A bad case of the burnouts
This week: reader mail, wellness apps, Slate Star Codex, MAGA merchants and TikTok music
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Friends — by the time you read this, I hope to be a many-hours’ drive from my computer, in a small town in upstate New York. We are taking ~a weekend trip~ in a pandemic, in winter, which effectively means getting take-out from another town’s restaurants and reading books in a confined space we don’t own. Your girl has a bad case of the burnouts, however, so I’m pumped just to see another view out the window for a bit. (For those of you feeling similarly, a reader sent me WindowSwap a few weeks ago and it is truly the coolest.)
On the topic of reader correspondence, several of you have written recently to complain about misdirected links. This is not a good look and I feel bad!! Sorry. The reasons for mistakes of this type are twofold: First, the “C” key on my laptop sticks, and so sometimes things don’t copy/paste the way I want them to. Second, I do have a day job, which means I work on this at night and sometimes get sloppy/tired. Nevertheless, I have promised you links, so I’ll try harder to double-check them. For those who asked: this is the “better than a meditation app” from last week’s edition.
Last thing: Jennifer Amur wrote in last week with an alternate explanation for the prayer hands/“high” association I talked about in the intro. Some people also use prayer hands to mean high-fiving hands, which would explain Instagram’s choice of keywords. But not that many people use prayer hands that way, per Emojipedia, so I think the #blessed hypothesis still has legs.
Not that any of this matters, because emoji aren’t cool anymore, anyway.
If you read anything this weekend
I file Slate Star Codex discourse in the same cabinet as endangered subspecies of elephants and the inner workings of Facebook’s Oversight Board — things I guess I care about, in the abstract, but about which I would not personally choose to read. (More on FB later.) The latest SSC discourse, however, appealed for two reasons: first, because it sparked all kinds of follow-up meltdowns about the increasingly hostile relationship between Silicon Valley and legacy media, especially the New York Times (… inject right into my veins); and second, because Elizabeth Spiers weighed in with a witty and very readable analysis that is somehow insightful into the motivations of all involved parties.
Back to the Facebook Oversight Board … this began as an obligation-read for me. (You know: When you write a newsletter about internet culture, you are basically required to read any/every big New Yorker tech story.) But holy crap, Kate Klonick got so much access — to Facebook’s weird planning meetings, to their offices, to the mundane details of how this giant corporation grinds on. Even better, this story ends up being less about online moderation and more about the thorny, indefinable values that allegedly inform it. What is truth? What is justice? The easy questions!
Two final recs, in case you — like me — plan to spend your weekend with a Kindle. First: There’s a really thorough, thoughtful essay on Vulture this week about the impact TikTok has had on pop music. Second: Marie Claire braves the world of “money manifestation coaches,” who are predictably making bank this year. A Venn diagram of the themes in this story vs. that MLM one I shared last week would probably be a circle.
Postscripts
TikTok recipe good. Influencers bad. The Clubhouse Bio generator. What’s next for Etsy’s MAGA merchants and the mystery of OnlyFans’ one-percenters. If you loved the Britney doc but tweet about Claudia Conway, you might wanna reevaluate a few things. “But there are perils of offshoring one’s memory.” Ya think?
Why computers will never write good novels. How your email spies on you. God bless Snopes, still fact-checking an internet where facts no longer matter. The only thing I’ve yet to read that kinda makes me like Clubhouse. The most in-demand ebooks at public libraries. Ghost kitchens. All your base. Last/not least: an after-hours simulator for fans of Coffitivity.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin