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Jacob Bacharach
@jakebackpack
Novelist. Critic. Books about crooks.
Jacob Bacharach’s posts
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Only racism, denuded American Christianity, and good ol' American provincial ignorance keep the Save the Children moms from realizing that the adrenochrome factory is just some Tanzanian factory town where babies are worked to death to provide Nestle Crunch.
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I mean, did anyone pay attention to A Christmas Story?
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Ha! Yeah, I owned an 1890s rowhouse for 15 years, and let me tell you, everything sure was straight, square, level, and very consistently measured!
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Flipping through Richard Yates: "Ah, the masculine virtues."
It's incredibly funny that Harvard let this guy graduate with a BA magnum cum laude from its philosophy program and he doesn't even have a working layman's definition of "ontology."
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This is the dumbest political idea I've heard in a while
It's still hard for me, as someone who is deeply incurious about the world, to ascribe mental states different from my own to beings external to my physical self.
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It's still hard for me, as someone who has always thought the Bernie movement was dumb and pointless, to comprehend how deeply some people felt inspired by it at the time. twitter.com/bobbybaklava/s…
He looks like a guy who gets busted for running a child pornography ring out of a fried chicken restaurant in an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger.
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Well, there are few better ways to honor the legacy of Sen. Feinstein than having no idea and genuinely not knowing, so off to a good start!
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Exclusive: In first interview, Laphonza Butler says undecided whether she’ll run for Feinstein’s seat next year.
“I have no idea. I genuinely don’t know. I want to be focused on honoring the legacy of Sen. Feinstein.” @TarynLuna @hannahcwiley @latimes
latimes.com/california/sto
I know I'm late to this party but Mont Blanc is over 1,000 feet higher than any peak in the lower 48 and a train goes right through it.
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Before you make your high speed rail map, please just stop and take a brief look at a map like this before continuing
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None of the defenders of Western Civilization has ever encountered it.
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Man oh man, I sincerely expected an exceedingly niche 1970s New Hampshire libertarianism that has barely even managed to establish a regional electoral presence and has never mattered nationally to be the majority of Americans!
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It is now extremely masculine to believe in potions, poultices, and outrageous bits of wild gossip about merchants and peddlers and extremely feminine to get a master's degree.
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Moving to the least hospitable remaining land on Earth outside of Antarctica to escape the extinction of 99% of the human race only to discover at the very last minute that you can't grow a tomato.
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You gotta learn to recognize a subtweet if you're gonna put numbers on the board in the posting games, son
Excess personal savings have declined from a 2021 peak of over $2 trillion to under $200 billion and the cost of capital is higher than it's been since before 9/11, to answer any of your questions about current popular economic sentiment.
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There are 10 million French guys who have achieved exactly this look after consuming nothing but eggs, steak, mediocre salmon, and Côtes du Rhône for their entire adult lives.
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My man, activists have been trying to get Congress to pass federal abortion protections since Roe. The Freedom of Choice Act was introduced in 1989, and reintroduced 4 more times after that. Feckless Dems fucked up and failed every time, then shrugged and left it up to RBG, oops.
It is so funny that our foremost liberal intellectuals are constantly doing less honest versions of Trump's "and the wonderful masculine truckers with tears streaming down their faces came up to me, many hundreds of them, and said, Mr. Trump, how can you bring our country back?"
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Have we passed “peak woke”?
This is a question I keep getting. And there are some good reasons to think that it might be.
But I think the answer is no.
Here’s why.
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We take it for granted today, but a single fetus has more ontology in it than a peasant in the 1400s would get in his whole lifetime.
Becoming an epigenetic operator because I had an uncle in the Coast Guard.
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I only interview job candidates on Chaturbate and they better have a decent ring light, is all I'm saying
I wrote a sonnet about David Brooks getting drunk, alone, in an airport. (jacobbacharach.com/2023/09/21/bor)
Not long after it opened, we took my grandpa to see the Warhol Museum in Pgh. On the way home, he complained that he couldn't believe they'd "spent all that money, and for what?" We said, come on, Fritz, there must have been *something* you liked. "Sure," he said, "Leaving."
