Seriously, it's the Rabbit Hole's fourth birthday

Here's a look back at the last year. Also, I put a Mexican raccoon in this story.

Maybe this is coincidence. Maybe not. But today, it snowed at my house for the first time in 1,038 days. The last time I saw snow falling? Exactly one year ago today.

I wasn’t in North Carolina. I was in Green Bay, Wisconsin, getting ready to go to a Packers game and watching the flurries outside my hotel window. My phone buzzed. On my screen was an invitation from a guy I’d never met, asking me and my dad to come tailgate with him.

So, we did.

The NC State tailgate at the Green Bay Packers game on Dec. 3, 2023. From the right: Kelly Fitzgerald, me, my dad, and the rest of the crew.

I did not intend to go to Wisconsin to write a North Carolina Rabbit Hole story. And yet, that’s exactly what happened, all because Kelly Fitzgerald saw that I was in town and told me I could find him by searching for the NC State Slobberin’ Wolf flag in the Lambeau Field parking lot. At one point, my dad asked me how I knew these guys, and I had to tell them that I didn’t actually know these guys. But they were kind enough to show us a good time, give us some liquor and food slathered in Wilber’s Barbecue Sauce, and tell us where we could go warm up between quarters.

I think about this quite a bit, because I really want to go tailgating with Kelly and his crew again. But I also realize: This happened because of the Rabbit Hole. Kelly felt comfortable tweeting at me because he was already a subscriber. I had no idea that I had a subscriber in Wisconsin. Turns out I have 11! Much love to the small but mighty Rabbit Hole Pimiento Cheesehead Army.

It will not shock you to know that 75% of the people who get this newsletter every week live in North Carolina. But there are a lot of ex-pats and Carolina curious people out there too. About 3% are from South Carolina, which is this newsletter’s sworn enemy. Why? Why not? I also have one subscriber in Zimbabwe. If you are this person, please send me your address so I can ship a Rabbit Hole sticker to central Africa.

In all, there are 10,332 Rabbit Hole subscribers, which is a far cry from the 58 people who got the first edition of the newsletter back on November 19, 2020.

Do you know what it’s like to have 10,000 people on the lookout for interesting stuff? Amazing, that’s what. A month ago, a friend tagged me in the comment section of a Tony Hawk Instagram post about a mysterious skateboarding photo from the 1970s. That caused me to enlist some librarians who helped me find the 10-year-girl in the picture. Mr. Hawk sent his regards. (This is the second time I’ve solved a Tony Hawk-related mystery, even though Tony explicitly told me to leave him alone.) Another time, some subscribers asked me what was up with two large Hugo the Hornet statues just lying in a junkyard near a highway in Charlotte. That too became a Rabbit Hole. Why, someone asked me, do the lanes on I-85 flip for a few miles in Davidson County? There’s now a Rabbit Hole for that.

I like figuring things out. But I also, increasingly, find myself interested in why things are the way they are. That’s what led me to try and figure out why electric companies don’t bury more of their power lines before storms knock them down, why southern homes don’t have full-on basements, or why people keep putting white flags in the windows of their broken-down cars.

That said, sometimes I’m merely satisfying my inner Beavis. This year, I really wanted to know whether the people who designed Winston-Salem’s tallest skyscraper knew that it looks like a penis (The architect, in his infinite grace, never did get back to me). I also thought it was pretty awesome that a dude once drove a monster truck across the Currituck Sound, so I found the guy and wrote a story that seemingly will never die. I know this because every day for five months, I’ve gotten Instagram notifications about this video I did with Joe Ovies.

All of this stuff is nourishing to my internet-rotted, obsessive journalist soul. And yet, every year when this newsletter’s birthday comes around, I decide that it’s a good thing for me to step back and reflect. I cannot tell you how much I hate doing that! I’d rather just do some reporting and write things. But this year, a voice in my head keeps asking me a question about this newsletter. It’s the same question that I had about a mostly benign raccoon that roamed around the Mexican resort that my wife and I went to last month: How seriously should I be taking this thing?

Here’s the raccoon. I know you wanted to see the raccoon.

