Elizabeth Spiers

@espiers.bsky.social

164131 Followers 3857 Following

NYT opinion writer, Slate Money co-host, Dem messaging consultant, former EIC The New York Observer, Dealbreaker founder and Gawker founding editor. Brooklyn via Bama. Rednexican. Striver with no chill. https://linktr.ee/elizabethspiers

Peter Thiel, looking waxy and undead
Photo from a Barry Hanna profile in Oxford American by Louis Borgeois
Naomi Klein admitting that she was wrong about Graham Platner and apologizing
Participation Trophy Brewing’s “it’s like nobody wants to impress Jody foster anymore” hazy IPA 🍺
Blonde woman with Utah curls Smokey eye cross necklace
Prism rainbow stickers from the 80s
Me with phone and sticker that has a skeleton who appears to be a woman holding eyeballs over her head with the word bubble “excuse me but my eyes are up here”
Sticker that has Jesus poking his head in and saying “ I saw that”
Sticker with a piece chart that has the lyrics to the Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime
Sticker says “directed by Rob Reiner”
Robot from short circuit
Pepe the prawn from the Muppets - very disheveled large eyed creature
The “greetings professor falken” intro from the movie Wargames
World Cup announcer in France v Norway - bleached blonde guy in a navy suit with a microphone
FEMA official who said he teleported to Waffle House steps away from job
NYC population data demonstrating that NYC growth has been positive
Basketball themed I voted sticker in Knicks colors
Knicks watch party cancelled and photo of men in neon traffic jackets standing around
Hand with snake tattoo on the middle finger
dril tweet: "Im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad."
Dude now whining that I had the temerity to respond to his insult, “putting him on blast”
Guy saying I’m “circling the wagons” for Barkans and claiming he didn’t plagiarize, which is the opposite of what I wrote
investment bubble Dumb Money. Griffin moved Citadel's headquarters to Miami four years ago but keeps a $238 million penthouse in New York City. Mamdani ingeniously filmed a video about the pied-à-terre tax in front of his building. "What Mamdani just did to me, " Griffin said in response, "and more broadly is doing to the city of New York, is triggering of the trauma I went through in Chicago." Trauma in Chicago, you say? Was Ken Griffin kidnapped by ICE? Abused by a family member? Shot by a cop in the back while unarmed? Evicted while working two jobs and trying to be a caretaker to his children and parents?
Drawing of a murder hornet talking about the danger of murder hornets vs Covid
This is an even more intractable problem than colleges being allowed to adjudicate sexual assaults and courts making it onerous for women to physically separate from their partners. Men who cannot handle accountability, cannot admit that they’re wrong, cannot actually face the hard work of self-examination and repair, are dangerous to everybody. There are a lot of them out there right now. And unlike Justin, some of them do actually get elected president.
Justin had been obsessed with “clearing his name.” His process of doing so involved disparaging his accusers, browbeating people and institutions that no longer wanted to be associated with him, and refusing to accept a path that precluded a return to being a public figure. This betrays a deep sense of entitlement and contempt for women that also feels awfully familiar: Think of the comedian who goes back on tour and jokes about how much the accusations against him cost; the many people in the Epstein files who cannot believe anyone is up in arms about women (read: these 16 year olds), who absolutely knew what they what they were doing when they got involved with the notorious financier; the multi-hyphenate entertainer who’s unsuccessfully hiding behind a Bible on an attempted redemption tour. They may not end up killing anybody, but deep down, in my opinion, they believe they’ve done nothing wrong. They think they deserve what they stole from those women, and that they deserve their prior success. Most importantly, they believe that they are in control of the narrative.
The good person in this story is the person whose life he ended. And the more I think about what happened, the more I see the same patterns that emerge in stories that end this way—with women violated, abused, and killed. To me, two points stand out: the fact that universities are allowed to adjudicate sexual assault cases internally instead of treating them like the violent felonies they are, and the fact that the legal system incentivizes divorcing couples to live together during their separation process because otherwise they may give up legal rights, even though women killed by their partners have often tried to leave. (Black women in particular are more at risk, and are murdered by men at two and a half times the rate white women are.)
