The white-male effect
In this week's edition: people with principles, TikTok pop, the hell of modern work, Etsy mask empires, Spotify spam and ad trackers.
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In a week so bad one must truly stretch to imagine what else could yet go wrong, I keep returning to this appreciation Nina Totenberg wrote of her friend, Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It’s an intimate portrait, full of dinner-party fodder — did you know that she loved wine? That she couldn’t use an oven?! — but more than that, it’s a chronicle of a very long, very close and veryyyy unusual friendship.
Totenberg, of course, covers the Supreme Court for NPR. You might’ve expected the two to have some sort of casual, transactional, vaguely sleazy friendship, the way that many reporters (including, sorry, yours truly!) sometimes have with their sources. But Totenberg and RBG were essentially besties; they had dinner together every week. Totenberg writes that her house is one of the only places RBG visited after the onset of Covid-19.
More remarkable still, the two women maintained this enormously close relationship while (Totenberg claims) still doing their jobs, neither leaking information to or otherwise favoring the other. There’s one insane anecdote, in particular, where Totenberg recounts taking a trip to New York with her husband, a surgeon, and Ginsburg. Unbeknownst to her, the husband and RBG sneak off to Sloan Kettering to plan RBG’s lung cancer treatment with a secretly assembled team of doctors. RBG goes into major surgery without ever telling her friend what’s going on.
The next day, RBG says she didn’t tell Totenberg because she didn’t want to force her to choose between her obligations as a journalist and a friend. And sure enough, Totenberg reports the news of her friend’s (very serious!) medical procedure only after the court announces it.
I might be hung up on this story because it feels improbable: Surely no one segments her life so neatly into strict, ethical lanes. And there’s something suspect in the false distance that Totenberg conjured in much of her reporting about Ginsburg: “By Friday night, Ginsburg was sitting up in a chair and calling friends,” she writes, of RBG’s surgery, without ever specifying that the friend was … well, her, specifically.
Still, in a moment when so many political and cultural leaders seem to believe that the only true standard for behavior is how much can be gained or won, I think I’m mostly hung up on the two women’s devotion to principle: Their quaint unwillingness to invent new “precedents,” or excuse a certain flexing of the rules, when doing so would doubtlessly consolidate their individual power and/or help Totenberg land major scoops.
I don’t know if it’s inspiring, per se. Like principles, inspiration feels ill-suited to the current moment. But like I said: It’s a bad week, and I’m hung up on it.
Other things I read about RBG this week:
“The Glorious RBG” [The Cut]
“RBG’s Life, in Her Own Words” [The Atlantic]
“Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Lace Collar Wasn’t an Accessory, It Was a Gauntlet” [NYT]
“Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Advice for Living” [also NYT, from 2016]
“The Rise of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Cult” (Current Affairs)
If you read anything this weekend
This all-too-relatable essay on the hellish technologizing of work. Links fave Anne Helen Petersen has a new book out (… you may have heard). This excerpt takes on the myriad ways social media, chat apps and mobile internet have extended the hours, and the shittiness, of knowledge work. I am a small bit skeptical of Petersen’s personal experience with this, since it reads to me like she has fully embraced the “burnout” culture in her own work (?) and profited from it (??). But you can’t argue with the premise! [Wired]
This exhaustive inquiry into the science and theory of “move fast and break things.” Weird that tech companies throw this catchphrase around when they do, in fact, appear to sometimes break … entire societies! The reporters on this piece spent months digging into how industries approach risk and why Silicon Valley, by and large, chose to ignore it. Hint: It has something to do with a phenomenon called the “white-male effect.” [OneZero]
This alarming investigation into the many, many ways your favorite websites are tracking you. Includes a neat/addictive tool that lets you plug in any URL and uncover its trackers. Fwiw, I just learned Substack runs only one ad tracker and three cookies, which seems like not a lot. But the Mayo Clinic *logs your literal keystrokes* when you turn to it with symptoms. [The Markup]
This extremely fun feature on how TikTok is changing pop music. We all know songs with big beat drops make the best dance videos … so major labels are signing artists and writing songs with far more of them. [LA Times]
This high-drama romp through the breakup of ♫ Cellino & Barnes, your injury attorneys.♫ This piece will mean nothing to my out-of-state readers. For that, I am sorry. [New York]
And now for something completely different
Postscripts
Etsy mask empires. Spotify spam. Flights to nowhere and “encrappification.” The rise and fall of the rice cake. Why Goodreads is bad for books. How to track your mail-in ballot like a UPS package and what QAnon looks like in Europe.
The environmental costs of streaming music. The discriminatory effects of GreatSchools. The Italian mafia is on Tik Tok, as is this conspiracy-quashing Hot Firefighter. Last but not least: How ranch dressing took over America (and, probably, the world). Fwiw, blue cheese is the OG chicken wing condiment … accept no pretenders.
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You are all very familiar with Joshua’s excellent work from Vulture and The Verge. Many a Links has included links to his articles. But I am pleased to say he did not tweet about the newsletter for that reason, I don’t think; rather, it’s because we went to college together. 🙃🍊 THANK YOU to Joshua & everyone else who shares this newsletter. Your referrals are the main way it finds new readers!!
— Caitlin