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From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.
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Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to a special Friday edition of the Tangle podcast. I am your host, Isaac Saul, Tangles Executive Editor. Today is Friday, March 20th, and today we are updating our editorial policy and we're also announcing a comment, moderation policy and some changes to our overall newsletter and podcast. On the editorial side, some small stuff, nothing too big and crazy though the comment moderation policy and some of the editorial standards I think are actually pretty important. So before we jump into what exactly is happening, I want to start with just explaining some background here. One of my primary goals with Tangle is to build the most trusted political news outlet in the world. That's part of why I started this Two of the most important ways that we're working toward that goal are maintaining trust with our audience by responding to their feedback and being transparent and creating a special place for our community to interact, debate and learn from each other. So today we're making a series of announcements in service of those two objectives. First, we're making several updates to our editorial guidelines. This is the first time we've done so since 2023. As we've learned at Tangle, it is not just what we say, but how we say it. I don't think any news outlet is thinking harder about the ways in which we communicate on controversial issues. We are a big tent media organization and we are trying to win the trust of Americans from across the political spectrum. Language, choice and editorial standards in service of this goal were the subject of my 2024 TED talk, and it's part of how we continue to evolve for the widest, most politically diverse audience possible. Additionally, we're going to share some explanations and commentary about internal dialogue that led to the choices we are making. Rather than just telling you what we're going to do, we hope to build some trust by explaining why we're doing it. Given that we rarely have unanimous agreement on any of these decisions, we recognize that some are bound to upset certain listeners or groups. Our sincere hope is that by explaining our thought process, even if you don't agree with our choice, you'll be able to understand it. Second, we're going to be making some adjustments to the structure of our podcast. We always want to grow and evolve what we're doing, which means evaluating what we're doing periodically. We also want to remain true to what works and what our readers are getting value out of. So we we aren't trying to reinvent the wheel. A number of these changes we've already begun doing, and we're always willing to review if any of our practices are working or not. Third, we're announcing our first ever moderation policies for the comments section on our website. As with our editorial guidelines, we have put a tremendous amount of consideration into how to best build commenting rules that align with our mission. We want to embody the spirit of free speech and exchange while also trying to create a space for for genuinely quality dialogue. The guidelines we're laying out today, I think meet that goal, but this is also the first time we're doing this, and we'll consider the feedback we get from our audience and adapt into the future to continue to pursue that quality space. We're also announcing that starting next week, we'll be making the comment section on our website accessible for members only. I know some listeners and readers will be disappointed about the decision to gate the comments, and in anticipation of that feedback, we're dedicating part of today's podcast to explaining our rationale. So with that, we're going to get into it our newest editorial guidelines, updates on the structure of the newsletter and the podcast, and our new moderation policy for the comments section. I'm going to be joined by some editors from our staff today to share these updates. I hope you guys enjoy.
