Anti-Wrinkle Straws and Other Ways to Avoid Ever Accidentally Moving Your Face
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This Week’s Loves
A perfect headline about the “new HBIC” of millennial writers: “Vanity Fair writer kicked off jury in murder trial for social media post on ‘hot FBI agent’.” But don’t blame astrology! Another perfect headline, this time: “Russian honeytraps useless against French spies … their wives already know”
Obviously, as a notorious hater of Fake Accounts I was very intrigued by the recent Lauren Oyler takedown in Bookforum, which other writers have already covered (especially
here, and here). From the Bookforum piece: “But Oyler is contemptuous of disagreement, quickly bores of research, and rigidly attempts to control the reader’s responses. As a result, the writing is cramped, brittle. Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot—but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so.” As pointed out on Twitter, Sheila Heti said as much last week in The Paris Review directly to Oyler’s face: “One thing that distressed me in your collection was the sense that someone as obviously intellectual as you are nevertheless does not carry around in her head a library of references and quotes from decades of reading and remembering what she read. It seemed clear that many of your references came from Google Books searches or internet searches. It made me feel the relative shallowness of the contemporary mind that many of us share, compared to the intellectuals of the past who had a world of references inside them. Is this something you feel, or are bothered about in any way?” To which Oyler replies, basically, I’m only 33, what do you expect?This extremely trippy 1934 short film about sea horses we watched on Criterion. The entire life cycle of a sea horse, including the males floating around with each other huffing and puffing as they give birth for HOURS?? If he wanted to he would, ladies.
This Week’s Hates
This heartbreaking story, on the only incarcerated New Yorkers in “possibly the entire state” that were allowed to watch the recent solar eclipse: “Almost everybody put the glasses on and went to the window to see if they could see it. They all wanted to see it.”
See also: the eclipse was a 3-hour boon for gas, batteries, and hydro
It’s “time to start typing like a grownup” and ditch the lowercase, says The Wall Street Journal, even though its founder was literally who they made Succession about but ok
Terrifying animal news time! Beware the hyper-sexual “zombie cicadas” that are infected with sexually transmitted fungus expected to emerge this year
TikTok, for reminding me of the existence of Anti-Wrinkle Straws (“I never raise my eyebrows, nothing”). Let’s make Binchtopia’s recent podcast episode about aging mandatory in schools until we figure out what’s going on.
On My Reading List This Weekend
If You Love Podcasts, Dump Spotify (Defector)
To Polly Atkin, “Diagnosis is Like a Wedding” (Electric Lit)
The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’ (The Guardian)
Condé Nast Purgatory: Dozens of Staffers Marked for Layoffs Bide Time at “Central Editorial Group” (The Hollywood Reporter)
A little too obsessed with Taylor Swift? It might be a coping mechanism (Los Angeles Times)
Against Journaling: Dennis Tang on the Joys of Not Writing It All Down (LitHub): “Don’t be afraid of losing touch with the past. After all, you were there, living it.”
How Capitalism Disordered Our Eating (The Nation)
The Rejection Plot (The Paris Review)
Breaking: Arizona to Enforce 1864 Ban (Jessica Valenti)
How to be enough (Vox)
Academia as Accessory (Haloscope) (PS. If you’re interested, I wrote a semi-related piece a few months ago titled “Intellectual as Influencer”)
Why Women Online Can’t Stop Reading Fairy Porn (Rolling Stone)
The Dumbphone Boom is Real (The New Yorker)
Optimization Will Not Save You (Magdalene J, Taylor)
Is Recommendation Culture Making Us Act Nutso? (Totally Recommend)
Ufologists, Unite! (NYRB)
Revisiting Annie Dillard on eclipses (Pioneer Works): “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.”
The Brooklyn literary power throuple all working and baby-raising from home (The Cut)
Reading the Paris Review interview I was pretty shocked by this statement: “ I don’t know if it’s a biggest fear, but I think everything is really boring right now. I find it hard to muster the energy to write about contemporary culture anymore. There is also a lot of droning competence—work that is pretty good but that lacks a sense of purpose or strangeness, or any reason to actually look at it. Nor does any of this work seem to represent some horrible trend or tendency that it’s nevertheless fruitful to discuss, as bad writers of the very recent past did. Everyone seems to be going through the motions.”
That is so wild and unbelievable to me when I’ve been reading the most purposeful thoughtful expansive books and writing of my life. Contemporary literature is pushing the novel so far ahead, our era of storytelling is at the START of a renaissance, that’s what I see when I put my critiquing hat on, and despite the capitalism of it which will always be there as long as money is. It really makes me doubt she is reading enough books by people of color, queer people, indigenous people and especially Black women, and books from other countries. Or even by authors named Paul, cuz three Pauls were up for a Booker which surely is a record. If you just read David Foster Wallace over and over again no wonder you think our culture is stagnant. Yo, we are light years from David Foster Wallace. (No offense)