The doom volume on my feed lately has been crazy. If it isn’t the fucked-up airports/TSA situation that gets you, it might be any manner of new health “findings” (don’t take the flu shot with your COVID booster, apparently?), the incoming flu season itself, the AI bubble, or the recession at our front door that will do us all in very soon, it seems. And that’s if you’re not already worrying about SNAP benefits or getting hit during this lay-off quarter. What a season!

As someone who is not-so-secretly indifferent to podcasts and unskimmable media in general (I only like to listen to pods when I’m cooking, which is like 1x week max), I actually did not know anything about Scott Galloway other than his longtime working partnership with Kara Swisher; he apparently has a book called Notes on Being A Man out last week that is unfortunately a lot less Live Laugh Love than that cover font would lead you to believe. In a move that is good for the culture and especially good for the current masculinity crisis discourse, Jessica Winter took Galloway’s whole deal apart in an essay for The New Yorker trollishly titled What Did Men Do To Deserve This. I like to imagine by the time you as a manosphere type click in, hungry for new rage-baity stats on how The Man Has Been Kept Down By (checks notes) The Other Men?, it’s too late.

Galloway, in both his podcasts and “Notes on Being a Man,” presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a life style, one equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about those.) Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all … What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be.

It will be very, very interesting in 10-15 years when people are clear-headed enough to do a real analysis of what happened with gender dynamics in the 2020s—like, whatever’s leading us to NYT op-eds about “conservative feminism” and Vogue columns about whether having a boyfriend is “embarrassing” and the chauvinist insistence that yes, times are tough and we all have it hard but men shouldn’t!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m back at Highsnob part-time for a good while, helping out with special projects and building my knowledge base of good lunch spots in FiDi. (The best, of course, being Los Tacos No. 1—get exactly two chicken quesadillas, flour tortilla, with everything on it; plus a glass of the jamaica agua fresca.) Last year, I met Faran Krentcil at that swanky holiday party Justin Theroux/Mark Ronson et. al always throw in their mid-town spot and was very happy to connect her with the team for this excellent story on WTF is the Lyst Index: Faran cornered 46 fashion insiders to talk about the vaunted industry ranking, and got at the heart of the more universal matter of what these “data-driven” meaning-makers are really for. A perfect quote, from “creative director whisperer” Camilla Morton: “We call it the attention economy, and now you can get your own attention from tracking who’s getting attention.” Zing!

It’s actually really annoying that Kaitlin Phillips writes so well; like this is the kind of thing that all the professional vibe-captureresses are trying to put into words and then she just tosses it off in a newsletter intro. Doesn’t she know you’re supposed to choose between being a cool publicist/mayoral king-maker? living in Connecticut vs. having a fantastic grasp of prose?

The wildest part of reading Larissa MacFarquhar’s New Yorker investigation on mental imagery and the people who both don’t have it (and the people who have too much of it) was not simply pulling apart which condition sounded more harrowing re: matters of memory (would you then rather have no vivid memories, or be trapped in an exhaustive memory palace??)...but the additional experience of then hopping over to Sam Circle’s newsletter (wherein each issue of The New Yorker gets reviewed closely) and seeing Sam write about having a “slow-dawning realization” about having aphantasia while reading about aphantasia. (Sam’s newsletter is great; I like to browse it ahead of my actual issue sometimes just to see if “that piece everyone is raving about” actually passes muster.)

TikToks:

• The delight I feel watching animals “walk” in time to a beat makes me realize I’m no better than your average citizen of a fascist country that at least puts on decent parades. Oh wait…

• The importance of borders, design-wise

• JFK as a DJ deepfake…sadly I don’t hate it

• The ESPN TikTok account does a perfect job of highlighting super random yet compelling feats of achievement such as: “Winning the contest where you have to guess where the decisive beat falls in Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’”

• If The 1975 went country…

How good are you at spotting lies on social media? How many times a day do you wonder if that thing someone posted is true, or if that video is AI? On the Question Everything podcast, journalist Brian Reed (S-Town, This American Life) investigates forces inciting lies, and sets out to fix the internet. He knows exactly where to start.