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Now here’s a stellar (if grim) standout amongst the recent crop of fall magazine cover drops: The Atlantic going pulpy and non-verbal with maybe the definitive illustration for election season anxiety…

I’m enjoying the dark romanticism vibe that that scarlet A gives against that stormy background. Also: this tweet about the corresponding Harper’s cover made me laugh. Mag beef is the best beef.

While we’re on the topic of The Atlantic, I now have an excuse to share my pet amusement with one particular byline that reliably pops up on my feed with some of the most sardonic? ominous? depressing? headlines that, unfort for me + the singer Faith Hill’s SEO but fortunately for whoever’s spearheading The Atlantic’s quarter life crisis content initiative, get me every time:

Just an admirably consistent, troll-y beat on the drudgery of young adulthood that dares to ask, “What if 20-something Wednesday Addams went into journalism?” Savage us, Faith.

I already gave points to The Cut’s all-killer-no-filler fashion issue (and even ran into Cathy Horyn on the street in Chinatown earlier this week, who was wearing not the suit she writes about in her essay but a jacket with perfect shoulders nonetheless), but what I really can’t stop thinking about is Chantal’s piece on the “Very Important Clients” that luxury houses are increasingly entangling themselves with. There’s an amazing conclusion that brands like Chanel, Hermès and Louis Vuitton are now de facto “hospitality machines” thanks to their efforts to create celeb-like “experiences” to entertain and pamper VIP clients (who now coincidentally actually have something to wear all that couture to). The clothes are just part of the larger mission of making rich people feel special and famous, too. 

For Flaming Hydra’s month-long series on “The Lost Internet,” Tom Scocca reflected on how the soul of today’s internet is a direct descendant of blog comments, which made me think about how Twitter etc.’s efforts to unhitch itself from the publishing/media ecosystem (i.e. Things to Comment On) in order to become Only Comments make it feel so flat/full spew…

In the years between then and today, readers became concrete—concrete, specific, and, in meaningful quantities, hostile. Comments became the norm and then broke free from the stories to become the entire setting in which the life of words took place. Every medium is a social medium now, and that society is often an unsympathetic one. To post something is to know you’re going to inflict it on strangers, and that some of those strangers will be spoiling for a fight. 

Of course you should read Katy Waldman on “The Temporary License of Literary Bratdom,” which reviews the latest Zoomer/young-millennial books that everyone is (if not actually reading) forming strong opinions about. Tl;dr, each generation anew finds rebellion in constructing “messy” / “unlikeable” antihero and foisting them onto the rest of us; I particularly enjoyed this line: 

“Here, though, there’s an even stronger implication that all of the characters exist in a place where identity has come unmoored, where everything is performance. One might be tempted to call this place the Internet, but, more accurately it’s the lifeworld that the Internet has created and is a part of.

Finally, can you guess who’s likely the most responsible for the trend of every recipe being named something like “brothy beany garlicky x”? I bet you can. This history of recipes-as-modern-food–content from Eater’s Jaya Saxena is as detailed as it is illuminating about the way language has gotten millennialified/internetized in the last couple of decades. 

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