The Bamboo Series

Praise for The Bamboo Series:

• “I cannot remember the last time such a large group of people … were waiting around impatiently for a journalist to publish the next part of a written story.” The Bamboo Series is one of “the most innovative formal experiments I’ve seen recently.” — The New Yorker, Five Things That Changed the Media in 2025.

• “Ryan Lizza has single-handedly reinvented pay walls, part works, cliffhanger endings, weekly serials and the profile of bamboo as a garden plant. People who pretend they are too highbrow to read it are wrong in every possible way.” — The Financial Times, The Best Non-FT Articles of 2025

• A “blockbuster story” and “one of the splashiest—and most-read—pieces of independent journalism this year” that “drew an eye-popping audience in excess of 700,000 readers.” — Mediaite, Most Influential in News Media 2025

• Lizza’s series has “done more to lift [Substack’s] cultural and political relevance than anything else in recent memory.” — The Information

Part 1: How I Found Out

Part 2: She Did It Again

Part 3: Catch and Kill

Part 4: Means of Control

Olivia’s Strategy Memo to Bobby

Part 5: Loyalty Test

Part 6: ‘Bobby was behind the whole thing.’

Part 7: Day in Court

Part 8: Bamboo

Part 9 Coming Soon