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by Scott Meadow | Editor-in-chief, IRREVERENT Magazine
Monday mornings begin the same way they have for the better part of two decades: I open the submissions folder before I open anything else, including my eyes fully. There are usually forty-three emails. Forty of them are pitches. The other three are from someone named Gary who has been trying to sell me a timeshare since 2019 and whose commitment to the bit, I'll admit, I respect.
The pitches are the problem. Not because they're bad — some of them are quite good — but because by the third coffee, I can no longer tell which ones I'm reading from the submissions folder and which ones I accidentally opened from Reuters.
This is not a metaphor. This is my Monday morning.
Let me give you some examples, because the abstract version sounds like the complaint of a man who drinks too much and has opinions about it. The specific version sounds like that too, but at least it's useful.
Case One. A writer — good writer, has been with us since the last redesign — pitched a piece about a legacy Fortune 500 company launching a cologne for men "who want to smell like quarterly earnings and quiet dominance." The subhead was something like: *Notes of mahogany, suppressed empathy, and offshore accounts.* It was sharp. We assigned it. Two days before publication, a billionaire — a real one, living, breathing, insufficiently satirized by the universe — announced an actual fragrance line. Same energy. Same demographic target. Real press release, real distribution deal, real retail price point that was, somehow, more absurd than the one our writer invented.
We killed the piece. The writer took it well. I didn't. The cologne, reportedly, sold out in seventy-two hours.
Case Two. One of our staff writers spent three weeks on a piece about a Senate subcommittee convened to regulate artificial intelligence, populated by members who demonstrably did not know what artificial intelligence was. The joke — and it was a good joke — was that the subcommittee's most substantive contribution was asking a technology CEO whether "the cyber" was "in the phone or behind the phone." We'd workshopped the dialogue. We'd tuned every tin-eared question for maximum comic density.
The piece came back from fact-check with a note that said: This is real. The subcommittee is real. The questions are real. The quote about the cyber is from the public record.
I sat with that for a while. Then I had a drink. Then I sat with it some more.
Case Three is the one that still gets brought up at editorial meetings, usually by someone who thinks they're being funny. We ran a piece — ran it, published it, sent the newsletter — about a city's 311 service being replaced by an AI chatbot that responded to every complaint, regardless of content, with a haiku. Pothole on Elm Street: haiku. Noise complaint: haiku. Missing recycling bin: haiku, with seasonal imagery.
The reader response was unlike anything I'd seen. Not because they loved it. Because they were angry. Because seventeen separate readers emailed to inform us, with varying degrees of aggression, that this was already happening in their city. Not the haiku specifically. But the chatbot. The automated deflection. The poetry of non-response.
We ran a correction. I'm not sure what the hell we were correcting. The piece was fiction. The readers were right. Both things remained true.
Here's my working theory, developed over several years and one informal Slack channel we started calling #is-this-real: satire used to be amplification. You took something that was ten percent absurd and you ran it up to ninety. The distance between reality and the joke was the space where the laugh lived. Now the math has inverted. Reality is running at something like ninety percent absurd on a slow news cycle, and our job — if we're being honest about it — is deflation. We file it down to sixty percent so it reads like something a person made up rather than something that happened.
The copy desk has a flag now. It reads: Insufficient distance from fact. I had it laminated.
Three interns have left for PR in the past eighteen months. I understand. In PR, you also make things up. But the things you make up are less depressing, the health insurance is better, and nobody sends you a correction because a city in the Midwest accidentally validated your comic premise in reality.
I want to be careful here not to sound like a man delivering a eulogy for something that isn't dead yet. Satire isn't dead. Satire is fine. Satire is, in fact, having a moment — the wrong kind of moment, the kind where everyone is doing it and most of them are just angry people with Canva access, but still.
What I'm describing is something more specific: the discipline of the form. The craft of maintaining enough fictional altitude that the reader can breathe up there, can look down at the landscape of the absurd and recognize it without drowning in it. That's harder than it sounds. It requires distance. Distance requires a gap between what is and what we're pretending. The gap keeps narrowing.
And yet.
Every piece we've run that landed — the ones that made people send it to someone else, which is the only metric that matters — they worked because underneath the joke was something true. Not factually true. Structurally true. The world is not making sense, the piece said, and here is a formal demonstration. Satire, at its least stupid, is insisting that the world should make sense. Not that it does. That it should. The joke is the demand.
I still believe in that. I believe in it on Monday mornings, before the Reuters feed loads, in the narrow window between the second and third coffee when the submissions folder is still full of possibilities and Gary hasn't emailed yet about the timeshare.
Next week's column will be funnier, I promise — assuming Congress, the Vatican, and the venture capital community can all be convinced to take Tuesday off.
— The Editor.
If it's the Editor's Mess, let HIM clean it up!
Editor's Mess runs irregularly, on a schedule that reflects the editor's confidence in the future of linear time.
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by Scott Meadow | Editor-in-chief, IRREVERENT Magazine
I was in the shower the other day—where all my best and worst thoughts happen—when I suddenly remembered Gerald Ford existed.
