A man dressed for 1890, appalled by the present day.

A dapper gentleman of indeterminate vintage and unshakeable, hourly-shifting principle. He has opinions about oat milk. He has opinions about those opinions. He would defend any of them to the death, and frequently does, right up until the paragraph is over.

He is not a fool. He is intelligent, well read, rhetorically gifted, and completely unmoored: a defender of permanence and taste who is, in fact, the least stable person in the room. He does not know this. You do. That is roughly where the comedy lives.

He writes essays, comic short stories, and a satirical periodical, The Reversalist. His floating apostrophe handles the parts he cannot see.

The Reversalist is a satirical review with a premise no one else is running: a masthead of comic correspondents, one from every era of history, each writing the wry comedy of their own age. Mr Fickle is the founding editor. The cast runs from a Roman certain civilisation is collapsing to a mid-century curmudgeon certain it already has.

The idea carries three advantages at once. It is evergreen, because human folly repeats and satire built on it does not date. It is expandable, because a new voice is simply a new era. And it is coherent, because every correspondent believes the same wrong thing: that their own century was the last sensible one.

The model is deliberately lean. Each voice publishes on Substack, where discovery lives, and every piece is mirrored here as the permanent, owned archive. One brand, many bylines, a single running joke, and a cast that can grow for as long as history keeps producing absurdity, which is to say forever.

Meet the correspondents →