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Friends, I have written a villanelle about David Brooks's tweets, and his eternal soul. (jacobbacharach.com/2023/09/23/une)
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1:46
>> @nytdavidbrooks: "I screwed up. I should not have written that tweet. I probably should not write any tweets." #NeverTweet
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I'm a married cis gay guy, and I wouldn't give it up, but it does seem pretty unassailably clear at this point that Lawrence and Obergefell really did defang queer liberation movements in profoundly important ways.
The year is 1320AD. You just inherited the Most Serene Republic of San Marino at its absolute height of territory and power. What do you do to make certain it survives until modern times?
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The year is 2024AD, you just inherited the People’s Republic of China at its absolute height of territory and power. What do you do to make certain it survives until modern times?
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Okay but THIS is also incredibly funny and somehow perfectly summarizes the liberal mind.
I love the "Trump to visit Detroit autoworkers amid labor dispute" grafs in all the big papers. Just wildly silly. "Rommel to visit Allied forces in North Africa amid territorial dispute."
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I'm a firm believer that the true liberatory power of The Airport is to exist in a special zone where one can be an absolutely degenerate alcoholic with neither judgment nor consequence, regardless of the hour, but please, man, you gotta sit *at* the bar.
Is there a purer example of East-Coast geographic bias than that we all talk and joke so frequently about what a hilarious monster the odious Eric Adams is but so rarely what an even more hilarious monster the even more odious Gavin Newton is?
Seems strange that WaPo IDs the author of this curiously pro-crypto review simply as the proprietor of a finance substack and not as the head of marketing and comms for Sequoia Capital...
Starting to formulate a hypothesis for the most ridiculous, and therefore most likely outcome in 2024, based on Democrats' continued wild overperformance in special legislative elections: they're gonna miraculously hold the Senate and take the House but lose the WH to ol' DJT.
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Also: effective HIV treatments and prevention. But, I wonder if the health needs of trans people, and the increasingly routine legal denial of care, will have to become a similar ground of activist confrontation. Seems like they'll have to.
Autonomous cars are QAnon biobeds for people who got BAs from somewhat selective universities.
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self-driving cars are just wildly underrated.
An AMAZING technology is going to make a dangerous thing that sucks into a safe thing that doesn’t suck, and you’re all “meh”??
Still really the only Anglo newspaper worth reading.
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Fact-checking some dull bits of Elon Musk’s biography on.ft.com/3PPcx9Q
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Yes, there's a clear partisan sorting effect, amplified by media choices, but I think Dems are again falling to the trap of telling themselves a just-so story about an overall strong economy under a Dem admin that belies fundamental issues and will bite em come the next election.
90s kids *remember*
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Just had a quite emotional, personal conversation w/ ChatGPT in voice mode, talking about stress, work-life balance. Interestingly I felt heard & warm. Never tried therapy before but this is probably it? Try it especially if you usually just use it as a productivity tool. twitter.com/sama/status/17…
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We laugh, but you're really just describing Gore Vidal in his prime.
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So did Wallace Stevens, and he still changed American letters.
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Whatever, I love this guy, though. He makes Kyrsten Sinema look like David Hume and that's really the energy I want on a social network.
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I mean, and how are you gonna beat Trump with a message of "Our candidate has sexually reproduced."
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"Ah, the promise of Twitter, which scales worse than 1990s public access cable."
I am no Biden partisan, and I think he should be replaced, but still, incredibly funny to immediately recognize that you've commissioned a wild outlier junk poll but then shrug and publish it in the nation's second-most-important newspaper anyway. Journalism!
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Looks like someone's Twitter hiatus has . . . desisted.
I predict that "Ron Desantis was too much of a pipsqueak, gopher, and loser to torture anybody, get a grip" is going to cost him 5 more points in polling among the GOP's extremely normal primary voter demographic.
PATSY: Tone, thank God I caught you. Listen, our friend just told me, Jack Massarone, he might be woke.
SILVIO [muttering]: Jesus fucking Christ.
CHRIS [sucking a lolly]: This could be bad, Tone.
TONY: You think I don't know that! [pause, thoughtful] He did mention my "identity."
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As an Airport Frequenter™️ myself, the saddest thing here is actually that he is clearly sitting outside of the Bar Symon proper at one of the handful of tables on the far side of the railing in those little tiled al fresco-ish areas that shitty airport restaurants all have now.
