This is The Sword and the Sandwich, a newsletter about white nationalism, whimsy, and everything in between.
This newsletter will be the home for all my writing for this next phase of my career—a mix of in-depth features on the far right, personal essays, political musings, and food writing. Every Monday, I’ll offer a feature on the state of the contemporary U.S. far right, in all its many and hideous aspects—from anti-vaxx marchers to all-white Heathen temples. Every Friday, I will select a sandwich from Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches and write about it: American Sub to Zapiekanka, I aim to go through them in order. And every Wednesday I’ll write about whatever I please—a crudité of my predilections and obsessions: video games, classic novels, interviews with labor leaders, rabbis, activists, and colleagues. Because I cannot live without the intervention of an editor, I’m very lucky to be joined by David Swanson, my former editor at the Village Voice and a gem of a human being.
I’m an author and journalist who has written for The New Republic, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post, among others, with a primary focus on the far-right. I’ve been a columnist at MSNBC Daily and a contributing writer at GQ and I also wrote a book, Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, that I think is pretty good and the New York Times said was “furious,” “insolent,” and “funny.” Furious, insolent and funny is a pretty good descriptor of me at my best, too, and I want to be all three in the digital pages of this new venture.
This is a no-bullshit but many-frilled look at the far right, and food, and many things great and small. There are free and paid subscriptions available. The best way to support my work is by choosing a paid subscription.
I am a strange person who, by virtue of living in public, has come to adore my own strangeness, and wear it with pride. I’m very excited to—under the auspices of my very own publication—celebrate that strangeness and endless curiosity and angry hunger for justice all in one place, and at length, and over time. I’ll be able to obsess about Nazis and write about the most interesting people on the frontline fight against the far-right; write about bread and all contained within it; and let loose on everything in between. This is an eclectic publication, fueled by passion, redolent with desire, with a cartouche atop it that says out of anger comes change. Mondays for wrath, Fridays for gluttony, Wednesdays for all other vices; or alternately, Mondays for investigation, Fridays for celebration, and Wednesdays for sorrow and goodness and all the rest there is. If you sign up, I promise it will never be boring, and in the delicate “huh?” wrinkle of your brow some wisdom or some joke or some sandwich awaits you. Come join.
