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Joe Ragazzo

@jragazzo.bsky.social

Publisher of TPM, Writer of Rhapsody

27,816 Followers  |  42 Following  |  49 Posts  |  Joined: 14.06.2023  |  2.4886

Latest posts by jragazzo.bsky.social on Bluesky


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What We Lost When Condé Nast Unceremoniously Shuttered Teen Vogue This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news...

Teen Vogue is getting folded into Vogue and losing most of its staff. It’s the end of one of the only publications that allowed young people to share their own stories and took them seriously as political actors.
talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/what-we...

04.11.2025 16:53 — 👍 102    🔁 38    💬 3    📌 2
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What We Lost When Condé Nast Unceremoniously Shuttered Teen Vogue This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news...

Wrote about Condé ending Teen Vogue as we knew it.

talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/what-we...

04.11.2025 16:55 — 👍 458    🔁 140    💬 7    📌 8
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Watching the Podcast Bubble Burst From the Inside I started my first podcast in 2009. It wasn’t anything special, just...

Slow Burn producer @andrewjparsons.bsky.social saw his show become a hit + a boom in podcast investing

By 2023, the industry was shrinking. Ad revenue + Hollywood IP acquisitions declined + everyone was getting laid off. "The podcast bubble had finally popped"

talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/watch...

31.10.2025 13:25 — 👍 21    🔁 7    💬 0    📌 2

I wrote a thing

31.10.2025 13:27 — 👍 19    🔁 5    💬 1    📌 0
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For TPM's 25th anniversary, we’re hosting a party at Brooklyn's Bogart House on 11/7, where you can meet TPM staff, alums + contributors to our new edit project on 25 years of digital media.

There are a few half-off tickets left. Get yours now:
eventbrite.com/e/1716908833539/?discount=PRIME

30.10.2025 16:37 — 👍 22    🔁 8    💬 0    📌 0
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Anti-Vax Facebook Groups Ushered in Our Current MAHA Nightmare In 2007, Oprah Winfrey featured Jenny McCarthy, the former Playboy model turned...

@ericmgarcia.bsky.social tells the story of how autism disinformation spread from obscure Facebook groups to the top of the U.S. government’s public health apparatus

talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/anti-...

30.10.2025 13:01 — 👍 43    🔁 14    💬 1    📌 2
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Anti-Vax Facebook Groups Ushered in Our Current MAHA Nightmare In 2007, Oprah Winfrey featured Jenny McCarthy, the former Playboy model turned...

For the 25th anniversary of @talkingpointsmemo.com I wrote about how the anti-vax mommy bloggers and Facebook groups launched our current MAHA hellscape and facilitated the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/anti-...

30.10.2025 13:05 — 👍 189    🔁 47    💬 5    📌 1

As a teenager pissed off about politics, @talkingpointsmemo.com became my go-to website. Really grateful for @joshtpm.bsky.social and @allegrak.bsky.social for letting me take part in the 25th anniversary retrospective on how the internet changed media.

30.10.2025 13:07 — 👍 231    🔁 43    💬 1    📌 2
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The Cabinet in My Apartment That Explains How Journalism Broke During COVID There’s a cabinet in my apartment that tells the story of how...

Aurin Squire bought a cabinet’s worth of supplements during the pandemic. For @talkingpointsmemo.com's 25th anniversary series on 25 years of digital media, he explains how the COVID "infodemic" dissolved the line between news, advertising and conspiracy theory

talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/the-c...

28.10.2025 13:18 — 👍 24    🔁 4    💬 1    📌 1

This piece is terrific, and this line had me thinking about a Chuck Klosterman essay from 20+ years ago, about how early "Real World" cast members got edited into caricatures, prompting future cast members to sell themselves as caricatures.

Presaged our influencer dystopia now eating journalism.

27.10.2025 14:57 — 👍 74    🔁 22    💬 4    📌 1

An important read.

27.10.2025 14:17 — 👍 318    🔁 64    💬 8    📌 1
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Patron-Supported Journalism Can’t Be the Future of News Writing about the failure of patron-supported journalism is itself a kind of...

I did not enjoy writing this; it can't even serve as an ad for my newsletter, which I've suspended due to an overbilling situation that has me almost regretting leaving Substack. But, you know, it's evidence for the piece I just didn't get to include.

talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/patro...

27.10.2025 14:12 — 👍 597    🔁 189    💬 31    📌 55
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What It’s Like to Watch An Internet-Based Ideology Break Containment I first realized the extent of the internet’s takeover of U.S. politics...

What It’s Like to Watch An Internet-Based Ideology Break Containment
talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/what-...

27.10.2025 13:04 — 👍 23    🔁 4    💬 1    📌 1
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What It’s Like to Watch An Internet-Based Ideology Break Containment I first realized the extent of the internet’s takeover of U.S. politics...

@kellyweill.bsky.social takes us inside a 2018 Flat Earth conference. While flat earthers were then a curiosity at the time, "They were early adopters of a delusional digital mode that, a couple years later, would come to dominate political speech," she says talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/what-...

27.10.2025 13:07 — 👍 34    🔁 11    💬 1    📌 3
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What It’s Like to Watch An Internet-Based Ideology Break Containment I first realized the extent of the internet’s takeover of U.S. politics...

