The news ain't all bad
In this week's (abbreviated!) edition: cottagecore, digital blackface, dogs in baby pools, doom-scrolling, extinct cheeses and the best food newsletters
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.
Friends: It’s gonna be a very short one this week. But it’s also very EARLY, so the news ain’t all bad. I’m going camping for a few days and hope to be nowhere near a cell signal during that time. A more complete Links awaits you when I get back!!
If you read anything this weekend
This important and deeply researched account of Black appropriation and exploitation on TikTok. The platform is new; the issues are not. But the very mechanics of TikTok — the ease with which you can remix and lip-sync over other creators’ content — would appear to supercharge the problem. Bonus read: how creators have reacted to Trump’s threats on TikTok, which they call a “a crucial outlet for education about climate change, systemic racism and the Black Lives Matter movement.” [Wired]
This illuminating trio of links on cottagecore. Like many of you normie olds, I suspect, this — aesthetic? movement? subculture? — was new to me pre-Folklore. But now that Taylor Swift’s embraced it, we all better get on board. [See: Vox for the basic explainer / Ringer for the deeper musical review / The Museum of English Rural Life Twitter for sass on Marie Antoinette, the original cottagecore influencer]
The latest Covid doom-read from Ed Yong. Actually think that about says it all! [The Atlantic]
And now for something completely different
Postscripts
The most soothing man on TikTok. The food pantries of Reddit. An interview with the ex-fashion guy who makes QAnon’s graphics. How cellphone access changed a remote Inuit community. How the Twitter hacker masterminded crime by 17. Meet the newsroom where politics is not all about men and the single-serving site that lets you doomscroll endlessly.
Abolish the suburbs. Subscribe to the foodletters. Rick Steves is the pandemic balm we needed. Last/least: How a cheese goes extinct. (I too would like to be remembered for my temper and cheeses …)
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Did you know I have made two honest-to-goodness IRL friends from this newsletter? Katie is one of them. When I moved to Buffalo she was like “hi I subscribe to your newsletter do you want to hang out?” and I was both gleeful and deeply terrified because I’m more boring in person. THANK YOU, though, to Katie & everyone else who has shared this newsletter. I love you all like IRL friends. Until next week!
— Caitlin