This bagel pulses with the blood of cream cheese, and the knowledge that God is dead.

"The Cream Cheese Stuffed ‘Tax-Free Bagel’ Is a Crime Against Nature, NYC", Christopher Robbins for Hell Gate

Hell Gate continues to be the best thing to happen to NYC media.

but when you live somewhere else, you realize that grief is also america's biggest export.

A tweet from Kate Wagner (@mcmansionhell)

This thread as a whole was really good; feels appropriate that a thread on grief was the most resonant thing I've seen recently on the dying web page that is twitter dot com.

Further confirmation of the celestial hierarchy came a day later: “It’s God, the railroads, and then everybody else,” said Pam Fischhaber, deputy director of rail safety at the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

"What hazardous cargo moves on Colorado railroads? It’s a ‘black box’, even to state regulators", Samuel Shaw for High Country News

It’s like getting a moral lecture from a gun.

Gillian Branstetter interviewed on the Know Your Enemy podcast

I am generally bad at listening to podcasts, and I listened to this podcast solely because of seeing this sentence quoted in a tweet. It was pretty informative!

What’s more, during the yearslong squabble over which of us lady writers would become the next Joan Didion, no one had tried to claim the title of David Foster Wallace for girls; his reputation as both a misogynist and an author beloved by misogynists meant it was just sitting right there this whole time, waiting for anyone with grammatical flexibility and the courage to try.

"I Didn't Really Want to Go", Lauren Oyler for Harper's

A few years ago I went to a screening of the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold at Metrograph where the audience was overwhelmingly stylish-but-casually dressed white women with literary publication tote bags. I didn't have a tote bag and I probably had a lot less in my bank account than most of them but I would be lying if I claimed no resemblance to the particular type of white woman writer on display.

The main things I remember thinking after the documentary were 1) did Joan Didion have an eating disorder?, and 2) to write like Joan Didion required a little bit of sociopathy. I'm not sure if it's just a matter of leveraging the kind of socially indoctrinated sociopathy that comes with the positionality of white womanhood (especially rich white womanhood) or something more nuanced. My admittedly questionable armchair pathologizing isn't a knock on her talent; it's more that it wasn't talent alone that made Joan Didion Joan Didion.

A few years before the Didion documentary, I read Infinite Jest and was absolutely furious at how intensely I connected with it. A lot of writing about addiction and recovery is garbage; Infinite Jest's depictions of addiction and recovery made me feel seen in a way that most addiction and recovery literature doesn't. I read that book in ten days.

In an interview with Fresh Air, the writer Mary Karr (who was close with DFW, a central character in Infinite Jest is very obviously based on her) talked about how many of the characters in recovery in Infinite Jest, and their stories, were not only directly based on people DFW was in a halfway house with but also the novel originally used their real names. I think about this a fair amount, and about the way those parts of the book hit me like a ton of bricks, and the irreconcilability of these facts. I wonder whether Joan Didion would have used their real names. I absolutely believe Joan Didion would have talked her way into a halfway house for a story.

Anyway. Based on her previous work and this essay, I think Lauren Oyler would have bullied me in high school for being too pretentious. Maybe not bullied; deigning to acknowledge me at all would have taken too much effort. She has moments of brilliance and moments of maddening smugness, an occasional righteous glee at punching down. What I think makes this sentence perfect is that it captures some of the excellent aspects of her writing and also why I think she'd probably have bullied me in high school. I did not finish reading this essay.