When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed

Earlier this month, Hamilton Nolan came out with a truly excellent analysis of the phenomenon of overpaid, under-talented columnists. Alongside a review of my older posts, it confirmed my belief that I shouldn’t write this newsletter unless I had something I needed to say. (Hence, of course, the subject line of this message, which you surely don’t need to have explained to you.)

As he describes it, “Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week. (I say this as someone who writes at least twice a week.)”

But why, he wonders, would a venue such as the New York Times have so many mediocre columnists? A Times column is, after all, probably one of the best jobs in writing, so even if most columnists are not very good, the Times could find truly excellent ones. But they do not.

I want to quote him at length here, because what he’s saying is insightful, and sharp, and hilarious:

The existence of these uninspired and uninspiring people occupying the very best jobs in their industry is evidence of the limits of the ideals that liberal society purports to value. Sure, the institutions of journalism name truth and enlightenment and justice and equality as their goals, but the unspoken qualification, “within the pool of people who went to, at least, Brown,” is every bit as important as the more noble part that is spoken louder. There is no reason for there to be even one shitty New York Times columnist. They can hire anybody they want. Anybody. The existence of shitty New York Times columnists, therefore, is an unimportant thing that reveals some important things about the myths of meritocracy. The most self-assured liberal institutions are in some ways more profoundly corrupt than some of the more raffish institutions that they look down on. I mean, the NFL is one of sickest symbols of America’s barely subdued imperial impulses, but you don’t see a guy playing nose tackle on the New York Giants because he was the owner’s kid’s college roommate at Yale. Can the New York Times say the same?

Short-form

Long-form

I’ve been reading sci-fi and fantasy by Ann Leckie, and both her sci-fi (starting with 2014 Hugo winner Ancillary Justice) and fantasy (2019’s The Raven Tower) take enormous structural risks that pay off beautifully.

Ancillary Justice features a narrator who isn’t quite human, and may or may not count as a person, or as a civilized person. The plot — interstellar machinations, political wrangling, epic quest for revenge — manages to dance along merrily as it makes us think about the nature of gender, of self, of humanity, of how a society perpetuates and defines itself, of what happens when it that definition needs to change.

The Raven Tower alternates chapters narrated in the first and second person. It’s not immediately obvious that it’s the same narrator in both cases, nor that this narrator is, in fact, a pagan god embodied in a boulder stuck in a castle subbasement. Until the very end it’s not clear that all the human characters are, in essence, pawns in its plans. How is this a setup for a good story? I don’t know, but it works.

Cute

Dog spots its dog-walker out of context.

Gang of illegally small kittens.

Good Enough to Do Bad Work

404 Media recently did a report on the use of AI-generated images as food illustrations on DoorDash and other food delivery services. InstaCart has also been making algorithmically suggested recipe suggestions with uncanny illustrations. The restaurants most likely to use fake pictures of fake food seem to be ghost kitchens — restaurants that exist only as a brand on a delivery site, operating out of the back of a different restaurant. There are more than a few in my city, like “Send Noods,” a delivery-only joint run from the kitchen of a Korean sushi place. (It sends noodles. Get it?)

Their judgement:

This is all incredibly depressing. A local pizzeria can’t get by unless it makes sandwiches for ghost kitchen brands, the people who make a living taking photographs of food are being displaced by AI tools, and gigantic food delivery apps are still making money by taking a cut from restaurants and screwing over gig delivery drivers.

It’s not good, it’s not accurate, but it’s good enough to be a vague illustration, good enough for a glance if you don’t look closely, if you’re not counting on the product you buy to match the picture on the menu. And who is? We all know food photography is fake anyway. This is just faker and cheaper, just like shitty fast fashion gets you an outfit that’s half as good for a third of the price, and it works OK as long as you don’t think too hard about the pollution, the exploitative labor practices, the millions of coal-fired GPUs churning away to produce the gray goo that passes for “content” these days.

