into what X.com user @VivianKesandre calls “suicide rightism”: An ideology whose cultural touchstones and heroic myths reflect values not of calculated risk or noble self-sacrifice of literal suicide--pointless, sensational acts of total self-destruction. One of the striking things about Suicide Rightism is how soy it is, how mewling, wounded, and self-pitying. For all that Russell and Heemeyer are celebrated by their apologists for their (warped expressions of) agency, they are ultimately regarded as victims, men thwarted by an uncaring and corrupt society. The idea of many tweets about the heroic suicides is that you should be able to identify with them, and not as crazy dreamers but as depressed and resentful losers. The aspirational figures of Suicide Rightism are a guy so anhedonic that he felt compelled to leave behind his family for the sake of an hourlong plane ride and a guy so antisocial he built a tank to visit ruin on the local General Store. Fascism is a literally suicidal ideology, one obsessed with purging the body politic to the point of total self-negation. What’s funny about Suicide Rightism is how direct it is about all this. You don’t need some big theoretical analysis; there’s no level of abstraction to move through. It’s just pretty straightforwardly pro-suicide. I don’t think you have to be a professional psychologist to understand why dramatic, attention-grabbing suicide might be appealing to semi-employed guys who spend 14 hours a day watching Asmongold or whatever. Its promise is that all the pain and frustration you feel can be visited on the people you believe authored it--and then ended. Not to put too fine a point on this, but this is school-shooter ideology.
January 30, 2026 at 7:20 PM
Reposted by Max Read
albertburneko.bsky.social
great blog maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...
'Suicide rightism' and the penguin
Is it based or soy to kill yourself?
maxread.substack.com
January 31, 2026 at 12:01 AM
maxread.info
feel like “moltbook” is effectively “sydney 2,” insofar as:

(1) it’s genuinely cool and spooky, but

(2) most of the posts are the bots "performing" implictly for the approval of human readers, including a lot of confabulation, which we should expect because
January 30, 2026 at 11:04 PM
maxread.info
on the right's new pantheon of heroes: "sky king," killdozer, and that penguin maxread.substack.com/p/suicide-ri...
I wouldn’t personally endorse it, but “The Flight 93 Election” has been useful over the years for understanding a rational core of MAGA. For people like Anton, voting for Trump is a logical, justifiable, even sane choice: the high-risk unknown outcome over the guaranteed bad one. I’ll admit, as an argument, it’s overwrought and hysterical, and in real life Flight 93 did crash and kill everyone on board. But it’s a metaphor, right? The point is that Trump offers a high-risk alternative to a deadly flight path, not that it would be cool and heroic to crash a plane in the middle of a field and die… … Right? Between Flight 93 and Sky King, the Republican Party now enjoys in circulation two prominent and horrible plane-crash tragedies as allegories for its politics, which seems like too many deaths by plane crash for a political party? And where “The Flight 93 Election” is legibly rational and defensibly logical, offering up “likely suicide” only as an alternative to “certain death,” the Sky King mythos reduces to no such rationality: It takes spectacular suicide as a heroic act in and of itself. The “Nietzschean penguin” wants 🫵 you to kill yourself Online, among the tech right and groyper true believers, Trumpism in its late stages has devolved into what X.com user @VivianKesandre calls “suicide rightism”: An ideology whose cultural touchstones and heroic myths reflect values not of calculated risk or noble self-sacrifice of literal suicide--pointless, sensational acts of total self-destruction. One of the striking things about Suicide Rightism is how soy it is, how mewling, wounded, and self-pitying. For all that Russell and Heemeyer are celebrated by their apologists for their (warped expressions of) agency, they are ultimately regarded as victims, men thwarted by an uncaring and corrupt society. The idea of many tweets about the heroic suicides is that you should be able to identify with them, and not as crazy dreamers but as depressed and resentful losers. The aspirational figures of Suicide Rightism are a guy so anhedonic that he felt compelled to leave behind his family for the sake of an hourlong plane ride and a guy so antisocial he built a tank to visit ruin on the local General Store. Fascism is a literally suicidal ideology, one obsessed with purging the body politic to the point of total self-negation. What’s funny about Suicide Rightism is how direct it is about all this. You don’t need some big theoretical analysis; there’s no level of abstraction to move through. It’s just pretty straightforwardly pro-suicide. I don’t think you have to be a professional psychologist to understand why dramatic, attention-grabbing suicide might be appealing to semi-employed guys who spend 14 hours a day watching Asmongold or whatever. Its promise is that all the pain and frustration you feel can be visited on the people you believe authored it--and then ended. Not to put too fine a point on this, but this is school-shooter ideology.
January 30, 2026 at 7:20 PM
maxread.info
an administration of commenters maxread.substack.com/p/the-commen...
But even beyond the demographic specifics of early Gawker, to be a regular commenter anywhere1 is to constantly put yourself in a subject position all but guaranteed to develop the kind of resentment that powers Trumpist politics: Your voice is (literally) suppressed, made subordinate, often hidden; your intelligence and expertise receives a fraction of the attention of the glib P.M.C. blogger you’re responding to, whose attention and approval you both scorn and desire. Among the altogether too many “unfortunate and stressful experiences I had at Gawker that in retrospect prefigured the political dynamics of the Trump era” was the Gawker Hack, in which chat logs between Gawker writers (among other proprietary information) were leaked to the press, including one in which Richard Lawson (now writing the great Premiere Party newsletter) referred to commenters as “peasants.” Any sane person who has ever read ten words of Richard’s writing could immediately and easily identify this as a joke--but many Gawker commenters, paranoid about their own position relative to the writers, neurotic about their emotional investment in a site that mostly ignored their contributions, took real and sustained offense. For years afterward,2 commenters would sometimes refer back to the gag with geniune hurt, seemingly imagining themselves as the Forgotten Men of the Gawker empire (such as it was), discarded and disdained by the haughty bloggers. That was commenter resentment. Smith mentions that many Trump administration staffers and appointees are “people whose defining experiences in public life involved being silenced by social platforms.” I think just as important to the actual silencing in the self-conception of many Trump ghouls is the sense that some other, less deserving voice was being heard or elevated. There are obvious resonances here with the structure of political feeling that characterizes Trump voters in general. But it’s also basically how angry regular commenters feel about the blogs to which, for whatever reason, they’ve shackled themselves. I suppose my point is that one way of thinking about the Trump era is as: The commenters are running the show now!
January 27, 2026 at 2:54 PM
maxread.info
interesting thread/link here on sensei's tbird in the year's best car movie
shuadc.bsky.social Don Incognito @shuadc.bsky.social · 15d
Saw One Battle After Another last night and honestly really disliked it, but the car choices were interesting enough from a #weirdcarbs standpoint to make me seek out Max Read’s excellent take. Mostly agree, though two other thoughts (1/3) maxread.substack.com/p/the-oscar-...
The Oscar Should Go to Bob Ferguson's 1991 Nissan Sentra SE-R
'One Battle After Another' as a car movie
maxread.substack.com
January 27, 2026 at 2:18 PM
maxread.info
i wrote about the trump appointee who is a former gawker commenter maxread.substack.com/p/the-commen...
The commenters won
Which Trump administration official is a former Gawker commenter?
maxread.substack.com
January 23, 2026 at 7:38 PM
maxread.info
"podcast with joe mazzulla and liam rosenior" - a concept so powerful the fbi will show up at your door just for reading this tweet
johnspacemuller.com John Muller @johnspacemuller.com · 24d
We are witnessing the birth of an icon
January 16, 2026 at 2:44 PM
maxread.info
funniest running bit on twitter is "gentle r kikuo johnson new yorker cover drives idw and tpot types insane trying to interpret it"
January 15, 2026 at 1:44 PM
maxread.info
live now with @vinsoncunningham.bsky.social and @lioneltrolling.bsky.social open.substack.com/live-stream/...
LIVE NOW: Read Max x Unpopular Front with special guest
Max Read on Substack
open.substack.com
January 14, 2026 at 7:08 PM
Reposted by Max Read
lioneltrolling.bsky.social
going live on substack at 2pm with @maxread.info and a special guest
January 14, 2026 at 6:14 PM
maxread.info
things im learning from this tweet:

