You've Been Good, Have Some Summer Links!
It’s amazing to me that once upon a time, I reliably posted a weekly digest of all the things I’d found worth reading on the internet. I kept this up for years. Now, I cannot imagine keeping up that pace without being paid to do it - shout out to all the bloggers and journalists who have pivoted to Substacks, but I don’t think I will ever be able to live by my pen the way I once did and in the current landscape even trying seems ludicrous. But I do yearn for the earlier 2000s when writing on the internet was not just feasible for work, but also so gloriously prolific! You could find the profound or the profane without even trying hard, and I do feel that we’ve lost quite a lot of great culture with the switch to social and shortform media. Anne Helen Petersen has a lovely piece on this, which feels like the only way to kick off the summer links smorgasbord.
Entry 1,568,082 in the “Are Men Okay?” investigation.
Good grief, Marina Hyde (columnist at The Guardian) never, ever misses. I wish I had her flair for the eviscerating!
Answer: misogyny. Next question.
Equally if more subdued in its devastation, Charlie Warzel’s latest for The Atlantic starts to count the cost of, as Elon himself put it, “becoming meme.”
And in case you missed it, this Wall Street Journal run down on Elon’s…I don’t know what else to call it except a harem, in the most traditional sense…is fascinating reading. And because with me everything comes back to Mormonism, learning that the consigliere of Musk’s family office is Mormon was especially striking.
This is not exactly a companion piece to all of the the above. But it’s not NOT a companion piece either. DOGE is about sex, it claims, and what happens when a very specific type of tech bro, perceptions about who is productive/deserving in our society, and the toxic brew of misogyny endemic to most online discourse and culture (remembering of course that DOGE is based on memes at its foundation) all converge with tangible power.
The Trump/Musk breakup was the first major event of Pride Month. A month on, the fallout is still working its way through the American political system and stock market. Love that for us, love to be beholden to ketamine-fueled oligarchs and mad wannabe kings. That being said, it was also immensely funny to watch and this kind soul rounded up the best of Twitter commetariat.
Question: what on earth made people think he would be “more disciplined” this time around? All his guardrails and so called “adults in the room” were purged in the first go round and he’s spent the last four years allying himself with even more extreme extremists. What did the markets THINK was going to happen?
If there is one thing Decadent Nationals can get behind, it’s a stunning archaeology/architectural find!
Laura Ingalls Wilder was NOT a tradwife. On how narratives obscure truth.
As I top and tail this post, the UK has just broken through a major heatwave and exited the hottest June on record since monitoring began in the 19th century. Climate change is already affecting immigration and agriculture patterns, and it’s starting to affect our bodies. This series about fertility issues on a warming planet gripped me.
This piece on “losing interest” in chasing things resonated in a way I’ll be thinking about for a while.
I have never, ever doubted my medievalist degree. It was immensely pleasurable to pursue in university, and it has given me a surprising amount of context for framing the age I live in. Technological reformations, changing class structures and demographics, plagues, and…a creeping return to feudalism?!
Oh god…let’s add wacky religious movements to the list… (Journalist and chronically online person Taylor Lorenz has a quippy but still pretty useful video on this bonkers phenomenon.)
Abolish ICE. The mask is finally coming off a lot of the political messaging of late and while it is not surprising to those of us paying attention, it’s still depressing. It’s never been about criminality. It’s never been about illegality! It’s about what “sorts” of people are acceptable and which aren’t.
For example…there aren’t 65 million illegal or criminal immigrants in the US. But there are approximately 65 million Latinos…
The big news the week I’m finishing this is the Bezos Sanchez wedding in Venice. It’s grotesque, it’s tacky as hell, and the PR blitz on trying to push it to the masses as a positive celebrity event is not working. At all. The comments have been brutal, the hot takes have been almost uniformly unimpressed, and even more measured media has been pretty damning. Fashion journalist Amy Odell summed up the moment perfectly in a New York Times Op Ed, and went even further in her very good Substack work. I like and am intrigued by her zeroing in on the apparent root sin in this wedding: tackiness. Donald Trump’s rise in many ways ushered in an era of nouveau tackiness, with his love of ostentatious bad taste, throwback 80s garishness, and revelling in vulgarity. But it’s a trick that those who try to replicate seem to fail at every time - which is fascinating to me. Style and taste is often helped by money, but (unlike Vogue covers) no amount of money can buy it in the first place. Bezos is leaning into the persona of a splashy ultra-wealthy man in his second act, where the Musks of the world are making their drug habits and lack of therapy our collective problem, the Zuckerbergs are trying too hard to be cool, and the Thiels are…well they’re just scary. Bezos is a man who doesn’t just enjoy being rich, he enjoys being rich in public, which feels deeply at odds with the moment of populist anger and growing class consciousness. The last time a wedding caused any kind of online chatter was when Sofia Richie got hitched and heralded a period of “stealth wealth” and “quiet luxury” which dovetailed with the smash TV series Succession (some of the best TV in years, to be honest). Just a few years ago we seemed to still like rich people, so long as they looked good and the true or fictional narratives we had of them were at least complicated. Succession was all about terrible people being terrible to each other, and the huddled masses were at best gestured at. Even when the show indicated that the actions of the wealth characters clearly impacted the real world (an ex-wife removing herself and her children from a city for feeling unsafe, protests in streets, and so on) it barely registered for the main characters for whom wealth is buffer against the hoi polloi and the normal lives lived by peasants. But Bezos and Sanchez renting out a literal sinking city, site of a former mercantile empire par excellence now tourist destination, protested by native residents for the harm and damage and ecological impact of their party for those who have to LIVE there, as a record breaking heatwave grew in force, and multiple major geopolitical conflicts raged…all of that backdrop against a 50m USD price tag event that was over the top in its gaudiness…it all felt too on the nose for our moment. And maybe that’s why instead of celebrating and revelling in pomp and spectacle like plebes are supposed to, the public’s almost entire collective reaction has been, “ICK.”
…or maybe her dress was just really not good…
The general “eat the rich” mood is growing. McMansion Hell gives a perfect take in the way only she can.
One of the most compelling economic communicators is Professor Mark Blyth. He podcasts on behalf of Brown University and writes highly accessible books which I can personal recommend for those who want meaty economic ideas in everyday language. I’ve heard this analogy from him in lecture form before, but it’s a good one, and he’s reproduced it for The Atlantic: why the economy is overdue for a reset, and on a larger scale than you may think. It’s a perspective I find compelling. .
Honestly I felt not a jot of patriotism for July 4th this year. My government has voted in some of the worst legislation in my lifetime, almost entirely to feed the ego and power grab attempts of probably the worst man we have ever elected to power. But maybe that’s why I appreciated Ken White’s (aka Popehat online) thoughtful reflections on a life practicing law. Like him, I find myself deeply at odds with my nation and apparently a governing majority of its citizenry. But also like him, I think the most compelling thing about America is that we are a nation who has never once lived up to its own ideals…but our entire narrative history is one of continuously striving to achieve them anyway. That’s a cause worth loving. It’s also a cause which we seem to be blatantly, even gleefully abandoning. It causes immense grief to feel like the things you thought you believed are a lie. Trust me. It’s the defining emotional journey of my entire adulthood.
