Welcome to The Scroll

Let’s talk about bullshit.

If you consume the news at all these days it’s likely that most of what you see on a daily basis is bullshit. Some of it pretty obviously so. When one prominent former cable TV host tells another that he called the Israeli government to demand an end to attacks on him by American Twitter users, you probably know that’s bullshit without us needing to tell you—not least because, if you’ve been reading The Scroll, Tablet’s daily afternoon news digest, over the past few years, you know the idea the Israelis could direct a successful campaign on American social media is bullshit on par with “Joe Biden is as sharp as a tack behind closed doors.”

Sometimes the bullshit isn’t quite so obvious. Sometimes it’s a story—“reported” and “fact-checked” by Pulitzer-winning newspapers—in which the facts are true but presented so as to create an impression that is mostly if not entirely false. Sometimes it’s an utterly trivial story hyped as an event of world-historical importance, or an important story dismissed as the preserve of cranks or simply ignored altogether. Sometimes it’s “news” that is in fact a foreign information operation, or a domestic information operation, or a domestic information operation disguised as news about a foreign information operation (hello, Russiagate). Sometimes it will be a fake story from the left that shadowy Zionist financiers are trying to drag the United States into another war. Sometimes it will be a fake story from the right that shadowy Zionist financiers are trying to drag the United States into another war. Social media is not much better in the best of times, and lately, it’s been getting worse and worse.

The point of The Scroll, according to our internal strategy document, is to give you, our readers, “a skeptical and discerning account of world events delivered by writers who they specifically expect to filter out overhyped media bullshit, expose the material interests and power politics behind PR language and ideological posturing, and cut through to underlying realities.” And for the past few years, we’ve been doing that, every day of the week, for free. We’ve covered the October 7 attacks, Israel’s war in Gaza, the social media information war surrounding it, and the billionaire-funded protest movement opposing it. We’ve covered foreign influence operations, dark-money influence operations, online censorship, deep state shenanigans, and official and semi-official bullshit from both the Biden and the Trump administrations. We’ve reported to you live from the Democratic National Convention. And we like to have fun, when we can. Based on our subscriber growth and feedback from our readers, we think we’ve done a good job.

Another way of saying this is that it’s our job to cut through the bullshit—without fear or favor, as the old adage goes. Which means, specifically, that it’s not your job. Sure, some of you want to spend hours sifting through everything that’s reported in a day and making sense of the daily deluge of memes, propaganda, and meta-commentary on social media in order to figure out what’s real. And if that’s what makes you happy, go for it. But for many of you, that sounds like a recipe for going insane. As Tablet Editor Alana Newhouse puts it, “you are not the media.” We’re the media, which means we mediate between you and the world at large.

As you may have heard, starting June 1, Tablet will be relaunching as a subscription-based product. We’ll have a gorgeous, monthly print magazine, plus some brilliant new additions. We’ll have the website, where we’ll continue to provide a limited amount of free articles on the topics of the day. And we’ll have an enhanced version of The Scroll, which will be migrating on June 1 from Substack to the Tablet website—though, if you sign up, you’ll still receive it directly to your email inbox, just like before.

But from our end, we’re not changing anything about our approach to cutting through the shit and telling you what matters. The only difference is, now we’ll be asking you to pay.