Big Things Happening at The Hinternet

In Which We Announce a New Book, Push Our Merch, Solicit Writing from Women, Seek to Fill Various Other Vacancies, Plead for Major Donations that Will Transform Us into a True Cultural Powerhouse, &c.

0.

We have acquired a great number of new followers over the past weeks, drawn in, it seems, by JSR’s trenchant essays on contemporary politics. We are happy about this success, if not entirely at ease. This for two reasons. As for JSR, we continue to monitor his activity carefully, and are prepared at any moment once again to rescind his writing privileges at the first sign that this great responsibility has grown too heavy for him. As for our new readers, we are concerned to make clear that The Hinternet is not primarily a place to go for play-by-plays of our unfolding global dégringolade. It is, rather, a cross between an idiosyncratic project realizing the unique creative vision of its Founding Editor, on the one hand, and a somewhat legitimate media operation in the broad “arts and culture” category on the other.

We say “somewhat” because, although its ultimate aim is always the truth and nothing but the truth, its methods include pseudonymy, metafiction, and other experimental and often inscrutable techniques, which place it in a more direct lineage with, say, Minotaure, Potlatch, or the Situationist International, than with any ordinary on-the-level review of the news of the world, and of the fashions and gestures of its most eminent personalities (though we do admit to a peculiar obsession with Reader’s Digest, especially the peak-Cold War “Humor in Uniform” feature). In other words, newbies: we’re artists, though some of us are still too timid to come right out and say as much. And for us this means first and foremost that we are under no obligation to hold your hand or to be explicit at every step about what exactly it is we’re doing.

There are so many important items of business today that we are going to dispense with our usual practice of soliciting input from our other Featured Contributors. Not that they’d be up to it anyhow. Mary tells me someone recently dumped what she describes as “an entire herd of semi-feral ânes du Poitou” at Kick-Ass (her New Mexico donkey sanctuary), and that she has therefore been forced “indefinitely” to suspend her second career as a music critic. “Do you have any idea how long it takes to brush these guys?” she writes. Kenny Koontz, it seems, was picked up by the secret service last month while parked in a rental car outside the CPAC venue in National Park, Maryland, with a crossbow in his trunk. His whereabouts are currently unknown. That leaves yours truly, old down-to-brass-tacks Hélène, to keep you informed of all that’s going on.

1. A Book

Oy, JSR has written yet another book: On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality (Norton/Liveright, 2025). It is now available for pre-order. And here is the cover you may now pre-judge it by:

You can be sure that in the coming months our Founding Editor will be positively emanating paratexts here at The Hinternet to accompany the book, and, we of course hope, to boost its sales. For now, this is all I could get out of him when I reached out for comment:

Chère Hélène,

Here is what I would say to our readers about my new book:

I am currently seized by a deep fear that never crossed my mind in early conversation with my publishers: that some of you will fail to grasp the double entendre of the title, and will take that On not as equivalent to the Latin De found in the names of so many medieval treatises (Albertus Magnus’s De Anima, Thomas Aquinas’s De Ente et essentia, &c.), but rather as a literal description of my general condition. And this makes me want to say rather urgently: whether or not my fear is justified, this book, much like the internet, is almost certainly not what you think it is. I sincerely believe it will surprise you, both in the philosophical conclusions it draws and in the way it arrives at them.

I recall years ago hearing an interview with Tracy Chapman where she recounted that early in her career her promoters were pressuring her to pump up her crowd by shouting things like “Are you guys ready to rock?!” between songs. And she replied with quiet dignity: “I just don’t do things like that.” I feel I may have to say something similar in response to the usual expectations placed upon a trade-book author these days to be out there perpetually pumping, with a strange sort of monotone glee, the greatness of their own work and the urgency of your helping to move it up the bestseller list. I just don’t think I have that in me.

What I can promise to do, at The Hinternet, in the coming months, is to continue to expand on the reflections I share in the book, in ways that I hope will awaken your interest and cause you genuinely to want to read it. I put the best of what I have, as regards both intellect and style, into writing it. Shouldn’t that be enough?

Fine, JSR, you can hold back and act all dignified, which really just means, as usual, that you’re leaving the dirty work to me. So here goes: are you guys ready to rock? Our Founding Editor has written, in all honesty, what I know to be a truly great book (I read and commented on the proofs, and even made it into the acknowledgments), and I’m telling you: if you read it, it will change the way you think about a great many things, and you will be glad of it.

Oh, and just one more thing, JSR: you better be practicing your “Thank you, Terry’s” and your “Happy to be here, Ezra’s”, if you know what’s good for you. Life’s a hustle, little buddy, qu’on le veuille ou non.

2. Merch

We still have far too many Hinternet t-shirts and bookmarks languishing in our offices and doing absolutely no good. We really want to get them out of here. As for the bookmarks, which to remind you, look like this:

we would love to send packages of, say, 40 or so to interested parties willing and able to place them in conspicuous spots around their cities or villages. These do not have to be great metropolitan centers — as our friends at Cabinet Magazine used to say, we would love to see photographic evidence that our merch has, for example, penetrated the state of Wyoming. We would love for a whole new genre to emerge on TikTok of dumb young people giving our bookmarks to Antarctic penguins, or to the polar bears of Nova Zembla or Estotiland. Whatever helps us get the word out. If you are keen to enlist for this effort, please send us your mailing address, and perhaps a line or two about where you live and what your distribution plans are, at editor@the-hinternet.com.

