It’s Labor Day, which in this country means two things. One, somebody in your family is overcooking a burger right now. Two, the sprint to the midterms officially starts today, and everything between here and November is going to come at you fast.
So here is an accounting.
In the last three weeks, six things ran at Blue Amp that I am genuinely proud of. Every one of them is behind the paywall. Every one of them exists because a few thousand people pay for this, and not one of them exists because an advertiser approved it. If this list moves you, subscribe today and save 26% (for the Midterms, get it?)
Here is what you missed.
1. Gloria Steinem Died One Signature Short of the ERA | Cliff Schecter · September 5
She died at ninety-two and every outlet in America ran the same obituary. Here is what none of them ran: the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified by thirty-eight states and is still not in the Constitution, and the reasons are a deadline Congress wrote in 1979 and an opinion Trump’s Justice Department issued in 2020. Both are fixable. This piece is the how.
2. Russia Has 1,000 Ships With No Country | Lawrence Winnerman · September 6
There is a fleet of roughly a thousand aging tankers sailing under flags of convenience, owned through shells nobody can trace, and it is dragging anchors across the undersea cables that carry Europe’s internet and electricity. Nobody can legally stop them. Worse, nobody seems willing to try. Thirty-five hundred words on the most consequential thing happening at sea, and I have not seen it explained anywhere else this clearly.
3. Epstein Emailed “trump tower” on Nov. 13, 2016 | Ellie Leonard · August 17
Five days after the election, Jeffrey Epstein told a contact exactly where he was. Ellie found it in the files. Nobody else did. This is what an actual investigative reporter does with a document dump while cable news is running a panel about it.
4. Hunter Biden on His Father’s Health, Recovery, and the Media | Cliff Schecter and David Shuster · August 19
Ninety minutes, no handlers, no ground rules. He draws a distinction about addiction I have never heard anybody make out loud — not cured, not still an addict, in recovery and permanently vulnerable — and then explains exactly what that means he can never do again. He walks through the money: his paintings, about two hundred thousand a year, every single buyer hauled before Congress to testify under oath, set against billions in federal contracts going to the current president’s family. He says what he actually thinks about Kamala Harris, which he could have skated past and didn’t. He did not dodge one question. Not one.
5. Andy Borowitz Has Stopped Pretending to Be Neutral | Cliff Schecter August 16
“I am a Democrat. I’ve never pretended to be both sidesy.” Ninety minutes with the man who created Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on the life of a comedy writer, what Fox News actually wanted when they booked him, and why equal-opportunity satire is a lie when one side is doing all the lying.
6. Raskin: Trump Pardoned Him. He Molested a Child. Then He Tried to Buy Silence. | Cliff Schecter · September 3
Congressman Jamie Raskin walks us through Pardons, Inc., his committee’s report on how executive clemency became a cash business — who paid, who got out, and what it cost the people they hurt. The case in that headline is one of them. Raskin has spent a career explaining constitutional machinery to people who would rather not hear it, and he is very good at it, and he is doing it here while fighting cancer. If you want to understand what has actually been sold off in the last two years, start with this hour.
That is three weeks. Not a year, not a greatest-hits reel. Three weeks.
That is the whole pitch, and it is the only one I have: this is what it looks like when the people reading the thing are the ones paying for it. No network. No billionaire. No sponsor who gets nervous.
If you are already a paid subscriber, you have read all six and you are the reason they exist. Thank you! Nothing below is for you. Go flip the burgers.
That is less than four dollars a month for all six of those, plus everything that runs between now and November, plus the archive, plus the comment threads where the sharpest people I know argue with each other and occasionally with me. If you’re already a subscriber, consider gifting someone Blue Amp for a year.
I am subscribed, and it's worth every dime! I think my renewal date comes up in November!