Letter of Rec

I ingest an inordinate amount of content so you don’t have to! Here are the best things I spent time on this month:

1. Change Blindness by Ethan Mollick on One Useful Thing. This is a quick audio/visual tour through 21 months of AI. The before/after on the same song prompt is phenomenal.

2. What Tweens Get from Sephora and What They Get from Us by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker. Jia Tolentino writes, I read! This made me reflect on my own childhood relationship to the beauty industry, in that I very much wanted to be someone who already wore makeup but did not want to endure the humiliation of beginning to wear it. People might realize I wanted them to like me! Terrors, terrors.

3. The Sunday Read: ‘The Woman Who Could Smell Parkinson’s’ on The Daily. I don’t often listen to the Sunday Read, but this made me think I should. Pretty much what it says on the tin. Completely wild. Also in article form!

4. Organizing all of your clothes into outfits so you can finally get rid of that sweater that doesn’t go with any of your pants. I sense this will only appeal to those of you who also get to the airport three hours before your international flight. But! For this elite few, it's giving Cher Horowitz.

5. Who Trolled Amber? from Tortoise Media. Investigative reporter Alexi Mostrous dives into the data of social media posts surrounding the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp trial to conclude that a significant portion of pro-Depp online sentiment was posted and liked by bots. He suggests these bots were probably commissioned by some combination of Depp’s legal/PR team and the Saudi Government, to whom Depp has social and financial ties. This came onto my radar after I heard it (here) compared to the sudden online vitriol toward Blake Lively in the Justin Baldoni It Ends With Us press tour fiasco. (Note that Baldoni hired Depp’s PR firm.) For all we’ve heard about bots manipulating politics, this is the first time I’ve considered how terrifyingly easy and inexpensive it would be to leverage bots for personal feuds. I feel it would behoove us to view our internet selves through a determinist lens, by which I mean: You cannot possibly expect yourself to react entirely of your own volition to a deluge of content that seeks to tell you everyone has Opinion A. If you insist you cannot be manipulated, you’re being too hard on yourself. We could all do with some humility around our own critical instincts.

6. The Egg by Andy Weir, animated by Kurzgesagt. I first read this short story in high school; it popped into my head again over the years, but I never knew how to find it until I read The Martian and realized it was the same author. This is a lovely, transfixing animation.

7. The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt. I read this book when it came out in 2007 and loved it, and it was a joy to revisit. It’s set on Long Island during the Vietnam War and is about Shakespeare and the confines of masculinity and being thirteen. In general, I highly recommend rereading whatever you remember from middle school.

8. Making my own playlists. I’m so tired of seeing the same three artists at the top of every single algorithmic Spotify playlist. The cutesy nonsense titles no longer fool me; you always just play Noah Kahan and Sabrina Carpenter. I’ve been making an effort to rely more on user-generated playlists, especially as I continue to hear murmurs around Spotify’s use of in-house artists (particularly for instrumental music) to avoid paying streaming royalties. I find it so much more satisfying to hone my own little playlists. Critique and curation is a welcome part of engaging with art. It feels good to engage with the content you consume! It feels good to make things!

9. Can someone please tell me if I can wear my Birkenstocks in the city?

10. Daha etymology?

Currently reading: Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. Cannot recommend this enough. It’s about the extent to which we can separate art from the artist. Was delighted to find it touches on some of the things I mentioned last week re: identify formation and Harry Potter! This is excellent:

Non-urgent thought of the week: Why did all upper-middle-class families redecorate their kitchens to look like Olive Gardens in 2007?

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