Newsletter News
This newsletter has now been going for more than a year. I’ve written over fifty individual posts, covering topics as diverse: as the lethality of Covid, the meaning of ‘woke’, the downsides of the minimum wage, cancel culture, race and IQ, abortion and eugenics, global poverty, and the Great Awokening. For those who may be interested, my five most read posts are:
While this newsletter has been fun to write and research, it’s also been a lot of work. I’d therefore like to say a big thank you to all my paid subscribers for supporting the newsletter: without your help, I couldn’t afford to spend as much time on it as I do. So far, every one of my posts has been free of charge. But alas, all good things must come to an end. And going forward, I will be introducing subscriber-only content, which is a polite way of saying that some of my articles will be paywalled.
The tighter-fisted among you needn’t worry. Much of the content will still be free, so if you don’t have any spare cash (because you blew it all on drugs and booze), please do stick around on the free email list. However, if you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter and you don’t regularly eat out of the garbage, I’d really appreciate you throwing a few dollars my way. Unfortunately, I can’t accept goats, camels, chickens, bottlecaps or hand-written IOUs as a form of payment. (Please stop sending them to my house.)
The cost of becoming a paid subscriber is $5 per month, which works out to just £3.75 at current exchange rates. That’s roughly the price of a large cappuccino in London. And which would you rather have? A heavily caffeinated drink embellished with a mawkish leaf design, produced by a faceless global corporation that has no real connection to coffee, most of which you’ll probably have to throw in the bin anyway? Or a paid subscription to Noah’s newsletter? I can assure you that none of my inputs are sourced from underpaid farmers in the third world.
If at this point, you’ve decided, “Yes, he makes a fair point – I’ve enjoyed reading his newsletter and I don’t regularly eat out of the garbage” then just scroll to the bottom of this post, and hit ‘Subscribe now’. (For those of you who do eat out of the garbage, but only rarely, I still hope you’ll consider subscribing.) Paid subscriptions are handled by Stripe, which I’m told is a reliable company. In fact, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney was recently appointed to their board, so I’d put the chance that the whole thing is a Nigerian email scam as “moderate to low”. (In all seriousness, they’re legit.)
Some of you might be wondering, “If he really wants me to subscribe, why doesn’t he put the ‘Subscribe now’ button in the middle of the post? Why do I have to scroll all the way to the bottom?” The reason for this is simple: aesthetics. It’s not visually pleasing to have ‘Subscribe now’ buttons littering the main body of the post, like some third-tier news website where advertising takes up three quarters of the screen. And I hope, valued reader, that’s the kind of attention to detail that might tip the balance for you to become a paid subscriber.
Image: Ferdinand Pauwels, Luther hammers his 95 theses to the door, 1872
Woke medicine
The psychiatrist Sally Satel has written an amusing piece for Quillette about the American Medical Association’s Orwellian new language guide. Here’s an excerpt:
Instead of “individuals,” doctors should say “survivors”; instead of “marginalized communities,” they should say, “groups that are struggling against economic marginalization.” We must also be clear that “people are not vulnerable, they are made vulnerable.” Accordingly, we should replace the statement, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease,” with “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease.”
The Daily Sceptic
I’ve written four more posts since last time. The first comprises an interview with the economic historian and lockdown sceptic Phil Magness. The second summarises a study finding that Covid passports reduce trust in the health authorities. The third summarises a study that reviewed 11 cost-benefit analyses of lockdown, all of which found that lockdowns did more harm than good. The fourth notes that vaccine side effects are more common in those who’ve already had Covid.
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I'm usually very thrifty on Substack, but this post made me laugh enough to get me over the line. Well done!