#700: Gmail diaries and typewriter buffs

"I hope this email finds you happy and leaves you miserable"

(Samantha Borges and Tyler Nix via Unsplash)

I didn’t get called for jury duty last week, as expected. Instead, I spilled an entire cup of steaming coffee directly on my laptop, which has roughly the same productivity- and morale-ruining effects. Every how-to article on the subject of wet laptops tells you to immediately power down. But only rarely do they cover what you should do if the spill is *so* voluminous and *so* direct that your computer actually turns itself off, leaving you in a temporary state of desperate, coffee-scented paralysis.

Anyway: I’m writing this from a new computer!, because the old one seems unlikely to power on again. It’s survived by my Chrome browser settings and all the photos and writing I’ve saved to cloud storage — which is to say, almost everything — but it did unfortunately take two years of OneTab bookmarks and some excellent stickers with it to the grave.

Jason asked if I “learned” any “lessons” about “backing up more of my work” or “using a different bookmark manager.” What? Of course not. But I have acquired some expensive wisdom about the importance of placing liquids very (!!) carefully (!) when in the proximity of one’s laptop.

---

---

If you read anything this weekend

“How Gmail Became Our Diary,” by Paul Murray, Rebecca Makkai, R.O. Kwon and others, for New York. Gmail turned 20 years old this month, which means — if you’ve had an account from the beginning — it now represents a complete, accurate, chronological, two-decade archive of your correspondence and memories. I’d never actively thought about how powerful and eerie that is, at least before New York invited a bunch of novelists and writers to wax poetic on the subject, but I’d now HIGHLY encourage you to do a quick search for the first emails you ever received or your earliest messages from a close friend or partner.

“What a TikTok Ban Would Mean for X,” by various authors for various outlets. On Wednesday, President Biden signed legislation that could ban TikTok in the U.S., a possibility that I’ve largely ignored because it seemed so … improbable. Now that it’s not, I find myself newly attracted to the outpouring of articles, most published over the past month, that predict the impact the ban will have on various industries and communities, from food to music to sports to romance novels. But the anticipated harms still feel hyperbolic and hypothetical to me — why wouldn’t these communities just migrate somewhere else? In India, where TikTok was banned four years ago, that’s exactly what happened.

“Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation,” by Adam Iscoe for The New Yorker. Few “problems” are more first-world than the challenge of booking dinner at a trendy high-end restaurant, particularly when that challenge often seems to play out on usurious reservation resale sites or between the holders of competing luxury credit cards. Still, you gotta appreciate the hustle of the 19-year-old college students and virtual line-sitters pocketing my annual salary from selling reservations that are technically free. And you have to wonder at the fundamental economics of an industry where the margins are purportedly so thin for restaurants — but where demand exceeds supply so absurdly.

“How a Virtual Assistant Taught Me to Appreciate Busywork,” by Amanda Hess for The New York Times. I remain really interested in the notion that AI assistants could help women, in particular, offload emotional labor — maybe by handing it off to AI or maybe by punting to their AI-assisted husbands. Hess trialed a service that promised the former, with (sigh) predictably disappointing, vaguely dystopian results: “When these services style themselves as ‘worker bees,’ ‘secret helpers’ or ‘fairy godmothers,’ they lean on the iconography of fantasy to obscure the grimmer reality of farming out your ‘grunt work’ to an anonymized labor force.”

Two short reads on the internet of Taylor Swift. I could have read another 2000 words of this 404 Media dispatch from the internet’s vintage typewriter communities, who are bracing for/contending with a sudden influx of Swifties. Meanwhile, in Vulture, Emma Madden reports on the subreddit where “former hardcore Swifties try to deprogram” … unsuccessfully!

---

---

In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last Saturday's round-up was this op-ed on the rise of erotic asphyxiation among teenagers. Y’all are freaks but I’m here for it.

There was no Wednesday edition because, as previously mentioned, my laptop was upside down on a towel on the floor. I had planned to write a (candidly, very morbid!) update to this piece on AI gift-giving bots, so let’s just link to that again.

AI gift-giving, gossip surveillance and the tyranny of Spotify Wrapped towns

(The coffee incident makes me think the universe wants me to keep that one in drafts.)

---

Postscripts

This week in internet aesthetics: #corecore and frutiger aero. The hacker who outed an entire country’s secrets. The man who purportedly ruined Google. Revisiting MTV’s “Catfish” and online shopping circa 1996. Why CAPTCHA tests are getting harder and scam calls have gotten ubiquitous.

I hope this email finds you happy and leaves you miserable. Why so many women think they’re controlled by the moon. The fascinating rise of a chess-ranking formula. The seniors letting their freak flags fly on Feeld. The Hollywood gossip blogger who took it too far. As a former ag reporter let me say this is not NEWS, but: Influencers do get paid to promote foods like mangoes, eggs, pork and butter.

Until next week! Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

P.S. I rarely run classified ads anymore, but this is a good one:

Book Clubs are stressful. Join Article Club, a community of kind readers. We discuss one great article every month on race, education or culture.