Welcome back to the Pens and Poison Podcast!

This is not your ordinary literature podcast. Join me as I explore the state of humanities education, the publishing industry, and the literary world at large through a series of spicy interviews, hot takes, and literary ramblings.

On today’s episode, I spoke to Baz, the founder of The Split Ticket Substack (not to be confused with the Split Ticket WAR Numbers site), a politics Substack read by more than 17,000 subscribers craving analysis that refuses to toe either party line. A former FAANG software engineer and self-confessed polling obsessive, Baz blends Bayesian stats, campaign history, and a healthy disdain for tribal punditry to reveal the structural forces really moving voters. Split Ticket publishes twice weekly “outside-the-echo-chamber” essays that puncture media narratives, challenge readers’ priors, and spark devil’s-advocate discussions across the spectrum.