If there’s one thing I take very seriously, it’s the fact that hundreds of you pay me to keep this newsletter going. As of right now, the Rabbit Hole has 273 paid supporters. As a rule, I try not to think about money stuff on the same day as I write or report things for this newsletter. But when I do, I see that number as a gauge that shows me how ambitious I should be. I began offering paid subscriptions on the Rabbit Hole’s first birthday, and they steadily rose until last fall. Since then, they’ve basically flattened out. If that number plummeted, I’d start to ask what I was doing wrong. If it skyrocketed, I’d try to lean into what I was doing right. Since it’s been the same, I figure that I’m going down the correct path. As you can tell, I am a business genius.

Some of you have asked if I’d ever do the Rabbit Hole full time. The honest answer is: I don’t think I can. To do so I’d have to add more than a thousand paid supporters, which feels very unlikely. I did not type the last sentence to kick off the Get Jeremy To Quit His Job Pledge Drive! I like my job! But I guess if I got to, like, 600 paid subscriptions, I’d bring back the podcast (for real). Or maybe I’d start taking more reporting trips, or commissioning brilliant and creative people to do interesting things. If I got to 10,000, I’d start building the Rabbit Hole water slide. At 20,000, I’d add a loop.

For now, paid supporters keep this whole thing going as a mostly free newsletter, which is great. As I’ve said before, your support allows me to be a journalist who doesn’t have to freelance. It justifies the time I put into research, interviews, and writing. I can direct my energy toward the stories themselves instead of pitching, waiting, marketing, and shaking down increasingly cash-strapped publications for checks. In short, it takes a lot of work to make something that has the capacity to be really dumb sometimes.

It also allows me, from time to time, to pay for things. I was able to take one reporting trip this year, for an in-person look at the North Wilkesboro moonshine cave which, um, was more of a conveniently located sinkhole. But I was also able to commission the excellent Jessica Wakeman to write a story about life in Asheville without water (UPDATE: She can drink from the tap again and is very happy about that). I also licensed Pete Schreiner’s fantastic photos of Tara Dower’s record-breaking run on the Appalachian Trail. Last year, I spent some money for the production of a podcast episode, and for a photographer to accompany me to a Carolina Hurricanes game with Governor Roy Cooper.

As for the rest of this newsletter, I try to take it seriously enough, but not too seriously. I’m serious about writing something that comes out once a week. I’m serious about sticking to facts because punditry just feels weird to me. But I also realize that I’m not the newspaper of record. I only have the amount of time that I have. I can’t do it all. Over the years, I find myself overextending myself and then pulling back, and saying that I can’t make the Rabbit Hole more than it is.

And yet, this little thing keeps getting bigger. I’ve had several opportunities come my way because of it. I’ve turned down most, if only because I don’t think I’d have the time to pull them off in a way that would feel good to me. I did say yes to one: the folks at Beacon Media asked if they could syndicate some of the stories you’re reading here, and I said yes. I’m not getting paid for that. But I am getting a kick out of seeing stories like this one show up in print in small newspapers across North Carolina.

A North Carolina Rabbit Hole story in the Roxboro Courier-Times.

I try to keep things fairly light, because there are plenty of people out there doing great work about important things. And yet, sometimes the mood changes. Hurricane Helene was sobering, and I wanted to make sure that I wrote about the immediate aftermath in a way that captured the magnitude of the storm and the suffering it left behind. I’ve also wondered what the results of the last election mean for all of us. In an effort to process it, I wrote about a particularly nasty U.S. Senate race from 1950, and it touched a raw nerve in several of you. Some people were upset that I was talking about politics. Others were upset that I hadn’t talked about politics sooner.

I can’t predict the future. I can’t tell you if I’m going to write more serious stories like the one about an accused would-be assassin from Greensboro, or ridiculous ones like the post about a young woman who called Greensboro ugly on TikTok. (What is it about Greensboro?) But! I can tell you that things will continue to catch my attention. I’ll always have an itch to keep writing. And I hope that you’ll continue to see potential Rabbit Hole stories out there as well. I’m grateful that you keep sending them my way.

As always, it’s hard for me to say what the Rabbit Hole means to you. But your presence here means a lot to me. This four-year-old newsletter has allowed me to discover new things and to meet new people in unexpected places. I get to talk about North Carolina, a state that I’ve lived in for almost two decades. It’s a beautiful, strange, flawed, and surprising state. One with an endless supply of stories. As long as you’ll have me, I’ll keep writing them.

Thank you again for your support of the North Carolina Rabbit Hole.