There really is no substitute for time. Time to mull stuff over, time to not think about it at all, to narrativize and then realize the narrative is trapping you and then to re-narrativize.

Anyways, go read “I searched my own name in my dead dad’s phone”:

I knew that looking through my father’s phone was a dangerous game. I had been hunting for passwords, account information, clues to understanding his sprawling financial setup that I was now responsible for as the executor of his estate. To sift through someone’s camera roll, text messages, and Google Search history is a novel and modern tier of intimacy — violatory and porous with context gaps.

There were landmines I knew to dodge, scroll past, avert my eyes from, close out of — like anything that began to resemble sexting. Yet there was one landmine I needed, desperately, to detonate.

I started typing my own name into the search bar almost reflexively. Deep down, a naive and childish part of me stood, fists clenched, eyes shut hard like seconds after blowing out birthday cake candles…wishing, wishing, wishing.

you’ll have to go over to prism to read the rest… and then you’ll kind of understand this photo…

Thank you, as always, for reading! I spent a lot of time these last few years hoping to find writing about grief and estrangement and I didn’t find as much as I needed at the time (although I’m a “Free Churro” episode of BoJack Horseman person forever).

My hope is that if you relate in any way you feel a little bit validated or have a new way to turn things over in your head, and if you don’t relate in any way, that you get to hear about someone else’s version of complicated family dynamics in an interesting way.

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It’s the generalized version of how young people often think they will die young. Rebecca Solnit wrote in A Field Guide to Getting Lost that, “teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.” Similarly, it’s easier to fixate on nuclear annihilation than all the cumulative fights, stand-offs, bravery, sacrifice, loss, and complexity that it will take to turn this country around and make the future seem bright for even most of the people in it. Anyone saying that the solutions are simple is trying to sell you something.

There’s no escaping history and there’s no escaping other people. The world I miss and wish we could go back to never existed at all and I’ve wasted too much time pretending I could claw my way back there. I think this is true in varying ways for a lot of us. There is a slippery line between adapting to what’s new and changing and just going along with what’s being forced upon us for someone else’s benefit. And there is a slippery line between keeping your head down to stay safe and abdicating any responsibility and obligation you have to your neighbors and community.

Self-optimization and self-insulation is tempting and popular these days. The advice economy is thriving online at a level that makes me feel like I’m at the bottom of four pyramid schemes at once. People I know with jobs not directly attached to social media post on LinkedIn like they’re writing a corporate Buzzfeed article about the six craziest insights they’ve gleaned about generative AI or sales or public health even.

I probably spend too much time wavering about all this and not enough time identifying forward and going in that direction. It’s so much easier to swim around in your sense of doom or do anything you can to distract from said doom. I find it increasingly challenging to plan for and commit to the future without drifting into anxieties. I think about how older peoples’ advice for navigating jobs, careers, and the economy feels comical and borderline fictional and I worry that all the implicit beliefs I’ve racked up about how the world is meant to work are also stale. I want someone to tell me the new rules that are not to become an influencer, be a right-wing knucklehead, place a bet on Polymarket or Kalshi, or cede your values and your capacity for thought to an AI chatbot.

—

stuff i read recently

When the floods at Camp Mystic happened, I had thought it was a freak accident… but there’s much more to it and Kerry Howley does a great job here of indicating the broader tensions of religion, loyalty, and self-preservation going on

Being an adult content creator is a job!!! You can’t just make an OnlyFans and get rich

Chiropractors are the backbone of MAHA… wish I could find that funny

rayne fisher-quann on the manosphere and chatgpt

My favorite piece on the Lindy West polyamory memoir discourse

Suing Grammarly for using writers’ names to give out slop advice and the right of publicity

casino sociale

stuff i wrote recently-ish / photos i took recently-ish… you can find more if you go looking…

interviewed fortesa latifi about her book LIKE, FOLLOW, SUBSCRIBE!! i am not a child/family influencer viewer but i am utterly fascinated by the industry and the ecosystem and its implications

interviewed lisa lee about her debut novel, AMERICAN HAN, which is about the not-discussed-enough topic of asian american rage and its consequences on families and the bitter price of the american dream and long-term self-abnegation

i have been thinking again about this book i reviewed last year, WHY EVERYONE HATES WHITE LIBERALS, especially as the 2028 presidential election speculation begins

if you know me you know i love dwg and i saw him again in feb:

my friend kat did not win her primary but she did teach me and so many other people a lot about what a political campaign can look like, the inaccessibility of running for office, and how to continue to have hope for the future

But I don’t have control of the CDC, the NIH, or the FAA, or Senate confirmation hearings, or fire policies, or immigration, nor can I vote on them right now nor can I even exactly donate to their causes (to varying degrees depending on issue). I’m fed up with people posting what seem to be essentially subtweets about feeling like other people aren’t doing enough to help themselves feel like they are doing “enough” and I’m fed up with people posting about “joy as resistance” in a way that seems to justify not doing other resisting and then I’m fed up with myself because though I post neither of those things, I’m afraid of “not doing enough” and I’m afraid of not having enough “joy as resistance” and I’m afraid of pretending I’m doing “joy as resistance” but really excusing myself. I’m sad because it feels like protests and calling your representatives barely does anything, not to suggest it does nothing. I’m mad at other people who want to point blame and I’m pointing blame at people who point blame and then I’m trying to have compassion and then I’m wanting to change peoples’ minds and then I’m remembering people are hard to convince and that we need community but where is the community without church and local neighborhood stuff we associate with old people now and and and and

You get the vibe. And I do not want to veer into “self-care” and individualism and introspection too hard but something I have been contemplating that I think is both something to evaluate in myself and something to fight everywhere is what I’ve come to call “ROI brainworms.”

ROI as in return on investment, a corporate phrase that has leaked into the everyday vocabulary of people I know including myself and whose underpinning logic feels like a part of many problems we face. It’s not inherently bad, it makes sense for businesses to want to estimate what profits they receive in return for their initial investment. Like most concepts, it becomes bad when taken to an extreme and taken as the end all consideration. It’s bad when you wake up one day and every decision you make is heavily shaped by “trying to get your money’s worth.” Obviously a cousin of our obsession with optimization, I find ROI disease much more insidious because it fuels a lot of what we choose not to do at all whereas I associate optimization with a lot of consumption behaviors like beauty regimens, life hacks, buying everything that Wirecutter recommends, etc. Two sides of a coin! Probably blurrier than that.

This has worsened due to high cost of living. I think about this whenever I see people framing choosing to stay in every weekend as “enjoying my rent.” No hate to making your space yours or not going out (I am not even a partier), but like committing too hard to the label of introvert, I worry that it’s a covert normalization of isolation, loneliness, and not hanging out with friends because of the perceived lack of ROI. The feeling of having to spend money to be a person outside of your living space does feel very acute these days! Weigh that against the blobby, hard to quantify appeal of socializing and it can be a tough call, made even worse if you throw in how much you’re paying for rent as a consideration. You might not even have the best night out, so why bother? Sometimes I am groping for “practical” reasons to not see people because it makes me sad when I’m walking in a group of people and conversations happen to separate out in such a way where I’m walking alone, or because it makes me sad when people flake last minute, or because it makes me sad that a lot of my hangouts with certain people now are just each of us recounting what’s been up recently (which is not the most optimistic of topics these days) and then leaving after 2 hours. I can save myself the immediate sad by staying home, where I know I will experience a safe neutral amount of enjoyment watching television and crocheting. Again, sometimes that’s the right call, but it’s dangerous to let this impulse win out too often. So much of community-building and relationship-building is about showing up, even when you don’t completely want to or aren’t entirely sure, and the payoff is not guaranteed nor will it take the same shape every time.

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An issue with ROI, which is also an issue with applying pretty much any corporate logic too intensely to the real world, is that it prioritizes what can be quantified in discrete units and easily forecasted. A lot of social potentiality is incalculable. What if tonight is the night you meet the love of your life, etc.? You can never leave your house knowing it’s going to be the best night of your life; that would actually ruin it.

Personally, this is a reason that I find myself pretty incapable of actively trying to date. While in theory I would like to be in a relationship and am aware that it takes work and “putting myself out there” and whatnot, I absolutely despise the fact that I could go on 100 dates and it might yield what I perceive as nothing if I don’t meet the right person under the right circumstances. I could spend all those hours on any hobby or even watching movies I’ve been meaning to see and I would feel like I accomplished something. The complete lack of correlation between effort in and results out irks me, perhaps because there’s been little in my life I would say feels quite like that.

ROI has plagued us for a long time. In high school, I remember being shown “ROI calculations” of various college majors based on average salary versus tuition costs. While a valid consideration (again, especially because of rising costs), following that kind of logic too intensely is how we end up with a glut of investment bankers, consultants, and software engineers and a shortage of nurses, teachers, and social workers. It’s a part of how we end up in an aggressively preprofessional version of college, and how the humanities become thoroughly devalued and dismantled.

I suspect that ROI brainworms are also a part of the pressure on children these days, not because parents are cold, calculating overseers of their children/investments, but because it’s just become such a pervasive underlying logic that it feels like what makes sense. The more we know about how pertinent childhood is for development and how good children are at learning languages and whatever, the more valuable that time becomes for putting them into controlled environments to improve return on investment. The ROI of exploratory, free play is probably actually quite high, but it’s far more fuzzy and less measured than putting your child in a bunch of structured classes and activities. Independence, self-confidence, autonomy, and other squishy takeaways are important but not as clearly available in any “If you put X time and money in, you get Y out” situation.

ROI brainworms shape my consumption habits. I don’t want to spend several hours watching a movie that’s going to be mediocre. I don’t want to go to a restaurant and spend too much money on food that doesn’t feel worth it. Luckily everything is rated on an easy 5-star scale by everyone else. I’m mentally preparing to rate it on a 5-star scale as I consume it. The weird decision paralysis that I land in here is honestly embarrassing sometimes. It would be much more fun and memorable and honestly informative sometimes to just pop into a random place to eat. I’m afraid of feeling stupid and like I wasted time/money/etc. The same applies to starting hobbies!

The obsession and constant barrage of and demand for clean narratives, whether it’s influencer social media branding, the way we are taught history, most memoirs, or our own beliefs about the story of our lives, does not help. In hindsight, ROI can be written in after the fact; of course you did A, B, and C and so now you’re at point Z (sorry I love the alphabet). I think of the stories where someone moves across or out of the country or breaks rank from familial expectations and turns out wildly successful enough for me to be hearing their tale, of activists who took a stand and are now constantly referenced and revered for their moral backbone. Now it looks obvious that the big risk was a great decision, that that was always what they should have done and knew to do and look at how it all worked out! But clearly when you live that life it had to be terrifying in the moment, had to have taken a lot of courage and a willingness to fail and be wrong and embarrassed and even destitute. If you had attempted to calculate the ROI or expected value or anything like that, you simply wouldn’t have had enough information, and you literally never will.

In this particularly turbulent point in time, it’s so understandable to crave control. It’s so easy to turn inward. I think that explains a lot of behaviors in myself and others. But we lose so much capacity for taking even small risks when we get to used to it, partly because more and more things become perceived as risks rather than just things you do. The inertia only gets stronger over time, and so too do the perceived costs and risks. I find it annoying when people tell me that anything (besides real muscles) are muscles, but I fear I feel my own capacity for doing things with highly uncertain outcomes atrophying over time. Several of the best decisions I’ve ever made involved fewer pro/con lists and ROI calculations than I’d whip out now, and the ineffability of certain human experiences is actually inherent to their so-called worth.

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if anyone is in the chicago area and wants to do like… fun creative portraits… i’m oddly itching to do more!

i genuinely believe one piece of building our brighter future is people READING MORE thnx

nobody knows what a journalist is anymore and that is a huge problem

big aidan zamiri fan (you might recognize his work with charli xcx, billie eilish, and wallows recently) so i enjoyed this interview

the future of fire cannot look like its present

profile of a top male onlyfans creator and the sort of unreality of his life

who gets shipped (in a fanfiction context), really cool visual presentation of this too!

this essay was a reminder that we are living in the echoes of the 1980s

dry january is over now but this was a really interesting take on the sort of evangelical, moralistic tone it’s started getting in certain spaces

cute little profile of macaulay culkin and brenda song!!!

rayne fisher-quann on writing, actually writing and the thinking that it requires

the internet is worse than a brainwashing machine; it offers you justification

title says it all “i hired someone to watch all my friends’ instagram stories for a week”

i love when people point out the vibes of millennial aesthetics

no more startups with tech solutions to solve fundamentally human issues pls

really fascinating breakdown of the podcasting manosphere

haven’t read this book yet but this interview helped it rise on my to-read list: american bulk by emily mester

other forms of media <3

the truth about child influencing (podcast ep)

democrats are losing the war for attention very very badly (podcast ep) like so badly i saw the former social media person for wendy’s posting on bluesky offering cory booker their services pro bono

snl’s future of healthcare is promising, perhaps unfortunately lol

re books: i read detransition, baby by torrey peters after owning a copy for literally over 3 years and i loved it. also i read rejection by tony tulathimutte and it was disturbing in the best possible way, absolutely insane. pre-order sucker punch by scaachi koul if you, like me, love a divorce memoir btw!

re movies: recently saw nickel boys and it was beautiful but also devastating because it’s about boys growing up at a jim crow era reform school, adapted from the colson whitehead novel. it’s shot in first-person which is such an interesting choice!

bovine excision music video save me samia third album save me

himbo dome patrons rise up for the mj lenderman tiny desk

ankles by lucy dacus

re tv: all i can say is if you don’t watch severance i have little to say these days. was here before the recent hype and will be here until they drag me out

Of course, this is not to suggest that nothing good happened during that time either. Many good things happened. Some of my friends showed up for me in ways I can’t even yet fully express my gratitude for; I got to meet and work with musicians and feel like a real concert photographer; I realized how easy it is to make a big batch of a version of my favorite Sweetgreen salad at home; I visited London again; I’m permanently emotional about how much good art exists that I get to enjoy. In many ways, I remain incredibly lucky. It’s just that I tend to let good things float right past me because they don’t require reckoning or healing from or trying to figure out how to become un-haunted by. I’m constantly at risk of dismissing my problems with “well, it could be worse” and/or trying to surmise some kind of grand narrative and insight so that everything feels like it was Worthwhile. But importantly, all of that kind of thought is largely meta-narrative and there’s such a profound chasm between what you know in your head and what you feel in your bones. It’s not a gap I have found an easy bridge for. Some things take time to sink in, sometimes I have needed to be personally whacked over the head to really understand.