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Hi, I'm Tangles Associate Editor Audrey Moorhead, and I'm here to talk about the new commenting moderation policy we're going to implement. These rules are the first ever comment moderation policy Tangle has issued. In conjunction with these rules, we're also announcing that commenting privileges will only be available to paying Tangle members who are logged into our website. This policy will go into effect when we come back from break on Monday, March 30th. First, we want to explain how we came to the decision to begin paywalling the comments section. First and foremost, we believe having a members only comment section will encourage buy in to our mission. If someone is paying to support or access our work, they are more likely to care for the space and conduct themselves in a way that comports with our vision. Given our affordable subscription price and our policy of giving free subscriptions to people who have financial barriers, we believe we can do this without creating unreasonable burdens, which is a core priority for us. Second, free spaces in which you can comment on Tangle already exist. An active Reddit community is constantly discussing our work. Platforms like X Instagram and Facebook offer readers more places to interact. Given that these spaces are out there, we think we can and should strive to make something special and distinct on our own website. This is our space, so we should own it. Finally, in the process of monitoring our comments and preparing to embark on the moderation journey, we realized the people who are most likely to do or say things that degrade the quality of the commenting space are overwhelmingly users who do not pay for our work, some of whom are not even subscribed at the free level. These are not people who level harsh criticisms about us, but people who intentionally use inflammatory language and sling insults at fellow Tangle readers. In short, we think forcing these people to either invest in the community or be unable to comment will improve the quality of the discourse on our website. Of course, this will also immediately box out the trolls and rabble rousers who find our work online and show up in the comments just to be disruptive. With all that said, if you want to subscribe to unlock those comments, you can do so at the link in the show Notes Our goal is to create a robust community for dialogue that's unique from other spaces on the Internet. In service of that goal, in addition to adding a paywall to the comment section, our team has agreed to a series of commenting rules and guidelines. While they represent our blanket positions on comment section behavior, they come with an important caveat. We will avoid drawing lines on live debates about what is and isn't an acceptable view. Therefore, comments like boys can't become girls or Trump supporters are all racist, are certainly offensive to some, but they will be allowed on our page provided the comments do not otherwise violate our rules. We reserve some right to issue warnings or delete posts that we feel violate the spirit of the guidelines and the community standards we are trying to enforce. Additionally, we may disable commenting altogether for anyone who continues to post outside of these guidelines. We're a small team and comment moderation is time consuming work. While we will enforce these guidelines as best we can, we can't guarantee that we will catch and remove every violation or that we will do so promptly. Ideally, our comment section will be a self policing space. The less we have to get involved, the better. Making these rules is a difficult and fraught process, and as with any other tangle decision, we're open to reader feedback and may update our guidelines as we see the rules play out in practice. Practice now without further ado, the rules first, no direct name calling. This is pretty simple. Saying Republicans are stupid is permissible. Saying Kevin, you're stupid is not. Additionally, directing slurs of any kind at other commenters is unacceptable. Second, no inciting violence. This is also pretty simple. Saying Democrats want to burn things down is allowed. Saying we should burn things down or I will punch you in the face is not. Third, no gratuitous obscenity. Our obscenity standard is pretty relaxed. Swear as much as you want, but comments explicitly describing sexual actions or bodily functions will be removed. Fourth, no sharing violent multimedia imagery. We reserve the right to determine if graphic footage of violence is newsworthy and to share or reference it within the newsletter and podcast as we see fit. Discussion of graphic content in the comments section is fine, but direct links to footage and imagery will be removed. Fifth, no spam, self promotion or advertising comments. Advertising products promoting your own work or that are otherwise unrelated to the main article or ensuing discussion in the comment threads will be removed. Finally, no excessive reports. Unnecessary reports make it more difficult for us to find and take down actual rule violations. Do not report comments just because you find them offensive or you think they should be rules violations. Report them only if you think they are already legitimate violations of the rules laid out above. Those are the only hard and fast rules that we have. However, we're also issuing commenting guidelines. If your comment isn't in line with these guidelines, you may receive an email reminding you to keep these best practices in mind when posting. Be persuasive. Our goal is to encourage dialogue across political lines. While commenting that Democrats are stupid is allowed, it won't change anyone's mind. If you feel you need to say this, why not explain why you think Democrats are stupid? 2. Approach arguments with curiosity. We hope that you encounter ideas you don't agree with in the comments section. When you do, rather than dismissing them outright, we encourage you to ask questions about the points being made. Think of it as a conversation, not a post. Number three hold one another accountable. If someone isn't engaging in good faith, you can call them out directly. This is ultimately your community and we want you to feel empowered to set high standards and expect rigorous conversation. Of course, you can always report a comment when someone oversteps. That wraps up our rules and guidelines. Again, all of these rules and guidelines are our attempt at making the comment section a better place for everyone. If you think one of them isn't working, or that other rules would be more helpful, be sure to let us know and we'll see you in the comments.