@kellyweill.bsky.social talks abt how coverage of the far right + Internet trends was often siloed outside politics verticals

"'Extremism'" suggested that our subject matter was somehow divorced from meaningful power, even as politics grew visibly more extreme" talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/what-...

27.10.2025 13:12 — 👍 28    🔁 9    💬 2    📌 0
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Why I Founded a Print Magazine At the Peak of Digital Media Mania Here in New Orleans, if you want to go out and buy...

In 2015, at the peak of the digital media boom, law student Nathan Robinson founded the print magazine @currentaffairs.bsky.social. He makes the case for why democracy needs small print magazines for TPM’s 25th anniversary series on 25 years of digital media:

talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/why-i...

20.10.2025 13:51 — 👍 41    🔁 9    💬 1    📌 0
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The Future of Local News Is Making People Pay For It You can leave journalism altogether or you can take the longest way...

@maxrn.bsky.social thinks the most "bone-headed" of all the rules for online journalism was that it should be free. When he & his co-founders started @hellgatenyc.com, a local NYC news site, they decided to do so as a reader-funded, worker-owned publication.

talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/the-f...

20.10.2025 13:27 — 👍 56    🔁 12    💬 3    📌 3
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The Original Sin of Digital Media Was the Belief That Digital Journalists Were Part of the Tech Business I want to begin this introduction to our 25th anniversary essay series...

To celebrate our 25th anniversary, we asked 25 writers we admire—from @jeetheer.bsky.social to @anamariecox.bsky.social—to reflect on a moment from the past 25 years of digital media. Read @joshtpm.bsky.social's intro to the project: Pivots, Trolls + Blog Rolls

talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/the-o...

16.10.2025 15:40 — 👍 262    🔁 62    💬 8    📌 7

Extremely excited about this series TPM is doing in concert with our 25th Anniversary, reflecting on 25 years of digital journalism .. the good, the bad, the awful, and where we are now.

Our first two essays are out. We’ll be publishing 25 over the next month.

16.10.2025 15:50 — 👍 24    🔁 7    💬 2    📌 0
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To celebrate making it 25 years in this generally cursed industry, TPM asked 25 writers we admire to reflect on a moment from the past 25 years of digital media.

Introducing 💻 Pivots, Trolls and Blog Rolls 💻

Take a break from the abysmal news to check it out! talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25

16.10.2025 16:09 — 👍 21    🔁 9    💬 1    📌 0
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What Made Blogging Different? Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary...

Talking Points Memo is turning 25 and I wrote a little encomium to early blogging, which I sometimes miss: talkingpointsmemo.com/tpm-25/what-...

16.10.2025 16:39 — 👍 262    🔁 48    💬 23    📌 10
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Introducing: The TPM Social Club – Let’s Do The F*cking News Josh and Joe introduce a new TPM podcast and talk about the...

.@joshkovensky.bsky.social and I launched a podcast!

We're still figuring out exactly what this thing will be, but it's going to be good — that we know! Check it out

talkingpointsmemo.com/podcasts/the...

10.10.2025 21:29 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Before folks overreact to headlines about the judge’s ruling in the Khalil case, please note that (1) it was an immigration judge (IJ), not a federal district court; and (2) the IJ had no power to consider Khalil’s constitutional objections.

This particular decision was a fait accompli.

11.04.2025 20:23 — 👍 7392    🔁 1926    💬 184    📌 154

"Kids are sponges. They just absorb everything. It wasn't all that long ago that we were going to have internet in our schools. Now, let's do A1."

09.04.2025 19:53 — 👍 729    🔁 43    💬 19    📌 6

For your enjoyment: here is Secretary of Education Linda McMahon talking about implementing AI in schools, but pronouncing it "A1," as in "A1 Steak Sauce"

www.youtube.com/live/lxrg28z...

09.04.2025 19:49 — 👍 6828    🔁 1875    💬 506    📌 644

This is the ruling class, right here. Not your asshole MAGA neighbor, not the guy in your building who buttonholes you so he can tell you what he heard on Rogan. Those people are, at worst, aspirants to this sort of evil. The people who commit it are the signatories here.

01.04.2025 00:14 — 👍 180    🔁 43    💬 3    📌 2

incredibly depressing to read the replies here. "this is what they voted for" is just the stupidest, meanest response and if you start writing it please do yourself and me a favor and log off and pet the cat or something

31.03.2025 12:42 — 👍 221    🔁 26    💬 18    📌 2
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Kingdom Of The Biters | Defector The summer after I got married, one of my bosses bit me on the arm. I had a lot of jobs that summer, and a lot of bosses; at the time, I was recreating the sort of interchangeable, poorly paid jobs I’...

As I wrote, elite lawlessness also proves out the basic premise of Trumpism, which is that all of governance is finally just rich creeps doing whatever they want, whenever they want; the degeneracy of the people doing it, and what they do, is a self-perpetuating thing. defector.com/kingdom-of-t...

30.03.2025 23:32 — 👍 1387    🔁 229    💬 33    📌 14

didn’t we used to have a word for this

30.03.2025 20:14 — 👍 3097    🔁 729    💬 29    📌 26

Seems bad

30.03.2025 18:10 — 👍 190    🔁 44    💬 4    📌 1

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