Puck article titled “how the left has lost the moral ground on political violence”
pitch for America's Christian Credit Union, offering adoption loans
Spend per student at PS 234 in Tribeca ($22,796)
Following his 2026 impeachment, polls indicated a majority of voters—around 55%—supported the House's decision, putting him in a "Nixon resignation" territory of low approval. Support for impeachment actually increased compared to his 2019 inquiry, with 52% to 55% of voters supporting his removal. Quinnipiac University Poll Quinnipiac University Poll +4 2026 Impeachment Polling: A 55% majority of Americans approved of the House move to impeach, with a similar 54% in a Quinnipiac University Poll supporting Senate conviction, reflecting high dissatisfaction.
Reply guy tells me it's my job as an opinion writer to sell impeachment. I reply to him with column I wrote selling impeachment.
An hour earlier, in the Situation Room of the White House, senior intelligence advisers explained to the president that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance Osama Bin Laden had been located in a compound in Pakistan that the C.I.A. had been scouting for months, and the president needed to decide whether he would move ahead with an air strike or a ground strike, or if he would wait to gather further intelligence. Around 7 p.m. that evening, Mr. Baquet followed up: “I don’t want to trash the small and medium size papers that really care about this. It’s just the way we feel.” (For the record, The Observer is a small-size paper, and does not officially attend the dinner.)
Kash Patel as Lego with big weird eyes and lots of beers
Lady asks me who the dem base is and I say non white people who are working class
CREATIVE PRACTICE WORKSHOPS Where do writers get their ideas? It varies for everyone, but I've developed some systems over the years that have been incredibly useful for me, an Internet brain-rotted person with no attention span. This workshop explores techniques for generating and capturing ideas, and tips for creating a consistent writing and creative practice. This is probably the only writing centric workshop you'll ever do where we'll talk about behavioral science, zines, obscure German information organization systems, and the utility of crayons. You will be encouraged but not required to doodle while we talk. The workshop has been described by very serious academics as "fun."
result for stock photos for polyamory, which features two bananas and a lemon
I began my media career as the founding editor of the gossip blog Gawker. (Ms. West wrote for its sister site Jezebel, which began a few years later, but we don’t know each other.) I wasn’t writing about my personal life, but as with Ms. West, that early work defined me in some ways. People still expect me to be full of snarky opinions about celebrities and cocaine and are sometimes disappointed that my dominant opinions these days are sincerely held beliefs about monetary policy or geopolitics and that I don’t even have the decency to be funny about it.
Chotiner: There was an American strike that killed at least a hundred and seventy-five people, many of them Iranian schoolgirls. The U.S. government denied this for a long time. The President himself is still denying it. It doesn’t take someone supersmart to realize that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth do not care that much about the fact that an American strike killed a bunch of Iranian schoolgirls. I’m curious how you synthesize that with your larger feelings about the war. Boies: Sure. Well, first, nobody can feel comfortable with civilian casualties. Chotiner: No one outside of the Administration, you mean? Boies: I don’t even think . . . I really don’t think that Donald Trump doesn’t care about civilian casualties. Chotiner: Sir, you’re a very, very smart guy. You don’t think Donald Trump actually cares about casualties, do you?
case where Felix admits he's wrong, and the bot returns "For once, Felix is right"
App that says "who is wrong?" and allows the user to input arguments from me and Felix, and a button that says "Who is wrong?"
Typo in a NYT update that says the new supreme leader of Iran would “continue to blog the Strait of Hormuz” - later changed to “block”
Wired report that Trump has ordered the release of files related to aliens and UFOs
Forever stamps featuring Betty White
CREATIVE PRACTICE WORKSHOPS Where do writers get their ideas? It varies for everyone, but I've developed some systems over the years that have been incredibly useful for me, an Internet brain-rotted person with no attention span. This workshop explores techniques for generating and capturing ideas, and tips for creating a consistent writing and creative practice. This is probably the only writing centric workshop you'll ever do where we'll talk about behavioral science, zines, obscure German information organization systems, and the utility of crayons. You will be encouraged but not required to doodle while we talk. The workshop has been described by very serious academics as "fun."
Quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.
Although gun ownership is associated with positive feelings about firearms within “gun culture” (Pierre, 2015; Kalesan et al., 2016; Metzl, 2019), most research comparing gun owners to non-gun owners suggests that ownership is rooted in fear. While long guns have historically been owned primarily for hunting and other recreational purposes, US surveys dating back to the 1990s have revealed that the most frequent reason for gun ownership and more specifically handgun ownership is self-protection (Cook and Ludwig, 1997; Azrael et al., 2017; Pew Research Center, 2017). Research has likewise shown that the decision to obtain a firearm is largely motivated by past victimization and/or fears of future victimization (Kleck et al., 2011; Hauser and Kleck, 2013).
Mr. Foehner was interviewed at a local precinct and said Mr. Gonzalez had demanded a cigarette, money and his phone and had brandished what looked like a weapon. The police returned to his apartment with a search warrant and, in addition to the .38, found eight revolvers, eight semiautomatic pistols, an AK-47 and eight other long guns, including two more assault-style weapons. All but three of the 26 guns were illegal. Also seized were two body-armor vests and 152 large-capacity ammunition-feeding devices, 10 of them loaded.
The DN asked me for comment and I confirmed that I was short, that my beauty or lack thereof was a matter of opinion, that I’d done cocaine recreationally a handful of times but didn’t like it, and I wanted to know why Lauren thought “lesbian” was an insult. I have no love for Erika Kirk, who I think is a grifter even if she did really love her husband, who was also a grifter— but if she was a lesbian it wouldn’t be an insult. And associating being gay or bi with pedophilia is an old conservative slur but usually not deployed against women. But it’s pretty rich coming from people whose preferred President is all over the Epstein files and they’re completely silent about that
When I was in my early 20s I interviewed Lauren Weisberger, the author of The Devil Wears Prada , and we’re about the same age. At the time I was covering Condé Nast and Anna Wintour and was interested to read the book but didn’t like her portrayal of a character from the Deep South and asked her why he was portrayed as stupid and naive but still somehow adjacent to this world. She said something like well you know how it is, like when you’re a teenager at the mall and you make fun of losers, and I probed her a bit about what made the character a loser. I had a mild critique of it in a long interview that was very flattering to her otherwise. Flash forward to her next book. A reporter at Daily News calls me and asks what I think of her portrayal of me in her new novel. I didn’t know I was in the book so I asked what it said. She called me a short ugly coke addled lesbian.
Photo of estrogen HRT patches
Elon says “we should have deep empathy, not shallow” and that deep empathy is about caring for humanity and shallow empathy is about caring about criminals
Polymarket announcement that they're entering into a partnership with Substack. It says "Journalism is better when it's backed by live markets"
Donald was practically vibrating when we left Cluely. “Dude, he’s just a scared little boy,” he said. “He’s scared he’s not doing the right thing, and because of the fucked-up world we live in, people who should be in The Hague are giving him twenty million dollars. Something bad is gonna happen here, something really fucking bad is gonna happen.” He sighed. “I just want Zohran’s nonbinary praetorians to march across the country and put all these guys in cuffs.” I found it hard to disagree. It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency, when agency essentially meant whatever it was that was afflicting Roy Lee. Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat,
SIgnup page for my newsletter. The free version now reads "Get the whole newsletter for NO MONEY"
Like many 20-year-olds, he appends the word “maxxing” to an astonishing variety of verbs and nouns when other, more obvious words would do. “I said, Oh, let’s start second-floor-maxxing while we’re at the mall,” he says in the profile. “And people in chat were just like, You’re such an idiot, dude, just say ‘go upstairs.’” I had the same reaction when I read an email from Epstein declaring that he’s interested in “genetic algorithms,” which he describes as “a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection.” You’re such an idiot, dude, just say “genetics.”