More Bad News

In Oklahoma, where anti-trans and anti-gay rhetoric and laws have been among the most aggressively poisonous, a 10th grader named Nex Benedict has died. One day they were fine. The next day, they were beaten into unconsciousness for not dressing the right way. The day after that, they were dead. Everyone’s in full coverup mode. Coverage from Slate and The Cut has some disagreement about details, but both sources agree that the full story won’t be known for some time, if ever. What does it mean? What kinds of behavior are allowed and tolerated and encouraged at every level to produce a situation where a fifteen year old is dead after a fight in a high school bathroom? Just another pointless death that folks like Chaya Raichik claim they didn’t intend to inspire.

Meanwhile:

Good News/Bad Opinions

In Hoboken, New Jersey, adjustments to traffic enforcement and parking have resulted in a remarkable record: no traffic deaths on city-controlled streets in seven years. The major changes were narrowing intersections to slow traffic, and “daylighting,” or preventing cars from parking right next to a corner, which improves visibility. Noted conservative intellectual Jordan Peterson responded to AP News coverage of this milestone on Twitter with outrage:

Two Excellent Pieces of Film Criticism

An exploration of Dune Part Two, and the ways in which it both subverts and supports the Chosen Hero narrative, which it gives the rather unfortunate but not entirely inaccurate nickname magic dick theory:

In Dune, though? It’s all a con. There is no benevolent higher power.

The connection between patrilineal inheritance, male heterosexuality, and just governance is not a fact of nature; it’s a convenient fiction. The prophecy that makes the Fremen accept Paul as the savior figure… was planted in Fremen culture generations ago… It’s a plainly imperialist fiction designed to exploit an indigenous population, and it works.

A very good meditation on the 1989 film Do The Right Thing, art criticism, and the kinds of violence that make us feel safe:

I think the reaction to Do the Right Thing revealed that the burning of a white-owned pizzeria and a fight over inclusion represented violence that scared white audiences, while a persistent police presence in a Black neighborhood that might at any moment turn into the murder of a resident of that neighborhood did not represent violence that made white people feel scared. It might have even been the sort of violence that made many white people feel safe. In fact, most of the talk by mostly white pundits and audiences didn’t even seem to acknowledge the act of policing on Black neighborhoods to be violence at all.

Like I said, sometimes when people talk about art, the art starts talking about them.

Joy

The old-school comic strip Nancy has been running since the 1930s, but has had something of a resurgence since the latest artist, Olivia Jaimes, took the helm in 2018. Two recent gems: one about the transcendence of art, and pondering the eternal question “is that all there is?”

Also:

Until Tomorrow

Today’s song is Ta Fardah, by PAINT, a Farsi-language tale of falling in love with the airport security agent by LA-based Pedrum Siadatian.

PAINT is just one of a perhaps-surprising number of bands revisiting the surf/garage/psychedelia vibe these days, with what may or may be greater depth than the first time around. I’m especially fond of Habibi, which mixes Farsi influences with punk and 1960s girl groups to produce catchy jams that veer from covering a fun night of dancing (I Got the Moves) to upsetting and unfulfillng sex (Siin). Another great pick is La Luz, which has a more lush and less punky sound but still carries the banner for what you might call woman-group rather than girl-group garage rock. Highly recommended.

Bad news

Big Ideas

The Ink: Future Shock. Progress is good, but how do we help people adapt to it?

Consider that we have completely changed the meaning of being a man and what you can do and not do as a man in the last 20, 30, 40 years. Thank god. But let’s be honest: We have done a better job of dismantling some of the old stories and practices and structures of masculinity that needed dismantling than we have of teaching men new ways to be men. The result is a vacuum, and certain podcast charlatans are very deft at getting in there and pied-piping men into new misogynistic visions to fill the void.

Dynomight: Taste Games. Yeah, I’ll drink Budweiser or a local craft beer but not Heineken because, wait, am I just falling into the Pierre Bourdieu trap again? Yes, we have YET MORE ruminations on Bourdieu, conspicuous consumption, beer, status, taste, travel, high-end sneakers, and the Correct Way to Pour Wine:

Something about how people talk about travel has long made me uneasy. After all, travel is expensive. No one in my circles would dream of going to a party and showing off their new Rolex. But somehow, travel is this unusual form of conspicuous consumption that isn’t subject to conspicuous consumption taboos. Why? … A deeper conspiracy theory is that Travel is popular because it allows people who aren’t socially permitted to play Fancy Cars a way to do that while pretending that they’re only playing a normal, respectable game of Glass Beads.

