Sausage Factory Offers Accidental Tour

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Come with me and watch something just spiral down, and then spiral down, and then spiral down from the spiraling down. This episode will be fascinating not for the thing itself, but for what it tells us about the action beneath the surface of the sensemaking institutions that make up the narrative voice of our lives. tl;dr: Check out this crazy shit.

Quite famously, Teen Vogue was at the very forefront of the important movement to explain anal sex to children.

Presumably most of its revenue was from gift subscriptions bought by the California legislature, but I’d have to check on that.

The story about hot butt play for high school sophomores was possibly the peak of the magazine’s quality, as it descended into endless trans fetishism and Orange Man Bad ritual, all in a uniquely cringe and subliterate tone. Picture TikTok content delivered in the form of text. You know, for kids.

Okay, brace for impact: At the risk of upsetting you, Conde Nast is closing Teen Vogue. Thumbs are being sucked, because this is a huge crisis:

Think tanks are offering formal statements of concern. Are not we losing the very commitment to democratic pluralism that makes up the something something? If you feel like firing up the Google machine yourself, you can go on a tour through the panic, but it’s a very, very, very, very dangerous sign of WHAT’S HAPPENING IN TRUMP’S AMERIKKKA that we’ve lost this important voice. This is how it happens, people! First the closure of the subliterate teen magazine about anal sex, then the death camps.

Important Teen Vogue professionals weighed in on the somber moment:

There will be no more politics staffers at Teen Vogue. It’s like a whole society just suddenly stabbed itself right in the heart. Who will speak truth to power?

Now, as a final development that leads to the big finish, the Conde Nast union issued an angry denunciation of the closure:

We’re losing Teen Vogue’s insightful journalism, at the time when we need it most. Reminder:

And now, the main event. Representatives of the Conde Nast union stormed the office of the HR director to demand answers about the closure of Teen Vogue, and it can’t be described. It just has to be witnessed, which only takes a single minute, and you’ll probably need to click on the volume button to hear this:

@thewrap

TheWrap on Instagram: "The most brutally awkward thing you'll s…

You can also watch it here on X.

I’m not going to say a word about it. It speaks for itself. But it’s…very telling.

Four of these employees have now been fired over this confrontation. One was Jake Lahut, a politics reporter at Wired. I wrote for a couple of Wired News publications, 25ish years ago, and everybody was smart and fun to work with. That appears to no longer be the case. Sample of Jake Lahut’s important journalism here, a warning that the current explosion of racist terrorist violence on the right isn’t being met by any capacity on the invariably peaceful left for fighting back.

Your mileage may vary, but my position is that you can connect Jake Lahut’s behavior in the hallway with the HR guy to the way the world looks in his journalism. You can see, in a single minute, why the news looks the way it looks. That’s who’s writing it.

With perfect timing, the Conde Nast employee Katherine Stoeffel just interviewed Sydney Sweeney, in a quaint episode of woke scolding that already looks like it flew in from a few years ago. You’re a white woman who was in a jeans ad joking about your “great jeans,” wink wink, and Donald Trump talked about it, don’t you feel like you need to apologize? Wouldn’t you like to take this moment to perform a ritual of self-criticism? Please flagellate yourself on cue.

@ericschmittmo

Eric Schmitt on Instagram: "NEW: Sydney Sweeney refuses to apol…

On social media, this exchange is being frozen into place as a cultural exhibit, for good reason. It belongs in a museum. “Confrontation between leading social types, digital photograph, 2025.”

Can a whole decade be summarized in a single pairing of images? Question answered.

The Conde Nast building is a box full of weak, bitchy, empty, performatively neurotic women and man-women, bitching about Trump and feeling terribly oppressed. I mean, I’m pretty sure we all knew that, but it’s fun to see it on video. For a reminder of how much fun the place used to be for a bunch of smart grown-ups with expense accounts, read this. I’ve spent much of my adult life in media and academia, in case you wonder why I now spend so much time drinking and wandering around in the woods, and I landed right in between the fun era and the bitchy neurosis era. I’ve spent thirty years feeling the transition in my bones.

Anyway, this is who writes the news. Respond appropriately.