Will K. Back (4:13)

Thanks for teeing me up, Isaac. This is Senior Editor Will K. Back and I'll be tackling the first question in today's mailbag, which comes from Jacques in Dinah, Minnesota, which is actually neighboring the suburb of Minneapolis that I grew up in, St. Louis Park. So shout out Minnesota. Love to see the representation, but Jacques asks. As a politically divided household, we gladly joined TANGLE and encouraged other couples like ourselves to join. My spouse and others in our group are no longer reading our take as they feel your organization has become significantly more left leaning in this evaluation section. When we started that was not as evident. Why are you becoming so much more left leaning in your take comments? I assume your right leaning readership has dwindled as a result. Has it? Those of us who love our right leaning spouses have connected and encouraged the use of tangle, but we are bummed that our spouses feel their side is no longer considered fairly and supported. I know that no organization can meet all needs, but your offering was so exciting and a hope for divided couples. At one point in time, why can't Our take be 2 responses, 1 more left leaning and 1 more right leaning? Maybe never. But wouldn't it be amazing if we found some issues that we could actually not tell the difference between? Here is what I wrote in response. We take this feedback very seriously. In fact, it's probably the issue that we discuss most frequently as a staff. Not specifically that we've swung to the left, but comments from readers on both sides of the political spectrum that we've strayed from our mission and become more over overtly biased than they used to Remember now, to answer one part of your question, we haven't seen evidence of a significant loss of conservative and independent readers. But a qualitative assessment of audience members reasons for unsubscribing does show a tilt toward the complaint that we lean left. A more powerful trend is that we've been adding a disproportionate number of left leaning readers as we've grown. As we've written and talked about before. We attribute this in large part to our 2024 feature in this American Life, the radio program which typically attracts more of a left leaning audience. Now we're probably accused of left leaning bias because our editorials have most recently taken a critical stance on President Trump's actions. These criticisms are often much more moderate than the ones you'd find in outlets like MSNow or the Atlantic, but they're criticisms nonetheless. One change that we have implemented with this in mind, and to highlight the ideological diversity within our staff, is the addition of staff dissents, which allow us to model constructive disagreement and offer more than one perspective in the My Take section. As we wrote back in March, we'll continue leaning into this new feature for that exact reason. But with that being said, I would push back on a few suggestions or implications in your question. First, the context of the political moment matters, and criticism isn't the same thing as ideology. When President Biden was in office, we were often accused of being too right because like most good political writers, we were taking a critical eye to the people in power. Now the reverse is true with a Republican as president and Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress. And at the risk of speaking for him, I think it's fair to say that Executive Editor Isaac Saul, who still writes the My Take section more frequently than any other writer on our staff, has been feeling increasingly frustrated with President Trump. And so that feeling from his takes probably permeates a lot of his writing and maybe your overall impression of Tangle too. I'd also note that criticisms of the president don't inherently come from a left or liberal point of view either, as we show almost daily in what the right is saying. Plenty of conservative commentators take issue with a variety of Trump's policies, his actions and his rhetoric. Now. Second, the notion that tangle has moved to the left is not backed up by independent media bias evaluators. Ad fontes still rates us as middle with high marks for reliable analysis, All Sides rates us as center and media bias Fact Check rates us as least biased. In fact, in All Sides most recent review of our content in July 2025, they actually shifted us slightly to the right. Now these evaluations aren't the be all and end all. But I think they offer a solid buffer against the idea that we've become significantly more left leaning, as I think your question implied. Third, I would encourage you and all readers and listeners not to think of the My Take as the final word on a story. Remember, we offer three arguments from the left and the right before our own, and our perspective is meant to be just one of the seven for you to consider. While it is the longest section of the newsletter, Tangle's Take is intended to be a conversation starter and hopefully a model of how to consider complex topics in an intellectually curious manner. That's why we end every My Take with a note of encouragement to write in with criticism, feedback and competing ideas, especially if you disagree. We've carved out the My Take section as a space to be completely transparent about how that day's writer is feeling and thinking about the issues that we cover, and we wouldn't soften or alter our analysis in the name of balance or nonpartisanship. So while we do take this feedback seriously and have developed some creative solutions to address it, like the staff dissent, our priority is and always will be sharing our honest opinions with you. All right now, I'm going to pass it back over to Isaac.

