HeyJaredWord Salad
I'm a bestselling author who also wrote speeches and jokes for President Obama. On here, I write about political persuasion, how obscure cultural references explain everything, and how to live courageously when it takes guts just to read the news.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 7
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest issues
The GOP is Full of Schmitt (opens the original)
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To say that Senator Eric Schmitt has the confidence of a mediocre white man is an insult to mediocre white men everywhere. I assume you’ve already seen the verbal exchange to which I’m referring. But just in case, I’ll summarize. Yesterday, while questioning former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, Senator Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, sprung what he thought was the perfect trap. Smith said he hadn’t been in Atlanta on February 3, 2024. In that case, Schmitt countered, why do we have text me
Let's Go Win the F*ing Senate (from the Word Salad Archives) (opens the original)
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I’m on another writing deadline and don’t have time for a full post right now. So I wanted to do something a little different - since many of you have subscribed to this Substack over the past year or so, I wanted to repost a piece I wrote in May, 2025. Partly, this is because, while I’ve gotten some things very wrong, this is one take I think I got very right. I think - based on this one piece, anyway - that there’s a good case to be made that reading this Substack will
Moral Numbness is a Sin (opens the original)
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To say that the American people responded to last week’s grotesque Republican Convention with a collective shrug would give us far too much credit. If anything, we responded with a collective, zombified stare.A decade ago – in the olden days when “basket of deplorables” was a major scandal – a pastor calling the Democrats “advocates for evil” might have provoked a nationwide reckoning, or at least sustained news coverage. Ditto
Have We Forgotten? (opens the original)
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I almost never write about September 11th. It feels simultaneously too personal and not personal enough. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and went to school on the Upper East. I was in Mr. March’s 10th Grade English class when the first plane hit. In the next period’s history class, Mr. Slick wheeled a TV into the room - this was in the olden days when getting a screen from place to place was no easy task - and we watched in silence. For the rest of the day, anyone who could hear fr
In Defense of Nostalgia (opens the original)
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I just got back from two weeks in Kenya.It was a great trip. Jacqui and I saw a ton of cool animals, including lions, elephants, and an endangered golden-rumped elephant shrew which actually had a golden rump!Am I about to show you a bunch of vacation pictures? Yes. Yes I am.<a class="image-link image2" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E9UO!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F87b15758-2c6d-4ec3-abf1-d80c20dd
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