The media industry further devolves into a game of Who Can Monetize their Cult of Personality best: Bari Weiss is on the cusp of selling her anti-woke Thought Catalog (government name: The Free Press) to Paramount for “somewhere between $100 million and $200 million,” wherein Weiss will get a role at CBS News where she’ll be “guiding the editorial direction of the division.” Not bad for a Substack girlie!

My favorite thing to gripe about TFP with media folks is the fact that, inane politics aside, as a media outlet, it simply reads like a bad campus newspaper desperately out of ideas. A recent spin on the homepage revealed unto your average unwitting bystander: a travelogue that tries to do something Steinbecky about riding a train with young sons but mostly fixates on a fellow passenger with a disability, a weekly column where “writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart” lol, and at least three separate items about Amy Coney Barrett’s new book. I know a content quota hates to see any of us coming, but even the best bullshitters amongst us can agree that’s pretty egregious…good luck filling all that airtime B!

On the plus side, we have the Abundance boys getting savaged in The New York Review of Books, which was especially amazing because it made me realize that most of the best recent book pans have all been a bit catfighty in nature, and I forgot how it so warms the cockles of my heart to witness violent male-on-male critique. Things really get going when you hit “The mood of Abundance is that of a chirpy regional sales manager giving a PowerPoint” and then each of Trevor Jackson’s ensuing dry little counterpoints to their basic arguments hits like a prized video game power-up “[Klein and Thompson] … do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism;” “Abundance has little to add to that statement beyond technological enthusiasm;” “Klein and Thompson likewise seem unaware that technologies are owned by people.” Literary criticism can be so nourishing.

Nobody including Joe Hagan knows why he was invited to party-report what sounded like the most boring brand event on earth aboard the “creamily christened” (ew lol) Luminara, something something Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection Oaktree Capital Management for Vanity Fair. Bet the Google search ranking loved all those bold-faced names and link-outs though :)

Everything in Emi Nietfeld’s horrifying investigation for Wired on the venture capitalist suing her pregnancy surrogate is indeed jaw-dropping. It’s interesting to me the way this story’s framing (and the choice of publication) seems to characterize Cindy Bi’s punitive crusade as characteristic of the elite Silicon Valleyite mindset: entitled, arrogant, nearly comically results-driven, so convinced of their own exceptionalism that they are completely intolerable to the possibility that being armed with a boatload of resources (and legal channels) still might not be able to give them exactly what they want.

Of course, Bi is nearly impossible to sympathize with, given her professional and financial standing compared to “Smith,” her surrogate, but I still couldn’t help but detect a familiar feral desperation in her actions, something that I think is emblematic of a more general neuroticism when it comes to the supposed choice and control that modern women have about creating the families they so desire. To me, Bi’s story fits more clearly under the narrative umbrella of a woman trying to do everything “correctly” (and going to extreme lengths in doing so) and yet still having to confront life’s brutal and randomizing uncertainty. Bi’s crash-out gives the reader a front-row seat to how total and toxic her personal illusion of control was; the more interesting question, to me, is how such a belief/sense of entitlement of control proliferates through the in culture, non-exclusively to the richies of the Bay.

Defector is celebrating its 5-year anniversary this week, which is perhaps the only non-depressing news to be had in the media industry. One of my most favorite recent reads was Mitch Therieau (of course)’s analysis of the The Tragedy of “Stomp Clap Hey” music, particularly for the way he mapped the Edward Sharpe/Lumineers of it all onto the role of music as a cultural product in and of itself—one that used to be nearly synonymous with sociality, which now is basically just a tool for producing whatever air waves are most amenable to one’s interior sense of vibe, for cheap…

Recession-era folk rock is about the capture of social life. The form’s ability to take the fragments of chatter and moments of communal participation that accompany music and absorb them into the music itself—the shouts and claps functioning as built-in crowd noise—is its distinguishing feature. It is exactly this feature that makes it uniquely attuned to the changing social function of music … Over the next decade after “Ho Hey,” the entrenchment of the streaming regime would drastically change the way music was valued.

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