“Apple Has a New Daddy” is the weirdly horny headline that CNET decided to go with for Corinne Reichert’s otherwise straightforward story on John Temu replacing Tim Apple as CEO of America’s last computer hardware company. Tim Apple is best remembered for the gaudy gold brick he presented to Apple’s old daddy, Donald Trump, last summer. New daddy John Temu was recently extruded from the bioplasma fabrication facility located deep underground beneath the focal point of Apple’s Cupertino Qi Accelerator Compound. As the first executive to be publicly unveiled from the new iExec 3 line of business leadership drones, “very little is known about his personal life, his hobbies, or his views,” reports Andrew Griffin in The Independent.
“And there is a similar mystery about what he thinks of other parts of Apple’s business, especially its more controversial policy positions, from the company’s crucial but contentious relationships with the political leadership of China and the US, for instance, to less high-profile but still vital parts of the business such as its relationships with developers.”
His technical specs are also still under wraps for now, although rumor has it that Marques Brownlee is currently testing an identical model for an upcoming review. Outgoing CEO Tim Apple plans to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, legendary Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, and die.
At the Paris bar La Perle in 2011, John Galliano—then head of design at Christian Dior—turned to a fellow diner and very deliberately said: “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.” I know he said this because it was widely reported at the time, because he was found guilty of saying it by a French court, and because there is a high quality video of him saying it which you can watch right now.
Of course this sort of behavior made Galliano unemployable in the straitlaced world of high fashioha ha ha ha ha damn I almost got through that with a straight face. No, in fact, as Galliano biographer Dana Thomas wrote in the New York Times:
“Two years after his firing, he completed a highly publicized residency at Oscar de la Renta in New York, reportedly with [Anna] Wintour’s support. One year later, he was appointed creative director of Maison Martin Margiela, owned by the Italian entrepreneur Renzo Rosso, another longtime Wintour ally. In 2024, he was the subject of the Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald’s well-regarded documentary ‘High & Low: John Galliano,’ produced in association with Condé Nast Entertainment, the film and television division of Vogue’s publisher.”
The occasion for this guessay was Galliano gal Anna Wintour’s announcement that the next Met Gala would be the launch party for a John Galliano career retrospective exhibit, which was also kind of a cultural heat check for how ok we all are with Hitler fans these days.
John Galliano: the Johnny Depp of Salvador Dalis. (photo from 2010 by AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)
I guess it’s good news that the verdict is: “we’re still not entirely ok with Hitler fans, actually.” Yesterday Galliano announced that he “has decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” presumably to spare his bestie Anna from the embarrassment of having to cancel it herself. Galliano also referred to his “fifteen years of sobriety,” which is a reminder of his recurring claim that drug and alcohol addiction is what made him love Hitler. Don’t tell my Mom but personally I’ve been drunk once or twice in my life, and I always find it makes me more of whatever I am at the moment—sad, happy, maudlin, whatever. Being drunk has never made me love Hitler, but perhaps they have different wines in France.
“…who apparently led a weekslong campaign that included several high-dollar donors threatening the Met to withdraw their cash… One of those donors, Alice Tisch, who happens to be NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch's aunt, said that the Galliano exhibition ‘bespeaks a failure of governance.’"
Yikes! That’s how fancy people say they hate you. Meanwhile Anna Wintour still squats like an aging dragon atop the rapidly decomposing corpus of Condé Nast’s media empire, from which perch she presided over last year’s juiceless and embarrassing Lauren Sánchez Bezos Met Gala and Prom Dress Exhibition. John Galliano will return to his job at Zara, where he is reportedly in trouble for missing shifts without lining up a replacement.
Today in Stuns: Addison Rae stuns in new photo. Zendaya stuns in David Faustino merch. Mole People stun in Manhattan. Former Barclay’s CEO Jes Staley stuns in suspiciously specific denial. Gal Godot stuns in Bitcoin film A.I. controversy.
Kiwi Korner: In the New Yorker this week Laura Preston profiled the enigmatic New Zealand artist Susan Te Kahurangi King.
“King’s career has had a curious shape. She made her first important works in the nineteen-fifties, when she was very young. During the next thirty-four years, she drew prolifically; then, sometime around her fortieth birthday, she stopped. Her family recalls that she spent the next sixteen years at home watching television. In 2008, she started to draw again. It was only in this second phase of art-making that the world noticed what she was up to. Artists and curators saw pictures of her work on Facebook, and in 2009 Peter Fay, a collector in Sydney, arranged for her to have a show. It was King’s first solo exhibition, and her first time on an airplane. She was fifty-eight years old.”
Today in Hate Reads: Hamilton Nolan has some good advice: “You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits.” I appreciate that he carved out a true hater’s exemption, writing that “If you are a genuine hate read connoisseur, I respect it.” Thank you. I concur with his advice though, and also with the Kate Lindsay corollary that “You are what you hate read.” One must choose carefully of whoms’t one becomes a committed hater. I know people who got into hating Rod Dreher as a goof and they sure regret it now.
Speaking of committed haters, New York Times critic Parul Sehgal is not a fan of Rachel Cusk’s Portman à clef, “The Life of M.” And Alex Gendler put on a Noam Chomsky hating clinic in Strange Matters, starting with the puzzling question of how famous leftist Noam Chomsky ended up best pals with New York financier Jeffrey Epstein and going on to eviscerate Chomsky’s entire career and legacy.
“Thus, when confronted with concrete evidence that he has either gotten an analysis horribly wrong or lent his imprimatur to those who did, Chomsky immediately shifts into defense lawyer mode with all the pedantic testiness of a right-libertarian drawing distinctions between hebephelia and ephebephilia…
Similarly, Chomsky marshals an impressive level of deliberate obtuseness and feigned outrage to assert that he cannot possibly fathom how writing a laudatory foreword to a book could in any way imply endorsement of its contents or author, while insisting in the same breath that he has not read the work in question, that it cannot possibly contain anything abhorrent (but if it did it wouldn’t matter), and that he is in any case not qualified to evaluate its accuracy or integrity but is merely defending the freedom of speech by ensuring that unpopular or marginalized perspectives are heard (without addressing why he chose this particular perspective to defend).”
Just one more line, so I don’t quote the whole thing:
“We may have manufactured consent once upon a time, but America has long since transitioned to a post-manufacturing economy.”
It’s good stuff.
And Finally: “Dolly, Josephine, And Me” by Peter Coviello in Defector is also very good, and the opposite of a hate read.
Today’s Song: David “D” Lil Faustino (TV’s Bud Bundy), “I Told Ya”
Heathen Disco’s Doug Mosurock described this song as “Beat isn’t bad (‘92 NYC),” but Faustino “may be the worst rapper of his time or any other.” Two for two.
That is me out of your inbox until the week of September 21st. Keep your hater energy at whatever level you feel comfortable maintaining and we will reconvene at the end of the month to see what all else has gone wrong. And if you enjoy Tabs, tell someone about it. There’s no way for me to identify who will like this weird media product and get it in front of them, but you know which of your friends would vibe with it, right? Tell them! And thanks for reading.