- everyone on this site was a really annoying kid
- really annoying kids today love newspaper comics too
- there was apparently a generation that preceded millennials, but they've all died out and little is known about them
maxread.info Max Read @maxread.info · 27d
why did so many millennials read so many newspaper comics? easily 60 percent of my reading diet in elementary/middle school was collected editions of calvin and hobbes, farside, dilbert, peanuts, doonesbury (!), foxtrot (?!?) and i know im not alone. historically unique phenomenon
markpopham.bsky.social abraconagra @markpopham.bsky.social · 27d
rather than talk about Scott Adams I want to talk about something weirder (me). Who else was really into Dilbert when you were 12. Who else was like, boy, I can't wait to work a cubicle job
January 13, 2026 at 5:25 PM
maxread.info
why did so many millennials read so many newspaper comics? easily 60 percent of my reading diet in elementary/middle school was collected editions of calvin and hobbes, farside, dilbert, peanuts, doonesbury (!), foxtrot (?!?) and i know im not alone. historically unique phenomenon
markpopham.bsky.social abraconagra @markpopham.bsky.social · 27d
rather than talk about Scott Adams I want to talk about something weirder (me). Who else was really into Dilbert when you were 12. Who else was like, boy, I can't wait to work a cubicle job
January 13, 2026 at 4:53 PM
maxread.info
publishing james pogue on marie glusenkamp perez in january 2026 should result in a fine and multi-week suspension
January 12, 2026 at 4:51 PM
maxread.info
I’d say a big thing we’re all learning from the pats-chargers game is that skyrizi works for crohns as well as plaque psoriasis
January 12, 2026 at 3:45 AM
maxread.info
trying to explain to jd vance why it's bad that renee good was killed by federal agents: ok, so, imagine that she was a squirrel belonging to an IG/onlyfans influencer,
January 9, 2026 at 9:12 PM