Hello all! Welcome to my self-loathing newsletter, A Fête Worse Than Death, the name of which is an homage to a chapter from Norman Rush’s luminous Mating. Sincere thanks to all of you—except the ones whom I added to the subscription list, possibly against your will, in which case, sorry—for following me off the dungheap that is Twitter and into the brave new world of Substack. I hope that I can recover some intellectual integrity and purity of mind here. Nonetheless, it will probably take me a while to silence what I call, in conversations with myself, “the Twitter voice”—the screech of the internet’s collective outrage, which I have assimilated, despite myself, into my habits of thought.