Timothy McSweeney's Artisan Energy Drink Can Legally List Only Two Ingredients
Hello and welcome to the second edition of McSweeney’s Internet Substackency, the substack of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a humor and satire website run by McSweeney’s Publishing.
We hope you had a pleasant holiday weekend. We spent ours lighting sparklers and staring into the void, trying to embrace the potentially final Independence Day. Anyway, back to the grind: Here are excerpts and links to a few of our recent pieces.
Middle-aged Andie Walsh lives in a Chicago suburb with her underemployed and estranged husband, Mike, whom she can’t afford to divorce, because they both stupidly pursued creative careers instead of going into finance. That means their retirement savings are in the triple digits, he wears only dirty white tank tops, and she still drives the pink Karmann Ghia she had in high school.
Please read the whole thing here.
Alright, everybody calm down. I know Joe Biden didn’t have the best debate performance. Or TV interview. Or radio interview. Or July Fourth address. Still, this whole thing about his age is getting blown way out of proportion by a small group of political insiders, journalists, delegates, donors, former staffers, former presidents, senators, representatives, governors, European diplomats, swing state voters, independents, and regular American taxpayers spread across all fifty states.
Please read all of this one, too.
A WORD OR TWO FROM OUR STORE…
McSweeney’s National Magazine Award-winning Quarterly Concern celebrates our first quarter century of being an occasionally actually quarterly publication as so many mid-twentysomethings do (drenching ourselves in a sea of nostalgia for our misbegotten youth and looking forward to the promise of the future) with one of our most dazzling issues to date! Coming to you housed inside a deluxe tin lunchbox illustrated by the legendary Art Spiegelman, McSweeney’s 74 features a portfolio of pareidolia art by Spiegelman himself, wherein he teases out images from random watercolor inkblots; original pieces by Lydia Davis, Catherine Lacey, and David Horvitz printed onto pencils; and three packs of collectible author cards, packaged in real tear-away baseball-card packaging and featuring some of the finest writers of our time, including Sheila Heti, Hanif Abdurraqib, George Saunders, Sarah Vowell, Michael Chabon, Eileen Myles, and many more.
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Hey, so great to see you! Sorry, the bar’s so crowded tonight; it’s not normally like this. Usually, you can grab a booth, no problem, but it looks like we’ll have to share a single barstool. Hope that’s all right. Normally, there’s live bluegrass on Sundays too. That’s why I picked this place, because I know you like the mandolin. But I guess Fiddle Creek isn’t coming tonight, and also, there’s no music playing at all, just the Lolita audiobook.
Head on over to the Tendency to read the whole thing. We promise this link isn’t a Rickroll.
And here’s this week’s BLAST FROM THE PAST, a classic Tendency piece from our archives…
1. Rent one big house together. Working “together” to choose a house, everyone should drag their feet and be overly polite until the bossiest one just takes care of it. The Boss should resent that they had to do everything. Everyone else should resent that The Boss got to make the decision. No one should say anything (yet).
Save your upcoming family vacation by clicking this link and reading the remaining fourteen tips.
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