pomo update 15.0
Orthobros, technocracy, & the archbishop
Maya Angelou Flow
Thank you to our many new followers who helped us surpass 4k subscribers and reach a new peak on the Substack Rising Culture chart.
The stats are telling us that this new surge of subscribers is coming from our post about PhDs who don’t wanna teach high school (it broke our records on both X and IG)…totally didn’t see that coming. But in the spirit of giving the people what they want, we have more pieces coming out about why Stephen chose not to pursue a PhD, and how primary and secondary schools are ruining the next generation of teachers. Stay tuned.
And for those new followers who would like to learn more about pomo, we’ll leave some links from our archive below.
Pod eps
Evelyn Quartz, Anton Cebalo, & Jeffery Tyler Syck join the pod to discuss the technocratic paradigm. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Latest at no pomo
no pomo is our sister channel where Stephen, our curator, posts his off-the-cuff hot takes…you should subscribe to it too!
You need friends who will call you out on your BS
In high school, a classmate once remarked that I was the smartest of the dumb kids. Though I was offended at first, I was like “wait, he’s actually right.” In all honesty, I’m not intelligent, nor am I hard-working. I am creative, insightful, and passionate. My creativity and insight enable me to say intelligent things sometimes, and my passion can drive me to work hard. But I’m not actually intelligent or hard-working. This is why I end up around smart, driven people, despite being nowhere near as competent as they are.
I’ve come to realize that this is actually a good thing. I like hanging out with both dumb/underachievers/crazy/immature people, as well as successful/driven/overachievers/well-adjusted people. They make me feel normal, average…the dummies remind me of what I should avoid and the smarty-pants remind me of what I should aspire toward. But on a serious level, it’s good to have well-adjusted friends to turn to as points of reference/mentors, and to have struggling friends to be able to help.Rich friend, poor friend: on the need for inter-class community
So I’m a strong believer in Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez’s thing that if you say you love the poor, you should be able to name them…which is what drove Dorothy Day to start going to St. Joe’s on 6th Ave for early morning Mass after leaving the Hell Hole bar down the block—her radical pals would sit there talking about the poor, but she wanted to be with the poor…thus why she started following them into Mass.
Anyway, I get very annoyed with “progressive” people who talk about “advocating” for the poor, homeless, immigrants, minorities, etc, but who don’t regularly interact—or have friendships—with said people. Stop posting infographics and go “share life” with these people. Very easy to love people as abstractions, much harder to love actual human beings.
Pomo people elsewhere
Emmett Rensin on Olivia Nuzzi and John Hinckley Jr.
Nikos Mohammadi on the New Yorkers cosplaying at the Khamenei protests
Stephen (our curator) on
From the archive
For your newbies, the best way to get to know cracks in pomo is to “come and see”…meaning to come to one of our IRL events. But until then, you may want to check out our manifesto 2.0 which sets out our agenda, as well as our syllabus of books that have shaped it.
We’d also recommend you check out one of our first podcast episodes with Joseph Bottum about how puritanism always has a way of resurfacing in America’s collective conscience…which is a major issue on our agenda!