Dez Reads. Cockroaches & Culture

Just another week where reality outperformed fiction.

Mark Emerson here with the pen. There’s a lot to unpack this week. Let’s get into it. Anne Marie kicks us off with a story that reads like a corporate Black Mirror episode, where eBay employees turned unfavorable coverage into a full-blown harassment campaign. It’s bizarre, dark, and a reminder that how you handle criticism matters more than the criticism itself.

Sam Jefferies follows with a takedown of “sanewashing,” a concept that feels increasingly relevant as extreme voices get polished into something more palatable. Nathaniel Beach builds on that thread, digging into the manosphere and how algorithms are shaping a generation of young men in ways that are more exploitative than empowering.

Madeline Nagler zooms out to the live music economy, where seeing your favorite artist now comes with the price tag of a small vacation, and asks who gets left behind when culture becomes a luxury good. Michael Bova closes us out with a reminder that not everything moves forward in a straight line. Personally, I’ll take the vinyl and skip the Swiftie travel package.

A little chaos, a little culture, and a few things that make you stop and think.

Thanks, as always, for reading along with us.

Here we go.

Keep The Change, Ya Filthy Animal.

The Independent. eBay strikes a deal with couple who claimed in $500m lawsuit that tech giant sent them cockroaches and funeral wreaths

Every time I think I’ve seen it all, I haven’t.

When David and Ina Steiner, publishers of an e-commerce newsletter, wrote critically about eBay, the company’s employees responded with a harassment campaign that feels akin to something Kevin McCallister orchestrated, circa 1990s Home Alone.

eBay employees launched live cockroaches, spiders, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, pornographic magazines sent to a neighbor’s house, and a plot to break into their garage to install a GPS tracker on their car. Yes, that eBay, the place I go to find vintage coffee mugs and underpriced furniture. In addition to the civil lawsuit, seven employees faced criminal charges, including eBay’s former senior director of safety and security, who got nearly five years in prison.

The Steiners sought $500 million in damages and just settled for an undisclosed amount. My guess? Somewhere north of “go away” money and south of half a billion… but enough to make the point that terrorizing a couple from Natick, Massachusetts over a newsletter was, in fact, a terrible idea.

All is not fair in love and [online marketplace] war.

– Anne Marie Malecha

Sanewashing: The Art of Making Crazy Sound Like a TED Talk.

Mediaite. Hasan Piker is the left’s Candace Owens, The Press Treats Him like a Rock Star.

Media criticism is almost too easy. By definition, everything the media (broadly defined) does is public, so every piece of reporting, every crumb of analysis, every poorly written headline and even more poorly thought-out podcast comment lives under the microscope.

In a world where everyone is media and yet reporters and commentators are poorly trained or not trained at all, mistakes are the norm and biases are ignored or welcomed. Media criticism is as old as media itself. At times, it matures to meet the moment.

Colby Hall’s cold, analytical cut-down of far-left streamer Hasan Piker is can’t-miss commentary. Amongst other things, Colby breaks down the practice of “sanewashing,” the act of rephrasing or contextualizing a public figure’s extreme, irrational, or chaotic rhetoric to make it seem more mainstream, rational, and palatable to the general public.

Sanewashing is the whitewashing of the present moment. Intentional and purposeful, it wraps the crazy in false context and papers over madness to protect extreme voices. Piker’s radicalism is a frequent beneficiary of sanewashing. Hall’s media criticism should serve as a warning to others; sanewashing Piker will now live under its own microscope, too.

– Sam Jefferies

Rage, Algorithms, and the Boys Who Never Got to Be Awkward.

The State News. Dear male podcaster, tell me when my life begins

I’ve been loosely keeping tabs on the manosphere for a few years, and it’s always made me feel unsettled. I’m 27 and lean right politically, so although I’m somewhat older than the audience they typically reach, I’m close enough to the target demographic to understand where their raw channeled frustrations come from. The problem is the younger men they’re reaching were coming up at an especially vulnerable moment. COVID-19 locked them down in the middle of puberty, stealing their opportunity to experience awkward parties, fumbling first crushes, and learning how to connect with people. Instead, they were alone with social media algorithms that turned every insecurity into endless rage and resentment.

That’s the real heart of the male loneliness epidemic. An entire generation of boys who missed the messy, face-to-face experiences that build confidence and friendships and end up isolated in ways we haven’t seen before. The influencers saw that vulnerability and built an industry around preying on it. They package sexist, homophobic, and deeply toxic ideas as self-improvement, then feed them to boys who are still figuring out who they are. They call it “ascending as men,” but a lot of it just keeps guys angry and scrolling, just one “looksmaxing” technique or supplement away from “leveling up.”

I’m all for men getting stronger and building real lives, but this is exploitation dressed up as wisdom. We owe young men better.

– Nathaniel Beach

You Want to See Taylor Live? That’ll Be a Plane Ticket, Two Hotel Nights, and Your Soul.

WSJ. Why Concerts Keep Getting More Expensive.

As superstar artists consolidate into residencies, they aren’t just innovating the concert business, they’re quietly shifting the real costs of touring onto their fans. The WSJ notes that instead of crisscrossing the country, top acts now park in a few lucrative hubs, forcing fans to shoulder airfare, hotels, and extra fees on top of already inflated tickets.

What reads as efficiency for multi-millionaire performers and promoters becomes a regressive tax on devotion. This practice turned once-local, communal shows into luxury trips reserved for people with disposable income and flexible time.

The working-class fans who used to scrape together money for a nosebleed seat in their own city are now expected to bankroll an entire mini-vacation just to be in the room, effectively pushed out of a cultural ritual they helped build. In the name of spectacle, access is being quietly stripped away.

– Madeline Nagler

From the Bargain Bin to $1.1 Billion.

RIAA. US Music Revenue Database.

It looks like vinyl records aren’t just for hipsters in Brooklyn.

The Recording Industry Association of America’s year-end report found that 2025 U.S. vinyl sales revenue reached nearly $1.1 billion, the 19th straight year of growth. It’s still far off from the nearly $10 billion made in streaming (82% of consumption), but continues to be the second-largest format for music at 12%.

At its peak physical LP/EP revenue, the industry hit $7.52 billion (adjusted for inflation) in 1978, when the Bee Gees Saturday Night Fever album topped the charts — an album that I proudly own.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Taylor Swift has dominated record sales for the last four years, according to the NYT chart below; but there are a few surprises mixed in over the last 13 years. To whoever is putting “Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1” on their record player every night, you clearly aren’t the only one.

– Michael Bova

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