Joy

Song and Dance

Today’s song is Some Sunsick Day by Morgan Delt. It’s sort of an abstract nihilistic fantasy with psychedelic guitar vibes.

After the blast levels our town
We can relax and watch it come down

To go with the song, check out this Financial Times story about an emerging global gender divide in politics (alternate link for the paywalled). The upshot: on average, young men are dramatically more conservative than young women, while in prior generations there were roughly as many conservative men as conservative women. The FT has plenty of charts showing, for example, that British men under 30 are almost as opposed to immigration as their fathers, while British women the same age are more welcoming to immigrants than their mothers. Or that nearly half of young German men voted for the far-right AfD party, while only 16% of young women did.

As though to underscore the point, this was the top reply to the journalist posting about his article on Twitter:

As with so much else in pop culture and trends these days, Korea appears to be in the vanguard; a major issue in the 2022 elections there was whether to dismantle the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Writing in The Dial, Yung In Chae & Spencer Lee-Lenfield explain the moment and its terminology:

In Korean, the term for “single” or “unmarried” is mihon. Hon means “marriage”; the prefix mi- means “not yet.” Put together, the word implies that marriage is a natural stage in any given person’s life. Over the last eight years, feminists in Korea have increasingly pushed back against this idea. One result has been the emergence of a new term: bihon, or “not married:” a single life by choice and forever.

The Atlantic went in depth on the same issue last March (no-paywall link here), emphasizing the fear and fury of the separatist “4B” movement that rejects dating, sex, children, and marriage with men:

One woman, a 4B adherent, said she jokes with her friends that the solution to South Korea’s problems is for the whole country to simply disappear. Thanos, the villain in The Avengers who eliminates half the Earth’s population with a snap of his fingers, didn’t do anything wrong, she told me. Meera Choi, the doctoral student researching gender inequality and fertility, told me she’s heard other Korean feminists make the exact same joke about Thanos. Underneath the joke, I sensed a hopelessness that bordered on nihilism.

After we start over again
We’ll start to feel safe in our skin
Maybe we’ll be wrinkled and grey

Further Reading

In Defector, The Future Of E-Commerce Is A Product Whose Name Is A Boilerplate AI-Generated Apology: an exploration of the enshittification of e-commerce, AI, lazy content generation, and more.

In Scope of Work, Tallow to Margarine, a remarkably interesting discussion of industrial fat science.

In Newsweek, I Miscarried in Texas. My Doctors Put Abortion Law First, a first-person account of the pointless torture that Texas puts women through.

Joy

She Was a Shark Smile in a Yellow Van

Today’s song is Shark Smile, by Big Thief, a tale as old as time: falling in love with the wrong person and dying in a tragic car crash.

She was a shark smile in a yellow van
She came around and I stole a glance in my youth
…
But who wouldn’t ride on a moonlit line?
Had her in my eye, 85 down the road of a dead end gleam

Which is a great time to remind you once again that American car deaths are rising, especially people struck by taller SUVs, which are encouraged by our ludicrously out of date CAFE standards. And muscle cars, which have too much power. And our road design standards which emphasize speed over safety. And driver behavior is worse since March 2020, just as cars continue to get bigger and deadlier and faster.

Also killing a lot of us: booze.

Policy

Georgia didn’t expand Medicaid coverage during the Obama era, but they recently implemented a new program called Georgia Pathways to Coverage, which allows more people to qualify for Medicaid. It may surprise you just how stingy the regular benefits are: to qualify for standard Medicaid in Georgia, you must be a child, severely disabled, or pregnant.

The new, more generous Pathways program allows working adults below the poverty line – that’s just over $14,000 per year for a single person — sign up for insurance. “Working” must be at least 80 hours a month, and they generously count education, training, and community service as work. Applicants must submit documentation of their work every month or risk disenrollment.