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hey, this is Adam Grant, host of Ted's podcast Rethinking with Adam Grant. Let me share with you why smart finance leaders turn to Bill. They know that clarity isn't just helpful, it's strategic. As the intelligent finance platform, Bill uses AI to automate the busy work for nearly half a million businesses so they can focus on intentional growth, eliminate the friction and start scaling with the proven choice. Visit bill.com proven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and get a $250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com proven terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details.
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This is Tangles Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, here to talk about some of our new editorial policies around language use. We'll get started with our new policies about using the terms fascist and authoritarian. From the start of President Donald Trump's campaign for president in 2015 up to the present, some scholars, writers and critics have labeled Trump and his policies as fascist or authoritarian. We want to offer some clarity on these terms and our usage of them going forward. For our purposes, we're focusing specifically on fascist and authoritarian political figures and governments rather than say, fascist art or authoritarian parenting. In this context, fascism is a far right form of governance that expresses hard power through the state. Fascist ideas originated in 19th century European writings in response to rising progressivism and secular liberalism, but it wasn't until the interwar period that paradigmatic fascist governments we think of today like Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, came into power. Encyclopedia Britannica is one of the sources we like to use most for definitions like these, and Britannica notes that there is no universally agreed upon definition of fascism, but it does find several shared characteristics among fascist figures and fascist governments. Those are extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy, and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and subordinating individual interests to the good of the nation. Arguments promoting Trump as a fascist figure center on his reinstatement of Schedule F for federal workers, his targeting of immigrants and DEI programs, his attempted removal of birthright citizenship and his domestic deployment of federal troops and masked DHS agents. Since the start of Trump's second term, many readers have asked us whether we think these actions amount to fascism. We don't. For a few reasons. The United States under Trump remains a healthy democracy with free and fair elections and a working judiciary. And although Trump is amassing executive power, he's largely doing so through existing legal avenues, such as executive orders, which can be overturned by the next president. Encyclopedia Britannica also defines authoritarianism as a form of government that has no mechanism for transferring executive power power and that affords its citizens no rights. In authoritarian governments, all power lies in the hands of a single person or a small group of people. Modern authoritarian governments persist across the globe in North Korea, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, among other places. In earlier editions, we've defined our own markers of a shift towards authoritarianism in the United States. Those are prosecution of political enemies, using the military against peaceful protesters, the erosion of free and fair elections, the collapse of a legitimate opposition party, and genuinely restricted free speech. In previous writing, Executive Editor Isaac Saul has argued Trump is checking the first two of these five boxes. Next up is our usage of the word America or American. We refer to the United States of America as United States or US for short and typically use us as an adjective. However, we find it to be an awkward usage in many cases, as in US Citizen instead of American. Not only is that wordier, but it's inexact. Nationality is not the exact same thing as citizenship, and we should have a general word to refer to someone who is a legal and long term resident of the United States of America. As such, we've adjusted our policy to allow for the use of the word American to refer to U.S. citizens or as an adjective describing U.S. governance or culture. A common criticism of this term is that American can refer to a resident of any number of countries in North America or South America. However, in practice this criticism is pretty unconvincing for three reasons. First, we rarely if ever hear people say American when they mean North American or South American. Usually, we'll hear one of those two terms. Second, it's similarly rare to hear anyone use the word American when to refer to residents of both continents all at once. Lastly, nobody would refer to a Canadian or a Guianan as an American when that person could just be referred to by their nationality. Meanwhile, without the word American, the United States of America would have no such easy demonym. This usage of American has a history dating back to the pre revolutionary British colonies. To use one particularly beautiful example. In Rob Chernow's biography, A Life, Chernow quote quotes a British soldier watching how Americans behave once the British officially withdrew from New York City. Here's that