in the taylor swift show, there's a part where she "dives" under the stage and then the floor plays a video that makes it look like she's swimming from one end to the other. two women sitting behind me in pittsburgh believed this was real
i wrote about a specific style of fandom-led conspiracy thinking that has become quietly quite popular over the last 10 years and is now making its highly public debut!
Olivia Wilde via Instagram: “Enter:
@Harry_Styles
, our “Jack” . Not only did he relish the opportunity to allow for the brilliant
@florencepugh
to hold center stage as our “Alice”, but he infused every scene with a nuanced sense of humanity.”
after reddit banned r/gendercritical they made a new website which looks exactly like reddit except it's purple and the conversation is getting worse. i wrote about what platform moderation can't do
the moderators of r/relationships let me inside their "fiefdom" for a little while! i was really struck by the strange mix of cold logic and uh, blisteringly pure empathy that informed the rules and norms there
please: every single woman in new york has seen that guy on tinder who is standing in front of a huge granite kitchen island in all of his photos in the same position but different colored shirts, yes? he deletes his account at least once a week so he can show up over and over
"That we are even weighing the possibility of the incumbent president inadvertently infecting his opponent with a pandemic virus during a nationally televised event should be an indictment of America’s laxity in dealing with the pandemic."
i liked the essay about the writer whose boyfriend broke up with her due to his love of nora ephron. it made no sense whatsoever which is how you know we've got the magic back—letting people blog their post-breakup psychosis for national outlets, being silly
when taylor's dad argues well, BING CROSBY didn't wade into politics, and andrea swift says to him "bing... crosby" — proof Marriage Story could have been 12 seconds long
this summer, I went truly all over the country to talk to people who firmly believe that hundreds of thousands of children go missing in the U.S. every year, and that the media and the government are heartlessly ignoring "the real pandemic"
in the September issue: i wrote about the internet's chilly "i don't know who needs to hear this" relationship advice and an incident in which i behaved badly and was diagnosed as toxic
i'll be doing interviews with One Direction fans for the next several months and here is a contact form to fill out if you are a One Direction fan who would like to participate!
i talked to some My Little Pony fans about the strange mix of values they've held onto for years, drawn exclusively from 4chan and from a children's television show about a magical fantasy world
i asked a brand naming expert if pfizer became the hot person vaccine because of the jake gyllenhaal movie love and other drugs, in which jake plays a pfizer rep who learns about love... he said "that seems like a stretch"
i wrote about the shift from fans asking celebrities to champion their causes to fans organizing among themselves and setting their favs aside—harry styles update accounts tweeting bail funds, k-pop stans using fancams to spam the police, etc!
i wrote about how renting a car is one of the most bizarre experiences a person can have during the course of their regular business. you never know what will happen to you, it feels like it could be literally anything
the irishman is a movie about how al pacino and robert de niro are both old now, but al pacino was super hot when he was young and robert de niro was only ever kind of hot in specific circumstances
i finally watched the west elm caleb videos which are so so sad? dating is such a humiliating experience for everyone involved! requires so much forgiveness of strangers... grace, even! if you can't give it, you're the one truly in need of it!
i wrote about "relatable" content and gradient accounts, related to my ongoing fascination with "girl culture" and how all of social media is about girls
i asked some experts what social distancing really looks like and one said “being close to people is what makes life a pleasure. So, this is going to be a very difficult time.” then i called my mom !!
"My time is better spent running this website, which is my job, rather than doing the emotional work of explaining racism to a man whose staff has been explaining it to him all goddamn week."
a top 10 day of my life was the day julia rubin offered me a fair salary at vox dot com without asking me to tell her what i'd previously been paid! perhaps if this were the industry-wide norm then scrolling through the Real Media Salaries doc would not make us all want to die
words are not good enough to describe how excited i am to write my first book, about ONE DIRECTION FANS, for
@FSGOriginals
, the dream team. need a pop song!
please: my DMs are open if you would like to talk about any of the other great mythological figures of your local tinder scene (i think the most recent nyc one is maybe the "creative director" with orange sunglasses who starts a new account every single day?)
i wrote about how the domestic aesthetics of instagram function to make QAnon appear approachable and virtuous, with great insight from
@beccalew
and
@sophiehbishop
last august, i borrowed my mom's minivan to visit Eastman Business Park! here is everything i have since learned about invention and failure and nostalgia and capitalism and Rochester, New York. from the july/august issue!
social distancing is really important and "loneliness is really persuasive." i talked to a woman who has fallen in secret love during the pandemic and feels terrible about it! but also great! because she's in love!