Last year, I helped with a small portion of the implementation, mostly making sure that instructions were legible at a sixth-grade reading level. At the time I thought it was corrosively bad, clearly designed to allow politicians to issue a press release saying they were helping people without having to pay for any actual care.

Rollout has gone, predictably, very badly.

Meanwhile, in Texas, abortion bans are, predictably, killing people. And the state is, predictably, tormenting those who survive.

Reading

Joy

Housekeeping

Later this month I will migrate this newsletter to a new platform and automatically import your subscription to that new platform. If you don’t want to get any more emails, let me know (or just click the unsubscribe link). I have been migrating old content off this platform and onto SecretlyIronic.com, since I only posted stubs and links to the newsletter for a few years, and I feel like it’d be a shame to lose it all, even if half of it is linkrot and anger. There’s some real bons mots in there!

Terrestrial Radio and the End of TinyLetter

Tinyletter will be shutting down at the end of February, meaning I need to either find a new platform or just go back to blogging here. I’ve been going through all 285 posts I’ve written so far, moving the full content to this site, and it’s a pain but it’s also neat to look back and reflect.

Back to your regularly unscheduled programming: I have Some Thoughts about terrestrial radio.

First, of course, we have to say “terrestrial radio” now, of course, to distinguish it from satellite and streaming services, the same way we have to say “acoustic guitar” and “postal mail” and “acoustic bicycle.” It’s almost charmingly obsolete. Who still listens to terrestrial radio? Well, “people who can’t figure out how to work Bluetooth in their cars” turns out to be a pretty big audience.

And with the persistence of terrestrial radio, we must of course have the persistence of the radio edit. Sure, we’ve come a long way since the FBI investigated whether the lyrics to Louie, Louie were obscene, but the radio edit – the one without the swears – persists. However, it makes almost no sense, because merely taking the swear words out of a song doesn’t truly render it “safe for kids.” For example, the radio version of Lil’ Nas X’s Montero changes “cocaine” to “champagne” in one place, but the line “shoot my shot on your face while I’m riding” is a little harder to finesse. The result is “put a smile on your face while (mumble mumble).” Either way, it’s a song about celebrating your identity by getting absolutely railed.

It’s inconsistent, too. Radio versions of the Akon fuck jam “Dangerous” bleep out even metaphorical swearwords like “snake” and “kitty,” but Ariana Grande’s song 34+35 (the sum is 69, get it?) leaves in phrases like “give me those babies” and “hold it open like a door for you,” as well as an entire verse celebrating the cleanliness of the singer’s butthole. Does this discrepancy have anything to do with race or gender, or is it just the result of different editors having different standards? Who’s even going to check?

Similarly:

  • Cardi B hated having to do the radio edit for Bongos because seriously, how does the phrase “eat these peaches and plums” make it any less obvious about what’s getting eaten?
  • Farruko’s stylophone-heavy club banger Pepas was inescapable on Spanish-language FM radio last summer. The clean version drops “fumando y jodiendo” from the intro and squelches the actual word “pastillas” but leaves the slang for pills (pepas) in place both in the song and in the title. The whole song is about doing molly and there’s no way to make it family-friendly, and yet here we are, singing a song about taking (….) in the club and being sure to drink plenty of water for your hangover tomorrow.
  •  “WAP,” the ode to vaginal moisture by Cardi B & Megan Thee Stallion, may one of the filthiest songs to ever reach #1 on the Billboard charts. It may also the #1 song with the least play on terrestrial radio, because both radio edits are absolutely awful. One eliminates all the filth, which is to say it has lyrics about how “my (….) make that (….) game weak.” The other replaces the title phrase with “wet and gushy,” which somehow manages to be even dirtier.
  • The original radio edit for Notorious BIG’s 1994 “Juicy” elides the n-word, of course. However, after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks they had to cut out a metaphor involving the 1994 World Trade Center bombing (“time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade”). Since the artist was dead by then, the producers just cut out the vocals for the whole verse, leaving a bar or so of inexplicably unadorned bass line.
  • Spanish-language stations might censor it, but English-language ones don’t know what to do with the Pitbull x Lil’ Jon collab “Culo.” They just… leave it all hanging out there. CULO!