quote. Here in the city we have had an army for more than seven years and yet could not keep the peace of it. Now that we are gone, everything is in quietness and safety. The Americans are a curious, original people. They know how to govern themselves, but nobody else can govern them. Indeed, that brings us next to our usage around governmental nomenclature and speaking of America, we have made the editorial decision to not use new names for geographical places or governmental entities that a presidential administration has decided to use unless or until an act of Congress officially acknowledges those changes. That means in our coverage, the Gulf of America will remain the Gulf of Mexico, the Arabian Gulf will remain the Persian Gulf, and the Department of War will remain the Department of Defense. This is not intended as an oppositional stance against the Trump administration, but as a general precedent that would apply to any president unilaterally renaming geographical places independent of Congress. And again, if Congress authorizes these name changes, we will adjust accordingly. Next, that brings us to the particularly sensitive topic of language around suicide as a general guideline. If our word choices can theoretically decrease the odds of terrible behaviors being repeated, we will make those choices. That contagion effect drives our decision not to reprint the names of perpetrators of mass shootings, which is something we say every time we cover such an event in Tangle. We also refer to recommendations from professional groups to help guide our choices. On the flip side, we have a policy against using terms that feel or sound nicer just to protect the sensitivities of language users, as we've written about before, and we do not follow recommendations from policy groups dogmatically. If a suggested guideline is not supported with sound reasoning and evidence, we won't reflexively follow it over other alternatives. We very deeply want to make choices that could prevent suicides, and coming from that position, we want to commit to two important editorial choices. First, following the recommendations from the nonprofit reporting on suicide or ros, we are going to avoid describing suicide attempts as successful, failed, or completed. As the nonprofit describes, the contagion effects of suicides is real, and referring to the act of taking one's life as something that can be done successfully could arguably contribute to copycats. Deciding to follow that guideline is a relatively easy and straightforward decision for us to make. Our second decision is to use the phrase kill themself when describing an act of suicide, a phrase which is also recommended by ROS we considered other possible alternatives but ruled them out for different reasons. Ros also recommended the phrase died by suicide, but we believe that phrase goes against a common journalistic standard of avoiding passive language. The group also recommends against the term committed suicide, saying that it uses language consistent with crime or sin, as in committed murder or committed adultery, and that connotation can create a stigma that makes it less likely for suicidal people to seek help. However, several members of our staff found that justification unconvincing, and after coming through the research reporting on suicide has compiled, we found the data to be inconclusive that avoiding the term committed suicide would be prevented, meaning this phrase is unlikely to influence behavior in either direction. The best study we could find on this term is a survey of adults affected by suicide about what terms they prefer. As shown below, the study found no association on the acceptability of the term among this group whatsoever, meaning there is no demonstrated reason to avoid it. At the same time, the data also shows no relationship with the phrase kill themself, and since several members of our staff also felt that the stigmatization theory provide a good reason to avoid the term committed suicide on its own, even if the data is inconclusive, the available reasonable alternative of kill themself made it an acceptable solution. We know this is a particularly sensitive and difficult area, and we don't consider ourselves to be the sole arbiters of what is right and what is wrong. These guidelines only represent the decisions that we've come to for our own writing, and for now we are always very willing to hear other arguments from readers, and we will never enforce our preferred wording choices to others in the comments section. Next Usage of words that Denote somebody's Political Orientation We've recently been paying closer attention to how we describe the political orientation of politicians, pundits, and public figures. While this impacts our word choices in a variety of ways, we're making a particular effort to differentiate between conservatives, right wingers and Republicans, as well as between liberals, left wingers and Democrats. It has already been our practice to use Republican and Democrat only to refer to active or former U.S. party members or party specific policies. The parties are a formal aspect of the American political system, and each party has represented a shifting variety of political ideologies over time. Republican is not interchangeable with conservative, nor is Democrat interchangeable with liberal. Moving forward, we will also be more specific in referring to ideologies across the political spectrum using the definition from Encyclopedia