Alright, Fine, I’ll Add a Disclaimer to My Emails

For reasons probably related to the fact that I'm now one of them, I've been involved in more and more email exchanges with lawyers lately. Their emails often include fancy disclaimers,^[1] while mine are just out there, naked and vulnerable, which made me self-conscious, so I decided to write a disclaimer of my own. I was rather happy with the result, so I sent it in to McSweeney's, where it was recently published:
Alright, Fine, I’ll Add a Disclaimer to My Emails.

What does this have to do with politics and political discourse? Um…I'm still working on that. In the meantime, so that this post isn't entirely an exercise in self-promotion, I thought I'd link to some of my all-time favorite McSweeney's pieces:

What Your Favorite Classic Rock Band Says About You.
And by all means, check out the follow-ups too.

An Open Letter to the Person in Charge of New Punctuation.
Probably the most compelling punctuation-related proposal I've ever seen (and there's more competition than you'd think).

Straight Answers to Some Popular Rhetorical Riddles
"If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent? Only if the police intend to question the mime."

Thirty-Nine Questions for Charlie Daniels Upon Hearing “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” for the First Time in 25 Years.
Actually, just go to John Moe's author page. It's all outstanding.

And, of course, Kevin Collier's Get to Know an Internet Commenter series, which I'm a little upset I didn't think of myself.

1. To be fair, some of these disclaimers, like the one about tax advice, are legally required in certain situations. I know very little about how that particular disclaimer came to be, or whether it's an effective solution to an extant problem, but the government probably knows what it's doing, right?