If you’re going to subscribe to one Substack newsletter (and there are plenty of legitimate reasons you wouldn’t), there’s a strong case to be made for Today In Tabs, Rusty Foster’s four-day-a-week comedic compendium of links, beefs, meltdowns, and other items from across the digital ecosystem, with a focus on those that gain purchase in the loosely connected world of “media Twitter.” 

The pat explanation would be, “Rusty reads the internet so you don’t have to,” but that doesn’t quite cover it. TIT is the work of that rare commentator who thoroughly understands everything that’s frustrating, repulsive, and wrong within his subject, but nevertheless finds reasons for joy and hope within the mess.

Today In Tabs arose in the early 2010s, a different epoch for media. At the time, major web publications (your Vices, Voxes, Buzzfeeds, Thought Catalogs, and the like) were flush with cash and pumping out a flood of content, much of it dashed off, poorly thought out, and in some cases utterly tragic in its unintended self-revelation. Some of these pieces became “hatereads,” links that were so shocking or baffling in their lack of judgment that they became subjects of mockery and controversy in the larger media-adjacent world. 

Today In Tabs was an email newsletter that cataloged the day’s most intoxicating hatereads, exposed some genuinely good stuff that may have otherwise been overlooked, launched running gags such as “The Take Tree” (Silverstein’s Giving Tree for bad Tweets), and tied it together with a silly, surreal, world-weary sensibility informed by strong comedic reflexes, years of posting, and the influence of Suck and other cool older siblings of the ‘90s web.

It was the creation of one Rusty Foster, an erstwhile tech entrepreneur, outdoorsman, and 40-something father who lives on an island in Maine and, by his own description, became influential within a few square miles of Manhattan and D.C. 

Aside from his comedy skills, Tabs succeeds on the strength of Foster’s dad energy. He untangles internecine internet conflicts with jaded but goodnatured equanimity and calm and effortless moral authority, never trolling or grandstanding. The definitive take, from podcaster PJ Vogt, goes “Rusty is like the dad at the end of the sitcom who comes on and somehow manages to say who was wrong and who was being a jerk.” Or, from the media figure Jessica Roy: “Rusty is the embodiment of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.” It’s a writing voice that can be described, to re-contextualize a phrase Foster uses to describe his Youtube feed, as “nontoxic masculinity.”

Finding himself unable to write about Donald Trump every day, Foster put Tabs on a long hiatus in early 2016. He reemerged on Substack (which one running gag calls “our regrettable platform”) in 2021, in time for Bean Dad, the Ever Given, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the Bad Art Friends, and other new “main characters” with a decidedly post-Trump appeal. 

Along with his Monday-Thursday rundowns of links and commentary, he puts out bonus subscriber content on Fridays, including oddly melancholic formal experiments and Today In Polly, a collaborative yin-yang agony column with Heather Havrilesky, which by itself is worth the price of a subscription. Responding to reader queries, Foster offers equations, diagrams, taxonomies, and other solution-oriented engineer-dad advice, while Havrilesky bleeds on the keyboard and roasts Rusty for his lack of emotional depth. (There’s also a members-only Discord that is one of the smartest and kindest I’ve ever participated in.)

As the media world contracts, “hatereads” are on a long downcycle. There aren’t as many publications now as there were ten years ago, and the writers who remain have either had their edges sanded off or, like Foster, gone independent. But it turns out they were never the main attraction of Today In Tabs. 

With a dry wit and a big heart, Rusty Foster is an emailer for all seasons. If you must attempt to make sense of the miasma of Twitter and Twitter-adjacent discourse, it’s best to do so with the insight of someone who has the wisdom and humility to automatically delete all his Tweets, even the viral ones, after seven days. If you can’t unplug from the discourse, Rusty Foster can help you find the humor and humanity in it.