Britannica. Conservatism is a political doctrine that emphasizes the value of traditional institutions and practices. More specifically, American conservatism has long been defined by commitments to free market policies and opposition to government expansion. Liberalism is defined by Britannica as taking protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics in the U.S. liberalism is also associated with the use of government programs to address broader societal restrictions on individual freedoms such as poverty and inequality. However, traditional American conservatism is not the only right wing ideological position, and traditional American liberalism is not the sole ideology on the political left. Furthermore, ascendant figures on the left and the right increasingly represent ideologies that break from traditionally conservative and liberal ideals. Going forward, we will use liberal and conservative to describe figures and ideas in line with the traditional American understanding of these terms, and we will use left and right as umbrella terms to discuss other relevant political ideas and figures when they come up. And lastly, our usage of the word Unauthorized migrant in our 2023 guidelines, we wrote about our decision to use unauthorized migrant in place of illegal alien or undocumented immigrant. It was a straightforward compromise, avoiding two terms that felt politically loaded for another that adequately described what we were talking about at the time, people who cross the border without authorization. However, over time we've discovered a few reasons why this term wasn't the catch all solution we had thought and hoped it could be when we landed on the phrase. Initially, border crossings were at an all time high. Now they've shrunk to their lowest levels in recent history. Many of the people who crossed over during that elevated period of migration are now living in the country legally or illegally. As such, we're going to start using unauthorized immigrant as a default to describe people who crossed into the United States illegally, or residents who were not in compliance with their legal restrictions. This term is also imperfect because immigrant implies a person who has moved with the intention to repatriate to another country, which is an implication that isn't true in every case, but it's as close as we can get without being too wordy. Lastly, we will always be as precise as possible when describing a person or group. So if we're talking about residents or H1B visa holders, or asylum seekers, or even the original term unauthorized migrants in the appropriate context, then we will use those words. And if we are talking more generally about people not from the United States, we will use the words non citizen or foreign national. But again, and for clarity, when discussing people who crossed into the United States illegally, or residents who are not in compliance with their legal restrictions, we will be using the term unauthorized immigrant. And we may also use the term immigrants here illegally or describe someone as in the country illegally. That's it for our section on our updated language choices. Foreign
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we'll be right back after this quick break.
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Hi, this is Senior Editor Will Kbach and I'll be reading our section on structural choices and changes that we're making. First up is our staff dissents and concurrences. So we rolled out the staff dissent feature in September of 2025, describing it as a way to highlight viewpoint diversity on our team and articulate criticisms from our AUD that are often argued internally but never seen publicly. These tenets remain the same, though we'd add that dissents also serve to highlight areas of an issue that a staff member or members thought the take writer did not sufficiently address. Separately, we recently debuted a staff concurrence feature to highlight areas where one of us agrees with the thrust of a take but wants to add additional color or reasoning on a related issue. In other words, it's a new line of thought, but not a substantive disagreement with the main argument. For example, in our first ever staff concurrence published recently, Managing editor Ari Weitzman added a thought to Isaac's take on the Senate primary results in Texas. Ari's concurrence offered an additional lens through which to view the election, but he didn't disagree with Isaac's main conclusions. These features, staff dissents and staff concurrences were inspired by the Supreme Court, and we aspire to be something akin to perhaps the Supreme Court of the media, with robust ideological diversity among our staff and comfort in publicly sharing our disagreements and different methods of reasoning when they arise. The Tangle community seems to appreciate that, too. In fact, these features are the most popular additions we've made to the newsletter in quite some time. We should also note that if you don't see a dissent after a take, that doesn't mean the entire staff was in agreement. In many cases, the take writer will moderate or adjust their argument in response to internal feedback that they found compelling during our editing process. In others, we decide that the level of disagreement is not significant enough to warrant a full dissent. It might be a dispute about how an issue is described, a minor difference over framing, or something else in that vein. Broadly, an internal