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Something I have long wanted but wanted even more deeply and desperately and impossibly over the last 1.5 years is someone else to be there with me through it all. A best friend, a significant other, a close sibling. Though I rationally know even those options would have their own subjective experience and also be busy living their own life, I have generally struggled with the sprawling chaos of the experience of the last two years personally, not to mention also more broadly in the world. It’s just incredibly hard to explain myself and what’s been going on without a pretty expansive amount of context and understanding which has made me hesitant when figuring out how to make new friends and also hesitant when catching up with old ones because I also know we often don’t have time to run through it all and I also just don’t even want to repeat myself this often. I have been in LORE OVERLOAD man. And then it’s also really, really difficult when people do not respond well, for whatever set of reasons related to our lack of scripts for grief, the discomfort of family estrangement, general eschewing of negativity and awkwardness, personal overwhelm, the desire to solve problems instead of listening, whatever. I know nobody needs to or really can know 100% of the intimate details of your life to be your friend or to care about you or to be a confidant but I have grown so tired of dealing with so much shit mostly alone. It’s been isolating just in terms of how I spend my time, but also in experience, and then I made it more isolating in my own head by repeatedly evaluating how people disappointed me in small and big ways. I was already a consummate wall-builder and this was like a divine brick and mortar upgrade.

And the envy I have felt this year… I always thought I was a little immune to the whole social-media-makes-you-feel-bad-about-your-life thing. Maybe true when I was doing better, or when most people I knew were in college, but man… she really kicks you when you’re down. Look at these people succeeding in their cool creative careers (don’t think about how they could be secretly rich, or they went to college for this and so have been working on it for many more years than you). Look at these people with their love for their siblings and parents who are all alive and happy to spend time together (don’t think about how pretty much everyone has a weird relationship to their family in some regard or another, to varying levels). Look at these people on their pretty vacations (again, secretly rich? Also, I don’t even love traveling that much). The little reassurances that social media isn’t reality are almost cliché and I still can’t quite internalize them.

All year I’ve been envying things I didn’t even really want (e.g. being married at 26, being promoted to senior consulting analyst or something), things I implicitly or explicitly made a tradeoff decision in, things I simply can’t ever have and need to stop dwelling on (a good father, siblings closer to me in age, being born secretly rich). It’s easy to look at the constellation of impressions you have of someone else’s life and construe the most shiny, streamlined image, to assume ease and grace. But for me, and my life, I have to be there for all parts of the adventure… far less glamorous, far more half-clean laundry on the floor. It is so easily to tumble into an aggrieved sense of self (which we see reflected in national politics and culture painfully frequently…) and find yourself keeping score, unaware of all the known and unknown unknowns that are missing from your math.

So, as this year comes to an end, I do think I’ve been released, somewhat by force, from the belief that life is some kind of forward, upward and to the right progress narrative. But I’m still trying to figure out how to unravel the torment. The more I think about the same qualms and questions and issues and beefs without allowing a wide enough array of outside stimuli, the more I’m just carving it all into my brain. And I think the theme is overarching—it’s gotten easier and easier to splinter apart and untether from a shared, stable sense of reality. Receipt of information is both staggering and selectively filtered. What feels true is valid to you but that doesn’t mean it overrides everything else. And often I think what being a person and being an adult requires is being able to assess when it’s time to (gently) invalidate your own feelings so you can get yourself out of your hidey hole, for the longer-term benefit of yourself and others.

In 2023 and in 2024, to my personal dismay, the way out is through. The way out is to think the appropriate amount beforehand, and then do whatever it is you came here to do, trusting in yourself and the people around you that you can handle whatever gets thrown your way. What happens and has happened and will keep happening is not my character backstory, not my apportionment of bestselling memoir fodder, not my excuse for shirking obligations, not the required reading for anyone to get to know me. For 2025, I hope to interact with no estate lawyers in a professional capacity, I hope to be able to be more open to meeting and getting to know people who will have never known the me I was pre-2023/24, I hope to be able to root for people with no shred of strange envy tagging along. I think about the maelstrom of events that happen every single year, how many of them I could never anticipate with accuracy, how many of them bear down on me for days, weeks, months, but eventually drift away or at least transform into some new shape or texture. I know that in my head conceptually, but I’m still working on feeling it deep down.

Want to support my work? You can buy me a coffee here.

writing i wrote

I interviewed the great Lyz Lenz about her memoir This American Ex-Wife for the Chicago Review of Books

reviewed Sable Yong’s essay collection on beauty Die Hot With A Vengeance in The Brooklyn Rail

reviewed Weike Wang’s new novel, Rental House, for Chicago Review of Books

I just reread my post from 12/31 last year about how I never feel proud of myself and move the goalposts on myself all the time and… still working on this!

wrote about Chappell Roan and projecting on other people and our fondness for one-sided relationships because they seem psychologically safer than connection and acceptance

also wrote about therapy tiktoks and how there is a point where trying to find root causes for your behaviors stops being interesting or useful

some of my favorite photos i made this year

writing that moved me / i kept trying to make other people read

A Lover’s Theory of Marxism by Andrea Long Chu

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Have a Plan to Soundtrack Everything by Zach Baron

The Empathy Punishment by Reeves Wiedeman

the ends of empathy by Rayne Fisher-Quann

Government services should be delightful! by Garrett Bucks

living in interregnum: the context and the coconut tree by Sarah Thankam Mathews

What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained by Mary H.K. Choi

A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It? by Rachel Aviv

Drowning in Envy by Haley Nahman

The Gilded Age of Medicine is Here by Dhruv Khullar

The Texas OB-GYN Exodus by Stephanie Taladrid

When Couples Therapy Becomes a Weapon by Scaachi Koul

My Unraveling by Tom Scocca

I Can Hear The Men In The Room by Eliza McLamb

Guess What Private Equity is Doing to Childcare by Anne Helen Petersen

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books i read this year that i’m so so glad exist

Body Work by Melissa Febos

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Splinters by Leslie Jamison

All Fours by Miranda July

Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Can’t Even by Anne Helen Petersen

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

some more of my favorite photos i made this year

songs that stuck with me (playlist here)

“your apartment” by wallows (this was my actual #1 top streamed song)

“midas” by del water gap

“risk” by gracie abrams

“soup” by remi wolf

“i got time” by hippo campus

“girl, so confusing featuring lorde” by charli xcx and lorde

“good luck, babe!” by chappell roan

“scumbag” by role model

“i don’t know anything” by charly bliss

“missing out” by maya hawke

“bed chem” by sabrina carpenter

“messy” by reneé rapp

“body” by briston maroney

“docket” by blondshell ft. bully

“poltergeist” by meg smith

“the baton” by katie gavin

“downhill” by pom pom squad (two people told me this song was very on brand for me and i am still wondering exactly what that implies)

“clueless” by beach bunny

“yeah x10” by trent reznor and atticus ross (challengers soundtrack)

“wristwatch” by mj lenderman

“comedown” by maude latour

“little me” by maddie zahm

“designer dog” by hank heaven

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anyways, here’s some stuff i’ve found helpful to sit with this week! wishing everyone the best.

what i’ve been listening to:

Death Panel: Grief w/ Sarah Jaffe

Ezra Klein Show: The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election

what i’m reading:

Dissent Magazine: Exit Right by Gabriel Winant

Read Max: The TikTok Electorate by Max Read

New York Times: The Way Harris Lost Will Be Her Legacy by Tressie McMillan Cottom

New Yorker: How America Embraced Gender War by Jia Tolentino

Slate: Ad Man by Alexander Sammon

Atlantic: Voters Wanted Lower Prices At Any Cost by Annie Lowrey

User Mag: Why Democrats won’t build their own Joe Rogan by Taylor Lorenz

Rolling Stone: Dem Insiders Begged Team Harris Not to Campaign With Liz Cheney by Andrew Perez, Asawin Suebsaeng

Teen Vogue: If You're Blaming Young Progressives for the Trump Win, You're Wrong by Lex McMenamin

STAT: What can Trump and RFK. Jr. actually do on health care? by STAT Staff

Also, Haymarket Books is giving away 10 free e-books this week on relevant topics.

Being a famous musician (or other type of artist) might not be fathomable to most of us with other jobs, but it remains a job which means it also involves times when you’re not doing it. I think Jennette McCurdy does an incredible job illustrating the disruptive, tone-deafness of a benign fan approaching for a photo in her memoir. Sometimes shit is happening and you happen to be out and about. Not the time for someone to be coming up to you. Sometimes you just don’t want to be perceived. Taking a photo with a fan is actually not in anyone’s job description unless it’s some kind of VIP experience that specifically promises that. It should be an honor or a compliment that anyone wants to take a photo with you! It can be conceptually an honor and experientially a violation or inconvenience. 

Most art is not usually a service that the artist is providing for you specifically. You are not “paying their bills” and you are not their boss. Even if you were, some fans are STILL acting deeply inappropriately in the ways they convey their disapproval and the things that they disapprove about. 

This happens a lot more to female artists and celebrities, and perhaps especially to singer-songwriters who have developed a fanbase who strongly identify with their music for its sharing of intimate experiences. It is harder to parse what’s real and what’s a persona for musicians who are often mining their personal experiences and often performing under their real names (Chappell Roan actually makes a point of differentiating between Chappell Roan, her stage name and persona, and her real life and identity). But the answer also isn’t that hard—everyone is always performing to some level, and as John Mulaney says with emphasis in his most recent comedy special, don’t trust the persona. It is also suspicious to me how often the idea that female artists should be grateful and therefore uncritical of their experience of fame, as though it is a gift bestowed upon them and not a product of hard work, talent, circumstance, and luck (which it is for everyone). 

Someone disclosing something vulnerable never, in any situation, gives you free rein to speculate or critique. Having an opinion might be unavoidable, but choosing to share your opinion and believing your opinion is relevant and necessary is a judgment call. There is a difference between being entitled to your opinion and being entitled to a person. You are never entitled to the latter, whether or not you know them.

Another part of this that absolutely confounds me is the way so many people are eager to dismiss Chappell Roan and others musicians’ concerns as superfluous and “part of the job.” There is an eagerness to claim they deserve weird fucked up parasocial relationships and criminal stalking and harassment because they’ve also gotten to achieve some career dreams, as though playing Gov Ball means you cede the right to privacy. The underlying logic here is deeply unsettling in its preference for shitting on individuals instead of considering how we might make conditions better for everyone and the strange, impractical implication that people to whom good things have happened cannot lament any bad things that have happened. The latter would ultimately disqualify everyone, making it feel like we should all put our heads down and keep our mouths shut like good little cogs in a weird machine. The former justifies how things are now without question, denying the social and political imagination necessary to envision a healthier fan/artist relationship for all parties involved.

Eliza McLamb, a singer-songwriter and writer, points out that there is also the unease beyond the surface-level interaction: “I see this kind of frenetic energy in Roan’s videos. It’s not just “the picture” or “the hello;” it’s the convergence of online admiration and real-world interaction. It’s the all-consuming knowledge that people are consuming you.” Why would you put anything out in public then? I can hear the critics from the preceding paragraph already. Well, putting out music is not equivalent to putting your entire personhood and all your choices on display. The speed with which we want to generalize from one specific context to a person’s whole moral character is another essay.

What haunts me about the all-consuming knowledge that people are consuming you is that while it’s much more extreme and intense for public artists like McLamb and even more for Roan, the sense also applies to the rest of us. When I interviewed Taylor Lorenz last year for her book, she mentioned the stress of seeing people try to map out social networks and treat friendships as public content, leading her to refrain from posting friends. She pointed out that, “The struggles of fame are the struggles of everyone thanks to social media.” It’s a theme brought up in discussions of teenage mental health and social media—knowing too much is sometimes a curse. We also see this tension bubble up repeatedly regarding topics including filming people in public, disproportionate backlash, main characters like West Elm Caleb. There is a thrill in learning a small subset of facts about a person and then casting your judgment on them like a petty god. That awareness, whether conscious or not, can easily end up amplifying a fear and anticipation of scrutiny that cannot possibly be good for our collective mental health.

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It is easier to pretend you have some moral high ground and be a hater of other people. That doesn’t involve reckoning with your own mistakes, taking a risk, or really being an active participant of anything. Eliza McLamb points out, in a different essay with familiar themes, that while it’s normal to hear a piece of music and think you might have done something differently, that should be considered a basis for one’s own art or honing one’s critiques. She writes, “We have lost strength, culturally, in the creative muscle. We focus on if art is meaningful to us directly, if it’s up to our particular standards, and if it’s not, we seek to find fault either in the work or with ourselves. We’re moving towards a future of perfectly polished Artificial Intelligence music and playlists that are curated just for your ears so that one day, you may never have to hear a song that puzzles you ever again. What a bleak future that is.”

There is a thin line between fans and haters these days when both groups are engaging heavily with content and obsessively keeping tabs on celebrities, as Alex Sujong-Laughlin points out in her recent piece on influencer snark subreddits. There are too many stories to recount of female musicians fending off bizarre fans. I think often of Phoebe Bridgers talking about being harassed by accounts using her face as their profile picture after her father died.

“If you're a kid and the internet somehow taught you that that's an okay thing to do, then of course I hate capitalism and everything that led you to believe that it's okay to do that,” Bridgers says. But, she continues, “I, at one of the lowest points of my life, saw people who claim to love me fucking dehumanize me and shame me and fucking bully me on the way to my dad's wake.”

“It's not like they didn't know my dad just died,” she continues. “A lot of the top comments [were] like, ‘Hey, her dad just died, what are you guys doing?’” If you harass her with her face as your profile picture, “I fucking hate you,” Phoebe says, “and I hope you grow the fuck up.”

Obviously, the dehumanization component looms large here. I open Instagram and the little circles at the top are Stories from celebrities, friends, acquaintances, businesses, brands, with no delineation. The style and tone of posts have also homogenized over the years. No matter how logically one understands the difference when prompted to consider, I think everything is getting all tangled up deep down. Roles blur. Sometimes brands and influencers and celebrities want this because it makes it easier to sell you stuff. Instagram has incentive to push whatever keeps you on the platform. Individuals like to behave like little celebrities out of admiration, imitation, aspiration, etiquette, trend? The Internet isn’t a contained space for our worst and weirdest impulses—that shit leaks out, warps, remakes “real life.” The way that tides are turning on dating apps is an example of recognizing how streamlined, for-profit platforms promised something shiny and fun but ultimately enshittified (degraded/paywalled quality after capturing a user base) their products, altered social norms, and have not and will never be able to innovate their way into a solution to human connection.

I also think that some of this misdirected anger towards artists is about bigger, more abstract forces that are harder to yell at such as the Ticketmaster-LiveNation monopoly, isolation and weird bad hard to identify and surmount vibes probably contributed to by ongoing disasters, the enshittification of many products and companies, etc.

Just look at the AI friend you can wear around your neck that was announced earlier this summer. In many ways, it seems like the optimal friend for some people—you paid for it, you get what you want. It is a product and the user is a user and a consumer. On-demand, always listening, adapting to your desires without desires or boundaries of its own. Something else about the asking for a picture of someone specifically that I’m stuck on is that these people are clearly asking a yes or no question with zero belief that no is a valid answer. All this therapy discourse about setting boundaries was supposed to go both ways; treating other peoples’ boundaries as an affront to you suggests a self-centered misunderstanding of boundaries.

Other people are not content production machines, wish-fulfillers, or receptacles for your opinions and demands.

