#730: Instagram poems and Substack it girls

You can't post through the end of the world

⚠️ I’ve recently heard from several readers who aren’t getting Links in their inbox. This seems to relate to a change Substack made to its app notifications. You can read more about the issue and how to fix it here. Apologies for the disruption!!

Hi, hello!, and happy weekend. In the very last week of December, J and I bought a new car. I thought we’d eke another year out of my mom’s castoff Camry, but the threat of future tariffs and severe winter storms were potent motivations to upgrade sooner. Reader: I am glad we did. The new car came with heated seats. It also came with a three-month SiriusXM trial, which promptly reintroduced me to a once-favorite song that I’d entirely forgotten since like, 2013. That song, in turn, pulled me down a rabbit hole of other indie-pop from the late aughts: Atlas Sound, Crystal Stilts, various one-album wonders from the Pitchfork belle époque.

It surprised me, to be honest, that I’d forgotten so much of the music I once loved. And it surprised me that Spotify — in its infinite, addictive, algorithmic wisdom — had never once thought to feed me this stuff. We have this impression of abundance online; this idea that all the culture that ever is or was exists within easy grasp. But on some significant level … that’s all pretty illusory, isn’t it?

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In case you missed it

*Speaking* of the Pitchfork belle époque … on Thursday, I posted an open thread about You’ll Never Believe Me — the new memoir by Kari Ferrell, a.k.a the Hipster Grifter, and one of the first people to achieve (“achieve”?) wall-to-wall online virality. We don’t typically do open threads here, as a rule, but I was having a hard time formulating my thoughts about this book.

So imagine my surprise when … Ferrell herself joined the chat. Sometimes the internet is still kind of cool!! She’s been very generous answering questions from me and other readers, so bop in there if you’re curious.

All hail the Hipster Grifter

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If you read anything this weekend

“You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism,” by Janus Rose for 404 Media. If religion was the opiate of the 19th-century masses, then social media arguably plays a kindred role now: “encouraging us … to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void,” without ever actually acting to change the circumstances we post about. This essay struck me as both illuminating and timely, given Silicon Valley’s recent political reorientation: Rose argues that tech CEOs, rather like fascists, would generally prefer their constituents stay toothless and unimaginative.

Three sources for tracking — and resisting — the ongoing administrative coup. On that note! I’m generally choosing not to include a lot of incremental political or policy updates here, even though I believe that keeping abreast of that news is the best/highest use of your weekend reading hours. Simply put, there are lots of newsletters doing that work already, and I don’t think it’s the particular role I play in your media diet/inbox.

That said, I *am* working on compiling a guide to emerging and mainstream sources for Trump administration news — a vetted list of valuable journalists, commentators, newsletters, podcasts and other information sources to help folks navigate (and act on) the current chaos in Washington. I plan to publish that later this week and would love your suggestions. (Hit reply to email me.) In the meantime, three sources I’m reading personally:

• Wired has notched a string of truly spectacular scoops on the (racist, short-tempered) boy soldiers currently disemboweling the federal government. Some of this shit would almost be funny if it weren’t also so destructive.

• Emily in Your Phone
  is the newsletter of political analyst and former Senate counsel Emily Amick, who I found via her comprehensive and very helpful guide to calling your Congressional reps. I’m new to this newsletter, but so far appreciate the mix of news, analysis and concrete calls to action.

• El País de la Mañana is … a deep cut, I know! But after years of aspirationally subscribing to Spain’s largest daily in order to “practice” my Spanish, I now find myself opening this newsletter first thing every morning to get a sense of how international media are characterizing political events in the US. (As a bonus, I am also learning fun new vocab words, like “sinvivir” — which, as I understand it, is a state of intense anguish or distress. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

“Only Bad Poems Go Viral,” by Stephanie Yue Duhem for

Do Not Research

. A fascinating analysis of the “poetic traits [that] act as reliable catalysts for virality,” including meter-less verse, self-help vibes and … intergenerational rage-baiting.

Today, we engage with poems less as aesthetic objects worthy of sustained attention, and more as convenient units of online discourse. This shift becomes even more striking when we consider the material reality of poetry readership. While viral poems rack up hundreds of thousands of likes and shares, only about 3 million poetry books are sold annually in the United States—a fraction compared to the 189 million adult fiction books and 289 million adult non-fiction books sold per year.

The disparity between poetry's online virality and its actual readership isn't coincidental. Poems are, in many ways, the perfect vehicle for social media engagement. Their brevity makes them easy to consume in a single glance. Their self-contained nature means they can be completely divorced from context. Their formal qualities provide instant fodder for judgment. A novel might require hours of sustained attention to form an opinion, but a poem can be considered and dunked on in seconds.

Apropos of nothing: Reading this did make me wonder what Rupi Kaur had been up to lately, and I’m delighted to tell you she published an affiliate gift guide with Pinterest over the holidays.

Two profiles of Substack It Girls. The Substack-to-magazine-profile pipeline was in full swing last week: We see you, Substack PR! (Now please address those dumb app notification settings!!) Here’s The Walrus on Rayne Fisher-Quann and The New York Times on Emily Sundberg. New York also dubs The Bulwark the new face of the “resistance” media.

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Postscripts

• A Blue Sky bot for people who like puns (via digg)

• A TikTok-style interface for Wikipedia (via waxy.org)

• How AI-generated ebooks are sneaking into libraries (404 Media)

• Yet another bid to build a “right-wing women’s media” (Bloomberg $)

• “Welcome to the LOLfood era, where as the world burns, [people] eat pizza rolls” (Eater)

• The enshitification hall of shame (Ars Technica)

• Where Facebook groups have replaced local newspapers (Rocky Mountain Public Radio)

• No one who has sat through a bad eulogy could begrudge today’s bereaved from using ChatGPT (Vox)

• A remembrance of the horny profile (Flaming Hydra)

• The fastest-selling adult novel is romantasy (NYT $)

• Two pieces on the rebirth of physical media: an interview with the writer and curator Allison NB and an essay on the enduring sociality of vinyl (

  Embedded
  , The Hedgehog Review)

• Three attempts to capture/name Gen Z’s new fondness for vice-signalling: “boom-boom aesthetic,” the “dark mode shift,” the “mask-off era” (FT $)

• Not even sure where (or if) to begin with the vegan rationalist death cult (SF Chronicle $)

• “A spider builds its web to be invisible so insects don’t even realize they’re flying into it, and in such a way that the harder you struggle once ensnared, the harder it becomes to escape. The internet, I’ve realized, works exactly the same way.” (GQ)

Paid supporters can find unlocked links from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic below the paywall, along with my ongoing and unsolicited commentary on years-old seasons of Great British Bake Off. 🙃

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin