How to safeguard your sanity in the last days of the election
In this week's edition: K-pop, Crockpots, blue moons, baby boomers and baby witches, a blast from newsletters past and partisan fridges
Links is a free weekly newsletter with a simple premise: I read tons of stuff on the internet, and this is the best of it. You can hit reply to send your own links. You can also follow me on Twitter. And if you want to support the newsletter, please tell your friends. Or enemies, really! I take all comers.
Everything posted online lives forever, a certitude we should all probably dread.
Case in point: Someone recently reminded me that the last edition I ever sent of Links, before its very long hiatus, mailed just before the 2016 presidential election.
It wasn’t meant to be the last newsletter. Though reading it again now, I see why it was. I didn’t give up on the internet because of the election, per se, but it’d be a lie to say the two events were unrelated.
I’d covered internet culture for several years at that point, and had grown disillusioned with both the beat and the mountains of awfulness and inanity it entailed. It felt like work that would never lead to other, better work — like I was building a career on top of spun sugar and shit. By the time I send this last edition, I’d already accepted a job on another beat and was trying to decide what would become of the newsletter. Should I keep it up in my free time? Make it about my new beat instead? And then, surprise!, all the most awful and inane parts of internet culture ascended to a new and uniquely high-profile national platform, and I could do little besides lean into another internet certitude: lol, nothing matters.
Anyway, I present here again — as a special one-time rebroadcast, and an uncomfortable reminder of how poorly #content can age — the last pre-hiatus edition of Links, sent on November 3, 2016. I will stand by just one line of this, and that’s the exhortation to get out and vote. It’s been raining and cold and DISMAL in Buffalo for much of the past week, but dammit, we’re going tomorrow.
~ How to Safeguard Your Sanity in the Last Days of the Election ~
(The Official Links I Would Gchat You Guide™)
Leave all social media except Pinterest. Begin a board titled "puppies."
Compulsively click through "Here Is Today" until "today" has no meaning.
Print out an adult coloring page. Make sure it's not a map of the U.S.
Utilize the Amazon 1-click button every time you feel election stress.
Indulge in a relaxing soak and purposely drop your phone in the bath.
Do not look at polls. Don't read 538. In fact, forget how to do math.
Develop an addiction to a branded mobile game. Look, even Oprah has one now!
Enter therapy for said gaming addiction, and give it four ears before you come out.
If none of these work, here's a failproof fix: go out and vote early!! There are only five more days until we can return to ... something approaching normalcy. [2020 addendum: lol oh god kill me]
👋 P.S. Speaking of hiatuses (hiatae?), there will be no Links next week. Look for the next edition on November 13.
If you read anything this weekend
This very wild dive into the origins of the Epoch Times, now a major source of right-wing disinformation. The newspaper started as an arm of the Falun Gong religious movement, and retains close and mind-bendingly murky ties to it. On its homepage this morning, for the curious: Glenn Greenwald, “civil unrest” after the election, and Hunter Biden x1000. [Oscar Schwartz / The Atavist]
This tour through the highly organized, bubblegum world of the K-pop stans fighting QAnon. They’re basically the good witches of the internet culture wars, and they’ve mobilized around their love for … South Korean boy-band stadium pop. [Olivia Carville / Businessweek]
This witty and clarifying exploration of the concept of “fun.” For me, this was one of those rare pandemic lifestyle pieces that really clicked, like — shit, this is all true and completely explains so many of my emotions! [Rachel Sugar / Vox]
This thorough explainer on why baby boomers are so bad at the internet. Older people consistently read and share more disinformation — and “cognitive decline” is only one piece of it. [Michael Hobbes / Huffington Post]
This festive unmasking (heh) of the people who brought you the 12-foot Home Depot Skeleton. You might remember this meme from a previous edition. Two more spooky links, for the Halloween people in the audience: what a “blue moon” is and where you’ll see it tomorrow; there is also no better time to revisit the “fresh baby witches” drama. [Rob LeDonne / Esquire]
And now for something completely different
There is sadly no part of me that believes this is real but I’m very impressed by how far memojis have come. Basically straight out of Harry Potter!
Postscripts
McBroken. The end of lines. Shut up, I’m manifesting. I truly loved this essay on the existential terror of party reporting. The rise and fall of Parler. How email became work. Can you tell a Biden fridge from a Trump fridge? (Cold-press, NYT?! MAKE IT HARDER.)
Inside the Zoom chats where Quakers (okay, and others) are prepping for a contested election. Inside the bizarre, secretive publishing ring that tied 5G to coronavirus. Crockpot drama is the best drama. What we Googled in the past five election years. “Posts about topics like yard waste pickup, he says, can quickly descend into discussions about ‘antifa’” — or 2020 in a nutshell.
Sharing is caring
Who is this mysterious Adrian Guzman, whose Twitter avatar is just a serene blue circle and whose bio says only “Love to read!”? To what end has he tweeted my newsletter, with no further notes or commentary? Doesn’t matter! I will take it. Give me all the tweets. THANK YOU to Adrian/blue circle & everyone else who shares this newsletter. Your referrals are the main way it finds new readers!!
— Caitlin