Honestly, there are lots of indie musicians I think I could feasibly be friends with. We’re a similar age, we have demonstrated similar neuroses, and they seem cool! I like their art! I’ve seen them perform live! There is clearly a difference in “we could be friends” and “we already are” or the twisted entitlement of a more consumer-product frame of mind. Friendship is so much about personality compatibility but also the luck of circumstances, the reciprocated effort of nurturing the original chemistry, and of sticking around and allowing both of you the space the space to evolve and grow throughout. Maybe I could be friends with them but it’s definitely never possible if they live on a pedestal in my mind and definitely not possible from one interaction at the merch table (sadly I’m not maximally charismatic). To conflate parasocial awareness of a person and their life with friendship is to misunderstand both the ingredients and the spoils of a good friendship.

There are a bunch of psychological tests developmental psychologists run on children to determine when they develop the capacity to understand that other people have different perspectives and to attempt to take other people’s perspectives. It’s a gradual process throughout childhood to grapple with the fact that other people experiencing the same thing will perceive, interpret, and act on it differently. I am no developmental psychologist, but it also feels like a skill we have to continually work on, especially in our currently splintered culture where something that can be dominating the discourse in my world is nonexistent in someone else’s media environment and our feeds are personalized to keep us scrolling.

I have a very bad habit (that I am working on) of telling a friend a piece of information and finding myself disappointed by their response. Only after the fact do I become aware that I had told them expecting a certain type of response based on our relationship, my understanding of them, what kind of validation or feedback I wanted. They didn’t know any of that. I didn’t specify—it would be kind of odd if I did? But I’m caught off guard when they don’t also hate the tweet or they don’t even know who Barry Keoghan is so him dating Sabrina Carpenter is irrelevant or they’re not as hype as I am. I was operating like the interaction was a button on a vending machine or ordering off a menu. It obviously was not. I feel hurt, not even necessarily by the person. It’s more of an acute pang of loneliness that feels like it has deeper psychological roots, especially when it’s about craving approval or validation.

There is a comfortable pleasure in predictability, a sense of security in knowing what comes next. Our brains are constantly trying to pattern match and use past knowledge to approximate what to expect. But the steepest joys and pitfalls of life do not exist in the bland, grey space of a pre-outlined agenda or the 2D shapes of what you think other people are like. Being the main character is way less fun than recognizing you’re a part of a great ensemble cast. Sometimes people are busy! Sometimes they’ll surprise you! Vice versa of course applies as well. Learning how to not just deal with that but accept and appreciate it as a part of the experience of connecting with other people is important. I think if there’s anything that applies to both our real friends and the musicians we feel emotionally proximate to, it’s that.

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*Title credits to Karishma and reassuring me when I freak out and become convinced nothing I write coheres credits to Fumika and Karishma

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both of eliza mclamb’s essays on the same topic, which are mentioned above and will link again here: the right to art and the eeriness of fame

a close academic reading of chappell roan

this vulture compilation of obamacore media was a walk down memory lane

beautiful essay about… learning to ride a bike as an adult

how obama’s reading list gets made

loser/lover boy summer

anne helen petersen interviewed a former trad-wife on what it takes to leave that behind

dirt! in the nytimes! have been following daisy and dirt for a while, great fun publication that digs (ha) up some esoteric topics i’d never think about and publishes really great writing—bad waitress and aftersun/dogtooth have shown up in this section of my newsletter before. also enjoyed this jarring short story

200M people still playing candy crush… originally i thought “disturbing” but the way the company treats it seems at least kind of okay?

was worrying about the tweens i spotted in sephora and jia tolentino heard me and responded in the new yorker

aggregation theory, which i sort of buy bc who likes sorting through the muck of all this content… like literally you’re reading this section of links so you’re kind of seeing the point

read this unhinged and fun charly bliss interview in paste and listen to their new album forever

so late to this but alexander chee’s essay about inheriting after his father’s early death and how it messed with his relationship to money

is it ethical to be a billionaire on neopets??

i, like many, watched all of veep recently. i was rooting for literally nobody on the show and it makes me wish we had some b613 scandal ass scheming happening in the bowels of DC

now i am watching industry which is like succession (hbo, psychosexual, corporate) but also not (british, ice cold, protagonists in their twenties, banking)

i recently read anna marie tendler’s memoir men have called her crazy, which i enjoyed! it didn’t come together all the way, and i think there are intriguing parts of her life i wish were covered (not even about her marriage in specific, but about the surely bizarre and complicated experience of being married to a famous person) but it got an out-loud reaction from me a couple times. now i am reading an honest woman by charlotte shane and becoming little shell by chris la tray!

saw the film didi which i recommend for everyone who was cringe in middle school (all of us) and extra recommend for the asian americans wahoo

started listening to dead eyes, a podcast about an actor/comedian’s experience 20 yrs ago being fired from a small role by tom hanks for having dead eyes and is mostly just really fun to hear about if you’re like me in that you’re fascinated and invested in hollywood with absolutely no proximity to it

(Twisters spoilers forthcoming… but do we watch Twisters for its twists? It’s not about the twists, it’s about the friends with intense romantic tension that we make along the way… and the bumpy tilty 4DX effects.)

The film, directed by Lee Isaac Chung (he also did Minari! we love the Midwest), follows Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), starting when she is a bright-eyed grad student in meteorology in her home state of Oklahoma, hoping she has a scientific solution to stop tornadoes in their tracks. Her first field test ends in tragedy.

We jump to five years in the future when she’s working a desk job at the National Weather Service in New York, still traumatized by her mistakes. Her former classmate/friend-turned-weather-entrepreneur Javi (Anthony Ramos) convinces her to return to OK during an unprecedented “outbreak” of tornadoes to help his company, Storm Par, to set up sensors to create detailed 3D scans so they can better understand the formation of tornadoes. This requires a fleet of pickup trucks, military-grade ex-machina-sensors, and attendant staff who are characterized as a menagerie of PhD-holders. Javi offhandedly mentions receiving funding from “investors” who are interested in how weather relates to “housing developments” for this endeavor.

Kate uses her preternatural weather observation talents to aid Storm Par, as they zoom around on dirt roads tracking burgeoning storms, rivalled by charming Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his motley YouTuber “tornado wrangling” crew. 

When a tornado they’re chasing hits a small town, Kate demands that they help pull civilians out of the wreckage instead of tracking down the sensor that contains valuable data.

She realizes during her work with Javi that his top investor is a real estate shark who is lowballing victims of tornadoes with cash offers to buy up their land in a moment of crisis and destruction. This is a very real and extensive, often predatory industry. Though the marketing copy is usually about helping homeowners in an “ugly situation,” the reality is often grosser than that. Cash buyers often target those going through illness, loss, divorce, and other crises, using public records to reach out and badger people at their lowest, offering what can seem like the only or easiest option in a dark time.

Throughout the film, Javi expresses the desire to help people, but his ambitions have allowed him to justify accepting funding and its accompanying pressures from someone profiting off of the very people he hoped to help. Pragmatically, pretty much all money comes with strings attached, and of course cutthroat corporations and investors are the ones with the most money to front technologically complex and expensive operations like the theoretical company Storm Par. Government grant funding, if it did exist, would likely be extremely narrow and arduous to apply for.

At the start, it would probably also be easy to view Storm Par/Javi and the real estate shark’s interests as overlapping or aligned—they all want to get a better understanding of tornadoes, after all. Over time, however, the profit motive can easily curdle the whole operation; being able to predict a tornado in order to raise home insurance prices or target homeowners to buy their land for cheap in cash, for example, are more short-term profitable than investment in disaster preparedness or prevention of tornadoes. Helping people is a nice little treat on the side or a reputational shield, not a priority.

The professionalism and formalism of Storm Par—uniform polos, shiny tech, institutional credibility (they namecheck NASA and MIT)—creates a sense of trustworthiness and authority that soothes concerns at first. They’re handing out business cards to tornado-wrecked families, saying “Let us know if there’s anything we can do.” Meanwhile, Tyler and friends are portrayed as slightly bedraggled, ragtag, borderline irresponsible, and clout-chasing, which they somewhat inevitably are given the fact that they’re YouTubers. However, it’s ultimately Tyler’s team that is handing out free water and meals and assisting in the evacuation of towns. They appear less organized, but they have their own structures, expertise, and mission, even if they would not call any of it by those names.

After Javi and Kate have a dispute about the investor, Kate breaks from Storm Par. Tyler is able to help reinvigorate and rework her theories about how to interfere with the conditions that allow a tornado to form by releasing sodium polyacrylate and silver iodide upwards into a tornado.

Storm Par and Kate/Tyler go trekking after the same upcoming twister. When the tornado shifts paths and barrels towards a nearby town, Kate and Tyler’s crew rush to help people evacuate and take shelter. Javi moves to do the same, while his business partner Scott (David Corenswet) attempts to force him to turn around back towards the tornado, ultimately admitting that he does not care about the people in the town, but instead about the data collection and its ensuing profits from the real estate shark.

Earlier in the film, the viewer sees Scott introducing a local owner of a tornado-decimated bar as his uncle, making you feel like he is someone who is as personally and empathetically invested as the other characters. Yet the same circumstances and knowledge are worn differently by different people. This is where simplified identity politics falters; your backstory does not inherently bestow moral authority, or even contextual authority. Letting people use their personal stories as a narrative to deny other peoples’ opinions or to accrue their own influence and power, often by using a pandering and stereotypical version of events, is how you end up with clowns like Republican Vice Presidential nominee Jance Dance Vance.

The tornado tears through the small town, threatening EF-5 levels of damage, until Kate is able to release the sodium polyacrylate and silver iodide, halting the twister. Her theory about removing the moisture from a tornado turns out to be right. 

The final scene of Twisters takes place at the airport, with Kate leaving Oklahoma to go pitch her tornado solution in the hopes of securing funding to conduct more research on this groundbreaking field of tornado-ending science.

The fact that she could potentially be denied any further resources to develop this life-saving prevention tactic feels insane, but totally possible. I can imagine funders and opposition asking for the data that she was supposed to collect while rushing to save dozens of peoples’ lives, then ignoring or manipulating its interpretation even if it did exist. I recognize this may sound cynical, but think of how many universal basic income pilots exist, and their resounding results, and the current political viability of UBI in the United States.

Another constant struggle here is that prevention is unsexy. It’s not a quick win for a politician. If you succeed in preventing the disaster, there’s no good photo op, people might not even notice, and the damage that didn’t happen will be undercounted and underestimated. There is not enough credit given. Look at America’s underfunded public health departments. Very few people are thinking about the disease outbreaks that were nipped in the bud, the illnesses we’ve eradicated or come close to eradicating, the hugely meaningful difference that clean water makes. It will be taken for granted. The beautiful and horrible thing about people is that we habituate rapidly to our current state of existence. If the science of Twisters were feasible in our world, that would only be one small step towards actually preventing tornadoes. The bigger fight would be in rallying support and funding, implementing it, and maintaining the critical infrastructure. None of those create an iconic moment like seeing someone get pulled out of rubble, even though the lack of rubble means that many people get to keep living their lives. A generation would pass and people would be complacent and accustomed to a lack of tornadoes and then some alt right or alt left movement or conspiracy would spring up about the tech used to prevent tornadoes.

At one point in the film, Kate and Tyler are fleeing an active tornado and rush into a motel hoping they have a basement or some other form of shelter. A woman in the lobby tells them with comically frustrating confidence that “9 out of 10 times, there is no tornado.” The tornado sirens go flying off their poles, cutting off the eerie sound. “See?” she says, thinking her wisdom is being validated. She and several other unnamed people in this scene are then promptly sucked into the tornado and killed. We are not built to successfully intake and process all the information available today and evaluate risks well. Individual knowledge and preparedness is just one often fallible piece of the puzzle. It would be both more effective and in some ways easier to address such problems upstream, but the political will and focus is incredibly challenging to muster and requires decades of playing the long game from many angles.

Twisters is a movie about weather, but lowkey it’s also kind of a movie about how good intentions often get mangled by defeat and by fucked up incentive structures. It’s easy to think that nobody wants a disaster to ever happen, that if we could prevent them, we would. But it’s not that anybody necessarily actively wants a disaster, it’s that other priorities and opportunities and red tape and delusions end up in the way.

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popcraveification of news/finding out biden dropped out of the election via horny chain text or meme

trump campaign’s theory of victory (came out before biden was out but still wild to understand the professionalization and infrastructure building happening over there, and how hard they may or may not pivot now)

sibling age gaps are widening

men, please, read a novel, it’s for your own good

white boy stock value at an all-time high

this summer’s hottest ailment is hormone anxiety

i love the hannah montana era of pop stars

celebrity book club dynamics

romance writers rewrote the rules

the endless quest to replace alcohol (i don’t think we will ever do it but i’d appreciate if people got wayyyy less stupid and weird about sobriety or even just abstaining from drinking every now and then)

twitter still not dead

does anyone want to get me one of these cute canadian dept of agriculture prints…

on celebrity and giving up your face to the public

excerpt from a memoir i’m excited to read - an honest woman by charlotte shane

“deeply still in love” by ROLE MODEL

“close to you” by gracie abrams

books-wise i’m reading sloane crosley’s grief is for people and and craft: stories i wrote for the devil by ananda lima

“The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.

None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.”

secondly - I don’t think I can run an advice column (let me know if I’m wrong lol) for many reasons but I love feeling like I exist which is amplified when people TELL ME THEIR THOUGHTS so if for whatever reason you do not wish to comment on the post or reply to the email, put whatever you want (WITHIN REASON) in this form. Would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, tweets you cannot post, etc. I’m trying to let myself do things without the profound fear of flopping. If a post falls in the forest and nobody acknowledges it, then nobody knows I flopped? Probably not how it works but whatever!

also: I reviewed Sable Yong’s DIE HOT WITH A VENGEANCE for The Brooklyn Rail. It’s a fun collection of essays about vanity, beauty, and wellness from the perspective of a former beauty editor. There were definitely a bunch of parts where I wanted to shout “SAY MORE!” but maybe that’s where I should be doing the thinking/engaging, which I tried to do in the review. i’ve been getting nonstop ads for “preventative” botox recently so beauty as an industry is definitely on the mind.

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“well, it could be worse”

I wield the blunt instrument of the phrase “well, it could be worse” against myself constantly. It’s my mallet against personal sadnesses and feelings of having been wronged. As they pop up, I whack them back down, a weird little game. It’s not fair that I grew up with an alcoholic father. Well, it could have been worse—at least he had a job most of the time and he never hit or physically threatened me. I’m lonely and feel hurt by the actions (or lack of actions) of some of my friends. Well, it could be worse. At least you have friends and they are mostly good. I feel panicked by the precarity and sense of general decline in modern American society. Well, it could be worse. At least I’m not housing insecure, and not constantly urgently at risk of losing everything.

