John McDermott
@mcdermott
Writer | Contributor: @RollingStone, @Esquire, @GQmagazine, @GuardianUS | Alumnus: @AdAge @Digiday @WeAreMEL
“Guy told me I should give feedback in a ‘compliment sandwich.’ There should be a compliment, some criticism, followed by another compliment. I said, ‘That’s not a compliment sandwich, man. You name the sandwich by the filling. That’s a criticism sandwich on compliment bread.’”
The problem with tipping culture is you’re all spineless cowards. You can just hit “No Tip” when getting counter service. But no, you’re scared.
A rant: Tipping culture is out of control. I'm a generous tipper. But 20% for someone to make eye contact & hand me a muffin is crazy. Restaurants widely suggesting people tip 30% now is kookoo bananas. At this rate we'll soon be tipping the price of the meal. Make it stop.
Zoomers have no idea that Stephen Colbert was funny once. Sad.
All these "Where Have All the Good Men Gone?" articles neglect to acknowledge that dating apps + hookup culture have created a real-life fantasy for high-status men where they can have a roster of women 5-7 deep and drop one the moment they get bored. nytimes.com/2025/07/21/mag…
This is 100% true, but it was mostly due to the perverse business incentives of 2010s VC-backed, millennial-focused digital media. The only goal was to get as much as traffic as possible, so undertrained young writers relied on inflammatory political takes.
In retrospect one of the things that allowed wokeness to become so powerful, at its peak, was the decline of journalism as an industry. The kind of people who undertook its institutional capture in 2010 mostly couldn't have gotten hired in 1980.
Once again, my chat privileges on chess.com have been revoked.
I'm obviously qualified for the job.
They should let me edit Vogue
Like all great contemporary public intellectuals, Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) went to the University of Illinois, a public state school.
I chatted with @DisgracedProp and @AdemLuz about my @RollingStone article on L.A.'s anti-woke literary scene. x.com/i/broadcasts/1…
Will you raise your right hand? On July 26th, join us at 8 PM EST live on X for 𝙑𝙄𝘾𝙏𝙄𝙈 𝙍𝘼𝘿𝙄𝙊 2 featuring @mcdermott and @SamBuntz. As always, hosted by @TaylorNapolsky and @emily_sipiora.
Say what you will about Twitter/X under the Musk regime, but the old Twitter would have never been able to serve me a random tweet showing the neighborhood bar from my hometown.
it should be legal for your neighborhood to have a corner bar you can walk to
People doesn't realize how revolutionary this is for competitive chess. Chess has been perfected by A.I. bots and the top-ranked players are so bored w/ traditional chess that they are rewriting the rules of the centuries-old game to make it more challenging.
I can get Rolling Stone to let me write about right-wing trolls, but I can’t convince any publication to let me cover the Chess960 tournament in Vegas next month. Strange times.
I can get Rolling Stone to let me write about right-wing trolls, but I can’t convince any publication to let me cover the Chess960 tournament in Vegas next month. Strange times.
some great bits in this article about LA’s burgeoning anti-woke literary scene. no doubt Nutcrankr is an impressive work of fiction
Today I learned there are YouTubers who read entire articles to their audience, like a kindergarten teacher reading a flip book to her class. Except in this case, the host runs out of steam half way through my article and tells his viewers to read it themselves.
Me and the Trump-voting Downtown LA alt-lit girl who calls my writing “retarded”
After years of being tacitly driven underground, the “anti-woke” arts scene in Los Angeles is ready to blossom in full view. “We have been in hibernation. We have been in the cold. We’ve been hiding. Now we’re out in the open." rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…