Goodbye to 2025

Reframes Goodbye to 2025 State of the newsletter, an invitation to upgrade, and an end-of-the-year round up of essays. OK cousins, I'm pulling the ripcord on this not-so-great year. More essays coming early in the New Year. I hope you all have the opportunity to enjoy this time with friends and family. I hope you all read a good book. If you're new around here, you might not be aware that every three months or so we here at JuliusGoatCorp Incorporated LLC take a break from our regular scheduled antifascist ramblings and LOST recaps to talk briefly about the newsletter itself, and invite anyone who might want to upgrade to a paid subscription. And here we are. This newsletter is totally free, by the way. Everything I write I just put out there. You can read the long version of why people might pay for a free newsletter here , but in short some people who have the means to do so find enough value in what I do to pay for it even though they don't have to, and that material value in my work helps energize me to write more, and around and around we go. Astonishingly I see I've now been at this for four years and three different platforms. Paid subscriptions sustain me, and allow me to do things like put out a book of these essays every couple years. Another one's coming next year . We'll have a title soon, and then a cover, and then at some point the whole thing will appear in the book places and then holy shit there's no end to what might happen. The future beware, the present beware. However, some can't pay, and it's always been a core part of this project that those not inclined to pay or not able to pay shouldn't have to. Every week I hear from readers who tell me that my words have helped them, and it would be hard to express how meaningful I find that, and there's something almost holy about that to me. Readers sustain me too, whether money ever gets involved, and give me the clarity and focus and drive to keep doing this. So if payment is a challenge, or if your priorities aren't there right now, please continue reading, and if you want to help for free, maybe consider sharing the pieces around on social media and whatnot. In full transparency, there's been a rise in cancellations and an ebb in subscriptions here at the end of 2025. Over the years, I've learned it's best to resist the urge to subject this newsletter to the frame of the growth metrics that every newsletter host site very reasonably puts up in the creator dashboards. This, it seems, is a season that will let me exercise that recalcitrant instinct, because the numbers have been shrinking. I want to be careful with this fact to not ascribe too much meaning to it. Maybe this is the equilibrium point, and...

Preview: ~500 words