Elsewhere

Joy

Erasure

It’s hard to figure out which disaster to look at — the climate-change-driven storms, the rampage shootings, the hate crimes, the war crimes, the online meltdowns of people allergic to nuance. No, I’m not linking to any of those things.

The recent Polish elections, in which young people drove a surge of turnout and pushed back a severe right-wing trend in government, give me reason for optimism. But while the right was in power, things were pretty grim, and a single electoral victory doesn’t mean permanent success. For years, national and local governments in Poland have been championing an anti-LGBT ideology — see this profile from 2020 of a woman living in what was deemed an “LGBT-free zone.”  It’s not just something that shows up in human-interest stories, either: a recent working paper identified a surge in all-cause deaths, suicide deaths, and suicide attempts among LGBT people in Poland during the anti-gay crusades.

And there’s no reason to think it couldn’t happen here. Hate crimes of all kinds are way up, and rising percentages of Americans support political violence. There is a coherent, consistent movement to erase anything that isn’t exactly perfectly straight and white. Yeah, sure, it’s hilarious that Alabama libraries just banned a children’s book because the author’s last name was “Gay.” But take a look at the incredible reporting from Judd Legum’s Popular Information: Scholastic has just added a quick and easy checkbox for schools running book fairs: should we include any diversity? Basically, if you’re a school librarian and you want to avoid any hassle, you can just pick the “all white, all straight” selection. Bio of John Lewis? Bio of Harvey Milk? Story about two penguins raising a chick? Too controversial, skip ’em all.

Legum has been a key source of information on the book-ban situation in Florida, the vanguard of the “anti-woke” movement. He was the first to report that Manatee County school librarians had been ordered to purge all books with any gay characters. Local news picked up the story, although two Hearst-owned TV stations claimed it was fake, then, when confronted with evidence, put the whole thing into the memory hole. In other words, not only is there a movement to erase and normalize queerness, there is also a concerted effort to make you think it’s not happening.

The New York Times, as usual, fumbled the ball earlier this month with their profile of two families “moving out of state because of political polarization.” On the one hand, a family leaving Iowa because their child’s medical care is now a crime. On the other, a family leaving Oregon because they didn’t like looking at homeless people and were angry about freeway tolls. Because sure, pal, there’s gotta be exactly two sides to every story, and they’re equally valid.

Better: The New Yorker’s profile of a family of American domestic refugees fleeing anti-LGBT policies.

Other Reading

New Yorker: Evan Osnos China’s Age of Malaise
Philadelphia Inquirer: Will Bunch on the right’s “Red Caesar” plan for a US dictatorship
Chicago Magazine: Profile of a woman getting $500 a month in a UBI pilot program

Bad Cop No Donut

Joy

Hot Masculine Summer

Maybe it’s the climate change, maybe it’s all the hot air surrounding our latest “crisis of masculinity” right now — the Times, the Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Economist, Politico, all have various lengthy discussions of it, and have been doing it for most of this decade so far. As much ink as they’ve wasted on it, it seems to be ramping up even more now. Men are falling behind, or at least, not doing as well as they used to, and right-wing grifters like alleged rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate and alleged intellectual powerhouse Jordan Peterson are popping up everywhere to show men back to the glory days of strength and vigor and power.

One of the hottest of these macho scam artists right now is actually someone I met at a party maybe 20 years ago. He was fond of drunkenly challenging people to play chess without a board, something he claimed he could do because he was smart enough to remember where all the pieces were without seeing them, without the pieces even existing. Today he’s a neo-fascist philosopher with a PhD who goes by the pseudonym “Bronze Age Pervert.” He still thinks playing chess is a great test of intellect but now there’s a whole homoerotic BDSM fitness thing to go with it, real Hugo Boss for the SS vibes. It’s cheap and tacky but apparently young men just eat that shit up.

Meanwhile, other right-wing grifters are melting down over the popularity of the Barbie movie. Some of this is just an attempt to garner more hate-clicks as the Twitter ecosystem dies out.

