INFORMED DISSENT

A poison pen is a deadly weapon.

Welcome to Informed Dissent, the internet home of a syndicated column and (coming soon!) morning newsletter that distills the perpetual insanity of modern life into insightful, incisive, digestible chunks. I’m Jeffrey Billman, the North Carolina-based journalist, policy junkie, and curmudgeonly smartass trying to make a go of this thing.

You’ll find select archives of the column here.

As for the newsletter, the idea is straightforward: I’ll quickly get you up to speed on everything you need to know, breaking out the essential points in important stories, connecting key threads, and putting it all in context. Along the way, you might laugh, and you’ll probably learn stuff you didn’t know.

I’ve been the editor in chief of INDY Week in Durham, North Carolina, and Folio Weekly in Jacksonville, Florida, and written and edited for Philadelphia Magazine, Philadelphia City Paper, and Orlando Weekly, and other publications that run the gamut from stuffy business magazines to the snark blog Wonkette. I’ve won state and national awards for investigative reporting, sports writing, column writing, religion reporting, feature writing, inventing fun ways to mock politicians, etc. Once, I pissed off the cops so much they charged my paper with racketeering. True story.

Check out my portfolio here.

I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on government, I have a master’s degree in political science, and I spend way too much time obsessing over what’s going on in the world—not just the headlines, but white papers, academic journals, niche pubs, alt-weeklies, radical blogs, strange things on Twitter, and whatever else interests me—which is probably bad for my mental health but good for you.

So wake up with me, and be smarter than everyone else in your office’s Slack channel.

Subscribe now so you don’t miss the first issue. In the meantime, tell your friends!

This is me, by the way.