i wrote about how you can look through the replies and quote-tweets of "everything happens so much" and piece together all the worst days of the past 10 years lol
i wrote about the way conspiracy theories are spreading through MLMs, aided by a business model that incentivizes relentless posting, hampered only slightly by facebook's efforts to wipe out QAnon earlier this month
i wrote about the idealistic, unglamorous movement to decentralize the web, which was plodding along well before the "web3" boom but never promised to get anyone really really rich
Happy pub day to EVERYTHING I NEED I GET FROM YOU by
@kait_tiffany
! A thrilling dive into the world of superfandom and the fangirls who shaped the social internet
#EINIGFY
unfortunately i have one margarita at lunch and then i get on the Q train, i start crying, i think stuff like “we’re all looking at the river… unless we’re napping… this is walt whitman vibes… ben lerner vibes… ‘i am with you/and i know how it is’ vibes” i should be indoors
when hannah sees jessa on the fire escape i literally die—no offense, i am so upset. it hurts me that there isn't Girls fandom bc of the specific cultural climate in which that show debuted
my second book, coming from
@CrownPublishing
, is about the incredible New York character SYLVIA MEAGHER and the incredible American city NEW YORK and the incredible American mystery: WHO KILLED KENNEDY?? (kind of) I'm so excited!!
i like some parts of the new taylor swift album, especially this part which makes me wonder if Taylor’s teenage fascination with the kennedy family led to a passing interest in the assassination records review board
a lot of the weirdest rumors circulating about Heard reminded me of the "she faked her pregnancy" genre of celeb conspiracy theory—there are a lot of those and they always center around a woman who is "making all women look bad"
this is really too bad for everyone in manhattan / wburg. in south brooklyn the vibe is perfect. meat, wine, sturdy shoes, long johns, percolator coffee... renegotiating but not ending toxic relationships, i.e. selecting vivian gornick as lifestyle icon
near and dear to my heart!
@AshleyFetters
and i wrote about the dating "numbers game" and how it introduces the dangerous idea that dating should be fair
i'm sad and angry that so many of my incredibly talented colleagues will lose their jobs in the middle of a pandemic, especially after sprinting for months and bringing in tens of thousands of subscriptions from people who wanted to read their work
i talked to the guy who probably instigated the whole die hard discourse. he was like, i was just trying to come up with christmas week content for my job "much like you're doing now" and you know what, yes
i've seen a few distinct instances this week of people suggesting that millennials don't know who norman mailer is or care. this is sort of right but also flat wrong, as he appeared as himself in an episode of gilmore girls titled "norman mailer, i'm pregnant!"
really great
@emmaogreen
on a phenomenon every single person i know has been talking about: how did such a sizable segment of the "i believe in science" demo slide into calling a very, very wide range of things literal murder
i wrote about donald trump jr. and the rise of aggrieved influencers who enlist their followers in a form of political activity known as "like and comment on my posts to stick it to big tech tyrants"
strange to see people suggesting that journalists should not have taken photos of the attempted assassination of a former president bc the photos go too hard and might help him politically…finding the thought processes of my fellow Americans somewhat “unrelatable” these days
i wrote about the Breakaway Movement—a multi-level marketing sales group with a charismatic leader who did not want to say the words "multi-level marketing" or "Federal Trade Commission"
i recently installed a chrome extension that loads a random wikihow page every time i open a new tab bc, truthfully, i thought it would be a rly whimsical personal choice and i could spend the day surprised and delighted or whatever people used to use the internet for! anyway,
i wrote about numtinder—the online dating group for people who love memes about transit. personally, big nostalgia for making out just a little bit on the subway and only after 9 pm!!
i wrote about "don't cut your bangs, go to therapy," a very funny internet trope and presumably a horrible burden for women who get bangs on purpose for normal reasons (can't relate)
my last story for
@thegoods
is about Etsy! i spoke to sellers, early employees, former executives, and the current CEO about Amazon's world and the artisans trying to live in it. edited by
@juliarubin
! photos by
@colecwilson
!
"we took a chonce" in the paper of record! i'm so thrilled that EINIGFY got such a fun, careful read by
@amandahess
, one of my favorite writers. i'm gonna cry!
a lot of powerful people in the tech world want to abandon the great American cities and start from scratch somewhere else. i wrote about their plans (and New York) for the March issue of
@TheAtlantic
!
emily nussbaum announcing her one-year book leave was the most glamorous thing i've ever seen an adult woman do. now when boys ask me stupid questions about my dreams i actually have an answer: "one year book leave like emily nussbaum," to me the same thing as moving to paris