But some of it does appear to be a genuine obsession with performing masculinity in exactly the right way. They don’t appreciate the irony of their performance being, basically, drag. They think it’s innate. Tell a dude in a lifted pickup that his $75,000 expression of masculinity isn’t all that different from a pair of high heels, and he very well might get so angry he tries to crush you with it.

None of it seems new to me, though. I mean, men have been worrying whether other men are pussies for longer than I can remember. Teddy Roosevelt’s football reforms, for example, were driven by a concern that young men needed to play violent sports to be truly manly. It probably goes back at least as far as Socrates being executed for corrupting the youth of Athens, if not further.

I sometimes recall the way my peers taught me about what it means to be a man one summer. You see, as a child, I loved bright colors. When middle school hit and it was time to go to sleepaway summer camp, I picked out a bright purple sleeping bag. I packed my favorite neon pink shirt, because neon was rad in the late 80s and early 90s. I also had a very close friend who stayed at that camp for half the time I did, and I hugged him goodbye when he left.

I got called a faggot for it, of course, for that and for everything else about the way I was — I cried at sad movies; my taekwondo lessons had never actually taught me how to fight; I talked about things I’d learned from books; I brought sci-fi novels on hikes. I don’t remember who said what exactly, but I remember it culminated in a shoving match on a narrow trail several days into a camping trip.  We’d been rock-climbing. There was a cliff.

I don’t think I even told the counselors. Tattling only made it worse, and besides, it was normal. Just typical teen boys bickering, the typical way young men learn not to be pretty or thoughtful or affectionate.

This might be a broad generalization, but it seems to me that anyone who worries about the definition or nature or behavior of masculinity, or doing it correctly, is a colossal piece of shit willing to destroy other people rather than face his own insecurity. I don’t care if you’re a sincere seeker, a pseudo-intellectual, or an edgelord fascist: once you start trying to argue about whether this kind of joyful, fluid, self-expression “counts” as “manly” you’re taking a step down the path that leads to O’Shae Sibley getting stabbed to death in a parking lot for the way he dances.

Further Reading

Joy

Have you ever told or heard an anecdote that begins to curdle about halfway through?

Have you ever told or heard an anecdote that begins to curdle about halfway through? That friend whose amusing hijinks, you realize as you recount them, were really symptoms of a serious drug and alcohol problem? A fun childhood adventure that was horrifyingly dangerous and just turned out OK through blind luck? A harmless prank that was, in retrospect, way over the line? That tough first job that … wait, are sexual harassment, wage theft, and illegally dangerous working conditions good fodder for anecdotes?

They’re slippery things, our memories and our stories, and they mean things to us that they don’t mean to others. And of course they’re inaccurate: we play down things we don’t want to be bothered by, exaggerate things that we feel ought to be more important.

Take “the hometown scandal,” a perennial cocktail party topic. Everyone’s got a wild hometown scandal story to tell — the dueling car dealerships, the local real estate magnate’s marriage collapsing in public, that lady who murdered her husband and hid his body in a storage unit and told everyone he’d run off and only confessed on her deathbed.

Here’s mine: In elementary school, my friends and I all took taekwondo lessons from an affable due named Jim. He had what seemed like a pretty common-sense rule about the (rather small) changing rooms: when you were done changing, you should leave the door open and the light off, so other students would know the room was available. I forgot about the lessons and the oddly specific lights-and-doors rule until a few years later, when a local paper published an expose about the trick mirror he’d installed to spy on students undressing. When the story broke, he killed himself with a sword in a public park.

Is that a weird and sordid story? A recollection of trauma? I certainly don’t feel traumatized by it. I usually changed at school anyway, and he never touched me inappropriately, and by the time the scandal happened, the dojo had moved from the location where I’d studied, so the peephole/mirror probably wasn’t even there when I was. Probably. Right?

How about “how I fit into middle school stereotypes?” We may exaggerate the hierarchy of nerds and jocks for TV drama, but at the time the whole thing felt very real to me, with a special emphasis on “nerds like me don’t play team sports.” One year, an unpopular student a year behind me tried to join the junior-junior-varsity lacrosse team, and several of his teammates beat the shit out of him. One of the assailants was expelled, one was suspended, and the remaining team had to run a lot of laps for their failure to intervene, but I wasn’t surprised it had happened. That’s just what team sports just were to me: a clique that hated me and would hurt me if they got me alone.