The hardest mental fallacies to fend off are the ones that don’t feel entirely wrong, that I never feel like I can unravel all the way. Nothing above is wholly inaccurate. But there are always worse versions of the circumstances you’re in, and also better ones. There’s no real way to compare against anyone else’s life because the set of variables is simply too wide. That doesn’t stop me from trying though! I look at how my friends handle what I perceive as similar experiences, smooth over the many differences. I huffily think I could have “done better” than them if I had their starting points, or I dismiss my own problems because they seem nowhere near as consuming as someone else’s. I gobble up memoirs, noting where the author’s life takes turns mine doesn’t or hasn’t yet—I missed the obtain a supportive long-term romantic partner exit on the highway, unfortunately. I haven’t found the hypothetical well of compassion for self and others that is supposed to heal me. I read a memoir where an author’s parents are worse than mine and think, well it could have been worse, what’s my excuse? I read a memoir where an author’s life seems far more straightforward and manageable than mine and wonder where my book deal is.

I am, in many ways, extremely lucky. And in others ways, comically unlucky! And I know I need to stop invalidating my own experiences and feelings by fixating on the first part. I also can’t overindex on being unlucky though. These two extreme points I’ve been swinging between particularly vigorously in the last year leave me either scrambling to re-delude myself, chastising until I can push forward with whatever is immediately in need of my attention, or wallowing in a muddle of self-pity and vengeful anger. It encourages a really negative form of bitterness; I find myself angry at and disconnected from people who I perceive as having “gone through less” and unsympathetic to people who do actually acknowledge their own negative experiences fully. Not a recipe for human connection.

This is sort of an Anson brainworms version of privilege discourse; who has the right to be upset and angry at the state of the world? Are you “checking your privilege” and “listening and learning”? The way that well-meaning phrases become words that make me gag as they curdle in corporate and online settings is a discussion for another day. Whose problems are “deserving” of our attention? Am I doing this (life???) “right” (by whose measure??)?

Ultimately, this is a dead-end train of thought that I could almost believe was planted on the left to derail discourse and prevent solidarity. Weighing out anyone’s hardships, your own or others, and trying to hold them against each other is petty and a waste of time. I also feel like this is a common fuel for what I’ve come to think of as bootstraps elitism—a sort of harshness and unsupportiveness that people who have “made it through” the same crucible of shit sometimes hold for those coming up after them. It’s similar to a hazing mindset: I struggled to get here, so why shouldn’t you? I find it everywhere: people who have paid off their student loan debt opposing student loan forgiveness, immigrants who have been in the country longer denigrating those who are newer, women ascending to positions of power and kicking the door shut behind them. Where you’d expect the intimate familiarity with someone’s struggles to create empathy and solidarity, instead there is judgment and competition.

Some of this is attributable to a scarcity mindset, feeling like there’s a limited few spots so you have to gatekeep and stay vicious. There’s also the fear that you will be lumped in with everyone else in your marginalized group; I think a lot about Cathy Park Hong in Minor Feelings admitting that she easily perceives a room as “overrun when there are too many Asians, and “too many” can be as few as three.” A disgusting, relatable feeling. These feelings are understandable but they’re built on the broken assumption that we’re planning on maintaining current hierarchies, stereotypes, and power structures. 

The accumulation of more struggle does not alleviate the pains of the past. Welcoming more harm into the world makings things “fair” in the stupid sense of the word. Our lives are easier because of the sacrifices of people who came before use who we didn’t know, will never know, thank god. If we all operated from a sense of spite and regression, what would it all be for? 

I am allowed to mourn my losses, lick my wounds, feel my sorrows, as is everybody, without some bizarre need for justification or measurement. My experiences are not made flimsier or less impactful by the existence of someone else’s, and vice versa. I think especially in this era of aggressive and constant self-narrativization and hearing the blaring chatter of other peoples’ narratives via social media, this is challenging to internalize.

A more fragile outgrowth of this is the recognition that “well, it could be worse” was a coping mechanism, a way my child brain identified to prevent myself from crumbling under the weight of what was going on around me. Divorce, domestic violence, alcoholism, generational trauma, and mental illness are all still too big for me to wrap my arms around now, and my arms were once much shorter. I find it extremely challenging to slough off the instinct of self-criticism and be appreciative of my past self, especially as I wrangle with the now bitter psychological fruits of childhood survival tactics. But ultimately, the truth I’m still working on swallowing is that what helped me to survive is not necessarily what will allow me to thrive, and that I can move past the whack-a-mole of “well, it could be worse” now that I don’t need it as desperately.

It’s taken me a long time to recognize that I don’t even need to argue my way point by point out of bad logic. If anything, this can add fuel to the fire because I’m expending so much energy dissecting and shaming. I can release myself. It could be worse, it could be better, it can just be.

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content (not derogatory)

in light of, ahem, recent political vibes… i’m thinking about sarah thankam mathews on cathedral thinking (broad positive appealing welcoming political vision instead of constant firefighting and doom) and living in the interregnum/figuring out how to enact my beliefs day to day in a meaningful way

the nytimes 100 best books list came out… but who are all these big book lists for?

AI is extremely reliant on faith in its hypothetical potential… also even if Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington did build the best AI health coach in the world… that is NOT INFRASTRUCTURE!!!!! PUT THE MONEY INTO OUR LITERAL HEALTH SYSTEMS PLEASE!!!!!!

really appreciated how this essay delved into the way various experiences can really complicate how we understand/end up with diagnoses, and the messy, underrepresented ways autism can manifest

platonic partnership and life-building and love <3

god, one of my favorite genres of media is just a behind-the-scenes look at how a big complicated thing gets done! logistical success makes me optimistic about the human race. how do you feed the entire olympic village?

why are there NDAs everywhere now and what does it mean

famous author alice munro was recently exposed as having known about her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter and stayed with him… i can’t summarize this well i just recommend you read andrea skinner’s essay about her experience in her own words, the toronto star’s reporting on the matter, and then you read brandon taylor on art monster discourse and child sexual abuse

the weird needle that republican women are threading these days

the below essay probably has ~familiar themes~ if you’ve read other things i’ve written about semi-recently… convinced i’m just trying to (gently) attack myself from a variety of angles until i manage to INTERNALIZE THE MESSAGE. if you don’t want to read more of that i did interview the lovely lyz lenz for the release of her excellent memoir this american ex-wife. i also have a review of sable yong’s debut, die hot with a vengeance (about beauty and vanity), coming out soon.

here are two concert photos i took recently that i am quite proud of. as always, plug for my instagram.

I am a consumer of pseudo-therapy Instagram Reels. I nod at descriptions of being parentified as a child, I feel seen by lists of avoidant attachment behaviors, I have teared up at pep talks about healing from childhood trauma, and I have googled “how to feel your feelings” more times than I would like to admit. I scroll through more Reels, vaguely looking to be called out, validated, seen, hurt, entertained. I see a therapist, and I embarrassingly quote Instagram Reels every now and then as a jumping off point for our conversations.

In the comments sections of these posts, there are dozens of flustered “Ok but now what” comments–what do I do with the fact that this random stranger has somehow clocked me and my emotional dysfunctions? Why do they never tell me what I’m supposed to do now?

Well… they only really have a vested interest in you scrolling through more of their videos, perhaps signing up for their newsletter, coaching sessions, pre-ordering their forthcoming book. Consume more! It’s not with malice that they withhold your top-secret cure. The cure is simply too complex to be able to flatten into a quick vertical video with a visual or verbal hook. And also not really a cure. Many of these content creators openly point out that social media is not therapy, but it’s too easy to pretend it is. There is also a lot of misleading or oversimplified information bouncing around, causing confusion regarding terms like trauma bonding and imposter syndrome.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “Admitting you have a problem is the first step.” Admitting we have problems feels like all we ever do these days. The phrase actually originates from the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-Step program, which you’ll note has more than the one step. 

It feels true, but has also been adopted and twisted to a point where it seems to be treated like the only step. Or the admission of the problem is weaponized as an explanation and exoneration. At a certain point, “what next?” is an extremely personal question both in terms of determining what to do and determining whether or not it gets done. There’s no quick fix. No acronym or coupon code for BetterHelp or particularly killer well-worded two-paragraph summary of your deepest sadnesses that can substitute for trying to break out of your well-honed coping mechanisms, your defensiveness, your well-worn habits. 

Problem identification is a good skill to have, but it needs to come paired with figuring out what to do. It should not end the conversation. Even less myopic takes about mental health that are quick to point out systemic harms, economic precarity, and social isolation and alienation are often used as depressing enders of conversation. Instead, how can we use our identification of the problems to inform where we channel our energies? While a perpetual state of paralyzed overwhelm is pretty appealing to anyone benefiting from society as-is, starting to break that for ourselves can be beneficial psychologically and politically. I use “benefiting from society” in the loosest sense—many people are not having a good time but resigned to perpetuating current conditions because it is what feels safe and less risky. It can be more comfortable to relinquish agency and maintain inertia.

It’s hard to get started and even harder to build momentum, but both will suck less than continuing to bear the costs of this downward trajectory. I have good news and bad news and they’re the same news: Everything is connected.

Not every problem needs a name and a clearly outlined, pathological explanation. There is a limit to what frameworks can do for you. Sometimes I find having an explanation too similar to having a reasoning for why I behave the way I do, and it’s easy to tumble into stubborn self-righteousness. I am constantly irritated by my friends’ small inattentions because I was emotionally neglected as a child. I can feel myself begin to point fingers. It also fixates on personal struggles, but if these feelings are so relatable to such a broad swath of people, it should be grounds for greater sympathy and more social forms of discussion and healing. We should be able to be more forgiving of each other instead of so eager to pathologize from afar. Ideally, relationships with others involve both accounting for each others’ weaknesses as well as pushing each other to be better, even as the progress is gradual and nonlinear.

Our current iteration of pop psychology has us trained to pin up the red string between our parents, our childhoods, our mental illnesses, and our behavior too quickly. What can feel like solving the grand mystery of the pains of your life easily becomes a tangle where you trap yourself in current state understandings. Tying everything back to your past is probably not inaccurate in many cases, but it can start to resemble a strange sense of predestination or stuckness if you believe you are who you are because of how you were raised. We can’t keep normalizing mental health by reducing mental health issues into permanent categories of being. It is daunting to even be up against 18 years or more of childhood when you’re only 26 like me, but learning to better live with your problems, even if you cannot eliminate them, is worthwhile.

There is a local minimum where you recognize these problems but don’t know where to start. The best place to start is wherever you can find the wherewithal to start! Nobody has an answer key. 

You do not need a grand unified theory of yourself or other people. And you definitely don’t need a grand unified theory of yourself or other people before you can make changes. It misunderstands both theory and yourself—you are context-dependent, you are in flux, you are getting better and worse and also moving laterally and in every direction because you’re not a self-optimizing capitalist machine. 

The journey of what to do next will not be found in the continual scroll. These videos temporarily soothe a kind of deep loneliness or discomfort, but they do not and cannot help to process and integrate our experiences so that we can carry them forward with less suffering. Nobody is all the way along for the ride with you as you figure out how to stake your self-worth on less shaky grounds, learn how to address a conflict head-on with your friend instead of sulking indignantly, or take the risks inherent in trying to build a new version of a relationship with a family member. Aphoristic advice is easy to toss out. I’ve seen a million versions of “be soft on yourself” and “forgive yourself” but I am still deep in the throes of trying to figure out what that means for me personally and how it exists in tension with my assumptions about life.

Following through, operationalizing in the specific contexts of your life, is the hard part. I am the only person who can catch my instinct to self-isolate in response to disappointment and work against it, the only person who can make myself stop making myself busy as a way to avoid grief. This isn’t meant as an individualist bootstraps statement, it’s just that only you have all the context for yourself, and social media content about mental health tends to formalize common human experiences into set categorizations with sweeping generalization.

I think often of a dichotomy I learned from reading a book very often recommended on mental health social media – Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson. What has stuck with me the most was the dichotomy that the author draws between internalizers and externalizers. Internalizers blame themselves for all that has happened to them, try to run scenarios and figure out how to be better, hoping that will fix the problem. Externalizers eschew taking responsibility, blame others, turn to distraction. Neither of these sounds very good, though the author suggests that internalizers are the ones reading this book and externalizers are out in the world making a mess without questioning themselves. Both extremes seem very self-centered; the internalizer falsely believes they have such agency and control that they alone can make things better while the externalizer falsely believes they are the victim of outside circumstances that drive them to be the way that they are. Popular pseudo-therapy can feel like it’s intensifying both ends of the spectrum: you’re unwell because of childhood trauma that you alone can reprocess and grow from or you’re unwell because of systemic forces out of your control.

It can genuinely be very validating to have someone else encapsulate your feelings in a 15-second video, to hear from a stranger that what you’ve experienced or what you’re feeling has an explanation, that the mess has a name, that perhaps someone, even if’s not you, has figured out how to make it manageable. The problem with social media is almost never that it’s completely rotten to the core; it’s that the means become the ends, the artifice becomes all there is. The endgame is not a list of problems nor is the endgame the list of problems all neatly crossed out, to-do list complete. There’s no 1% better everyday compound interest self-help strategy to this. “What do I do with this information?” is an excellent question to ask, but not with the expectation of commenting “GUIDE” on an Instagram Reel to receive the answer. The rectangle in your hand has its limits.

Have you ever been frustrated with your friend (or yourself) because they keep bringing up and complaining about something or someone in their life? It’s taking up all the air in the room, they’re rehashing the same problems, and you’re sitting there wondering why they don’t just do something? You can almost map out their mental gymnastics like a sports commentator. You might even question whether on some level they are taking pleasure in the complaining, in whatever is grating against them? When I am alone at night and I open Instagram and I see the fifty millionth video about relational wounds and puzzling over if I could somehow solve my relational wounds outside of any and all relationships, I think the posts about how what you dislike in others is what you dislike about yourself have a point.

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content (not derogatory)

sophie vershbow discovering the amazing AIDS activism legacy of her cousin

i thought this was going to be a somewhat predictable euthanasia grief piece and i was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong

if you haven’t already read this read it now i very rarely shout at things while reading/watching but i did during this

america doesn’t know how to read the work of black writers

this is so old but i was just introduced to it… dream job

yt video: #1 solution for self doubt lol

recently watched hank green’s (yeah crashcourse guy) standup comedy special (you can 3-day free trial the service it’s on) about getting hodgkin’s lymphoma. it took me so long to realize that my #1 top coping mechanism for life is treating the worst things as an absurd joke but it’s validating to see other people do it too i guess

the girl, so confusing version with lorde by charli xcx makes me emotional… is it a universal experience to get a weird vibe from someone and be convinced they hate you only to find out they’re too busy being personally unwell to have realized this was going on?

“downhill” by pom pom squad

books-wise i am reading the atmospherians by isle mcelroy and enjoying it! the premise is a cancelled wellness influencer gets invited to start a cult with her childhood best friend where they try to rehabilitate antisocial/bad men. extremely up my alley for a wide variety of reasons. also recently read cultish by amanda montell which was quite fun and interesting in terms of mapping out the variety of cult and cult-adjacent things that have risen, especially in the decline of organized religion

I’m not a huge new year’s resolution person for a lot of reasons: a year is long and unpredictable, there’s all these resolutions that feel obligatory and popular that I don’t want to do but feel like I should (exercise more, go on ? number of dates), I want to pretend I am not an avid gulper of the self-optimization kool-aid. The most potent reason, if I’m honest, is that if I achieve my resolution I don’t feel good. I feel like I should have been more ambitious, and if I don’t, I just feel disappointed in myself.

