Josh Barro

A newsroom of one, on purpose

Open the inbox on a given week and you'll find the Mayonnaise Clinic - a reader mailbag with the most undignified name in American commentary, attached to some of the most disciplined. The name is a bit. The method is not. The column traces back to a 2018 essay Barro wrote about how mayonnaise sneaks into food culture in places nobody admits to looking. He decided that was a fine metaphor for how he reads everything else: watch what people actually reach for, not what they say they want.

That is the entire engine of Very Serious. The publication runs on revealed preferences - the idea that your choices, not your slogans, tell the truth about you. Barro points the lens at politicians, at markets, at his own readers, and occasionally at himself. The promise on the masthead is self-knowledge, delivered weekly, whether or not you asked for it.

He came to this from an odd angle. His father is Robert Barro, one of the most cited macroeconomists alive and a fixture at Harvard. The son went to Harvard too - and took his degree in psychology, not economics. The combination turned out to be the whole point. He writes about tax policy and interest rates with a banker's command of the numbers, then explains the human behavior underneath like someone who actually studied it.

The résumé before the breakaway reads like a tour of legacy media's better addresses. He was lead writer for The Ticker, Bloomberg's economics and politics blog. He joined The New York Times' data-driven Upshot in 2014. He wrote a business column for New York magazine. And he kept circling back to Business Insider, which hired him as a senior editor and columnist on three separate occasions - a fact that says something about both the outlet's persistence and his.

For years his most reliable beat was his own party. Barro started out a Republican, interned in college for the anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, and described himself as a neoliberal. Then he spent the early 2010s attacking the GOP's policies so consistently that he earned a nickname: the loneliest Republican. On October 11, 2016, with Donald Trump atop the ticket, he stopped being lonely the easy way - he left the party and registered as a Democrat.

Crossing the aisle did not make him a team player. He aimed the same skepticism at his new side, needling progressives for what he saw as sanctimonious lifestyle-policing - the "moralizing busybodies" who, in his telling, scold voters about their hamburgers instead of winning them over on policy. The position has kept him useful to exactly nobody's talking points, which is roughly where he likes to operate.

Radio sharpened the instinct. For years he hosted Left, Right & Center, KCRW's public-radio attempt at a civil cross-ideological argument, where the job was to hold a position and defend it live against people paid to disagree. He stepped down in early 2022, the same moment he walked out of Business Insider, to bet on himself instead.

The bet cleared. By May 2023 Very Serious had passed ten thousand paid subscribers, the kind of number that turns a newsletter into a paycheck. He didn't stop at prose. With the Los Angeles attorney Ken White - known to the internet as Popehat - he co-hosts Serious Trouble, a podcast that walks listeners through live litigation with actual legal rigor. In 2025 he added Central Air, a show with fellow journalists Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfuss. Three feeds, one newsletter, zero newsroom overhead.

He still surfaces on the legacy circuit - MSNBC, Bloomberg Television - but the center of gravity has moved. The man who once needed a network to have a microphone now lends his to other people's networks when it suits him. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, the political consultant Zachary Allen, whom he married in 2017. He is openly gay, an atheist, and constitutionally unwilling to let a comfortable consensus go unpoked. The Mayonnaise Clinic, in other words, is still taking patients.