Timothy McSweeney's Rebel Ways are Too Much for the Whole Foods' Fine Cheese Sample Kiosk To Handle
Hello and welcome to the thirty-sixth edition of McSweeney’s Internet Substackency, the Substack of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a humor and satire website run by McSweeney’s Publishing.
Hello, Substackers. We wanted to share a few upcoming events in the McSweeney’s world. First up, our founder, Dave Eggers, will be on a brief book tour in the Northeast next week in support of his Newbery Medal-winning book, The Eyes & the Impossible.
McSweeney’s and The Onion living legend Jason Roeder is a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor for his brilliant book Griefstrike. The ceremony will be held in New York City next month, but a couple of days before we’re hosting a celebration of Jason’s work at the Francis Kite Club. James Folta and Luke Burns, our friends from Points in Case, will be the MCs, and Josh Gondelman, Jen Spyra, Jiji Lee, and Colin “Decorative Gourds” Nissan will also be reading.
Finally, we’re going to be at the New Orleans Book Festival this weekend. That’s “we” as in Chris Monks, the editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, who committed to writing these Substack posts in the third person when he first started writing them, and it’s too late to turn back now. Chris will be speaking on a panel with other humor editors from the New Yorker, Reductress, and The Onion. Tendency legend, Mike Sacks, will moderate.
If you’re in the area, please drop by, and Chris will give you a firm but polite rejection in person. Panel is at 1 p.m. on Saturday at the Marshall Family Commons.
Alright, on with the links…
Go to a festival or fair. Stand in the longest line you can find. Buy something you don’t want.
Wake up at dawn on a Saturday morning. Make pancakes. Peel an orange. Fill two bottles of water. Sing the ABCs twenty times. Do all of this before you have coffee. Bonus points if you do it before you pee.
Pick a random Nickelodeon show aimed at seven-year-olds. Make sure it sucks. Watch it repeatedly until you start to develop a Stockholm syndrome affection for it.
Put on your favorite robe and/or dad jeans, and read the rest of this handy guide.
A WORD OR TWO FROM OUR STORE…
In McSweeney’s 78: The Make Believers (guest edited by Thi Bui and Vu Tran), ten writers of the Vietnamese diaspora write from the eclectic hodgepodge that is their shared imagination of what it means to be “Vietnamese.” Packaged in a beautiful foil-stamped cigar box (with art by Bui on each and every surface), and including two booklets, one menu, and a glossary of broken Vietnamese, the work in this issue spans from highbrow to lowbrow, proper to naughty, logical to absurd, and painful to funny. Published on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, its contributors work across perspectives and multiple languages. In this completely singular, nothing-else-of-its-kind anthology, these artists write (and illustrate!) from a place of collective loss and joy.
This is a preorder. McSweeney’s 78: The Make Believers will ship in early April 2025. All subscriptions to McSweeney’s Quarterly purchased by July 1, 2025, will include this issue.
Baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson is best known for [NOTHING IN PARTICULAR, OTHER THAN BEING A GREAT BASEBALL PLAYER]. Though most major league baseball teams at the time refused to sign Robinson because [THEY JUST DIDN’T LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB], Robinson finally became the first [PERSON NAMED JACKIE ROBINSON] to play Major League Baseball in 1947. Jackie Robinson paved the way for [OTHER PEOPLE WHO WERE DISLIKED FOR NO REASON] to play professional sports.
You can read the rest of these revised history lessons here.
Finally, in lieu of a BLAST FROM THE PAST, we wanted to share a new, intentionally non-funny thing we brought back to the site this week…
Early in President Trump’s first term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes, and it felt urgent to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. Now that Trump has returned to office, amid civil rights, humanitarian, economic, and constitutional crises, we felt it critical to make an inventory of this new round of horrors. This list will be updated monthly between now and the end of Donald Trump’s second term.
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It's gotten so that parody and satire have been lapped so many times that no one can what's real anymore. 🙄
I'm really grateful for the work you put into this. I've bookmarked it to use as a reference.