*The Week in 15 Selections*
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It was a great week for reading! And yelling about stuff you’ve read. For the first time in god knows how long, the main topic of discussion online was a piece of longform journalism from Harper’s! (It’s linked below). But damn, it felt like 2013 again! Everyone arguing over whether or not an article on gooning for christ’s sake was woke enough or queer enough or good enough for all the hype. What a treat to be back in a world where people are mad about something they read.
Anyway, here are this week’s links!
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My coworker and friend Patrick Redford is hosting a podcast (produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin!) all about how people cheat at/in/around sports and what that tells us about them. I really recommend it! Listen to Only if You Get Caught!
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I loved this profile on the women running Hagfish. One million years ago, I had a substack where I wrote about women’s work that was out of print, and I’m so thrilled that so much has changed since then (the year of our lord 2019).
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I’m SO into Vanity Fair using a painting of Charli XCX for their cover. Art is so back baby. I really like Issy Wood’s work, too, so this is such a coop for me.
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GREAT NEWS FOR ME PERSONALLY: The soundtrack for The Gorge (which I will not be seeing because it seems too scary for me) was made by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who are the kings of making music I can write to. I am BLESSED.
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I’m anti-Sombr so I liked this blog.
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You would THINK that a top U.S. prosecutor would know how off-the-record works, and you would be WRONG. Great reporting by Anna Bower at Lawfare.
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“It appears to us that the Rich have a sort of new MEGA OBSESSION, one that - by all measures - has emerged really right now. And that obsession is, basically, a veritable “Noah’s Arc” décor – a.k.a. the décor-appropriation of animals” -For Scale
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Gonna go see Frankenstein just because of this quote tweet:
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I’ve had the new Last Dinner Party album From the Pyre on repeat this week.
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My king Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote about The Brothers Karamazov for *The New Yorker.
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I liked this article by Leah Abrahms about the “death of the white dude novelist” discourse in the Cleveland Review of Books. Good paragraph here:
What goes unsaid in these essays is that the phantom limbs restrict membership in the lost colony of the literary man to a smaller and smaller group of people, winnowing down the books these writers are searching for to an authorship of one: themselves. The question underneath the question, “Where are all the white male novelists?” is a much sadder, more embarrassing one: “Why not me?”
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The Harper’s investigation by Daniel Kolitz into the Gooners is as upsetting and riveting as you might expect, but it’s better written than I expected. I tried to pull one quote from this and they were all either incomprehensible or disgusting so I guess good luck going into this tab. The backlash to this blog is deeply stupid. It’s envy. Sometimes a blog is so good that people hate it because they want to write a version of it. Grow up!
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[SCREAMING INTO THE NIGHT]WHAT CAN’T THE PRESIDENT DO? HUH?
“A remarkable thing about the Trump administration’s management of our country is the extent to which they are practicing the opposite of this maxim. Always and everywhere, they are introducing more fragility into our systems. They are making us more vulnerable on virtually every front. Their reign is chaotic, and being unable to know exactly what the worst crisis will be can leave us feeling adrift. But the most important—and disturbing—conclusion about our time is, in fact, perfectly knowable: When you make a system increasingly fragile, it is sure to break when the test does arrive.”
- I really liked this article about why higher ed is rushing to adopt AI and why it’s about so much more than cheating.
This week I did my bake off (a soufflé! and it rose!) and wrote about After the Hunt