debate merits a dissent. It rises to that level when one or more staff members disagree outright with a core part of the take's argument, and at least one member of the staff doesn't feel like their disagreement is reflected in the edits on the take. In cases where multiple staff members have separate disputes, we'll publish two dissents, though likely never more than that. Dissents and concurrences will arise on an edition by edition basis. That said, we'll never add one for the sake of keeping up a consistent cadence, only when it's merited along the lines that I just described. Next, alternating Features editors are famous, or perhaps infamous, for telling writers to kill your darlings, accepting cuts to passages, characters, or story arcs that they personally love but don't serve the overall piece. We value each newsletter section, but we recognize that the time has come for something of a change, and if we want to experiment with adding new features, that means some things have to go up front. Here's the good news. Nothing is going away permanently. Instead, we're going to start rotating the sections around our main story to make the newsletter more dynamic, visually appealing and digestible. Quick Hits the introduction to the day's main story, what the left and right are saying, My take the reader question and the extras will all remain fixtures. They aren't going anywhere. But the other section, specifically under the radar numbers and have a nice day will rotate in and out depending on what we want to prioritize in a given day's edition. And also to ensure that we're slimming down the overall length of the newsletter, which has gotten a bit long. Furthermore, we're going to be trying out some new sections and we have a few initial ideas that we're going to be experimenting with in the weeks and months ahead. Some of those ideas are a quote, chart or feel good picture of the day, a spotlight on a new piece of Tangle original content that's not part of the newsletter, a highlight from the Tangle team Slack, a staff recommendation for a book, a TV show, a movie, a recipe or something else like that, a historical look back at the day in history, an original puzzle designed by somebody here on our team, a notable international story that we want to highlight, a notable hyper local news story that feels worthy of highlighting, and finally, a cool personal fact or story from a member of the Tangle community. If you have other ideas for new sections in this vein, please send them in and write in and share with us. We're planning to roll out some of these new ideas, like I said, over the next few weeks and months, so don't be surprised if you notice a section missing one day or see something entirely new. And of course, we'd love to hear what you think about some of the new additions. Next is Flex Topics. Over the past six months or so you may have noticed us occasionally choose to cover a thought provoking topic that was outside of the current news cycle, like when we wrote about the debate over physician assisted suicide or sports betting. Internally, we call these Flex Topics. Our criteria for these stories are straightforward. They should involve an issue that's relevant to national US politics that inspire debates across the political spectrum, and address a topic that our audience has expressed interest in in the past. Flex Topics also comprise meaty enough issues that we don't think that they can be sufficiently addressed in a response to a reader question. We like having the flexibility to dip out of the news cycle from time to time, especially when the week's dominant stories are ones we've recently covered, and the response to these Flex pieces has been broadly positive when we've done them in the past, so you can expect to see Flex Editions more often going forward. With that being said, we'll always prioritize stories in the present news cycle. We won't just do a Flex topic for the sake of doing it if there's other more compelling topics that that day we should cover. One final note for this section. Again, please send us in your ideas. We solicit them internally as a full staff every single week. But we'd love to build out a deeper queue of potential topics, and we want to hear what issues you think would be interesting for us to tackle. Next is the 2:2:2 format when we cover stories that involve a specific group of people, a region, or an area of technical expertise, we'll break from our three views from the left, three views from the right format, and we'll add a third section of commentary with two arguments from each of the three groups. This 2:2:2 format allows us to share perspectives that are relevant to the story, but that don't fit neatly into political boxes. Most often these will be views from outside of the U.S. but we've also used this format for stories centered on American states, policy debates, and specific industries. We use this format whenever possible to bring in views that you usually wouldn't encounter in national political punditry. But we don't always have enough commentary to include it. So if you see an edition or a topic that you think merits it but we didn't do it, that's usually the reason why. And finally, AI. So Tangle is a people first organization. We don't rely on artificial intelligence to create any of our editorial content on any platform. We do the hard work of gathering sources, analyzing the research, and then refining our position through thoughtful debate with the