Even as I’ve gotten better about comparing myself to others, I can’t stop moving the goalposts on myself. It’s hard to compare against others as peoples’ lives diverge and I gain a greater understanding of how different everyone’s starting points and priorities and values are. But I always manage to examine my own life and think “if only X” or “what if Y” or “why didn’t I Z.” I don’t give myself enough credit for the A through W that I did accomplish because in hindsight I already did it, the effort and neuroses involved smoothed over in the memory. It’s no longer a matter of achieving more—I’m pretty sure I would be one of those people who got everything she ever wanted and then had an Eat, Pray, Love style crisis because she still felt hollow inside.

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The practice of self-compassion is a challenge for most people, myself included. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t also roll my eyes at social media posts about how you should be proud of yourself for just making it through another year. Though I’ve successfully complicated my sense of ambition and achievement, I feel like I added more inputs to the formula but my issue is abiding by a formula for happiness/contentedness/growth (also conflating these is a red flag), expecting input to lead to output, year over year growth inevitable. I want straightforward “If I do these things, I’ll get what I want and my life will add up and make sense.”

I can’t help but fear that being “soft on myself” is somehow weak, that if I don’t keep barreling forward fueled by self-criticism, fear, and anxiety, then I’ll stop moving forward at all. Intellectually, I know that the idea of “forward” needs to be disposed of.

I’d gotten attached to this vision of growing up and getting older as being a refinement of existing features, carving out with increasing certainty who you are and what you want. That isn’t entirely inaccurate; I do feel a greater abundance of clarity in some ways than I did the year before, or the year before that. Unfortunately and fortunately for me, now I think growing up and getting older is actually about releasing yourself from believing you’re a bundle of features that have clear purposes, understanding that who you are always was and always will be amorphous and subjective, that what you want isn’t always what you need or what you wanted last year. Being happy now doesn’t preclude you from pursuing what might be the ingredients of your happiness in the future.

Letting go sounds chill, yet it is so much more uncomfortable than grasping tighter and tighter. And it requires a high level of trust in yourself, in your ability to adapt and absorb and keep going (not necessarily forward).

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my non-newsletter writing this year:

reviewed central places by delia cai

reviewed meet me tonight in atlantic city by jane wong

interviewed sarah thankam mathews

reviewed while you were out by meg kissinger

wrote about a few of my chinese american identity neuroses for joysauce

recent media i’ve enjoyed:

the tyranny of in/out lists (personally i just feel like they’re free association exercises?)

adult piano lessons and not grinding your hobbies in capitalism’s wheel

daisy alioto is one of the smartest people in media

“holy revival” by maisie peters!

we are all girls online

fundamentals, not tweaks for a good day from one of my faves

e3 of lyz lenz’s divorce podcast is with maggie smith (you’ve prob read her poem good bones)

“I split so many times as a child that to recount all the ways would revert this essay into a Buzzfeed-style listicle of trauma.”

the film may december on netflix leverages ambiguity and discomfort really well

ameliorative/existential telic/atelic as though we needed more dichotomies

the female founder (derogatory, but not in a sexist way)

learning to want again

this essay gave me chills and also no desire to see the film dogtooth (i did like aftersun)

my favorite books i read this year with my little simplistic descriptions:

homecoming nerves and the realistic downsides of marrying into white upper middle class wealth and fighting with my mom: central places by delia cai (my review here)

i love absurd premises for my short stories: bliss montage by ling ma

complex ptsd, healing, and writing cute notes for everyone i love at my wedding (ideally that’s everyone): what my bones know by stephanie foo

similar to oppenheimer in that it reminded me that science’s greatest discoveries were made by messed up little guys: when we cease to understand the world by benjamin labatut

imagine your parents being disappointed because you aren’t left enough: olga dies dreaming by xochitl gonzalez

hope to view my own youth with the careful reverence that hua can: stay true by hua hsu

the creator economy has been a revolution and we need to examine it as such: extremely online by taylor lorenz (my interview with taylor here)

i’d probably have a breakdown and quit grad school too: chemistry by weike wang

why didn’t me and my friends create an extremely successful creative endeavor: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by gabrielle zevin

thank you for reading!!! i know i have been in and out this year and i will make no sturdy promises right now about what 2024 holds… but know that i am always grateful for anyone who reads my writing and this newsletter continues to be a special part of helping me to figure out what i want and how to go and do things instead of speculating.

Yet that all feels so far away now, and it’s hard to fathom how we got here—that’s what made me so excited for Taylor Lorenz’s book, Extremely Online, which is a social history of how social media and the Internet revolutionized both our society and our economy. The creator economy is not just individual, often beautiful, people waking up and posting; it has spawned an entire ecosystem of brand deals and management, changed who we trust to receive information from, reshaped how and what we pay attention to, and trickled the problems of celebrities down to the average user. I found it particularly thrilling to read about early YouTube and what went down at Vine.

Taylor Lorenz is a Washington Post technology reporter known for her excellent reporting on the Internet and the creator economy. I found her on Twitter sometime in 2020 and I haven’t stopped following her since because she is so prescient and smart about the Internet. It was so surreal getting to talk to her about her book! I also highly recommend her meme account.

You should definitely check out Taylor’s book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, which came out in October!

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

AT: Is there anything that you hope your average reader of Extremely Online takes away in terms of their mindset or how they use social media going forward?

TL: I want them to appreciate the Internet for the good and the bad. There are a few things. I mean, one, I wanted to write this alternative history of the rise of social media that included women and people of color, and people, not just these Silicon Valley Tech executives, which is the main version of the story of the rise of social media. It's solely been told through the lens of these founders in The Social Network version of history. And I just am really against that.

There's so much misogyny and vitriol towards the content creator world. And it makes me sad, because there’s this really incredible new media landscape that's full of so much good actually, and so much interesting stuff. Tons of bad, obviously. But it's not all bad. And I think I talk about this in the book, but this narrative flip that happened in 2017, where people went from the tech boosterism of, “wow, Facebook is so great. Oh my God it got Obama elected. It's so amazing!” to the Trump election and a lot of journalists being like, “oh, there's disinformation online it's bad.” And it's like, the platforms are bad. They’re so exploitative, our current landscape is really toxic. And I would never defend Facebook, but there is so much creativity and good on the Internet.

I'm very against the notion that the solution is logging off, which seems to be everyone's solution to like, Facebook's and Google's monopolies. “Well, everyone just needs to log off more.” No, actually, we should have a more networked, interconnected world. But we just need better platforms. I think this media landscape is better than what we had previously. But we need to push the tech companies to be better.

AT: I read your Marie Claire essay about how the haters don’t even know who you are, they hate this idea they’ve built up of you and you aren’t obligated to try to correct them. I really liked it because it felt like one of those things where intellectually most people would be in agreement. But then emotionally, it’s really hard to internalize that. I’m curious, what do you think would happen if everyone could actually live like that, how you live on social media being like, “They don’t need to know who I am. They’re just talking to an idea of me.” Do you think that would really change how social media works?

TL: I think people would be a lot happier if they could recognize the dynamics of the Internet and emotionally separate themselves from it. It's really hard. I say this at the end of the piece: even though I can emotionally separate myself from the horrible things people say about me online, that doesn't mean that those horrible things don't materially matter.

You can't totally not acknowledge it and live in a fantasy land. But, what I was trying to communicate with that essay is that there's this transition from private life to public life that we all go through now actually. We kind of lose control of the narrative about ourselves on the Internet, because this sort of crowdsourced reputation that emerges on social media and I just think it's really important to have a strong sense of self, and not let your identity be dictated by the Internet, or people's content about you on the Internet.

I think about this kid that I interviewed years ago for a story about kids and the first time they Googled themselves. And this one kid was talking about how they had signed up for social media and they realized that there was a hashtag of their name. And they clicked on the hashtag on Instagram and their whole family, for years throughout this child's life, had been documenting the child growing up with the hashtag of their name, and they were kind of like, “Well, wait a minute. This isn't me, this picture online.” It's very easy to see so much content about you online from friends, family, or just strangers and conflate that with yourself, you know?

AT: Also when you become a creator, people expect that you’re going to continue producing a certain type of content. I think it’s so interesting because I feel like a lot of people who succeed on the Internet, they do have a very strong sense of self, which is what’s able to be monetized and become a brand, but that almost backfires where they get locked into that sense of self. And I feel like everyone, whether or not they’re a professional content creator, can get stuck in a similar way.

TL: A lot of young people–I mean, I'm in my 30s. And I'm very much a millennial–but younger people seem to prefer a level of ephemerality of content, which I think is really healthy, like keeping a short Instagram grid or not posting everything publicly forever, not having this long, permanent trail of content, you know, and being okay with deleting an old profile or whatever, which I think people around my age, for whatever reason, seem very hesitant to do. Like, it's just weird. Sometimes I see people I grew up with, and they have their whole Instagram account public, everything they've ever posted, and it just seems weird to me. Why do you have all that?

AT: Another theme that came through in your book was that a lot of times what helped people become significant influencers is that either they're very authentic and they're really open and honest in ways that people weren't used to like the mommy bloggers. Or now it's become more about taste of like, can you curate content really well? Can you curate an aesthetic?

It's interesting, because then you point out in the Marie Claire essay that because everyone thinks they have to be authentic that everything feels really personal. And I think it's getting to the point where everyone wants to share their roundup and their recommendations. And everyone is like so into “being real” to a point of disingenuity. So I'm curious how you think about how it's shifted over time?

TL: I think we’re in peak commentary recommendation era. Every single person has to have commentary on everything. Every single person has to have their opinions, their song recommendations, their Spotify Wrapped that year. It's too much honestly. But I think it's influencer culture that's driven that and pressured all of us to make these brands. I actually think that you can be authentic without being personal. And I think I've definitely made that shift. I used to post a lot of highly personal stuff back when I was a blogger. And now I think I'm very opinionated and outspoken without sharing as much. That's a way to be authentic without being personal about my life, like that Marie Claire essay is the most personal thing I've ever written.

AT: But yeah there are no specifics in it. 

TL: I’m just a very private person, but I think the pressure is to not be because like you said, there’s so much reward in not being private. A lot of it is adjacent to clout, people want to position themselves adjacent to something with more cultural capital to try to get influence from that. I think that those pressures can be very toxic so it’s better to be outspoken on the Internet and be yourself but don’t feel you have to reveal everything about your personal life or be super personal. You can keep things private off the Internet and still have a “relatable, authentic brand.”

That goes back to this desire to correct the record. I used to want to correct the record on everything and now it's like, that's fine. And one thing that isn’t really related to what you asked but one thing that I think is really stressful and weird is how people try to map social networks like on these Reddit threads of influencers. They'll be like, “oh, you know, so and so was with her she hasn't posted with her in a while are they still friends”and it's this expectation that friendships are all public content. All of that is really bad. So I'm a big proponent of just not putting my friendships online. The struggles of fame are the struggles of everyone thanks to social media.

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AT: I know Kyle Chayka has a book called Filterworld coming out in January about algorithms and the creator economy and how it’s flattened our culture. The algorithm played less of a role in your book than I expected, I’m curious how you were thinking about that.

TL: For most of my book, there weren’t algorithms. People forget, Vine wasn’t algorithmic. They might have tried at the very end, but the reason content creators had so much power was because it wasn’t an algorithmic platform. Most of these platforms didn’t launch algorithmic feeds until 2015 or 2016. It’s funny, I was thinking that when I wrote the book – my book kind of ends 2021ish, 2022. It’s crazy we’ve only really had these algorithmically driven environments meaningfully for like 5 years and mostly it’s with TikTok, and the impact of TikTok has been to make all these platforms more algorithmically driven.

I love Kyle’s book and I think it’s a really interesting lens to look at culture through. Content creators obviously have a really difficult relationship with the algorithm. The big trend recently is to build audiences on platforms that are not algorithmically driven so you grow your audience on YouTube or Instagram and then you funnel people to your Patreon or your Substack or something else that gets you a direct line. 

AT: You write a lot about how all the platforms fumble because they don’t listen to the power users, and that they’re made great by the users, which is a great point. If you could make your own ideal social media, what would it look like from the user perspective?

TL: Oh my god - no public metrics. Something like Tumblr. What I liked about Tumblr was that it was very based on written content but you could have video. I think the short-form video content is so exhausting and I wouldn’t want to make a short-form video platform. I’d want to make something that makes it a little bit harder to post but lets people post anonymously which I think is really important for the Internet. It would basically be Tumblr with some bells and whistles.

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not the usual content but I found this recipe organizing app called Mela from Haley Nahman’s newsletter (which I highly recommend in general) and so far it’s working well - I’ve put links in and it reads the text well. also appreciate that their premium is a one-time $5 payment instead of a subscription.

self-promotion corner:

for joysauce, i wrote about my multitude of neuroses related to the thought of “going back” to china! have gotten a couple really nice messages from people about it and glad it’s been resonating - i am wary of personal writing for many reasons but so much writing has helped me to reassess and better understand my own life in context and it means a lot when i feel like i can even begin to accomplish that

also two things i wrote that are very thematically related to the above conversation: contentification and about bestdressed

books i enjoyed recently:

chemistry by weike wang

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by gabrielle zevin

articles:

delia cai’s interview with taylor lorenz for vanity fair

on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

i want a semi-adversarial taylor swift interview (in good faith)

“let’s put some time on the calendar”

why is the christmas movie genre so romantic

there are once again more of you despite my inconsistent posting! thank you! unfortunately, this will not be a long one — i have been less able to think/write for extraordinarily valid personal reasons and events that i genuinely believe, ego aside, should be in a memoir someday. but that day is far away!

in the meantime…

two things i did actually write:

• got to interview sarah thankam mathews about all this could be different which is now out in paperback

• reviewed meg kissinger’s memoir while you were out which resonated with me deeply when it comes to the complexity of watching loved ones struggle with mental illness

recent photos i took that i am v proud of: (best way to follow this is instagram)

you can see i am an indie pop devotee lol

• del water gap! there’s something so electric about his live stage presence

• reneé rapp! who i first saw on the show sex lives of college girls and is so multi-talented

  

• maude latour! i took all the photos in her post for chicago :) remember tho that the clout to profit ratio in the arts is insane

  

• chappell roan! every time i listen to “casual” i feel attacked somehow

well you made it this far so i guess i’ll tell you what i’ve read that i have really enjoyed:

• extremely online by taylor lorenz

• catch and kill by ronan farrow

• how much of these hills is gold by c. pam zhang

• olga dies dreaming by xochitl gonzalez

• a living remedy by nicole s. chung

just got myself on freedom by maggie nelson and demon copperhead by barbara kingsolver

a few articles:

on taylor swift eating at restaurants like the rest of us

the body keeps score guy and his legacy

kylie cheung on her new book survivor injustice which is on my to-read

ace representation on sex education

jia tolentino interviewed julia fox

i only read artists on AI for the most part

don’t trust book blurbs

thoughts i found in my notes app in the last few months:

• i think if a man yelled at me I’d run

• does nurse and teacher quitting content on social media have a significant impact on how people view the professions

• source confusion between social media post and conversation is depressing

ok, thank you! hope to write again soon!