Not 'remembered' in the sense that I recalled his policies or his presidency or anything useful. I mean I literally remembered he had been a president. Like, that was a thing that happened. A whole human being sat in the Oval Office for two and a half years, pardoned Nixon, bumped his head on airplane doors, and I had completely filed him away in the same mental drawer as 'the capital of South Dakota' and 'how to do long division.'
And you know what? It felt great.
It felt so good that I started playing a game. How many presidents could I name that I genuinely knew nothing about? Not the big ones. Not the ones who got shot or resigned or tweeted themselves into oblivion. The boring ones. The ones who just... governed. The ones who showed up, did the job, and went home without turning the entire country into a 24-hour reality show.
Gerald Ford. Obviously. I know he fell down a lot. That's it. That's the whole file.
Jimmy Carter? I know he went on to build houses and that he once saw a UFO, which turned out to be a barium cloud, but honestly it still makes him more interesting than most. But his actual presidency? Peanut farming, energy crisis, cardigan sweater. That's the Wikipedia summary my brain auto-generated, and the sweater may have been Mr. Rodgers.
George H.W. Bush? 'Read my lips,' Desert Storm, and... that's the list. I was alive for his entire presidency. I was a sentient child. I could read. I had opinions about Nintendo games. And I cannot tell you a single domestic policy he enacted. Not one. He might as well have been a fictional character from a Tom Clancy novel I never finished.
And then there's the ones I'm not even sure about. Did I live through part of Lyndon Johnson? I didn't but I probably thought so because I've seen the photo of him lifting his dog by the ears. That's not governance. That's just a weird guy with beagle issues.
Here's the thing: I don't think this ignorance is shameful. I think it's evidence. Evidence of a better time. A time when presidents could just... disappear. When they could go on vacation for three weeks and the country didn't implode because nobody was live-tweeting their golf swing. When 'breaking news' actually required something to break.
Can you imagine Gerald Ford's Twitter account? He'd tweet once a month, probably about football, and everyone would forget he had the nuclear codes. It would be bliss.
Compare that to now. I know what the current guy had for breakfast. I know what time he woke up. I know his opinion on twelve different topics before I've had my coffee, and none of them matter. None of them have context. It's just noise. An endless, screeching fire hose of information that adds up to nothing.
'He said a thing.' Okay. 'He did a thing.' Alright. 'He might do a thing.' Great. 'Someone who knows him said he might do a thing.' Enough.
Enough.
Enough.
I don't need to know every sneeze. I don't need real-time updates on every thought that drifts through the brain of the most powerful person on earth. I need to know what policies are being enacted. I need to know what laws are changing. I need to know if we're going to war or fixing a bridge or doing literally anything that affects my actual life. But instead I get 'BREAKING: President Makes Facial Expression.' And then twelve hours of analysis about what the facial expression means. And then a counter-analysis about why the first analysis was biased. And then someone who used to work near the president until they were fired weighs in. And then I want to walk into the ocean.
The worst part is I can't look away. None of us can. It's designed that way. The news cycle is a slot machine and we're all addicted to the dopamine of outrage. Every notification is a little hit. Every 'BREAKING' banner is another pull of the lever. And the jackpot is always the same: you're angry, you're exhausted, and nothing has changed.
But back in the Ford-Carter-Bush Sr. era? Those guys could vanish for months and the country just... kept going. The government functioned. The mail got delivered. People went to work. And if you weren't actively seeking out political news, you could go entire weeks without thinking about the president at all.
Weeks!
I can't go twenty minutes now. My phone buzzes. Someone said something. Someone else responded. A third person analyzed the response. A fourth person is angry about the analysis along with a late-night comedian, for some reason. And none of it means anything. It's just content. Empty, contextless content filling the void where actual information used to live.
I miss not knowing. I miss the days when my ignorance wasn't a moral failing but a natural state of being. When you could be a reasonably informed citizen by reading a newspaper once a day and watching the evening news. When 'well-informed' meant knowing the major policy debates, not memorizing the real-time mood swings of one very loud guy.
Gerald Ford fell down airplane stairs and we all moved on. Can you imagine if that happened today? We'd get three days of coverage. 'Is the president fit to serve?' 'What do the stairs say about his foreign policy?' 'We have an expert on stair safety standing by.' And then someone would find an old tweet where he criticized someone else for falling, and that would be another two days. And then a poll about whether Americans trust stairs. And then—
Enough.
I want to forget again. I want to wake up one morning and realize I haven't thought about the president in three weeks and the world didn't end. I want to live in a country where governance is so competent, so boring, so thoroughly unremarkable that it barely registers as news.
Give me a president so dull that children in the future will play 'remember that guy?' in the shower. Give me an administration so uneventful that historians will struggle to fill a chapter. Give me policies so quietly effective that nobody notices until they look back twenty years later and realize, huh, things actually got better.
I don't need a hero. I don't need a villain. I don't need a reality show protagonist with nuclear launch codes.
I need Gerald Ford.
I need to forget he exists.
— The Editor.
If it's the Editor's Mess, let HIM clean it up!
Editor's Mess runs irregularly, on a schedule programmed by a conspiracy so vast and world girding you've never even suspected they exist.