Broken but Readable

Dear Elon, I’d like to offer you some advice, if you don’t mind. A great deal has been written about you these last few years, and most of it agrees that you are something monstrous. A villain in a cape made of stock options. An emperor of bots. The internet, which is mostly other people who have not met you either, has decided you are a cartoon, and it has drawn that cartoon with such confidence...

My mother grew up in a house with five kids and almost no money. My grandfather made their lunches every day: two slices of Wonder Bread, one slice of bologna, repeat. The day she got into medical school she came home holding the acceptance letter, breathless, and showed it to her mother, who looked at it for a moment and said, “Oh. Okay. I’m going to bed.” What I remember most from school is how...

You sit at the desk in the basement corner you call your office. The window above it looks at nothing. Just a wedge of grass and the foundation of the neighbor’s house. The screen glows the pale blue of a thing that doesn’t sleep, and you have been staring at it long enough that your eyes have stopped registering the words. Behind you the house has settled into its night sounds. The refrigerator c...

Gender discourse has become stupid. I do not mean controversial, or incendiary, or even wrong, though it manages all three on a good day. I mean stupid in the technical sense, as a failure of the intellect to perform its basic office, which is to notice that the world is more complicated than one’s theory of it. The conversation is now carried on at a pitch of abstraction that would have been laug...

I recently walked around Princeton University’s campus on a Saturday afternoon. It was beautiful in the way old American campuses always are: stone buildings with ivy climbing the walls, oak trees filtering the light, the kind of place that was built to make you feel small in the presence of something lasting. And every single person I passed was taking a picture of themselves. Not of the building...

Most people are told to follow their passion. This advice is exactly wrong for most of them. For most of us, and I mean most of us, like the overwhelming, unglamorous, beautiful majority of us, you are not going to be a famous actor. You are not going to sell out arenas or throw a touchdown pass or have your face on a billboard. You are not going to be a podcaster with a devoted following, or a pa...

Trauma. We are all very into trauma right now. It is on our podcasts and in our group chats and in the passive-aggressive email your aunt sent after Thanksgiving, which is technically about the seating arrangement but actually, if you read it carefully is about something that happened in 1987. And look, I get it. The word arrived and it named something real, and we loved it for that, and then we l...

The AI Problem Two topics have something important in common: they both defy easy analysis because they refuse to stay inside a single discipline. One is artificial intelligence. The other is the question of what has been flying in our skies for the last eighty years. I won’t take much of your time. We built artificial intelligence the way we build most things: with tremendous ingenuity and almost...

People sometimes ask why I return to these accounts. I don’t return to them. They return to us. Men and women encounter things that do not ask to be believed. They arrive in the night, or in still rooms, or in the quiet hours when the mind has lowered its guard. Whether the cause is body, mind, or something not yet named is a secondary concern. What matters is that they happen. They leave people a...

In the past 30 days since I started doing these podcasts, over a thousand people a day are have been downloading them, but of course not subscribing. I’m not too worried about that. But I’m going to keep going. What follows is testimony. A man named Mario Pavlovich gave it to me in the way men give testimony when the world has cracked open and shown them what lies beneath. He is a social worker. C...

We talk about autism as if it were a single thing, when it’s really an argument between biology, identity, suffering, and love, carried out inside real lives. People are always trying to define it, but it resists definition in the way lived things often do, by changing shape depending on where you stand. It’s far more common than it used to be. In 1980, it was estimated to affect roughly one in 10...

Before I started doing these as audio essays, back when this was all just words on a screen that you scrolled through while pretending to answer emails, I wrote a piece that I assumed would sink quietly into the archive. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t about the day’s outrage. It didn’t arrive attached to a viral argument or a trending villain. I posted it, closed the tab, and moved on. It turned out...

The Campus I walked across Fordham’s Bronx campus in the early fall, when the air still held a trace of summer but the light had already begun to thin. Leaves scraped along the walkways like small animals fleeing something unseen. Somewhere a bell rang without urgency, just to mark the hour. Students crossed the quad with the unhurried purpose of a migration, some speaking, some not, and their voi...

In 2014, Vladimir Putin was helping himself to Crimea, as one does when one has tanks and a complicated relationship with borders. In the summer of that year, the U.S. Army sent my unit to Germany to train with about fifteen other NATO armies. The idea was simple: shoot, move, and communicate together, as if we were one fighting force. Different languages, different uniforms, same plan. In theory....

Here is the link to Dr. Beatriz Villarroel’s piece in the Liberation Times, mentioned in the beginning of the episode. Podcast transcript: So I’ll just say straight off that the reason any of this matters is that, years before we put anything into orbit, something reflective and physical was already up there – appearing briefly, then vanishing. But there’s a lot to this story so let’s back up. Yes...

In this episode, I try to do the calm, slightly sheepish thing that feels increasingly rare, which is to pause for a moment and ask what’s actually happening before deciding what to feel about it. Using a small, unpretentious framework meant mainly to preserve my blood pressure, I walk through the recent Greenland episode, looking past the surface noise to the strategic realities underneath, and t...

This episode is me, 13 days off cigarettes, trying to make sense of the raids that have turned neighborhoods into places where dawn knocks feel like threats. It starts with the facts: Renee Good shot dead by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week, families zip-tied after helicopters dropped agents on a Chicago apartment building, a farmworker falling to his death fleeing a raid in California -- and...

This is something I wrote years ago but never shared with anyone. It's a journal entry from the Mars rover called Curiosity . Not really, but use your imagination. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe

This is a story about driving through North Jersey to the place where I would tell the story of my worst little league game ever. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe

I felt I should address the very valid criticism I have received for having an unprofessional podcast. Thank you for your time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe

These are some thoughts I’d like to share with you on Jersey Italians, the Army, and the FBI. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com/subscribe

I’m trying a new format because it’s a new year. I have also committed to never smoking another cigarette again, perhaps for the rest of my life. Americans think this is funny. They tell me “Hey, Greg. 1986 called and they want their new year’s resolution back.” But perhaps if you’re an Indian man, or even a Briton, you could offer some words of encouragement for me. It’s January 4th and I’m reall...