I hung out with a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old on Saturday and discovered that I really do not know how to push a tire swing (the kind where the tire is horizontal). The method my childhood memory served me was to slowly twist the tire/chains together so that it would be sort of spring-loaded and then the whole swing would spiral wildly out of control; one look at the about-to-puke face of the 2-year-old as he clung on for dear life, and I knew that was Not Quite It.

Okay, I read the Zohran profiles that were recently published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the NYT Magazine, and if you only have time to read one, you gotta go with the latter: Astead Herndon’s (swan song!) profile, titled “Inside the Improbable, Audacious and (So Far) Unstoppable Rise of Zohran Mamdani.”

Primarily because, in reading all three pieces, it becomes quickly apparent what a sprawling subject, or rather a container of subjects, Mamdani is. I shuddered to imagine how I’d even try to order all of the basic elements (the campaign, the response to his primary win, his multinational biography, the influence of his parents and their personal biographies) with the major themes and context necessary (the multicultural coalition he represents, his personal experience of outsider-ness, the Islamophobia, his pro-Palestine throughline, the workings of contemporary leftist politics, the Democratic establishment, Trumpian America, rich New York vs. poor New York, millennialism, the celebrification of the contemporary politician—whew!

Narratively, the man clearly is a dream “in” for commenting and analyzing just about every aspect of America, down to “jerk-chicken Brooklyn” vs. “Starbucks Brooklyn.” By a wide margin, Herndon does the best job at guiding the reader through the deluge of topics to make sense of Mamdani as a person and as a figurehead, with just the right amount of humor: e.g. “This is a ‘poster’ we’re talking about.”

But if you’re a profile sicko like me, you should still read The New Yorker’s for a perfect marathon-related anecdote (at the beginning, clutch) and Vanity Fair for the EmRata secondary and critical observation that Mamdani’s PR person on staff is Zara Rahim, a former comms head at Vogue and also The Wing.

As (hopefully) the last word on The Life of a Showgirl—which like a Shein order, I have not touched since the original thrill of unwrapping the package and enjoying its initial shininess exactly once wore off—The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber analyzed the album for its true function, which was to serve as a unit of commerce “in the spirit of Temu” (which is by far the best and craziest line about all of this) incentivized by the Spotify economy:

Streaming encourages a volume game—the more songs on an album, the more streams it’s likely to notch. Streaming also makes repeat listening more important. Pop was always premised on replay value—but no matter how many times someone spun their CD of Bedtime Stories, Madonna received money only from the initial sale. In monetizing each listen, Spotify gave artists distinct incentives to cultivate fervent fan loyalty.

I used to work with an art columnist who insisted that Taylor’s re-recordings were an incredible feat of conceptual art; looking back, it did seem that T.S. had seized upon a particularly generational sensitivity to the passing of time, self documentation and reflection. But from the vantage point of TLOAS/a world where Taylor finally owns her masters, the entire (Taylor’s Version) project feels more hollow, and more like the business decision of a CPG company that has decided to now re-release the same product over and over, now in pumpkin spice!

We all know why, but whenever I visit a publisher website lately, I have the sense that they are getting increasingly aggressive about nabbing your email if you so much as glance around. Last night, I was Googling the Ali Slagle 40 clove marinara recipe and this morning saw that I was suddenly now receiving NYT Cooking’s newsletter, even though I’m 99.9% sure I was not clicking on anything toward that end. Today I was reading Zara Meerza’s essay about contemporary male’s obsession with Anne Frank for The Fence and had to agree to either sign up for the newsletter or pony up for a subscription to do so, which is at least a more obvious exchange. Online, you either pay with money or a little snippet of personal data, and that’s just the name of the game!

It looks like X/Twitter is trying to get journalists back posting links again by testing an in-app article reading experience—an attempt to solve the walled garden issue and keep readers on X but also let them click and view article links. I suppose this is better than a platform-wide throttling of links during the high Elon era, but am curious how X plans to work around paywalls, which now guard a much higher proportion of online journalism than when everyone was still playing the social media traffic referral game. (And if someone views an article in-app, does that count as a pageview for the outlet? Does X plan to share that data at all (lol do I even need to ask), or is this just another doomed Facebook Instant Articles / Google AMP debacle à la 2016… (And if you remember either of those things, congratulations, we are middle aged.)

Finally, over the weekend, I attended one of Mindy Seu’s lecture performances for her new book, A Sexual History of the Internet (which, to my commuter tote’s relief, was ⅕ of the size of her last venture, the door-stopping Cyberfeminism Index; the new one is brick-size and looks like a cool goth girl Bible). If you have a chance to see Mindy on tour, it’s always worth it because I’ve never met an academic with such style literally—she modeled for JW Anderson recently—and in her presentation. What I’ll say about the performance itself was that it involved the most interesting use of Instagram Stories I’ve seen to date—and beyond the material itself, made me consider the inherent strangeness of sitting in a dark room with a hundred-ish strangers, our phones almost syncing but not completely.