#697: PostSecrets, soft lives and tragedeighs

Reporting live from the path of totality

(via GDJ on Pixabay)

HELLO and happy eclipse long-weekend to those of you celebrating. Here in the dark heart of the totality, our civic leaders are breathlessly anticipating a million tourists and warning of gridlock to rival the end days. Don’t be fooled: They love this shit! It is Buffalo’s dearest and not-so-secret hope that some inversion of the global order will elevate the region to prominence again. Usually we bank on climate change to get the job done, but our downtrodden city will also happily take three-and-a-half minutes of daytime darkness.

Anyway! I plan to watch this cloudy, cosmic marvel from the sidewalk outside our favorite neighborhood bar. To mark the event, they’ve discounted beers to an anti-inflationary $2. I have never in my life purchased a $2 beer. Never seen one, in fact. It’s almost as exciting as the eclipse itself!

Alas, not everyone shares my/Buffalo’s enthusiasm about Monday’s event. On TikTok, I watched a series of ever-more-baffling videos in which earnest young men layered past eclipse paths over geological surveys and surmised … something something chaos calamity maybe an earthquake in Carbondale, Illinois? I’m not sure, I didn’t follow the logic, but I admire the attempt to rebrand a conspiracy older than civilization itself. Please drink your $2 beers responsibly and don’t forget your eclipse glasses!

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If you read anything this weekend

“‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel's Bombing Spree in Gaza,” by Yuval Abraham for +972 Magazine. The accounts in this story are *so* chilling — so brazenly dystopian — that I had to click away after a couple paragraphs to make sure this outlet was credible. Fwiw, +972 may be new to me, but not to people who closely follow this part of the world; mainstream U.S. outlets have since picked up its findings, and the White House has said it’s also looking into Lavender. Lavender, per this report, is the name given to one of several AI tools the Israeli army has used to automate the selection of bomb targets in Gaza, with virtually no human oversight or verification. These systems may be responsible, in part, for the staggering number of civilians Israel has killed during its invasion.

“Dark Matter,” by Meg Bernhard for Hazlitt. This is catnip for emo kids of the mid- to late aughts, of whom I am regrettably one: an introspective retrospective of Frank Warren’s PostSecret, 20 years after the site revved up. It’s a fun nostalgia-trip to hear from Warren and his project after all these years, and to catch up with some of the erstwhile secret-senders (cranky Carl is a personal fave). But the best character of the bunch may be Bernhard herself, whose lovely reflections on secret-keeping, self-disclosure and shame lived rent-free in my head for several hours after I finished reading.

“The Incel Terrorist,” by Lana Hall for Maclean’s. Journalists, academics and other observers have described “incels” in all kinds of terms: as misogynists, as “angry men,” as “Darwinian losers.” But an incel was never a terrorist — at least officially — until a Canadian judge convicted Oguzhan Sert on those charges last November. Men like Sert, who murdered a woman in his attack on a Toronto massage parlor four years ago, represent what one law enforcement agency called “a growing domestic terrorism concern.” I remember covering the Isla Vista massacre in 2014, when these guys were still considered unpleasant internet curiosities … this made me realize how much that movement has since coalesced into something more scary.

“Transparent Vice,’” by Elizabeth Lopatto for The Verge. I don’t think you have to be A Media Person to appreciate the depths of the dysfunction at Vice, which bills itself as “the definitive guide to enlightening information” but was maybe little more than a long corporate joyride. The quotes in this are straight out of Succession (“a screwball cast of suits,” “a fucking clown show”), and Lopatto unearths all manner of gossipy tidbits on executive infighting and incompetence. The nail in the casket, though, and the real triumph of this piece, is the running commentary from Vice’s crisis PR firm, whose ham-fisted denials make every claim all the more believable.

“Why Did Matt Farley Put a Song About Me on Spotify?” by Brett Martin for The New York Times Magazine. The real question is obviously not why Matt Farley recorded a song about Brett Martin, but why Matt Farley has recorded *tens of thousands* of songs, about thousands of people, places and objects, plus various permutations thereof. He has songs about nail technicians and electric razors. Existential crises and orange traffic cones. Oversleeping and — taking over where Sufjan left off?? — every city and township in Pennsylvania. “Money” appears to be one of his motivators, though not the only or even the primary one; Farley, a prodigious, inexhaustible and doubtlessly exhausting dude, also sounds like he’s having a lot of fun.

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In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last Saturday's round-up was The Cut 10-year age gap essay. I am glad to continue directing traffic to that piece in the hopes The Cut prints more of them. Wednesday's edition was a comprehensive round-up of classic first-persons in this vein, including your old faves the zany Victorian lady, the 10-day tampon and the woman who (essayistically) danced on her ex-friend’s grave.

The Links guide to (in)famous internet essays

Many of these links did not work on mobile. Sorry about that! You should have far better luck in a desktop browser, which won’t append random nonsense to the URL. Becky flagged a *stellar* addition in the comments, too: the Aziz Ansari bad-date story from 2018 (not technically an essay, but close enough!).

Two weeks ago I also recommended an excerpt from Jonathan Haidt’s new book on “the terrible costs of a phone-based childhood,” though at the time I wondered if Haidt had overstated his argument. Per a new commentary in Nature, he absolutely did: “The book's repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children's brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science.”

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Postscripts

People are taking “fake email jobs” so they can live soothing, soft lives. America is overrun by vaguely realistic fake local news sites. In praise of AllTrails and WhatsApp. The view from inside Trump Social. I see your r/tragedeigh “privacy concerns” and raise you babies Praylynn and Bramble.

The Sims may be getting a little too real. The Amish TikToker was not real enough. Extremely intrigued by the New Jersey nun earnestly schilling for TikTok. “Retention editing” may be out. “Fusion” cuisine can, in fact, get worse. When your boyfriend becomes the internet’s boyfriend and why fitfluencers look “healthier.” A very comprehensive list of aesthetics. I truly cannot recommend a walking pad enough. (Also, for my Pelotoners, this bike-handle desk; don’t judge me, it’s winter here for like, nine months.) This week I learned “Wi-Fi” means nothing at all and Chicken Soup for the Soul now owns Redbox. Finally, words to live by: “The world is too fucked up for us to pretend to be cooler than we are.”

Until next week! Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

P.S. A LOT of you are new here! And I have no idea where you’re coming from, because Substack’s analytics are terrible. Who are you? Who let you in? Do you have a fake email job? Please feel free to introduce yourself by replying or leaving a comment.