As for the t-shirts, which, to remind you, look like this:

it is not quite as easy to get your hands on one, but it is getting easier. We have about 20 of them sitting in our offices. While supplies last, we will be sending them out to those of you who either (1) purchase an annual Hinternet subscription; or (2) pre-order JSR’s book (like I told you buddy, life’s a hustle; just watch old Hélène if you want to see how it’s done!). Once you have done either of these, please send us an e-mail, at the same address as above, to let us know. We expect that once this announcement goes out our supplies are going to be depleted very fast, so we cannot guarantee that you will receive a t-shirt simply by fulfilling either (1) or (2). But of course there are independent reasons to fulfill them; you will already, in our view, be getting a significant bang for your buck, so, t-shirt or no, you’ll have nothing to complain about.

Perhaps even more than with the bookmarks, we are particularly interested in getting the shirts out to the sort of people who are especially well positioned to help us raise our visibility. If you are someone with a public profile such that your “fits”, as seen either in the streets or online, have a demonstrable effect on the shaping of the Zeitgeist, and you think your look might be suitably enhanced by our signature seahorse-and-“fancy H” design, please reach out to us. We’ll keep a few shirts set aside, and will send you one for free if you are able to convince us that you match this description.

3. Call for Contributions / Help Wanted

We remind you, in all seriousness, that we are, among other things, a real magazine, and that means, in part, that we regularly publish actual pieces from guest contributors, who are paid for their hard work and talent. Our usual rate for accepted pieces is $500 US. We want to see your submissions!

Well, let me walk that back a bit. We are dreadfully worried about The Hinternet degenerating into what might crudely be called a sausage party, especially in an era when the entirety of global politics is fast becoming one giant sausage party — the halls of government, from Russia to China to India and above all to the US, all reek now with the miasmatic stench of an unventilated high-school boys’ locker room. We want no part of that. We are deeply concerned about, and perplexed by, the dearth of submissions from women, and have therefore decided to take the radical step of imposing a moratorium on all pieces from “the male of the species” until this situation is balanced out somewhat. If you are a man, and you’ve got something you think might be suitable for The Hinternet, you can still submit it, but it’s almost certainly going to be kept on hold for the next few or even several months. If you are a woman and you love to write, we would love to publish your work! Please be encouraged by this invitation!

As might be expected, JSR bristled when I informed him of this decision, which I admit was unilateral on my part. “That’s absurd,” he said. “Olivia’s a woman. Hell, you’re a woman, in case you’ve forgotten. For that matter at least half of my own authorial personae are women, and I insist that they ought to count if anyone does. Even when I’m writing under my own name, most of the time I’m really writing more from the perspective of the primordial androgyne, from back before Zeus in his wrath split us asunder, than ‘as a man’ or whatever. I just don’t see what this has to do with any of the work we’re putting out there. The whole secret of our genius is that we’re above all that! But you do what you have to do, Hélène. You know how the world works better than I do. Of that there can be no doubt.” I confess for once I do understand where JSR is coming from, to some extent. I mean, it’s complicated for me, as you can probably appreciate. But still, a rule’s a rule, and I’m sticking to it: no more pieces from men until further notice!

We are however free to be looser as regards parité homme-femme when it comes to some other tasks we urgently need fulfilled. But before we get to these, let us offer a sort of apology: we are indeed aware that sometimes we issue calls that appear to come to nothing. This is in part simply because we are understaffed, and some of the ideas we have for projects just can’t be realized as quickly as we would like. For example, we launched a call for voice actors a while back, in view of an intended audio-play. That is still in the works, and perhaps we’ll get back to it by late summer or early fall. For now we are concentrating on some more experimental AI-based Hörspiel-experiments, some of the results of which you will be enjoying soon. And similarly with other such calls. We in fact find that sooner or later we do get around to realizing every idea we throw out there, but we are finite beings like the rest of you, and unlike God, so we’re told, we cannot do everything all at once.

We have also been particularly slow in getting our podcast off the ground, we know. Forgive us! We simply find writing a more natural and obvious priority. If we had more money, we could employ a more significant support staff, and we could also arrange things in such a way that our Founding Editor could devote himself more fully to his (or their) creative work here. But we’re not quite where we would like to be, for now (about which, see Section 4 below), and so we do the best we can.

In the short term, however, we do need some help in the following areas:

We would like to work with a Paris-based photographer, specializing in Annie Leibovitz-style magazine profile-like-work (perhaps this has a more technical name; we wouldn’t know).

We would like to work with someone, anywhere in the world, who has experience in graphic design and layout, and can help us with some of the finishing touches on The Oort Cloud Review, forthcoming from Hat & Beard Press, and which, though we did not initially conceive it this way, we are now comfortable in describing as a print-based paratext located broadly within the Hinternet universe — in fact, as it happens, I have myself stepped into the role of Lead Editor of the OCR as well.

If you think you might be suitable for either of these tasks, please let us know (by e-mail, not in the comments section).

4. Growth

We have been growing steadily over the past year, but would like to be growing even faster. In particular, we would like for The Hinternet to maneuver its way into a different sort of social role — to establish ourselves as some kind of cultural institution, with the power to endure independently of Substack, perhaps even independently of its founder. We are, to this end, planning large-scale collaborations, cultural initiatives, a publishing imprint, essay prize contests — and so much else that can, if we do it right, help culture to endure in dark times.

To this end, we are interested in reaching out to potential donors keen on helping us to arrive where we need to be, financially speaking, in order to realize these plans. We have come up with a visually stunning and exceedingly informative “corporate slide-show” to inform potential donors of everything they could possibly want to know about our mission. Here is the first slide:

We have already been in contact with several potential donors, and we remain eager to be in touch with more. We will hold back from sharing the full presentation publicly, but if you are interested in seeing it, please do let us know.

And on this note, with deep gratitude, I shall wind up this edition of my regular column, “Adequate Housekeeping”. I hope it has lived up to its name.

—HLG