I have no idea how badly he was actually beaten. (Of course I don’t: there was no way a prey animal like me was going to go into that fucking lion’s den). I heard he had to go to the hospital. I heard he exaggerated his injuries because he was a pussy. I heard a concussion wasn’t actually a big deal. Whatever it was, it seemed to me like the obvious outcome of joining the team, and I felt that it was his fault. I don’t think I talked to my parents about it, because it didn’t affect me, because I wasn’t stupid enough to try out for the lacrosse team.

My younger brother remembers it differently. He played lacrosse a few years later, and vaguely remembers that there had been an incident in the past, and the coach had placed a good deal of emphasis on being a good teammate, so maybe they fixed it. Maybe the scandal I remember was actually an isolated incident. I don’t know. It wasn’t about me, it didn’t happen to me, it was just something that happened in another room to someone I didn’t even know very well.

The kid they beat up left our school, of course, but kids getting bullied out of our school wasn’t that unusual. Not unusual enough to be notable, really. Although I did remember it. And when I was joking with a friend recently about how nerds like me didn’t play sports in the early 90s, I told her that story, and she said “Jesus Christ, I’m so sorry.”

But memories are slippery, and they mean things to us that they don’t mean to others.

Linkages

Joy (all cat edition)

The vibes are endlessly remixable

I’ve been thinking a lot about two mostly-unrelated articles I read recently. The first, titled Everything Is Interpolated, discusses music licensing. My takeaway is that there are few enough arrangements of common notes that any new melody has decent odds of sounding a bit like someone else’s song. And if it’s close, you better license a sample or at least the tune to avoid getting sued. And at that point, why even try to create a new melody when you can just buy one and remix it? So today, we get a lot of remixes, samples, and interpolations (that is, quotations). For example, I recently heard a new track from Lil’ Uzi Vert and Nicki Minaj and thought I recognized something familiar about the tune. We looked it up on Genius: it’s the piano hook from “Blue (Da Ba Dee)“, a bit of late-90s europop known for… well, that hook and nothing else. But that hook is popular.  Rapper Flo Rida used it in 2009, a slowed-down version anchors “Tus Celos” by Puerto Rican trap artist Anuel AA, Bebe Rexha and David Guetta featured it in a club track in 2022, and so on for dozens and dozens of variations. And just like this one, any remotely catchy tune is likely to be licensed and slotted into a new location, each new song just a fresh coat of paint on an existing tune.

The second article, The Banality of Conspiracy Theories, begins with what used to be a convent in what is now my city of Somerville, MA. Specifically, it begins with Protestant rioters burning it to the ground in August 1834 because they believed the nuns were being forced into sexual depravity, and that their resulting children were being murdered and buried in the basement.

The Ursuline convent was targeted because of conspiracy theories that, in many ways, were the 1830s version of the contemporary panic on the right regarding child sexual abuse… Although it is tempting to see these moral panics as something new, they have been part of American culture for nearly two centuries, and they recur at key moments in history for specific, identifiable reasons. Combating them requires first understanding that they are not only not novel, but in fact rote—almost to the point of banality. In other words, like a remix of an old tune, conspiracy theories just keep cropping back up, serving the same purpose. Only instead of something to dance to, these remixed vibes are something to riot about, a substitute for engaging with change or understanding the actual nuances of the actual world.

Car Brain

Let’s take another visit to The Atlantic, this time for the article Everyone has Car Brain, about a new study of “motonormativity:” 

Should people smoke cigarettes in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the smoke? Forty-eight percent of respondents strongly agreed that they should not. Should people drive cars in highly populated areas where other people would have to breathe in the exhaust fumes? Only 4 percent strongly agreed that they should not. If you leave your car in the street and it gets stolen, is it your fault? Eighty-seven percent said no. If you leave anything else in the street and it gets stolen, is that your fault? Forty percent said yes.

Meanwhile, Education

Joy