Not much.

Roughly about a pitcher of warm piss.

What we know about politics and $2.50 used to get you on the bus in Atlanta. Now it doesn’t even do that.

But I exaggerate a bitcoin.

Four years ago we published an ambitious series of hot takes about whether Trump was a unique phenomenon or just a continuation and intensification of trends long existing in the GOP. All of our essays more or less took for granted that Trump was going to lose, published as they were in the last days of the 2016 campaign when a world historically misguided conventional wisdom took hold. But I think the takes by Tim Lombardo, Casey Baskin, Rob Baker and other ToM stalwarts actually had a lot of insight, despite our mistaken assumptions about the election.

Our former political correspondent Clement Lime said at the time:

After 234 years of campaigning… this wasn’t even Fresh Hell anymore. This was more like Clearance Sushi at Kroger. Not exactly the same thing as browsing the clearance aisle at Ross or TJ Maxx for nipple clamps. It’s just stale, and disturbing.

And as Adam “A-God” Gallagher aptly observed on the eve of the 2016 election:

I think that the tepid support for Hillary Clinton, even among many ardent and lifelong Democrats, is because she has none of the cultural relevance that Trump has. She looks like someone (minus the weird pant suits) that would be standing in front of you in the line at the bank, and she tries to actually answer policy questions with nuanced responses. She’s not particularly telegenic and is terrible at delivering crisp soundbites. In this insane election, HRC seems like a candidate from another era.

Oh, Adam. Put the scales back on your eyes!

The last four years have been traumatic for us and our readers. There is no getting around that. But we have published some of the best work of our 10, going on 11 years during this time, with fresh and unique perspectives on the Hellworld we all inhabit. These are just a few of them, but we hope that these wonderful essays can put the whole sick pageant in some kind of context. Thank you to our contributors and readers alike for sticking with us through the persistent nightmare.

• Michael Stauch, The Beginning Is Near: Politics and Society in an Era of Social Movements (2019)
• Joel Suarez, Hope in the Time of Trump (2017)
• Jason Tebbe, These Are America’s Brezhnev Years (2017)
• Alex Cummings, “Get Out”: The First Great Film of the Trump Era (2017)
• R. Mike Burr, The Self-Serving Hustle of “Hillbilly Elegy” (2017)
• Stacy Fahrenthold, What We Can Learn from America’s Other Muslim Ban (Back in 1918) (2017)
• Ethan Kytle, What I Learned by Following the 1918-19 ‘Spanish’ Flu Pandemic in (Almost) Real Time (2020)
• Lauren Elizabeth, I Believe Christine Blasey Ford (2018)
• Ansley T. Erickson, Looking North from Buenos Aires: State Violence, Women’s Bodies, and What There Is to Lose (2018)
• Becoming Legible: Anger, Hope, and Power in the Women’s March of 2017 (2018)
• Myriam Gurba’s truly epic Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature (2019)
• Melqui Fernandez, Demanding the Impossible in the Time of Trump: On Activism and History as a “Usable Past” (2018)
• Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, Underwater: Global Warming to Flood the Former Ports of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2020)
• Elizabeth E. Sine, “We Charge Genocide”: A Historic Indictment of Anti-Black Violence in the U.S. Is as Relevant as Ever Today (2020)
• A Migrant Crisis Syllabus: What You Need to Know (2018)
• H. Robert Baker, A Brief History of Sanctuary Cities (2017)
• The SACRPH Series: Barbara Brown Wilson on Planning for Social Justice (2017)
• Miliann Kang, Getting the American Dirt on the Tiger Mother – or What Asian Americans Can Learn From Latinx Writers about Challenging Misrepresentation (2020)
• Seulghee Lee, An Asian Man Who Likes Math: Anti-Asian Misandry and Transformative Hospitality (2020)
• R. Mike Burr, A Hard Man in a Hard Time: Joe Manchin and the Fight for West Virginia (2017)
• Jason Resnikoff, The Bad Ivy: Columbia and the Long Struggle for Graduate Student Employee Rights (2018)
• Aimee Castenell, “I Got Purged, Y’all” (2019)
• Casey Baskin, Panglossian Pessimism (2019)
• Alex Cummings, Hospice of the Creative Class (2020)
• Gavin Benke, Elon Musk, Enron, and the Imperial Corporation (2018)
• Jason Tebbe, The Democratic Primary Field as a History Department (2019)
• Joseph Bagley, The Long, White History of “Law and Order” Rhetoric: From Nixon to the Original Klan (2020)
• Alex Cummings, The Hurricane and the Prisoners’ Dilemma (2018)
• David Austin Walsh, Can Democrats Win by Peeling Off Pro-Life Voters? Probably Not (2017)
• Katherine M. Marino, The Forgotten History of Feminismo Americano (2019)
• Miyako Martinez, Interracial Coalitions and the Hawaiian Sugar Strike of 1946 (2019)
• Stan Thangaraj, Green Cards and Red Lights: The Problem with Indian American Activism (2019)
• Timothy Scott Johnson, Our Haunted Present: Daniel Guerin on Historical Analogies and How We Confront Our Past (2020)
• Tim Lombardo, Frank Rizzo and the Making of Modern American Politics (2018)
• Wendy Cheng, Of Abject Fathers and Angry Mothers: Chia-Chia Lin’s The Unpassing (2020)
• Alex Cummings, Midnight in Atlanta: Thinking about the Catastrophe Two Years Later (2018)
• Arko Dasgupta, Can We Imagine Something More? Reckoning with Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough (2017)
• Sean Keith, Beyond “Point-of-Production” Organizing: The Radical Potential of Building the Solidarity Economy (2017)
• Carolyn Bourdeaux Is Running for Congress in One of the South’s Most Diverse Suburbs (2017)
• Stan Thangaraj, Sipping on the Indian Haterade: Hindu American Whiteness and Support for Trump (2017)
• Ju-Hyun Park, Reading Colonialism in “Parasite” (2020)
• Casey Baskin, It’s Hard Out Here for a PrEP (2019)
• Juan Pablo Valenzuela, The Ghosts of Victor Jara, Ho Chi Minh, and Salvador Allende Continue to Haunt the Chilean Right (2019)
• Joanna Dee Das, Katherine Dunham: The Artist as Activist During World War II (2017)
• E.L. Meszaros, Objects of Hate: Unwanted and Unremoveable (2019)
• Jason Tebbe, Ben Sasse: The Sassiest Boy in America (2019)
• Casey Baskin remembering the notorious “red-headed girl” incident at the 2019 AHA: Introducing the New “2019,” Now with 30% More Lemon Balm and Misogyny! (2019)
• Alex Cummings, The Monitor: The Punk Album that Predicted Our Politics (2017)