Last year, I saw King Princess perform and she introduced “You Destroyed My Heart” by pointing out that she can see it’s the least streamed song on the album but she likes it anyways. There just didn’t used to be that kind of quantitative feedback, like you couldn’t know what song was a common skip. Of course, everyone can see their likes and retweets and whatnot.

Would love to hear thoughts on this in particular, or anything in general about Content! Because on the flip side, I totally get why writers flocked to Twitter because sometimes publishing something feels so lonely without immediate feedback (but that’s probably also because social media has really cultivated the impulse for instant feedback).

Ella Jane, an indie pop artist I vaguely follow (vaguely as in my friend once said “she seems like exactly the type of furious indie girl you’d love” and then I listened to “nothing else i could do” and enjoyed it), recently posted this TikTok/Reel in her car.

We all know this is embarrassing as fuck, to sit in our little cars and be like “here’s my song… if you like Trader Joe’s and Phoebe Bridgers and oat milk lattes and Taylor Swift and you’re a little sad and a little gay and you wanna have a little dance then listen to Ella Jane!”

She points out that the market is oversaturated and that people are tired of musicians promoting their music… but musicians still, maybe especially now, need to promote their music and are pressured to try to go viral.

I’ve also run into this sad Instagram Reel audio asking people to hit “copy link” regardless of whether they actually plan to share it in the hopes of boosting artists’ posts. I hate that people who want to make art are forced to double as influencers, to beg for engagement in increasingly desperate ways. Like Ella Jane’s TikTok notes, I don’t know what happens now that a lot of the tactics to go viral that used to work have become common practice.

Offering little tidbits of their lives as Content and silly little TikToks aren’t panning out like they used to. My fear is that the next territory for monetization is friendship or companionship with people you have a parasocial relationship with vis-a-vis Fletcher offering spots on a vacation where you get to hang out and take shots with her or an AI-based escalation of those weird celebrity text lines that seem to just be a slightly cuter push to collect phone numbers. I guess this is not unlike some Patreon tiers for creators and only slightly creepier than meet and greets. The difference in my head is that meet and greets feel like the fan is paying for the privilege to meet the celebrity, while paying to be on vacation with Fletcher feels like a situation where the fan may feel far more entitled, which scares me.

This pressure for artists to pre-package their art to follow existing market trends or aesthetics or cores sucks, to say the least. It reeks of the type of innovation that capitalism favors—minor tweaks on something that already did well in the market, and online it involves the algorithmic reinforcement of existing consumer behaviors with little to no room for real originality or creativity. If you’re not sure what I’m referring to, consider how many remakes and reboots are all over TV and film.

I don’t want any musician to feel forced or pressured to create music that is a faint echo of an amalgamation of Lana Del Rey and Phoebe Bridgers because that’s “what works.” I don’t want any musician to feel like they need to pump out 15 seconds of optimized highly produced music purely with the hopes of becoming a trending audio. They should be allowed to be their own musician. 

Music discovery becoming so algorithm-driven, just as other content discovery is, is leading to a deadening homogenization. It’s boring and suffocating to be served another middling, ambiently pleasant but wholly unremarkable song, and I don’t think that is the artist’s fault as much as it is the market’s. 

Art should be weird and doesn’t need to have mass appeal to deserve to exist. Importantly, art should be able to be weird and not have mass appeal and the artist should still be able to afford to make it without being the heir to a small fortune.

We’re also all tired of seeing artists promoting themselves and making themselves clowns for the sake of engagement because everyone else is being a clown too. We are tired of being sold things but also often the ones selling things, or ourselves. People making zero cents of profit from their social media behavior still have this impulse to post like an influencer. We joke about “sponsored content” and mock the refrain “like, comment, and subscribe!” but sometimes it feels like it comes with a “haha… jk… unless?” The New York Times covered this behavior in the context of Gen Z, interviewing a number of pre-influencer influencers who set up their Amazon storefronts and list an email for brand inquiries in case someday a brand does inquire.

I know that being an influencer can be seen as an easy additional way to make money, and I don’t fault people for being interested in the prospect. At a time of inflation and economic precarity for many people and jobs worsening in quality, there is certainly a sense of scramble and bleak girlbossery. Acquire multiple streams of income so you’ll be safe(r) if you’re laid off. Turn your hobbies into side hustles and maybe you’ll be able to cover your living expenses confidently. There’s even the pyramid-schemey industry of influencers whose primary content is teaching you how to be an influencer.

We know now more than we possibly could have a decade ago the psychological toll of being an influencer at any scale—everything in your life becomes flattened into potential capital-C Content. Content as in “any media that can pass in front of somebody’s eyes and drags it all down to the lowest common denominator: something that will engage a user for a period of time,” as Charlie Warzel put it in The Atlantic. It’s even wilder that we are now enacting that ethos whether or not the Content production is a job. We are the consumers, the producers, the snake eating itself.

I’ve seen Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage, “The medium is the message” applied to social media more often in terms of Twitter and politics than Instagram and culture. His theory was about television, and how the advent of the television fundamentally reshaped society because of how it changed our consumption of media. Television as a medium inherently requires a focus on image, and encourages passive viewing. It is a medium for entertainment, and even the news and serious subjects are viewed through that lens. In school, I was taught that televised presidential debate helped to set JFK up for victory in 1960, his charisma and good looks outshining a sweaty and gruff Nixon. But does being a handsome guy indicate very much about your ability to govern the United States?

Instagram is, of course, also an image-focused platform that does to our personal lives what television did to politics. It makes it Content. 

As the medium through which many of us consume the news, entertainment, and friend life updates in no particular order, it has become increasingly challenging to feel appropriately scaled reactions (or sometimes any reaction at all). The emotional whiplash is tricky. To quote Jia Tolentino in Trick Mirror, “The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us.”

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The influencer economy is heavily dictated by quantitative stats: views, likes, reposts, conversion rates. There are a limited set of options for responding to a piece of Content. Like it, don’t like it. Share it, don’t share it. I guess you’re permitted a slightly wider range of emotions if you still use Facebook or you scroll LinkedIn. Suffice to say, this is an extremely narrow array of responses, and I worry that over time I can feel myself defaulting to evaluating media in these simplistic terms. I only need to think for a few seconds to double-tap something. I’ve had to make a really intentional effort over the past few years to critically consider what I like and dislike, to continue to have more complex opinions that involve holding multiple ideas at once instead of calling things “interesting” or absorbing the opinions from other peoples’ reviews.

Engaging with everything as Content on Instagram prioritizes the tenuous, freighted concept of likeability first and foremost. I have to like the person to want to hear their take, listen to their music, look at their art, accept their recommendation, which really reinforces the whole everyone-is-an-influencer vibe. 

I can see how it could be argued as democratizing compared to traditional gatekept celebrity and tastemaker roles, but it feels democratizing the way that TikTok has supposedly democratized virality by “randomly” boosting tiny accounts. It makes creators increasingly dependent on trying to game the algorithm to keep their numbers up and reach people, and TikTok’s content moderation is its own can of worms.

I don’t like being trapped in here. I feel so stuck on social media, but the people who run these platforms know that and so feel fine degrading the experience further and further so they can sell more ads. It’s difficult to balance the idea of having the agency to leave with the knowledge that there are still sometimes benefits from being on social media.

I don’t totally trust myself to make predictions, but I am personally really worried about what art gets to get made and supported in the current ecosystem and what opportunities exist for artists. I think that Patreons and Substacks and the like make sense but I just cannot shell out $5/month for every person whose content I consume and enjoy. That model especially doesn’t work for music. 

Executives shouldn’t get to rake in nine-figure salaries while making dumb choices (or even if they make fine choices). That’s why members of the Writer’s Guild of America (and potentially soon the Screen Actors Guild) are striking. I don’t for a second believe that the proliferation of AI will ever make human-made art obsolete, but it can flood the market with a lot of mediocre or worse than mediocre Content and drive down the understood market value of Content. At that point, I wonder if people could ever end up opting out of the Content culture en masse. What does that look like? Can we figure out something else to do all the time? Worse, everything just goes on like this, awaiting a breaking point or an imagined savior when everything has been breaking for a long time and unfortunately savior-ing is a group project.

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Content (not derogatory lol)

RIP Gimlet Media, it was built to end this way

Everything I learn about Mr. Beast scares me!

Good motivations maybe matter

An inability to deal with the limits of art being a part of the art fuels the Content spew. On tech, I was hoping maybe the Apple Vision Pro goggles could just fade out in Google Glass joke form but this episode of Hard Fork made me question that

The suburbs are a breeding ground for fascism. Public libraries as the last public place. If anyone wants to learn German and move to Vienna with me….

If Joan Didion saw the final unraveling, where are we now??? Living in the echoes of the music nostalgia-industrial complex

Chappell Roan on repeat recently

One of the ways I’ve been avoiding thinking, or at least thinking in a different way, has been through taking lots of concert photos. You can see some I’m proud of here if you’re curious. I really love music in a way that I find difficult to articulate, and a part of me wants to protect that because it’s one of the few things I haven’t really corrupted in my pursuit of articulation. My one writing thing - I recently reviewed Jane Wong’s debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City for the Chicago Review of Books! Would love to hear thoughts from anyone else who ends up reading.

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[Light spoilers for the third season of Ted Lasso ahead… but do you watch Ted Lasso for plot. You do not need to have seen Ted Lasso to read]

Ted Lasso has been hailed as a show about “radical positivity” and “soft masculinity,” an example of our culture’s return to the feel-good sitcom with storylines and characters that destigmatize mental health and challenge toxic masculinity. Ted Lasso himself experiences panic attacks and seeks therapy to process his father’s suicide when he was a teenager; Jamie, the hotshot star of the team, spends three seasons learning to be a genuine team player and to stop seeking approval from his verbally abusive father. 

Although the show doesn’t always balance its saccharine outlook and more serious storytelling ambitions well—certain scenes, like the locker room conversation about sharing nudes in the most recent season, have been roasted for taking on an after-school special level of stilted moralizing—at least flopping that way intends to land in a place of kindness and good.

This is why I was bewildered by the show’s handling of romantic relationships. "Love-bombing" is mischaracterized as a charming behavior during Keeley's relationship with Jack, the venture capitalist who showers her with insistent affection before eventually pulling herself and her funding after Keeley's nudes are leaked. Coach Beard's tumultuous relationship with Jane, whose only characterization is as “crazy girlfriend,” is laughed off as a punchline, despite repeated mentions of violence and intimidation and her shredding his passport to prevent him from leaving the country. They end the season married and expecting a child.

No one piece of media can be expected to nail its portrayal of every aspect of life, but I’d rather the writers of Ted Lasso have not even opened this can of worms if they were going to uphold longstanding dismissals of abusive relationship behavior. I’ve also seen limited mention of these issues in reviews, with the exception of this Salon piece on Ted Lasso’s treatment of queer characters and Kylie Cheung outlining the abusive arc of Keeley and Jack’s relationship in Jezebel.

I began to wonder what happened here, what turned off in the writers’ brains when it came to these relationships compared to the aforementioned, much more thoughtful character development. I do think one reason this happens is that depictions of aspirational romantic relationships are so rife with abuse are so normalized that it is incredibly difficult for people to recognize them as such. Given this reality, a far more interesting line of thought could have been characters realizing this to some degree and trying to face it.

A difference I’ve been thinking about between the first category of plotlines and the second that I listed out is how individualistic the stories Ted Lasso handles well are. Ted Lasso’s therapy is very much about his own processing and changing how he sees things. Though his panic attacks are mentioned and he briefly discusses his father with his mother, it’s mostly a him problem, accompanied by the respectfully distant support of those around him. Jamie grows with the encouragement of Ted, Roy, and his mother, but it’s mostly an internal reset of ego and expectations. There’s not very much friction or direct person-to-person conflict. It’s a stern conversation followed by a decently swift, straightforward evolution. A parental cameo and a repaired relationship.

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I do think some types of personal problems can be addressed more like that, dealing with your own thought patterns. I would love if everything operated so cleanly, trust me. When I first heard the idea that relationship wounds have to be solved relationally, I was annoyed. That is terrifying to me. It runs counter to our society’s general fixation on optimization and linear improvement. I want to become my best self in a quiet little corner after reading all the books and articles necessary and then burst out of my cocoon ready to be the consistent and ideal friend and partner.

Overcoming the discomfort of having to grow with other people is a part of the impossible-to-streamline, ultimately worthwhile process of improving as a person. Yet the dominant idea of personal growth right now is frictionless, bootstrap-oriented, and riddled in pseudo-therapy language. “Go to therapy” like therapy is the end-all, “cut out toxic people in your life,” tallying “emotional labor” like you’re billing a client, calling things “setting boundaries” that are not boundaries.

As Rayne Fisher-Quann puts it, “Rather than being a gradual, non-linear journey towards realization and fulfillment, we’ve begun to imagine "healing" as a series of personal-discovery tasks that exist to make the self more comprehensible. We’re encouraged to enumerate our flaws, systemically comb through our childhoods for neat, pert little stories that can explain how each of them came to be, and then destroy them.” There is no space in that idea for other people to actually be on the journey with you, for accepting that in a lot of cases the less than appealing parts of who you are aren’t vaporized as much as they are reframed and folded in.

There’s little room for real conflict, regression, or clashing in this concept of growth. That’s the vibe of the character development that Ted Lasso is able to successfully manifest for the most part. It’s palatable ~main character syndrome~ meets ~mental health awareness~ that we can still celebrate because it does represent progress and representation in a way. Ted Lasso himself gives regular speeches about the essentiality of trust and support, but the show rarely faces the vulnerability and sometimes pain that learning to trust and support involves. Romantic relationships, as the central focus of so much media, are probably the most mythologized while also being, in reality, the relationships where the most messy and interdependent conflicts and growth occur, so the lack of acknowledgment of that in the show flattens them down to the worst bits. If conflict of any form isn’t allowed, neither is real examination of what’s going on, leaving these weird dynamics as unexamined, disconcerting situations.

Ted Lasso has real heartwarming moments of collective love and community—when the whole team helps to clean up Sam’s restaurant after it’s vandalized by bigots, Nate and Beard’s conversation about forgiveness and second chances, former enemies Roy and Jamie biking around Amsterdam in search of a windmill. Perhaps, like the dream of personal growth in isolation, the appeal of a feel-good sitcom is witnessing those hard won victories without the hard winning.

Assigning You Reading

Kathryn VanArendonk on Ted Lasso as a whole, and how in trying to be everything, it faltered. I think the goldfish problem, fear of conflict, and choosing themes over stories definitely apply to what I’m talking about

Of course, Jia Tolentino’s profile on the man I’ve been forced to think about recently by virtue of being a Taylor Swift fan. Hunter Harris sums it up perfectly.

