Casting a Wider Net
Notable books, articles, videos, & podcasts from a variety of political perspectives
After the shock of the 2016 election, I vowed to start taking in a wider range of political news and commentary. For many years, I’d mostly followed elite center-left sources, listening to NPR in the morning and subscribing to The New York Times, supplemented only by a few alternative left and local news sources. In general, I ignored conservative media completely. Once I realized just how wrong the media sources I’d been listening to had been about the 2016 Presidential race, however, I was determined to broaden my scope. Clearly, the information I’d relied on was much more blinkered than I’d realized. I wanted to learn more about what the world looked like from outside my Blue State bubble so that I could see the bigger picture better.
Six years later, I regularly engage with sources of political and cultural information that span a much wider swathe of the political spectrum. That said, I don’t try to cover everything. For one, that would be impossible. For two, there’s a ton of content out there that I find shallow, offensive, or simply too specialized for my interests. In such cases, there’s no need to track it. Happily, though, there are also a lot of sources of political/cultural news and commentary that I find reliably smart, interesting, and worthwhile — many more, in fact, than I could possibly keep up with all at once, all the time. So I read and listen (I love podcasts in conjunction with doing chores, errands, etc.) selectively as I have time. I consistently try, however, to avoid confining myself to only one perspective, as I’ve seen how profoundly misleading this can be over and over again in recent years.
Listed below is a curated set of sources from a wide variety of points on the political spectrum (all U.S.-centric, to be sure, but that’s intentional) that I feel are worth recommending to anyone who finds the content here on Liberal Confessions engaging. Not surprisingly, many of these are other Substacks, as this platform has indisputably become the top choice for leading independent journalists. That said, YouTube, Spotify, and online magazines are also good sources. And of course, good books continue to be indispensable, as always.
Needless to say, I don’t necessarily agree with many of the takes provided — in fact, given the political range represented, doing so would be incoherent and illogical. I do, however, find all of them worth following sufficiently to have a sense of what they’re offering, and then selectively reading or listening to some of it regularly. Notably, the list below omits sources that focus only on one specialized topic (e.g., gender issues). With regard to books and articles, it’s also restricted to works published since 2016 to keep it more manageable. Of course, getting a handle on the historic political and cultural shifts we’ve been experiencing since then absolutely requires broader and deeper investigation. When it comes to recent and topical news, commentary, and analysis, however, I hope the following list offers you some intriguing and provocative options.
As always, comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome in the comments section below, or via email at carolhorton@substack.com.
Independent Journalists
Matt Taibbi, TK News. Formerly of Rolling Stone, Taibbi is now one of the most successful independent journalists in the country and the first to break the “Twitter Files.” A fantastic writer who’s truly committed to old-school journalism’s ethics and vision, he also hosts a weekly podcast with Walter Kirn that takes irreverent deep dives into recent news stories. (The podcast is for paid subscribers only — LMK if you want a free one-month subscription.) The mainstream liberal media thinks Taibbi’s lost his way, but that’s nothing but professional jealousy and blinkered projection IMHO.
Tara Henley, Lean Out. A Canadian journalist (ex-CBC) who couldn’t stand the woke BS that’d taken over her nation’s newsrooms any longer, Henley quit to become a successful independent writer and podcaster. Currently, she’s running an excellent (free) series of podcasts featuring interviews with other notable independent journalists and essayists who are also good to know about — I highly recommend a listen. Both as a writer and interviewer, I consistently find her smart, thoughtful, honest, and non-dogmatic.
Bari Weiss, The Free Press. Weiss made news in 2020 when she posted a public letter explaining why she was quitting The New York Times: Like Tara Henley, she’d come to find the woke takeover of the newsroom intolerable. Earlier this month, she formally expanded her Substack to become a new media company, The Free Press, which regularly features a wide range of writers. Weiss, it should be noted, is intensely disliked on the left due to her uncompromising (some would say extremist) support of Israel. Regardless of where you stand on that issue, she’s producing and supporting a lot of great work that’s very much worth checking out.
Leighton Woodhouse, Social Studies. Woodhouse is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Oakland, CA. By his own description, he writes a lot about “the two opposite extremes of American society: the professional-managerial elite (from whence I come) and the ‘lumpenproletariat’ — homeless street addicts.” It’s a provocative and, I think, highly relevant set of interests. And California is certainly ground zero (at least in the U.S.) for the interactive dynamics of elitism and marginality he’s investigating.
