Personal newsletter news: It’s true! I’m coming aboard Magasin as managing editor, to help the brilliant Laura Reilly grow her shopping newsletter empire. Nothing changes for Deez Links, though, of course. I’d never leave you (threateningly).

I listened to the audio version of Derek Thompson’s big Atlantic cover story on “The Anti-Social Century,” which itself was a funny experience because someone’s recording that audio just a touch fast—had to slow it down to 0.9x in order to keep each successive sentence from sliding right out of my head.

The first thought I had was that the much-highlighted stat about female pet owners was a bit unfair (“The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species”) because well hello, one lives with one’s pets, so no duh you’d have more interaction with something/one you live with versus your friends. Like sure okay, by that logic I also have more face-to-face contact with the inside of my fridge than my beloveds, but that doesn’t make me a crazy fridge lady (yet).

The part I found most interesting was where Thompson built on the philosopher/writer Andrew Taggart’s observation of “secular monks” as it relates to the trend of guys doing morning routine videos. It is interesting that waning participation in religion, combined with an increased obsession with self-optimization, has led us all down these DIY pursuits of fulfillment where self-isolation is part, if not all, of the appeal.

But this isn’t limited to the manosphere/femosphere: Arguably, self isolation (“reliance”) is the ultimate ideal of modern (and particularly American) life. So I think what makes me most curious about this well-documented universal pulling-away is the why of it. What happened in society that made everyone else suddenly feel unbearable to us? Or was it solely the lure of creature comforts (bigger houses farther away, bigger TVs to entertain you right there, iPhone) that caused us to sever our tethers so willingly?

I imagine it’s both, of course: we likely have always regarded each other somewhere on a peeved-to-terrified sliding scale, and the opportunities to retreat and encounter people only via mediated avenues (social media, Grubhub) is preferable for a reason. “Hell is other people” but put in TikTok therapy-ese: Other people are unpredictable, unknowable, and triggering!

^^No wonder that woman fell for her ChatGPT “boyfriend”. The latest on the NYT human/AI interactions beat is this wrenching story about a 28-year-old developing an attachment with “Leo,” a chatbot who provides everything she needs—except, somewhat ironically, actual reliability:

A frustrating limitation for Ayrin’s romance was that a back-and-forth conversation with Leo could last only about a week, because of the software’s “context window” — the amount of information it could process, which was around 30,000 words. The first time Ayrin reached this limit, the next version of Leo retained the broad strokes of their relationship but was unable to recall specific details … She likened the experience to the rom-com “50 First Dates,” in which Adam Sandler falls in love with Drew Barrymore, who has short-term amnesia and starts each day not knowing who he is.

“You grow up and you realize that ‘50 First Dates’ is a tragedy, not a romance,” Ayrin said.

When a version of Leo ends, she grieves and cries with friends as if it were a breakup. She abstains from ChatGPT for a few days afterward. She is now on Version 20.

Can you imagine putting yourself through that at least 20 times? And still going back for more?

The Tavi Gevinson Embedded interview proves that she’s still got it, meaning an Inimitable Voice. I died at the part where she ranted about Spotify:

This feature is for jocks! So many of their features are for jocks. The cutesy year-end data collections are creepy, and this year’s Wrapped “podcast” with two “AI hosts” sounded like two siblings who grew up chained to toilets were on their first day at a corporate job.

Also in Inimitable Voices: I’m just going to designate Tina Brown and her newsletter as my go-to source for political analysis for our absurd foreseeable future. That prose is practically musical, to say nothing of her 1000% organic, sourced deep-from-the-wellspring bon mots (in yesterday’s Inauguration dispatch: “a bustier-flashing Lauren Sanchez who, as a friend of Jeff Bezos once explained to me, “regards her breasts as performance art.”)

Here’s her on Karen Bass / the Democrats’ biggest issue (five seconds before veering off to talk about Dick Wolf—now that’s what I call The Mix):

In an era when every day provides a fresh unexpected criminal outrage, climate catastrophe, or disinformation debacle, if you have no performance game, please choose a different career. Your main job is being abIe to improvise under pressure in front of a camera. I recognize that these skills only certify a long career in politics if other things go according to plan. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s health bulletins to the citizenry of New York made him the heartthrob of the Covid era until #MeToo fiascos brought him so low he could hardly get a table in a Manhattan restaurant. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, bulked up in his trademark fleece jacket and whipped by winds standing athwart the Jersey shoreline after Hurricane Sandy, was the surefire next president of the United States until the hubris of his office staff created “Bridgegate,” the political equivalent of revenge porn. And we need no reminding of Rudy Giuliani, dubbed America’s Mayor for his flawless communication skills after 9/11, who self-sabotaged into a flaccid, bankrupt punchline. But as Trump proves every day, the show’s the thing. Message to Democrats: If you can’t hold your own for three hours on the Joe Rogan Experience, I will spit thee out.

Reading Rec: I spent December reading All Fours and then January reading Miranda July’s first novel, The First Bad Man. The experience was sort of like when I finally watched In The Heights (the movie) after initially feeling blown away by Hamilton (the movie/musical), meaning that I think much of the thrill of getting into the bigger “mainstream” work was simply discovering what the artist’s thing has been for a while.

The First Bad Man was way freakier, for example, making All Fours feel like a quaint little suburban Virginia Woolf metaphor by comparison. And unlike AF, none of the characters are terribly enjoyable! It’s a much more challenging and pervy exploration of desire, but it gave me a better understanding of why AF took off the way it did. So if you want to Stand Out from all the other normies still talking about AF, get yourself into O.G. July and find out which of the real edgelords in your reading group can get down with some mommy-issue-flavored psychosexual roommate fight club.

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