Never Meta Face I Didn't Book
Off the Record finally has a website so here’s Andrew Fedorov on newsletter writers burning out from the grueling pace of two posts a week.
[Long beat. Uncomfortably long. Direct, unblinking eye contact. And… turn to CAM 2:]
But it’s true that writing a newsletter can be exhausting. It’s Tabs Friday and we’ve had a busy couple weeks, so what I have for you today is:
✨ A Bunch of Links, with No Particular Theme or Structure 💫
“Isn’t that just what Tabs is every day,” you ask? That’s interesting but no one asked for your opinion.
Mark Zuckerberg and his dead black eyes put viewers through a grueling and entirely fictional presentation of stuff you’d be excited about if you were a billionaire who just read “Ready Player One.” Facebook will now be a subsidiary of Meta, a company name no one will ever use, and Choire somehow had a post about it up before the announcement was even finished, writing that “Facebook does not allow nudity on its platforms and so it’s unclear how people will have weird sex in the metaverse.”
The Today Show boldly reached back to a movie so old it can legally drink to bring us the recipe for Kronk’s Spinach Puffs.
“Writers do reveal things they don't realize they're showing us, or even know they know, in their writing.” In Harper’s Bazaar, Molly Fisk wrote about the short story that her uncle John Updike wrote about her dead father, and there is a hell of a swerve in the middle of it.
E.J. Dickson: “An Instagram-Famous Piglet Just Came Out as an Anti-Vaxxer.”
A reader who understandably wishes to remain anonymous sent me an example of corporate cringe that might be worse than anything in yesterday’s Tabs. Here is the 2015 Gannett Executive Team with “Everything is Awesome.”
“IIRC, this was unveiled in the same meeting as the name of the new broadcast company that was spinning off from the newspaper company… in which the letters T-E-G-N-A spun out of the word GANNETT to form the new logo,” writes my source. Media, what a business! Speaking of which: G/O Media just deleted all the images from pre-2019 posts on “11 websites, including the former Gawker Media properties Gizmodo, Jalopnik, Deadspin, The A.V. Club, The Onion, and Jezebel,” reports Gawker’s Tarpley Hitt. RIP Mr. Autumn Man, murdered by Jim Spanfeller.
Celebs Are At It: Apparently Brian Cox talked some shit in his new book. “[Johnny Depp] is, is so overblown, so overrated.” He’s right and he should say it. Timothée Chalamet had an Xbox controller modding YouTube channel when he was 15, which Vice brought in OSINT experts from Bellingcat to laboriously prove before getting savagely front-run by Chalamet himself.
Some Millennials are suddenly uncool and the Times is on it.
The Longform podcast has an episode with Ben Smith which is interesting if you’re a giant nerd. He declines to say why he hasn’t divested his BuzzFeed options yet, oddly suggesting that’s a question for the Times to answer.
Kiwi Korner: It looks very likely that the New Zealand Bird of the Year will be a bat. “Actually, when you look at the number one and number two rankings, it’s not winning by a little. It’s winning by quite a lot.” Ha ha ha, suck it birds.
Today’s Song: Beat Happening, “Indian Summer”
~ French tabs with molasses, croquet and Baked Alaskas ~
Today in Tabs is brought to you today almost entirely by stuff people posted in the subscriber Discord. Listen if other ‘sletterers are allowed to get burned out by two emails a week, I get a casual Thursday once in a while right? Never work harder than you absolutely must, my friends. Subscriber open thread tomorrow! Cash me in the metaverse.