Glenn Greenwald, Outside Voices & System Update. Greenwald easily wins the prize of the independent journalist that the mainstream liberal media most loves to hate. Unrepentently pugnacious, Greenwald fights back with relish. While undeniably grating at times as a result, his takes are definitely worth tracking. A passionate and indefatigable advocate of free speech and opponent of the surveillance state, Greenwald broke the Snowden story back in 2013 and continues to courageously pursue controversial and often literally dangerous (for him, not his readers) stories.
Lee Fang and Ryan Grim, The Intercept. Fang and Grim are two left-wing journalists notable for their refusal to blindly toe the dominant progressive line. The Intercept is a non-profit news organization originally founded in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Laura Poitras, and funded by billionaire lefty eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar. Greenwald resigned in 2020 and moved to Substack after The Intercept’s editors prevented him from publishing an article on the Hunter Biden laptop story. While I think he was right about the editors’ lack of journalistic integrity in this case, The Intercept still publishes some excellent articles (admittedly along with a lot of progressive boilerplate), and Fang and Grim are worth following.
Progressive / Conservative Dialog
Krystal Ball & Saagar Enjeti, Breaking Points. Breaking Points is an independent news show co-founded and co-hosted by Enjeti and Ball. They’re an interesting team: Krystal Ball (and yes, that is her real name) is a former loyal Democrat, Democratic Party candidate, and MSNBC host. Saagar Enjeti is a former loyal Republican and worked for the right-wing Daily Caller as a Pentagon and White House correspondent. Both have abandoned their former tribes, however, in favor of a politically heterodox, pro-working and middle-class, pro-labor agenda. Krystal and Saagar are also highly critical of mainstream media on both the right and the left, and offer an interesting ex-insider perspective on it.
Breaking Points hosts a similarly structured heterodox left-and-right-in-dialog show, Counterpoints, featuring progressive Ryan Grim of The Intercept (see above) and conservative Emily Jashinsky of The Federalist every Friday.
Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave, Rising. Krystal and Saagar used to co-host the online news show Rising prior to going independent and starting Breaking Points. Currently, Rising features progressive co-host Briahna Joy Gray of the Bad Faith podcast (which is excellent, see listing below) and conservative co-host Robby Soave of Reason magazine (also good, see below). I like both of them a lot: They’re smart, interesting, open-minded, and fully capable of civilly arguing their very different, yet equally robust political views. (Available on The Hill or YouTube.)
Liberals
Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable. Megan Daum is a writer, podcaster, teacher, and convenor of The Unspeakeasy, a series of weekend retreats for “free-thinking women.” I really enjoy her podcasts because she hosts a wide variety of interesting guests and is an exceptional interviewer, asking great questions while providing people with plenty of time to flesh out their thoughts. She is genuinely curious and open-minded, traits that seem to be in tragically short supply among writers and journalists today.
Nancy Rommelman & Sarah Heppola, Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em. Nancy Rommelman is a widely-published writer whose work first came to my attention with her outstanding original reporting on what was really going down in Portland during the upheavals of 2020. Sarah Heppola is similarly widely published, and the author of a best-selling memoir, Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget. I particularly enjoy their Substack because they make a lot of the pop culture news I normally don’t pay attention to interesting. For example, I really loved Sarah’s take on the Depp v. Heard trial, which I had pointedly ignored until I started following her commentary.
Yascha Mounk & others, Persuasion. Persuasion is a centrist liberal magazine-style Substack and associated podcast that features a lot of interesting writers and thinkers, including Emily Yoffe, Danielle Allen, and David French. While I tend to be more critical of actually existing liberalism than they are, Persuasion is consistently smart, thoughtful, and worth following.
Coleman Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. While shockingly young (born in 1996!), Hughes is so consistently smart, mature, and insightful that his age is irrelevant (except insofar as it sometimes provides him with certain relevant first-hand experiences, such as what it was to be a college student at Columbia University quite recently). He has a remarkable ability to discuss even the most controversial issues in a way that’s simultaneously deeply calm and sharply incisive. Without doubt, an exceptional talent.
