Subscribers to this newsletter have likely noticed I’ve been scarce of late. I can explain part of the reason now: I flew to Austin over the weekend and taped episode #1745 of JRE with the Mephistopheles of the national media establishment, old friend and fellow Masshole Joe Rogan. The episode is up now on Spotify, and you can see a sample in the YouTube clip above. Highlights include Joe realizing early in the show that my voice reminds him of Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, but waiting until mid-episode to break it to me. At the airport on the way home I checked out a video and burst out laughing. He may have a point:

I’m going to do a Callin in the coming days to talk about the Rogan show and other recent themes. Check here and at @mtaibbi for the time.

The other reason it’s been quiet: I’ve been working on a feature on the Loudoun County business, a frustrating story that for a while was seeming more and more obscure every time I picked up the phone. After a month of research, interviews, and FOIA requests, though, I’m finally nearing the end, and hope to have the first part of a series out by Friday.

Loudoun might be the worst case of media malpractice I’ve come across in my career. Residents should be furious. Noted Zoom onanist and occasional CNN legal expert Jeffrey Toobin declared blithely, “It’s about white supremacy,” but the core of the years-long schools controversy turns out to be a dispute over gifted admissions that mainly concerns two of the county’s nonwhite demographics, making such analyses wrong to a degree that’s not easy to achieve even on purpose.

And that’s just the beginning. Almost everything I’d seen published or aired about that case in national coverage turned out to be wrong on some level, which made reporting it out a build-from-scratch exercise. In any case, that version is coming, after which the pace will return to normal around here. Until then, thanks for your patience, and please don’t spare my feelings if you think the Holmes thing is true.