For all my fellow Normal Gossip/Kelsey McKinney fans. You’re probably also a Defector fan! The Internet isn’t meant to be so small

We continue to live in a continually expanding McMansion hell

RIP Succession, long live Succession, the story of how HBO almost lost Succession is very Succession-y

All the Asian Connies are Connies for a reason!

Rainesford Stauffer’s new book, All the Gold Stars: Reimaging Ambition and the Ways We Strive, comes out on 6/6! Two pieces from her recently that I really enjoyed: Could I Still Be Ambitious Without My OCD? and Is My Writing a Hobby or a Career?

Relevantly, waitressing and writing and ambition (LINK FIXED)

Are we… pro-cringe now?

To be honest I had assumed all teenage and twenty-something female fans of The National came to it as I had, by having a crush on a moody boy… not true! The sad and divorced in vibe band is great in their own right

“The truth is that the more you fuck with yourself, mine your own collapsing hillsides for bad jokes, second guess yourself as the rubble tumbles down into an important local source of drinking water, and wave off a professional team of environmental engineers in order to sift rubble out of the stream by hand, hour after hour, the more confident you become. I mean, it’s a laborious way to develop more swagger: think too much about who you are, work hard to redeem yourself over and over, tap dance furiously, scribble on fifteen pads of paper, throw everything away and start over, start over and over and over.” I love Heather Havrilesky’s voice

On the books front, I’m proud to say I’m actually 2 books ahead on my goal. Shocker! I recently read (and very much enjoyed but also screamed at the realism of) Real Life by Brandon Taylor and am now making my way through Filthy Animals so I can crack open his latest, The Late Americans

The early YouTubers rose to prominence at a time when cannibalizing your entire self wasn’t ubiquitous on social media. When normal people didn’t walk around making jokes about sponsorships and being an influencer while posting in bland ad-friendly influencer fashion for free. The idea that a third of children could aspire to be content creators was laughable.

As I grew up, I kind of lost track of YouTube. The most recent YouTuber I found and became a devoted fan of was Ashley, better known as Bestdressed, a fashion and lifestyle YouTuber known for her excellent fashion content, her relatable and straightforward vlogs, and her immaculately crafted videos. I found her in early 2020, and rapidly, I joined her now-3.75M subscribers in raptly awaiting her weekly Thursday uploads. I went back and watched her videos throughout film school in LA, took note of her recommendations for outfits, observed the trajectory of her now-ex who sometimes appeared in videos, was in awe of her thorough apartment makeovers. She shared a lot of herself and her life, accompanied by wry, frequently self-deprecating humor and brief but thoughtfully serious takes on feminism and capitalism.

Ashley never obscured her mental health struggles and the way her own mental and physical health would sometimes be sacrificed in service of her impeccably high standards for her own videos. I think often of this brutal 4-minute video she posted on her second channel, in which she redoes the same few lines of vlog over and over again like a malfunctioning robot.

It can be easy to suggest she puts herself through that, but it’s worth considering how much more complicated it is than that. YouTubers who edit their own videos (in genres that feature themselves, especially vlogs) spend hours upon hours staring down their own faces, hearing their own voices, scrutinizing every frame. The analytics that come back after a post can feel like a judgment on not just hours of your own effort, but on your whole self as you’ve presented it. Plus it’s a significant stream of income for professional influencers. And the toxicity of YouTube comments have been discussed often enough that I don’t feel like I need to elaborate on that. It is not emotionally healthy for anybody to deal with all of that.

People often underestimate the effort and the psychological toll it takes to be a public figure. Sure, it’s not the hardest job, but the urge to set up a “you must suffer this much to deserve sympathy” sign in front of the carnival ride is a dangerous one. And what traditional celebrities have whole teams to deal with, many YouTubers, unless they’re at the very top, deal with alone. In some ways, it reminds me of the underlying logic of the gig economy—having people do the same tasks they once did but without nearly as much support or protection. 

Bestdressed left YouTube without announcement or ever addressing it. Her last video was a New York City apartment tour in December 2020. In it, she mentions that she experienced a stalker incident and was laughed out of the police station when she went to report it. That alone makes her shift towards vague Instagram influencer totally justified in my book.

Perhaps some of the signs that this was coming were there already, prior to the stalker. It is easy for people to view a stalker as crossing a line, of having a terrifying level of entitlement and obsession. It should also be easy to see that a lot of rabid fans tend to be, well, rabid. Their obsession and entitlement is also a problem.

Before that last video, Ashley posted a video titled “how 2020 has me feeling” filmed on a vintage Super 8 camera, reflecting on her personal experience of the first six months of the pandemic. In four pages of voiceover, she reveals a new relationship, contemplates her constant sense of feeling behind, and tries to explain the bizarre energy of summer 2020. There’s a semi-cliche meditation on whether life is ever easy, where escapism comes from, what it means to feel belonging and love with her hometown friends. She expresses a hesitant sense of optimism and the crises bubbling underneath.

I do have to note that there is a clip of her blowing out birthday candles, and clips where not everyone is masked at a gathering. She makes a not-great joke about being fed up with hearing phrases like “the new normal” and wanting to have someone cough on her. These are important details because the comments section when this video came out read like Ashley had personally and explicitly wished death upon everyone.

This can feel depressingly anachronistic given where the pandemic and masking specifically stand now, in 2023. And I do not wish to downplay the millions of deaths and sufferers of long COVID, or the fact that most people have decided to “move on” and accept a sociologically produced end to the pandemic. 

But Ashley was one 22-year-old who experienced the first three months of the global pandemic cooped up alone and posted this video as a way to share with her audience how she had been feeling. I don’t think that exonerates noncompliance with pandemic safety, but also the expectation has never been and can never be that everyone must follow all the rules perfectly and if they don’t they ought to be publicly shouted down. That is not a politics that builds solidarity, or even offers a shred of hope.

I understand that there is so much anger and rage that has built up over the course of the last several years, about who and what we’ve lost, about the lack of recognition of that. People had deeply different experiences of the pandemic depending on their location, class, and other demographic factors. Trauma comes in many forms. To take the anger and rage out on an individual influencer as opposed to the people and institutions without the power to enact material change is misguided.

That was not the first or the last time Ashley was subject to a disproportionate level of vitriol for her behavior. Part of it was a paradox many influencers face; they gain a following through being relatable, but that following makes them less and less relatable. The audience can feel they made the influencer’s life possible, and are thus entitled to cast judgment on it.

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Bestdressed’s comments have been brimming with people who are quick to announce that they used to be fans, but that now they’re so disappointed, they can’t believe she would do this. Again, not everything she did was ever perfect, but that does not make sense as the bar unless you’re looking for a reason to punish, ridicule, and hate.

It reeks of what cultural critic Rayne Fisher-Quann has termed, being “woman’d.” Instead of genuine constructive criticism or allowing space for redemption, Ashley was and continues to be dogged with bad-faith critique that purports to be about politics and ethics. Wrapped in the language of social justice, the core of it remains sexism. Audiences are always eager to find reasons to hate a woman, to take her down a peg.

With Bestdressed’s rise came more and more critics ready to jump on every moment she didn’t fully live up to her professed ideals and political views. Video after video can be found with some title along the lines of “The Problem With Bestdressed,” as other content creators rushed to feed off of the controversy. As Fisher-Quann puts it, “It’s a system that builds women up into untouchable fantasies just so we can watch in glee as the facade inevitably crumbles.”

Ashley even gestured at this misogyny herself a few times, like in this TikTok where she notes how women can be expected to demonstrate “sustainable behavior” all the way down to washing blood out of their own period underwear, whereas men can buy entire new cars without any real questioning.

It is fair to point out that Ashley made a left-leaning politics a part of her brand and something that she regularly discussed on her YouTube channel. However, there has never been and will never be a successful social movement built upon the urge to punish and shame every person for every bad thing they do. People will fall short of their ideals. They should be held accountable for their actions. The impulse to “cancel” as it has recurred when it comes to Ashley, however, seems to stem from a much harsher and more unhelpful place.

Constantly searching for the flaws and political failures in other people also promotes or is perhaps inevitably entangled with constantly searching for the flaws and political failures in one’s self. These interlocking anxieties do not lead to forward progress; they lead to paralyzing stasis. As P.E. Moskowitz writes, “It is easier to live in a morally clear world in which no actual change happens, as long as you have moral authority in that world, than it is to commit to the messiness of true radicalism.” Fear of making mistakes, at its most concentrated, becomes a fear of doing anything at all. While Ashley experienced this at a large scale, it’s worth considering how that kind of surveillance and judgment on behavior is happening all the time now, and how this reflects a broader collapse in understanding how to process individual transgressions.

The most recent example of the intense scrutiny of Bestdressed happened on her February 16 Instagram post. The first slide shows her lighting a cigarette, and the caption is “fashion & other drugs.” Opening the comments section reveals several comments, each with two to three thousand likes, criticizing her for “romanticizing smoking.” Is smoking cigarettes good? No. Is Ashley smoking cigarettes personally offensive to me? ALSO NO. While some public figures certainly play dumb when it comes to how they use their platforms, putting someone’s every choice under a microscope and criticizing them for it is unreasonable and unhealthy for all involved. She is not the one responsible for the proliferation of cigarettes in our culture. I think that another reason for this type of fixation is that we feel powerless in the face of the actual forces that shape our culture and our world. There is no direct way to express my rage at faceless corporations or governments. Ashley is easier to openly, directly detest than Philip Morris International.

The pile-on each time seems more intense than for other influencers doing similar things. I wonder if this is because Ashley never really apologizes or addresses these situations; she simply moves on without engaging. Though I’ve never been impressed by anyone’s notes app post or melodramatic apology video, perhaps there is something to seeing the person at least try to feign admitting guilt in an effort to placate their audience. Instead, for Ashley, it seems like her critics keep score and continue to sharpen their knives, alert to every potential violation of imagined yet strict rules.

You can also find more banal comments littered across Bestdressed’s Internet presence now, questions about if or when she’ll return to the platform that made her famous. I’m not sure that these are the same people who were jumping at every misstep Ashley made, but I am baffled that anyone could expect her to want to come back to YouTube after the level of aggressive moralizing she’s been subjected to. The thing about the dehumanizing nature of fame is that it dehumanizes both the famous person and the audience.

If I could reclaim my private life and continue to make my livelihood by posting brand deals on Instagram after going through even a fraction of what Ashley has online, I would probably do it. I feel about her as I do the other YouTubers I watched growing up—grateful for how their videos shaped me, and every now and then curious about what they’re up to now. I hope Ashley’s doing better now. She doesn’t owe me anything.

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Assigning You Reading

Okay so here’s my fleeting moment of self-promotion, I reviewed Delia Cai’s debut novel over at The Rumpus!

Recently read All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews and really appreciated this honest behind-the-scenes look at her writing process!

Can’t stop thinking about ‘layoff brain’ and how that shapes recent economic forecasts

Rihanna the billionaire as opposed to Rihanna the singer

Wish I could have seen Rayne Fisher-Quann’s first live talk but had to settle for this well-written review.

Prison abolition is in fact pragmatic

Okay, but what happens if a bear does cocaine in real life?

With recent publication layoffs and closings, it was interesting to listen to this conversation about the attention industry, AI, and ads

Why is the US Surgeon General doing meditation app spon-con?

Best take I’ve read on the recent spate of anti-rich content, service work, and family

I have exactly one Taco Bell-related hill to die on, and it’s this: nobody should eat Taco Bell alone.

Senior year of college, every Tuesday night the texts would fly around or whatever verb texts prefer to verb, “Do you want Taco Bell” followed by “We’re in the drive through what do you want” followed by “We’re back in our room, door’s bolted come eat.” 

In conventional American life, one of the only ready-made communities available is college. Taco Bell has managed to lodge itself in association with community without even launching an elaborate marketing scheme. I once genuinely asked, “Why do we say things are living in our minds rent-free, who’s paying rent in there?” and everyone turned and stared at me and someone said, “Anson, that’s literally what advertising is. They are paying millions of dollars to live in your head.” A housing market as competitive as New York in here, and I let Taco Bell live for free.

A bulk order of Taco Bell at 10pm by a group of college students is a far cry from an original concept. I could salaciously detail every Crunchwrap Supreme, offer an ethereal vision of every Baja Blast. But I am already the benevolent landlord for Taco Bell in my own mind; I draw the line at subsidizing its rent elsewhere.

Taco Bell should be considered less a place for food and more a replacement for the social functions that churches once served. Every American should feel called by a higher power (me) to find and establish their own Taco Bell community. You can be ethically non-monogamous too. Set a rough time, a day of the week, make a group chat. You don’t have to like everyone equally; in fact, to my chagrin, you cannot. A quorum should be established before an order is placed. You don’t have to eat inside of the Taco Bell. A select few who are particularly dedicated to the cause may take on the blessed role of ferrying the armfuls of chalupas from T-Bell to table. I can already hear the church (Taco) bells ringing.

What’s stopping you? It’s time to live más.

That’s a fair question… what’s stopping me? I could go on a long and justified rant about how there are very few free public spaces available, that few are open at night, that being forced to congregate at a Taco Bell feels at least a little depressing. The people who work at Taco Bell probably aren’t paid enough, and the pricing of Taco Bell makes me suspicious of the ingredients in their food.

And who do I invite to my Taco Bell-based pseudo-religious gatherings? I won’t lie, I’m intimidated by several of my neighbors, for reasons ranging from “they seem like NIMBYs who would call the police on a person sitting on the curb” to “their wide array of packages in the mail room suggest a taste more sophisticated than mine.”

My friends live far and wide, and even those in the same city as me are busy with their jobs and their significant others and other friends and family and the fact that if you have to transfer between two buses on a journey in Chicago you are sometimes taking a serious gamble.

Committing to a regular thing feels like I am giving something up, like it somehow impinges on my “freedom.” My freedom to… lie on my bed and lament my loneliness and scroll Twitter until I discover a literary magazine called Taco Bell Quarterly. Even net negative behaviors have the occasional silver lining. I am afraid to commit to things, even as small as a weekly Taco Bell trip, because I know everyone will be exhausted from dealing with their workplace’s special version of toxic culture. Because when I am most anxious I fear giving too much or taking too much from my friends and boil everything down to a very transactional reciprocity that I am always failing at. Because even walking past restaurants sometimes reminds me of all the people who have died or become severely ill in the pandemic because some people wanted this more than they cared about other peoples’ lives. Because I grew up in a society that runs on a politics of efficiency and capital rather than a politics of care and community.

As I enumerate my excuses, I can feel myself turning redder than fire sauce. Of course, nothing I said is false, but nothing I said is insurmountable either. We can do better than this.

To recognize the broader political, social, and historical context in which I am situated is never a wholly or inherently bad thing, but I’ve come to realize that I sometimes use it as an excuse; I am just one person with the ability to purchase a Black Bean Quesarito, how can I face the realities of centuries of capitalist bullshit? This is a weak argument—literally nobody asked me to do any of this and doing nothing certainly doesn’t help. All anyone is asking me to do is to go to Taco Bell. Actually, nobody is even asking me to do that, that is part of the problem. I am asking myself to go to Taco Bell, and to not violate my own rule that nobody should eat Taco Bell alone.