Isaac Saul (10:15)

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Isaac Saul (12:03)

All right, next up is a question from Dak in Providence, Rhode Island. Dax said your article on Friday talks about how politics is on track to become less outwardly volatile and toxic and more kind and honest. Also, as hard as it is to imagine, we will have a post Trump era where things have hopefully calmed down quite a bit. If when this does come to pass, are you concerned that Tangle, thriving under the current political turbulence and tension, will have a subscriber and viewership plateau or slump as the political atmosphere shifts towards calm stability and decency? No, I don't worry about this at all and I'll tell you why. First, I have no idea how that hypothetical future world would impact us right now. We lose a lot of readers because the world is so divided that it's hard for a mission like ours to reach people so who believe people who disagree with them are the literal enemy. The two top reasons readers unsubscribe every day are because they're offended by something we wrote where they are fatigued by the news. I could see a world where a more decent, less partisan era of politics helps improve those problems, not worsen them. A decency wave in politics could be good for Tangle's bottom line. Maybe it would mean more people participating in the dialogue and more people reading Tangle. Second, I generally operate under the view that Tango's business model will survive all manner of political trends. The largest threat to us are technological, like AI summarizing your entire inbox. Not political. We have a good product that people use and learn from. We're affordable, we're unique, and we're adding value to people's lives with that as our winning formula. I think a less partisan, more decent political takeover wouldn't be the kind of thing that hurt us, even if it did reduce some engagement and attention toward national politics.

Acast Host (13:54)

This is Tangle's managing editor, Arya Weitzman, answering a question from David from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. David asks after reading this line of yours, One of the obvious hallmarks of AI generated text is its formulaic nature. It's not X, it's Y. And it isn't just A, it's B, end quote. I started noticing that formula on multiple substack articles by different authors. Then the other hallmarks of LLM writing started appearing that I can't quite put my finger on. When you suspect an article is written by an LLM, what are the telltale signs you look for? Again, that's from David in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That construction that just referenced the it's not A, it's B, it's called antithesis. And it's far and away the biggest telltale sign of AI generated text. Another related one is called chiasmus, which is Greek for diagonal arrangement, as in ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Or those whose lot it is to ramble can seldom write, and those who know how to write very seldom ramble. A quote from the literary critic Samuel Johnson Chiasmus was for a long time a telltale sign of great writing. Now it's a feature of AI generated text. You also see AI rely on metastructures like headings and bulleted lists all the time, sentence punctuation that tends to favor comma separated lists and eschew semicolons and a casual attraction to the EM dash. So much so that some members of Gen Z, in a charming linguistic NEOTENY, call the EM-D ChatGPT hyphen, rapidly accelerating millennial lingua files towards the boomerish takes. We entered adulthood deriding like ChatGPT get away from my EM dash, which is a real headline. And all of that can be pretty frustrating because all those features are useful tools in crafting good writing. In fact, we're using a bunch of them in today's piece. We don't want to avoid writing a certain way because of ChatGPT or Claude, since in many ways those models learn what to write based on examples of effective writing that they were trained on. On the other hand, ChatGPT's over reliance on antithesis has shown us how lazy it feels for constructing thoughts. So that is one instance we're shying away from, and we don't want to over rely on any writing tool ourselves. Looking outwardly, we expect the writers we know and follow to both write to the book and write to their style. So in order to tell whether text is AI generated, you generally look for all of its telltale antithesis, chiasmus, EM dashes, short sentences, structured headings, and comma separated or bulleted lists. But you also look for the absence of unique markers of a person's style over time. I think you just get a sense of the flavor of a certain writer. For instance, I can identify Isaac's writing because he likes to use incomplete sentences from time to time for rhetorical flourishes that'll give you the impression he's literally speaking his thoughts to you. And because, God help me, I've written more of his writing than any other writer who's ever lived, I think that I think is. I think that's actually true. But for myself to identify my own writing, I tend to get a little more, I don't know, arabesque. I mean, if you read what I wrote here, it's replete with parentheticals. And my second paragraph in this writing was all one giant run on. So you can write your own style, and it generally comes out as pretty good, or at least human and not feeling like it was made by a robot. In a way, that's pretty good. And when you see an overabundance of those telltale indicators, plus a lack of specific style markers, you probably have AI generated text. That doesn't mean that's a bad thing. It just. Well, I guess we wouldn't rate that way.

John Wall (17:36)

Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to retangle.com and sign up for a new newsletter subscription. Or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription, which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode, as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews, and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. I will join you again for the daily podcast. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'.

Isaac Saul (18:27)

All.

John Wall (18:30)

Peace.

Isaac Saul (18:32)

Our Executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate editors Audrey Moorhead, Lindsey Knuth and Bailey Saul. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@retangle.com.

Isaac Saul (19:11)

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Isaac Saul (19:57)

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Isaac Saul (20:09)

Make it quick, young man.

Isaac Saul (20:12)

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Isaac Saul (20:16)

I think we should call a doctor.

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