rest of our team. Currently, we use AI in one step of our editorial process, fact checking. After the newsletter and YouTube scripts have been through multiple rounds of edits and human fact checks, we run the content through an AI fact checker as a final check. Now, AI isn't perfect for this use case. It still flags things as incorrect that aren't and misses things that our human editors later catch. But we think of AI as part of our team. It certainly can't replace any one of us, but it does have utility for some of these specific use cases. We also use AI to assist with certain research tasks, like pinpointing information that we're looking for in long documents or reports, synthesizing summaries of events and identifying interview targets for reported pieces. We've found the technology to be helpful and efficient for these uses, and we haven't really encountered any significant downsides when we've used them with human oversight, so we'll continue to do so outside of fact checking and research support, though we don't expect to meaningfully incorporate AI into other aspects of our work. If that changes down the line, we'll of course let you know and try to be as transparent about it as we possibly can be. All right, that is it for this section on structural choices here at Tangle, and that is it for this edition. Obviously a lot of content and information in here, a lot of decisions that we're announcing. I'm sure many of you have thoughts and feedback on. So like Isaac said at the beginning, and like several staff members have said throughout this podcast, please do write in and let us know and we'd be happy to engage with you and hear what you think. All right, with that, I'm going to sign us off for our last regular edition before we return on Monday, March 30th. Again, we're going to take a week off next week to recharge and refresh, and then we'll be back ready to hit the ground running at the end of March, March and into April. Thanks as always for being with us. It's days like today that make me really grateful for the community that we've built here at Tangle, and I know I speak for the whole staff when I say that. So have a great weekend. Have a great next week. Hopefully you get a chance to unplug and refresh a bit yourself, and we'll talk to you in a little over a week.
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Peace.
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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.
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And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball.
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But you can call me the Smash Daddy.
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And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Steven here has not read Mistborn before.
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That's right. Hey. Hey.
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So, each week, you'll get my unfiltered,
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raw reactions to every single chapter.
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And along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert. He'll be wrong.
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News flash. I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you
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can find Fantasy Fan Fellows wherever you get your podcasts.
This special Friday edition of the Tangle podcast centers on significant updates to Tangle's editorial policies, podcast and newsletter structure, and the first-ever comment moderation policy. The episode’s driving theme is transparency: Isaac Saul and several editorial staffers explain both the what and the why behind each change, with an emphasis on building trust, encouraging constructive debate, and fostering a high-quality, diverse community. The episode establishes Tangle’s commitment to clarity, rigorous standards, and thoughtful adaptation as a politically independent outlet.
| Timestamp | Segment | Speaker | |-----------|----------------------------------------------|-------------------------| | 01:53 | Opening and overview | Isaac Saul | | 05:56 | Introduction to the new comment policy | Audrey Moorhead | | 09:54 | Detailed rules for comment moderation | Audrey Moorhead | | 14:15 | Editorial guidelines and language choices | Ari Weitzman | | 30:29 | Structural newsletter/podcast changes | Will Kbach | | 31:19 | Inspiration for dissents and concurrences | Will Kbach | | 36:35 | Explanation of "Flex Topics" | Will Kbach | | 39:06 | AI use in Tangle's editorial workflow | Will Kbach |
Throughout, the tone is earnest, measured, and transparent, with substantial effort put into explaining not just procedural changes but the philosophical reasons behind them. Tangle’s staff consistently invites reader feedback, emphasizes respect for disagreement, and signals a high bar for internal debate and continual improvement.
This “Friday Edition” marks a pivotal update in Tangle’s evolution, with meaningful changes intended to protect civil discourse, refine editorial practices, and ensure Tangle remains a unique, trusted space for engaging with America's most pressing political debates. Audience participation and feedback are repeatedly encouraged—listeners, like Tangle staff, are viewed as essential partners in shaping the outlet’s direction.
(For more detail, see key timestamps or visit www.readtangle.com.)