Democratic Socialists
Briahna Joy Gray, Bad Faith (& Rising). Briahna Joy Gray hosts her own podcast, Bad Faith, and co-hosts the online news show, Rising (see above). A Harvard-trained lawyer, Gray served as National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and is a contributing editor for the left journal, Current Affairs. An excellent interviewer who hosts a wide variety of guests, Briahana is also an important political commentator. In both cases, she manages to balance being curious and open-minded with a passionate commitment to the sort of equitable, class-based, small-”d” democratic politics that used to be associated with the Democratic Party — but that, as she regularly points out, applies no longer.
Adolph Reed, Jr., Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania. “Adolph Reed,” The New York Times reported in 2020, “is a son of the segregated South, a native of New Orleans who organized poor Black people and antiwar soldiers in the late 1960s and became a leading Socialist scholar at a trio of top universities. Along the way, he acquired the conviction, controversial today, that the left is too focused on race and not enough on class. Lasting victories were achieved, he believed, when working-class and poor people of all races fought shoulder-to-shoulder for their rights.” Naturally, this pragmatic viewpoint got him canceled by the DSA. “None of this surprised Professor Reed, who sardonically described it as a ’tempest in a demitasse.’ Some on the left, he said, have a ‘militant objection to thinking analytically.’” LOL and yeah. I’m such a fan. Read his books and articles, and watch or listen to his videos.
Jacobin (magazine & videos). From the website: “Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a month.” Jacobin’s lead editor, Bhaskar Sunkara, is smart, thoughtful, and (unlike most socialists) very interested in reflecting critically on the often beyond dismal record of actually existing socialism during the 20th century. Critics from the left often accuse Jacobin of simply being a 21st-century update of the sort of progressive liberalism that used to exist among New Deal-style Democrats — to which I think to myself, yeah, and that’s exactly why I like them, and not you.
OhioBarbarian’s Socialist Newsletter & Other Oddities. OhioBarbarian is a working-class socialist from Ohio who’s fiercely critical of corporate neoliberalism and the Democratic Party. His Substack newsletter is well-written, well-researched, and authentically grassroots. He writes from the perspective of both personal “lived experience” and socialist political analysis. We’ve had a few exchanges on my Substack comments thread and despite the fact that he identifies as a socialist and I see myself as a disillusioned left-liberal, our substantive views and commitments seem to basically line up.
Conservatives
Oren Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a policy institute that is seeking to develop a “conservative economic agenda to supplant blind faith in free markets with a focus on workers, their families and communities, and the national interest.” A leading pro-labor conservative, Cass is the author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (2018), a contributing opinion writer for the Financial Times, a Manhattan Institute fellow, and a Harvard-trained lawyer. Cass also served as the Domestic Policy Director for Governor Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. His new brand of pro-worker conservativism is similar to that of Saagar Enjeti of Breaking Points (see above).
City Journal is a quarterly magazine of urban affairs published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that seeks to “develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.” I subscribe to the free City Journal newsletter and regularly find interesting, provocative articles that I think are well worth reading. I also found Ezra Klein’s recent interview with Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam exceptionally engaging and think it’s definitely worth a listen.
Reason magazine and podcast. Reason describes itself as “the nation's leading libertarian magazine” and I’m sure this must be true. While I’m not a libertarian (particularly on economic issues), I appreciate and support their strong commitment to civil rights and civil liberties. On certain topics I’m quite interested in, like how Title IX ran horrifically off the rails under the Obama Administration, they consistently have excellent coverage. Reason prides itself on working outside “the left/right echo chamber,” and I think they do this quite successfully. It’s refreshing to listen to people who follow the news carefully but put no stock in the favored narratives of Team Red vs. Team Blue: They have their own independent perspective and less than zero interest in blind allegiance to either party.
Unherd is a British online magazine focused on politics and culture in Western Europe and the U.S. The name, “Unherd,” is meant to signal their commitment to pushing “against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking,” and providing a platform for “otherwise unheard ideas, people and places.” From their website: “We are not aligned with any political party, and the writers and ideas we are interested in come from both left and right traditions. But we instinctively believe that the way forward will be found through a shift of emphasis: towards community not just individualism, towards responsibilities as well as Rights, and towards meaning and virtue over shallow materialism.” I agree, and regularly find their free newsletter quite engaging.
Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish. Now on Substack, Andrew Sullivan has had a high-profile, varied, and successful career: He’s the author or editor of six books, a former editor of The New Republic, a widely published magazine writer, and an influential political blogger. He was also by far the most consequential public intellectual in the fight to legally secure and culturally legitimate same-sex marriage. Born and raised in Britain, Sullivan moved to the U.S. in the mid-80s and likes to share immigrant-based takes on his adopted country. As a philosophical conservative, practicing Catholic, and openly gay man, Sullivan has an interesting, independent take on political and cultural issues and doesn’t fit neatly into a prescribed box.
The Weird Right
Anna Khachiyan & Dasha Nekrasova, Red Scare. Although I suspect most people over 30 might find Red Scare irritating, baffling, and not worth their time, I’ve gotta admit that I’ve tremendously enjoyed listening to it now and again, finding it alternately hilarious, boring, fascinating, dumb, smart, shallow, and insightful. By its own description, Red Scare “has been associated with the dirtbag left and is perhaps best described…as ‘a critique of feminism, and capitalism, from deep inside the culture they’ve spawned.’” From what I can tell, co-hosts Anna and Dascha truly enjoy performatively skewering sacred cows (most often, feminist and progressive ones) in a pseudo-intimate, casually jokey format saturated with irony and camaraderie. Over time, “the ladies” primary political location has shifted from the Bernie-affiliated “Dirtbag Left” to “dissident” New Right-adjacent. I’m not sure what to make of their supposed conservativism — it strikes me as neither serious nor authentic — but I appreciate the irreverent relish they take in poking the post-liberal progressive bear.
Alex Kashucta, Subversive podcast. Alex Kaschuta is a writer and podcaster who’s deeply immersed and interested in the so-called “dissident” right. Originally from Romania, she worked tech professional in London before deciding to get married, move back to Romania, have a baby, and devote herself to interviewing every self-identified “subversive” writer or “Twitter Anon” possible. Her critical takes on the app-driven dating economy that she experienced in London are quite interesting. Her podcast (which you can access for free on YouTube or via paid subscription on Substack) provides an intriguing catalog of a very wide range of thinkers who either identify as part of the right or are sufficiently heterodox to be willing to appear on her podcast, even if they may identify more with the old-school left. I’ve found some of her guests quite likable and interesting. Others, though, have been horrifying, living up to labels like “misogynist” that have otherwise lost their meaning after progressives have so indiscriminately over-employed them. Either way, it’s an eye-opening archive of non-mainstream political conversations.
James Pogue, author & journalist. James Pogue is the only writer I know of who’s reliably producing good, original, thoughtful, and well-researched work on the new American right. While not a right-winger himself, Pogue approaches his subjects with a level of open-minded curiosity and open-hearted empathy that’s truly exceptional and makes for a great read. I’m a huge fan and very much identify with his perspective. His recent super-buzzy Vanity Fair article, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel is Placing His Biggest Bets,” April 2022) is a must-read. I also highly recommend his J.D. Vance profile, “Going Back to Cincinnati” (August 2021), recent roundtable discussion on “National Conservatism after the Midterms,” and book, Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West (2018) on the Western militia movement-fueled Bundy insurgency.
Books
Matt Taibbi, Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another (OR Books, 2019). A really fun read and brilliant analysis of our messed-up mainstream media landscape.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019). Scholarly and dense, but you can just read the introduction and still get a lot that’s extremely important out of it.
Angela Nagel, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Zero Books, 2017). Highly readable and a great guide to understanding the genesis of a lot of our recent Internet-fueled madness.
Toure Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (Verso, 2020). A concise, historically based argument in favor of a multiracial class-based politics by a publicly engaged academic, son of the illustrious Adolph Reed, Jr. (see above).
Laura Kipnis, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (Harper, 2017). An immensely readable skewering of the horrific insanity leveraged by the Obama Administration’s reinterpretation of Title IX by a fiercely independent feminist film professor at Northwestern University.
R. Shep Melnick, The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education (Brookings, 2018). For those who want to understand how we arrived at the hellscape Kipnis describes, Melnick provides a sober, factual, analytical account.
Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018). Deneen’s incisive critique of liberalism made a tremendous splash when it came out and rightly so; whether you agree with him or not, his analysis is absolutely worth reading.
Great list. I would add Wesley Yang's Year Zero substack, I guess under the "liberals" column.
What a cool lineup! I also discovered a lot of these resources during 2020 insanity. I wonder if you've ever looked at the Spectator? I heard about it on the Reason pod. It's conservative to the hilt but also witty and fun. More cosmopolitan than the American Spectator of old!