But WHY has the weather been so perfect in New York……I feel like we’ll get punished soon…..

Of course you need to read the excerpt from Elizabeth “Eat, Pray, Love” Gilbert’s new memoir, which was ingeniously placed in The Cut; spare a thought for all the young dears twittering about it online as simply “another” batshit The Cut essay. LITTLE DO THEY KNOW.

As Jia Tolentino pointed out in her review (which does what The New Yorker book reviews do so well, often to an annoying effect, which is to sum up the book’s juiciest bits so well you never really need to read the actual text), Gilbert’s greatest legacy lies in her self narration, if not also in her invention (or at least formalization) of the modern hero’s journey wherein self-discovery is both photogenic lifestyle and religion.

But Gilbert’s most pervasive influence can be found online, in the breathless having-just-finally-realized tone that dizzying numbers of women who narrate their lives on the internet have adopted. On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany. But even those who might seek to subvert that tone, or invoke it ironically, are negotiating the same conventions. Gilbert may be patient zero for the latter-day memoirist mind-set: so many women—and I would never exclude myself—have come to believe, at some level, that they, too, are Elizabeth Gilberts, people who search hard and love harder, whose personal journeys can and should captivate millions, whose flaws and failings only make them better heroines in the end.

It makes me think about the Taylor Swift of it all (a comparison Tolentino also acknowledges), as our reigning poet laureate of turning personal narrative into a business and cultural empire (which is about to form a merger with another valuable personal brand). And also: Lena Dunham, Joan Didion, Candace Bushnell, even. The demographic theme here, of course, is a lot more obvious than “who was also born on a Christmas tree farm,” begging the question: Do white women have an inherent yen for self-narrativization, or does society simply prefer them as baggage-less, culturally blank-ish, all-relatable avatars upon which to project all of our anxieties about gender, sex, and power? I for one think we should do more to acknowledge white women’s ancient cultural traditions! They sure make the hours go by.

In other news, the headlines on ChatGPT use by suicidal young people are piling up: the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine have apparently filed the first known case to be brought against OpenAI for wrongful death. Meanwhile, 29-year-old Sophie Rottenberg had apparently confided in a ChatGPT AI therapist named “Harry” for months; the kicker on her mother’s op-ed following her death is as grim as it gets.

Ironically, it was this relatively anodyne Cultured mag essay about using ChatGPT “to tell me about my future husband” that I thought best articulated the insidious nature of AI companionship for the impressionable—whether they’re in dire mental health straits or simply confused about, say, a relationship: “Few people are talking about the low-level epidemic of limerence happening to teen girls who’ve never received this much affection before—even if it’s from a robot trained on Reddit threads and Lana Del Rey lyrics.” The writer Roxy Sorkin explains she’s not even talking about the particulars of falling in love with a bot here, but of the just-as-spooky experience of “a chatbot convincing you that a real person is in love with you when they’re not.” Later, she writes:

And maybe that’s the twist: not that A.I. is taking over the world, but that we kind of like it. We want to be told what to do, who to love, what to feel. We want the algorithm to give us both direction and permission.

I learned a lot from Kelefa Sanneh’s piece on how music criticism lost its edge—or perhaps more accurately, how music criticism has always functioned alongside the business interests of its purveyor, whether it’s a YouTuber looking for virality or a magazine that needed to book talent.

It was also made newly interesting to me, per the section on poptimism and the concerns for justice and representation in the 2010’s, that the English descriptor for both aesthetically enjoyable and morally upright both come down to pronunciations of whether something is “good” or not: Thus, the problem of ever deeming say, Chris Brown’s oeuvre as worth evaluating at all. Perhaps the greater issue is that music criticism / criticism in American culture at large has always been inextricable from the larger hipster project of assigning a kind of Puritanical value to all of our consumption.

Finally, I really am enjoying the evergreen category of pigeon apologia. This latest one from The Guardian’s Joseph Earp, though my favorite is still Ian Frazier zeroing in on their feet.