Talking Points Memo

There was once a fellow named John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, professionally known as J.B.S. Haldane. He was a scientist who said all kinds of things and, allegedly, knew all kinds of things. A student of his is said to have once remarked that he may have been the last man to know all there was to know in the world. He's credited as having first posited the possibility of in-vitro fertilization and also provided a possible genetic basis for human cloning. "J.B.S. Haldane was perhaps the most brilliant science popularizer of his generation," the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said. On the other end of the ledger, Haldane said some very favorable things about Joseph Stalin. Anyway, I think he's one of the more interesting figures of the 20th century.
 

The reason I bring him up here is because he said something once that I think about a lot: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
 

In the same way a dog cannot understand calculus, no matter how hard we try to teach it, there are things about this world I — we — will simply never understand, or even be aware that we could understand.
 

Every once in awhile, though, I'm humbled, and something completely insane is presented to me. In these moments, I understand this strange rock and the people on it just a little better. Or maybe a little worse. I'm not quite sure.
 

Last week, we're all in the newsroom and I get wind of a story coming down the pike about a "documentary" on Truth Social's streaming platform about lizard people who inhabit planet earth, and another, similar film about how Jesus and The Buddha are aliens. Weird, weird stuff, certainly queerer than anything I could have supposed would be published on Talking Points Memo dot Com, a political news publication. But, these are the times in which we find ourselves.
 

One of the issues with a lot of political news outlets these days is they lack the imagination, the openness — the "beginner's mind," as the Buddha might have called it — to grapple with the challenges we face at the moment. This stuff — lizard people and aliens — it might seem inconsequential and dumb and beside the point. Certainly not as important as voting rights and trans rights and, well, rights in general, which we also cover. But it's all of a piece. It's "flooding the zone" with shit, blurring the lines between documentary and science fiction, what is right and wrong, and who can be trusted.

That's why at TPM we cover all of it. The more traditional, policy oriented stories about how the administration keeps losing cases in which it tries to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport people to how Trump's Devin Nunes-run streaming platform is peddling conspiracy theories in the guise of documentaries about the origin of world religions. It's all important. It all needs to be covered. So we cover it. With verve, I might add.

Today much of the world is celebrating International Worker's Day. Here in the United States — where we want to celebrate workers but not too much lest they think they can rise up and run the place — we have Labor Day, in September, which is maybe best considered an act of appeasement rather than a celebration. 
 

Regardless, today is a day about workers. TPM cares about workers. While there are a dwindling number of news outlets out there, there are an ever growing number of subscription and membership services competing for revenue. Of course, the quality of the product or service is generally the most important factor when considering where to spend your money. But to the extent you care about the quality of life for the people making the stuff, it's difficult to find a better option than TPM. 
 

Around 2015, there was renewed interest in media unions. It began with Gawker, which became the first digital news outlet to unionize. A few years later, TPM's staff unionized. Josh Marshall immediately and voluntarily recognized the union. Soon after, we had our first collective-bargaining agreement. Here's what the Writers Guild of America, East said at the time:
 

The Talking Points Memo editorial staff has unanimously decided to form a union under the Writers Guild of America, East. TPM's editor and publisher Josh Marshall has already voluntarily agreed to recognize our union, and we are thrilled that management agreed so quickly to work with us.
 

We all love TPM and appreciate the freedom that comes from working at a small, independent media company. We also really appreciate the huge strides TPM has made in recent years to make our office a great place to work.
 

If you aren't in this industry or perhaps are unfamiliar with the labor process generally, this might strike you as insignificant. But compare that with, for example, what Hearst employees said about their efforts in March 2023:
 

Zach Lennon-Simon (Delish) from Hearst's New York office said, "For two years Hearst has stalled, low balled, and refused to bargain with us. Today we're walking out because we'd like to remind Hearst what they are without our labor; nothing but a name."
 

We are very pro union here at TPM because we value workers. We don't exist just to make money. We think that we provide a good product to our readers and listeners and a good place to work for our employees. Good organizations exist at the intersection of those two objectives. We hope you'll consider supporting us.

A few years ago, a study was published in the journal Work, Aging and Retirement that investigated the relationship between employees' age and tenure and organizational performance. Here's what the authors had to say about their findings:

Our findings were clear: Employee age had no impact on business performance, whether performance is measured by financial, operational, or customer outcomes. Tenure, however, had a significant positive and sometimes very sizeable impact on financial performance and operational excellence.
 

