Great Value Dimes Square

Everything is gwymbarrassing.

“13 YEARS OF PEGGING” is a bracing headline for a Monday morning, thank you to the New Ulm Minnesota Journal’s Clay Schuldt (who probably schuldn’t have). But while some pastimes sink deep inside us, others come and go more quickly: Wordle is down to just one third of its peak daily players, reports the BBC. In Maine’s near-mythical Aroostook county, where winter sometimes lasts well into the following fall, “Northern Maine Ice Busters volunteers carved through about 29 inches of Long Lake ice to create a gigantic ice disc that weighs more than 165,000 tons and measures 1,776 feet in diameter.” It’s a new record in huge holes, way to go Ice Busters. And Natalie Weiner pegged her Verge story on the shuffle button to a dubiously timely anecdote about Adele.

This weekend in criminal justice: Gwynnocent / Gwyndicted 

Jayson Greene’s “‘Blurred Lines:’ Harbinger of Doom” in Pitchfork is clinically flawless.

Now, 10 years since its March 2013 release, “Blurred Lines” is a poisonous time capsule. In many ways, all of them unfortunate, it could be considered the song of the 2010s. Pick any disheartening pop-cultural trend of the past decade and chances are it applies to “Blurred Lines”: The hollow outrage cycle in news, increasingly reliant on hot takes tossed out with superhuman speed, often without a speck of human logic? The predatory power dynamics of the entertainment industry, and American society’s ongoing dismissal of consent? The increasingly litigious pop landscape, in which lawyers and music publishers fight for scraps, and every pop song feels safely Xeroxed from the last one? Every decade gets the songs it needs and the songs it deserves. 

Every paragraph is that good, it’s actually kind of gross? Like yeah good article, we get it. Chill. Also gross: Li Goldstein tried Starbuck’s olive oil coffee. “Tasting this one indeed simulated what I imagined it’d be like to down a shot of olive oil and chase it with a shot of straight espresso. 0/10.” Mmm.

While you’re choking down your anti-labor greased coffee, why not read about the same old brand new Dimes Square scene’s grand opening/grand closing in “The Last Days of Beckett’s, a Smoky New York Literary Salon,” feat. publisher Barney Rosset’s son, Martin Amis’s daughter, Martin Amis’s daughter’s cousin, Welch’s Grape Juice’s daughter, Matthew Gasda, and so on. Drunken Canal may be over but Dimes Square will last as long as Times Styles needs it to. Styles B-Side: Snob Gyms.

Twitter Is Going Just Great: The formerly influential microblog turned its promised April 1st legacy blue check removal into a legacy / paid-account muddle, possibly because Twitter doesn’t have any employees left who can figure out how to un-verify accounts. The new blue check explanatory message seems to be doing its job by convincing verified accounts to remove their own blue check out of embarrassment. Today the web site is buggy and the logo has become a Doge, presumably to celebrate the racketeering lawsuit Elon Musk faces for pumping Dogecoin. Masterful jape, sir. Epic bacon. Paris Marx argues that “When Twitter goes, it needs to take Elon Musk with it.”

Today in Leopards Eating Faces: British man who tweeted that Brooklyn “felt more unsafe than afghanistan by a mile” taken captive by the Taliban. Larry Summers disturbed by child-mortality consequences of the forty years of fiscal policies he created.

The Ultimate B-Unit: Bloomberg built its own finance AI trained on a mix of public and proprietary “FinPILE” data. Research paper on Arxiv. They should wire it up to a Furby, because at this point why not.

Were You Feeling Happy Today? Let the LA Times’ Salvador Hernandez ruin that with the story of Cedar, a nine year old girl’s 4-H program goat that the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office “drove more than 500 miles across Northern California” to abduct and murder, in order to “teach this little girl a lesson.”

Today’s Song: cursetheknife, “Feeling Real”

Did you think it was gonna be ”Blurred Lines?” Ick. No, we’re only doing shoegaze bangers from now on, because my mental health is absolutely fine. You should subscribe, if you like Tabs, or just keep reading it and don’t subscribe, who am I to give you the hard sell. I mean you’re reading the penultimate line of the sign-off so maybe that means something? We could just be friends I guess.

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