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I mean, is a terrific journalist and deserves a ton of credit here, but the fact that no one noticed this after years of wrangling is... Something
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Which four characters from the Simpsons define your damaged personality
The Desantis campaign has better FX.
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I suppose that being very publicly individually racist to prove your underlying thesis that racism is purely personal and not systemic is a kind of strategy.
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Something I also think about is how Hardy is a buff guy in a way that makes him look actually big and strong compared to all the weird dehydrated freak-bodies in other superhero/action stuff.
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You people are insane and God will not forgive you.
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If you're going to construct a Dolchstoßlegende then you've got to find a better inciting incident than a rather more competitive rerun of Clinton v. Dole.
An exquisitely crafted Roberts decision that delicately pretends only to apply to Merck and a highly specific class of drugs and a marvelous Thomas concurrence that claims that any regulation of any medicine invented after 1840 is unconstitutional.
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They're gonna write more articles about Killers of the Flower Moon than Kraven The Hunter or Saw 10 too, folks.
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Treating the politically disempowered people who live in internal resource extraction colonies as if they're either the bad guys or don't exist.
Proving the value of AI by making a picture of a cartoon Ozempic Kardashian painting Dumbledore wearing an Emily in Paris beret.
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Partly, yes, but even if you ask in a more open-ended way and less suggestive way, e.g., "Will the age of the candidates impact your choice?" you still have no idea of the actual *salience* of the response compared to a hundred other possible qualities and characteristics.
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Reminds me, and you have probably seen me tell this story, of the guy at Hambone's in Pittsburgh who told me he was a vet and the war really fucked him up, and when I asked him if that was Vietnam, he looked at me like I was nuts and said, "Naw, man, the *Cold War*."
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What're they gonna do, support DeSantis? Scott? Hailey? Come on! Exceedingly unlikeable and uncannily inhuman. Trump may be widely disliked and weaker than in past contests, but he's won before! That's a rational bet, given the other options.
Where does the Times FIND these people? It's like when some backpacker stumbles across an assumed-extinct bird still chilling in the New Guinean highlands somewhere.
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We were both a little older, but you get the idea of the man.
G'KAR: Captain Sheridan, I have been reading your ancient earth texts, but can you explain to me: what is a "himbo"?
SHERIDAN: I really don't have time-
G'KAR: Did the Narn not stand with Babylon 5 in-
SHERIDAN [gives in]: Fine. Just...ask Ivanova.
IVANOVA: No. Absolutely not.
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Kamala Harris, America's greatest Husserlian.
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America's most unpopular party gets rinsed except where it runs America's most unpopular ex-president against its unpopular current president.
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Oh please. Lake Norman is NOT Charlotte.
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There has never been a cargo cult as powerful as the sunk cost fallacy.
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We can't. The recovery from our crimes against nature will be measured in thousands of years and there's no short cut.
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Lmao this is also basically true of Je Tu Il Elle
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I did write about David's moral journey:
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He needs to get about 30% more occult and he'll be perfect.
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Again, not to shit on the article! It was a terrific read! But feels like there's a lot of the "no one is talking about this" tendency involved here . . .
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You know, there is one drug that actually powers Silicon Valley that seems only to be represented by the general background color palette of this image. Strange.
I've found that when you challenge the YIMBYs on this point they fall back on a couple of reports that, if I read them right, don't so much say that new supply reduces the cost of housing as that it may have some marginal impacts on the future rate of housing cost increases lol.
After the funeral of a beloved grandmother in the village of C---m, Roth came to sit shiva with the family. They were horrified to discover that he'd brought a great honeyed ham.
Her son cried, Roth, how could you, she kept strict kosher!?
Sure, and look where it got her!
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Buddy, this is how Elon would respond in 2023!
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I mean, is it really news, in Italy or America, that pizza was a regionally specific dish until it came to New York?
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People forget that the Satanist who got Adrenochrome for Dr. Gonzo and Raoul Duke explicitly forswore pedophilia. "'Why would I want to fuck with children?' he said, 'they're too small.'"
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Truly the most evil words in the English language are "alumni network."
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I mean, what's even funnier is that you can *already* take a TRAIN from the West Coast to the East Coast.