open tabs, empty cart
[Alt text: A painting of people on a subway car in the 1930s, in which people are chatting, reading, sleeping, applying lipstick, and otherwise not staring at iPhones.]
Twenty years ago, just after the first dot-com bubble burst, I was the editorial voice of a comparison shopping site. It was my job to "drive" website traffic by writing about/hyping new products. The hope was that people would read my 50-100 words about the Power and the Glory of the Classic Short Ugg Boot (so comfortable! your feet won't sweat or stink! all the cool kids are wearing them this season!) and then click on "Compare Prices." From there, people could see that the boots were one price at Zappos, another at Amazon, and so on. If they clicked on, say, the Zappos link, we'd get ten cents. Even if they didn't buy the boots. (Amazon was the only company that didn't pay us until and unless someone actually bought those boots.)
My employers had paid $750 million to acquire this comparison shopping site in 2000. Seven hundred and fifty million dollars. I doubt it made back even a fraction of that sum. Not that it had much of a chance, thanks to a revolving door of spectacularly incompetent managers, the 2008 market crash, and Google launching its own comparison shopping tool.
In 2022, no one's trying to get you to compare prices, but they are definitely still trying to get you to buy products they recommend — because they get a cut. That's why half my feeds right now are like "The 18 Best Gifts for Middle-Aged Women with Hot Flashes and Bad Knees" or "35 Celebrity-Approved Designer Suppositories That Make Great Stocking Stuffers."
I click on these stories or listicles way more often than I want to admit. "Maybe this time," I think, "I'll find the product I didn't know I needed, the thing that will Change My Life."
I never do.
Every year around this time, I start getting emails from someone named Lyette Mercier with links to various holiday gift guides. Lists of lists. I don't remember signing up for her emails, and I've never bothered to find out who she is. I open the emails almost religiously, clicking many of the links, and still never add a damn thing to my cart.
Last week, she included a link to this On and Off the Avenue piece in the New Yorker. I lost hours clicking all those links, many of which are broken now because the museum gift shops have sold out of those products. But, in case you are also into tree ornaments, I found a couple good ones, like this felt Medusa one at the Getty:
[Alt text: A felt ornament of a woman's face with green snakes for hair]
And I'm obsessed with this fire escape ornament from the Tenement Museum:
[Alt text: A tree ornament that looks like four levels of balconies and fire escapes, complete with drying laundry and flower pots.]
Holiday decorating with symbols of squalor and poverty? Yes, hi, I'm calling to confirm my reservation in Hell.
Anyway, back when I worked at the shopping site, I spent 40 hours a week looking at consumer goods on the internet. I bought loads of shit I didn't need, and had my holiday shopping done by early October. These days my online carts are usually empty, and I prefer to buy gifts at actual brick and mortar stores. But I still waste time looking at the online gift guides.
All of which is to say, if there's a specific item or genre of gift you're looking for, and you want to share it with the class, I'll keep an eye out over the next few weeks. I will use it as an excuse to justify all this blue light. Just reply to this email, and as always, anything I share will be anonymous.
Links
Science says dogs love reggae. (iNews) Can confirm; as I'm typing this, Prince Buster's "Too Hot" is on the stereo and my neighbor's dog is curled up in the other armchair, almost asleep.
There was a gala to raise money for Central Park or something. The theme was Mod, and most of the outfits are... disappointing. (Vogue)
Minnesota is still crowdsourcing funny names for snow plows and I wish more cities did this. (Boing Boing)
"It’s easier to dwell on an article about how your bedtime phone use is killing you and spend the rest of your life on your phone before bed in a self-reproachful spiral than it is to internalize a long and perhaps inappropriately personal article about how research and academia are filled with prejudice and how we all have wildly different biological, sociological, and psychological needs and how blue light might be giving us cancer or doing absolutely nothing to us but we aren’t sure because the health-care system is failing and society itself is ripping at the seams and reality might be a simulation, anyway, so it’s hard to say for sure whether screens before bed are good or bad." Are there Pulitzers for single sentences? (Vulture)
An overwhelming list of Twitter memes — ASCII, emoji, and words — that one guy has been compiling for many years. This could be a gold mine for someone's linguistics dissertation. Also: I'm betting a huge chunk of these came from Black Twitter. (Google)
An excerpt from Wendi Aarons' new book, I'm Wearing Tunics Now. (McSweeneys)
I'm 50 pages into Dirtbag, Massachusetts and this guy writes so well I'm pretty sure I already hate him. (Bloomsbury)
Some tweets about Thanksgiving that made me laugh. (Sad and Useless)