Now, you may have some general impressions about the digital news business, or the kind of people who tend to work in it. One of the things you might have heard is that it is the province of people in their 20s and 30s, and Millennials and Gen Z love jumping from job to job. Another thing you might have heard is that the journalism industry has experienced a massive number of layoffs in recent years. Or perhaps you've heard that journalists are struggling from intense burnout.
 

TPM is mostly made of Millennials with some Gen X stragglers, yet in the last decade or so we've been remarkably stable. The median tenure of a TPM employee is 7 years, which actually understates things because we currently have two people on staff who left and then came back. 
 

My point here is that there are a lot of reasons why TPM is good but one of them is our experience working together. One of the things the Work, Aging and Retirement study I referenced above gets into is, while there is discipline-specific knowledge and excellence, there is also "firm-specific" knowledge — in other words, not only do we know journalism and publishing, but we know how these things work at TPM. That allows us to be more efficient, more accurate, more interesting. 

Now, of course, there are benefits to infusions of new energy and ideas from the outside. That's one of the reasons we're currently looking to add two new people to the team. It's why we're (most likely) starting our internship program soon. It's why we want to build out a robust freelance operation. But these growth paths complement our core strength, which is years and years of working together and getting very good at doing what it is TPM

One of the many challenges of the news business is balancing the need for revenue to pay people, and to exist generally, with the moral imperative to distribute important information as widely as possible. Most journalists — but not all — get into this line of work because they are passionate about the craft and they want their work to be read by as many people as possible, which would mean the work has a significant impact.

However, this creates a natural tension. Most trusted news outlets cannot sustain on advertising revenue alone. Even before the internet, you paid for a newspaper or you paid for cable. But if you have to pay for quality news — emphasis on quality, there's a lot of free stuff out there — that risks creating a bifurcated society where only the affluent have access to the news. 
 

At TPM, we want to be part of the solution, not the problem. Fortunately, we've hit on an innovative and elegant solution to this problem: If you can't afford a membership, you can get one for free. These free memberships come in two flavors: Student memberships and community-supported memberships. We've given away thousands of these memberships over the years. 
 

We're able to provide these memberships thanks to two s a stable revenue stream that allows us to plan ahead financially into the future. Second, The TPM Journalism Fund. This was created to give  readers who want to give even more than the cost of a membership the opportunity to support the growth of our journalism team — and help fund free memberships, hence the phrase "community-supported."
 

When you become a member at TPM you aren't just supporting TPM, you're helping to sustain the journalism ecosystem more broadly. We hope you'll consider becoming a part of the community.

Sometimes when I'm bored I will just go to the Wikipedia page for whatever day it is and see what was going on in the past, on today's date. Eventually what you realize if you hadn't reasoned it out ahead of time is: every single day is packed with insanely important events, which makes sense because there are only 365 days and humans have been around for 200,000 years. And we have recorded history going back many thousands of years. A random sampling of April 8th events:

• 217 – Roman emperor Caracalla is assassinated
• 1232 – The Mongols begin their siege on Kaifeng, the capital of the Jin dynasty
• 1605  – Mary Stuart is born. Wikipedia says her "birth was much anticipated." Her death a mere two years later due to complications from pneumonia, was not
• 1820 – The Venus de Milo, which I have seen in person, is discovered on the Aegean island of Milos
• 1859 – Edmund Husserl, philosopher who established the school of phenomenology, is born
• 1959: Grace Hopper leads a group of people who develop the computer programming language we know today as COBOL and which Musk and DOGE seem to not understand
• 1974 — Hank Aaron hits his 715th home run, passing Babe Ruth to become the all-time leader
• 1987 – Elton John, the Trinidadian footballer, NOT the world renown musician, is born
• 2013: The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, dies
• 2024: A total solar eclipse is visible across much of North America. This was literally last year and I already forgot about it
   

What is my point here? Well I guess part of my point is that I had a dead period around 3 p.m. and so this is what I was doing. But my real point is: A lot of stuff happens every single day! How do you know if you are catching the most important stuff? It's tough in 2025 when there's social media spewing nonsense and politicians making stuff up and your neighbors saying they heard X about Y from Z. That's why at TPM, we're not only transparent, but we emphasize and take pride in not trying to cover everything. We say it explicitly in the Morning Memo but it also is an ethos that runs through our entire org: A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo.
 

Paradoxically, though time is finite, the number of things happening at any given time can feel infinite, and infinity is pretty scary. But that is why we're here, to sort through infinity and give you the most important stuff you need to make decisions about your life and win some arguments with the noobs you encounter when picking your kids up from school. So make April 8th the day you join TPM.