It’s “Live Más” not “Live Perfectly” or “Live in a way that somehow solves everything.” though if that were possible and Taco Bell supported it, I would be a fan. I’m sure the marketers at Taco Bell considered all of this when they were audience-testing their slogans. They say, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” I’m trying to say, “Don’t let fear masking as ideological purity be the enemy of chalupas and good conversation.”

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Assigning You Reading

I’m fully convinced I could be besties with Jack Corbett, the NPR Planet Money TikTok guy, if we met. His Grub Street Diet reaffirmed it for me.

“By our attention we gain the world and the world becomes a home.”

There are a couple reasons I do not have faith in the NYTimes bestseller list, so it was interesting to learn more about the ambiguity.

The quality of everything is getting worse. Unsustainably in every sense of the word. I wish we could have nice things. The problem is not ‘nepo babies’ as much as it is ~wealth inequality~ and the people who are even richer than our celebrities.

I watched Tár and then read this Slate piece on the ending and I fully agree. Spookier vibes than I anticipated.

Vanity Fair had Colin Farrell and Emma Thompson have a chat, which is so fun to read (“Oh, God. That's a different Zoom, darling. Email me.”). Also, I would recommend both the films they were respectively in last year—The Banshees of Inisherin (about two feuding men on a tiny Irish island ) and Good Luck To You, Leo Grande (about a woman finally discovering sexual pleasure for herself with the help of a younger male escort).

Touring for musicians has never been easy and often barely been profitable, but it’s getting worse, and music is facing a mental health crisis.

This video went around Twitter last month and I finally watched it and enjoyed it a lot — on the iconic four-note Disney Channel theme that followed a Disney star introducing themselves and drawing the logo with a little glowstick.

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1. Undoing Drugs by Maia Szalavitz

   This is a history of harm reduction and drug user activism that helped to fundamentally reshape my understanding of addiction and it was also very bracing to read about all the different characters and organizations and activists and leaders that stepped up throughout history. I know that can sound cheesy, but it really is so hopeful to think about how what started out as a dude pushing a baby stroller full of clean needles down a street and risking arrest can now be safe consumption sites all over the country. While reading about history can cause this sense of linear, inevitable narrative and the delusion that the arc of history naturally bends towards justice, this book constantly reminds you that many many many people died (and continue to die) as a result of the criminalization and stigmatization of drugs, and many people who agitated for change died without ever seeing the fruits of their labor.

   

2. The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Paige Harden

3. Portrait Of A Thief by Grace D. Li

4. Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou

   Disorientation starts off gently satirizing WMAF (White Male Asian Female) relationships and escalates to a skewering of academia and Asian fetishization that was both funny and deeply absurd to me. The protagonist starts off with pretty underdeveloped views of Asian American politics and it’s interesting albeit sometimes irritating to watch her worldview shift over time.

   

5. Ace by Angela Chen

6. Memorial by Bryan Washington

7. Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

8. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

9. Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant

   Genuinely, I think this book is so important. It ties together a lot of different things that I think a lot of people can see—the ways that health and healthcare is tied to one’s labor productivity, the warehousing of disabled and elderly people who are then often exploited for profit, the reality that a lot of mental health is shaped by the material conditions around us—and Adler-Bolton and Vierkant use history and political theory to put forth a coherent leftist politics where the central unit and figure is not the worker, but rather the surplus. Because, as they write, under capitalism we are all treated as surplus. It can be a bit academic and dense, especially if you don’t usually read political theory, but I found it so excellent. Highly recommend.

   

10. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

11. Daddy Issues by Katherine Angel

12. Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud by Anne Helen Petersen

13. Intimations by Zadie Smith

14. Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

15. Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

16. With Teeth by Kristen Arnett

17. The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante

18. Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

19. Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, & Beth E. Richie

20. The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

21. Blue Nights by Joan Didion

22. Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein

23. Bad Sex by Nona Willis Aronowitz

    Nona Willis Aronowitz is the daughter of the famous pro-sex feminist Ellen Willis, and so this book was really fascinating to me as it’s Willis Aronowitz navigating her own feminist politics and love life as well as diving into radical feminist history and her own mother’s personal and political approaches to questions of love and sex. I learned a lot and appreciated Willis Aronowitz’s candor and willingness to sit with the knotty contradictions between her feelings, self-perceptions, and politics. I think a lot of radical political writing can be very inspiring but leaves me nervous and concerned about how I’m supposed to live my life, and so I appreciated how Bad Sex is really real about those tensions.

    

24. Heavy by Kiese Laymon

25. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson

26. Foreverland by Heather Havrilesky

    The NYTimes excerpt that spurred a lot of hate and discourse did not do this book justice. Heather Havrilesky writes with so much voice and is so outrageously real about her experience of marriage and all the neuroses that accompany it. I really enjoyed reading this. I feel like the public misconstrued Havrilesky’s point as part of enforcing the institution of miserable heterosexual marriage, but ultimately Foreverland is a very funny exploration of one woman’s marriage.

27. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

28. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

29. Weather by Jenny Offill

30. Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv

    This book is comprised of several case studies of people grappling with their mental health and the tensions between diagnoses and cultural narratives and self-preserving identities. I found their stories very gripping and I think Aviv does a good job of weaving historical debates in psychiatry with the personal nature of these cases.

    

31. Grand Union by Zadie Smith

32. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

33. Ain’t I A Woman by bell hooks

34. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

    This is a short story collection about Black women, sexuality, desire, and of course, church. Every one of the nine stories was so intimate and immersive. My favorites were “Instructions for Married Christian Husbands” and “How to Make Love to a Physicist.”

35. All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

36. The Next Person You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

37. One More Thing by B.J. Novak

38. Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

    I’m probably biased towards lost twenty-something protagonists, but anyways Such A Fun Age was a solid fiction read. It starts off with Emira Taylor, a Black babysitter to a wealthy white child, being accused of kidnapping by a grocery store cop. The story really captures well-intentioned but ultimately self-interested white liberalism really well in the form of Emira’s boss, Alix Chamberlain. The interpersonal dynamics were so intriguing I had to keep on reading.

    

39. Not That Bad edited by Roxane Gay

40. Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis

Please let me know what books you really enjoyed this year! There’s a 30-60% chance I take your recommendations, depending on who you are and how much I trust you.

This list contains the articles that have haunted me, kept me company, made me feel seen, evoke deep sighs or long screams, provided a different angle, stunned me on a sentence level, and/or prompted me to question everything. These are the pieces that I’ve spent all year citing in conversation and frantically texting my friends hoping they’ll read them and feel the same way. There is no order to this list. Most were published this year, some I only found/read this year.

While I do not believe in soulmates in any romantic sense, I do sort of subscribe to the idea applied to media consumption. I believe there are certain pieces of art, music, literature, “content,” etc. that find you at the perfect time and resonate with you in a borderline spiritual way. It’s about the craft of the piece itself as much as it is about you, the very specific person engaging with it at that particular moment. To varying degrees, that’s an element I thought about while making this list.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few, but I tried my best. I will also quietly note here that these are my two favorite newsletters I wrote here: some queer thoughts & what if academia but better. I will try to be more consistent next year! (She exclaims, predictably and with mild doubts but moderate optimism as well.)

If you end up reading any of these, please let me know what you thought! And of course, please send me any articles you can’t stop thinking about!

—

long love by Helena Fitzgerald

The Joy of ‘Calm Technology’ by Charlie Warzel

How to Show Up For Your Friends Without Kids — and How to Show Up For Kids and Their Parents by Anne Helen Petersen

who's afraid of amber heard? by Rayne Fisher-Quann

Caring Is All We Seem Able To Do by Tressie McMillan Cottom

The Money Is In All The Wrong Places by Kelsey McKinney

Effective altruism is a political nightmare by Jon Ben-Menachem

Home is Where Your Best Friend Is by Mira Jacob

My 4 Days in Fake Gay-Conversion Therapy by Jason Anthony

The Subversive Joy of Being a Single Mother by Lyz Lenz

Fuck Puritanism by P.E. Moskowitz

Why Forced Addiction Treatment Fails by Maia Szalavitz

One Weird Trick To Forget about The Housing Crisis by Jia Tolentino

I Left My Career in Prestige Media Because of the Shitty Men in Charge and They Are Still In Charge and Still Fucking Up by Jennifer Barnett

Motivated Reasoning: Emily Oster’s COVID Narratives and the Attack on Public Education by Abby Cartus and Justin Feldman

My Depression Is Selfish — and Yours May Be, Too by P.E. Moskowitz

The school shooting generation grows up by Marin Cogan

Are Better Things Coming? Inshallah. by Abdullah Shihipar

The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser

On Self-Respect by Joan Didion

I’m a Longtime Union Organizer. But I Had Never Seen Anything Like This. by Vanessa Vaselka

Doctors Who? by Jules Gill-Peterson

The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture by Anne Helen Petersen

The internet is already over by Sam Kriss

The Curious Case of Gina Adams: A “Pretendian” investigation by Michelle Cyca

the pain gap by Rayne Fisher-Quann

The Professional Try-Hard Is Dead, But You Still Need to Return to the Office by Delia Cai

On Liking Women by Andrea Long Chu

Are you a baby? A litmus test by Haley Nahman

“You Know What I Say About Men Who F--- Asian Women?” by Elaine Hsieh Chou

You Can’t Ignore Politics by Chris La Tray

Confessions of a Perpetually Single Woman by Morgan Parker

With approximately 400,000 lead pipes in the ground in Chicago right now, might we expect some urgency from the government? To be able to go about my day, I have to believe that the vast majority of people would agree that lead water pipes are a serious health hazard that must be addressed with urgency. Even the most dedicated both-sidesing neutral centrist cannot possibly find a pro-neurotoxin stance.

The city of Chicago can proudly point to its nice website and its subsidizing of replacement water lines. Last year, Lori Lightfoot openly panned her predecessors for “kicking the can down the road” on this one. We’re addressing the problem now! 

As of September, 180 pipes have been replaced.

In The Guardian’s recent report of “shocking” lead levels in Chicago’s water, they spoke to a resident trying to apply for the free lead service replacement program, and spent a year attempting to comply with the paperwork requirements, which included tax returns, pay stubs, social security cards, driver’s licenses, and school transcripts for every member of the family. When uploading said documents, the city’s portal crashed. This is bureaucracy, and it is also violence.

It takes serious time and energy to obtain all this documentation. During that time, people still have to drink their lead-contaminated water. Their children still have to drink their lead-contaminated water. They will be dealing with the health and ensuing social and economic consequences of this for the rest of their lives. They will be paying the medical bills. Red tape is red in the same way blood is red on the hands of our leaders who spend their time worrying about budgets rather than the lives of their constituents.

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The Illinois state law called the Lead Service Line Replacement and Notification Act has set the ambitious deadline for lead pipe removal of… 2077 for Chicago. You read that right. 55 years from now. The City of Chicago has 5 years to produce a 50 year plan.

Plans take time, infrastructure takes time, everything costs money. These are all truisms that are frequently wielded as an excuse for a complete lack of political urgency and imagination. To tout a lead replacement plan that could feasibly outlive me as a meaningful solution is deeply embarrassing. There are a few key assumptions that constrain the imagination and leave us with these types of “solutions.”

Without constantly pointing them out and fighting against them, we risk being complacent with a status quo that takes most peoples’ lives as completely expendable. Identifying these assumptions in ourselves and those around us and asking how we might instead expand our belief in what is possible is vital to building a truly better future, for everyone.

The austerity mindset that underpins our approach to governmental programs is defined by deprivation, by a belief that there are people who deserve basic rights like clean water and that there are people who don’t. We have to save money by sorting them out accordingly, by demanding proof of their worthiness. Please don’t ask about how much it costs to do that, or how morally reprehensible the harm enacted by this gatekeeping is! Please do not inquire about why money matters more than literal human lives! All of this is obscured by mundanity and administrative language, but I promise that if you found out your child might suffer permanent brain damage from lead poisoning, it would not feel so mundane to you.

Another problem baked into our political systems and our thinking is a desire for appealing and intellectually interesting solutions, perhaps driven by the fact that for many in power this is more of a game than a matter of survival. If what you want is something that will fit nicely into your quarterly or annual report, or will help your midterm election prospects, you will never arrive at the idea of serious community investment or the fundamental restructuring of exploitative systems. You will arrive at a branding exercise in which you make a website advertising water from Lake Michigan as “Chicagwa.”

There is the obvious demand to make here: the lead pipes need to be replaced faster. In the meantime water filtration should be made not just free, but genuinely accessible without fifty hoops to jump through. But let’s think even bigger for a moment—Compromises will need to be made so let’s not make them preemptively in our own heads.

We cannot spend the rest of our lives playing whack-a-mole with various public health crises when they are all symptoms of much deeper problems with our institutions and their incentives and priorities. It’s not a one-off water crisis. You probably associate lead in the water with Flint, Michigan, but a 2016 Reuters investigation identified nearly 3,000 other areas in the US with higher levels of lead. Before Flint, there was the 2001-2004 DC water crisis, during which the CDC claimed there was no risk from high lead content in water. The House would later find this “scientifically indefensible.” 

Also, why are there so many lead pipes in Chicago and other US cities? The Lead Industries Association invested heavily in promoting the use of lead pipes and got them required in many city building codes up until 1986. Millions of Americans are now bearing the costs of the greed of lead companies.

There are people who deserve better now, and we have to fight for their immediate relief. But we cannot become completely caught up in scrabbling for the bare minimum all the time─there is a world where public health is truly public, where everyone is afforded the opportunity to live a good life.

The questions we ask need to be as expansive as the answers we hope to find. What would it look like for clean water to be a public good? What would it look like for there to be serious and equitable long-term investment in the infrastructure of our cities? What would it look like for profit-driven companies to not exert incredible influence over our politics to the detriment of millions of people? What would it look like if we honestly and wholeheartedly subscribed to the belief that everyone’s life is worth protecting and caring for?

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Assigning You Reading

It is my own embarrassment that I haven’t read any Octavia Butler yet but I swear I will soon, and I enjoyed this Vulture piece on her life!

“In Amazing Coincidence, Jeff Bezos Makes Meaningless Announcement He’s “Giving Way” Fortune After Stories of Racist Worker Abuse, Mass Amazon Layoffs” - Headline says it all.

After you read this, please google image search what “VeeFriends” look like and comment your reaction. PLEASE. Three Martini Lunch paradox.

I saw Cheryl Strayed’s byline and only knew her as woman who went on a long hike played by Reese Witherspoon, but damn can she write and damn what set her on that 1,100 mile hike is gripping to read.

Who gets quality leisure time? Take a guess. Maybe the goal is just to be shamelessly acquired.

Shoutout to Fumika for sending me this piece on Chinese dance, mirrors, and the complexity of gauging authenticity.

Thanks to Karishma for sending me this piece on not keeping a diary YET, it went well with this essay on deleting the old versions of yourself. Also, I know nothing of the art of seduction but I loved reading Melissa Febos on the matter.