Tabs Should Be More Like Prison

Today in Mean New Yorker, and shocking news about the Nord Stream pipeline.

If you’ve heard of U. Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard it’s probably either because of her smug picket line crossing in 2019, or because the day after last Halloween she dropped this banger of a Bean Dad/Ruthkanda crossover tweet:

Yesterday with the help of Rachel Aviv and The New Yorker she threw all of our candy in the garbage and instead left us with a 7500 word profile of her ex-husband + grad student struggling-second-marriage-throuple.

[Grad student turned second husband / object of professional study] Arnold said that, the first time Agnes’s sons came to his apartment, “I remember watching them play on the furniture and suddenly realizing: this is the point of furniture.”

Yes, these people are idiots, of a particular type you mostly find in academia, but the profile itself is a masterpiece which Callard will probably read with enormous satisfaction because she doesn’t seem capable of grasping that everything she does in it is pure horny middle-aged cliché.

Why does a book so concerned with the looming issues of our day, and possessed of such an urgent authorial voice, feel like such a time sink? …Perhaps her hope is to rush past the fact that so many of her observations are commonplaces… every sentence turtled against the arrows of social critique…

Odell’s signal question is to ask whose time is being devalued. I began to respond in the margins, faintly at first, and then with despair. Whose time is being devalued? Mine, I wrote.

Yikes. LARB liked it, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“College Should Be More Like Prison” writes Brooke Allen in the WSJ and you’d think she would have to do something to recontextualize such a deliberately provocative headline but nope! She’s just a big prison fan. After finally managing to get himself promoted to full-time cancel culture grifter, Scott Dilbert launched the gritty reboot of his namesake comic strip: Dilbert With a Hard R. And in today’s tedious but obligatory Elon Musk news, Musk got himself in a Twitter fight with the best person in Iceland, and lost so badly even the Dogecoin guy was like “hey man, that’s not cool?”

Derek Thompson reports that statistically, the new work at home class is boning. Graydon Carter announced a “beauty and wellness” vertical for Air Mail called “Look.” “Air Femail” was right there, but ok. Sara Fischer and Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian also co-bylined what qualifies as an epic Axios #longread on Semafor “partnering with a think tank in China that is known to have close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.” It’s a real fall from grace for the Smiths dot news since their starry-eyed early days of five months ago, funding their scrappy media startup with FTX money. ChatGPT creates boring content: restaurant edition. I am once again begging everyone to please stop doing this awful article. And the decaying skin of Slack, now fully inhabited by the alien bug Salesforce and staggering around like Vincent D'Onofrio in “Men In Black” with gobbets falling off it, thinks you might want to have ChatGPT talk to your colleagues for you.

Today in Threads:

Sick! Bug! Facts!

Other Options Considered:

For No Particular Reason: The first episode of “3-2-1 Contact” started with a segment about recording its iconic theme song.

Muppet News Flash: Adam Entous, Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman triple-bylined a momentous NY Times report alleging that according to unnamed U.S. officials, at least some elements of the American intelligence community are nearing the conclusion that someone was responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines last fall. I wouldn’t have thought the Times could make Sy Hersh’s Substack look sober and informative, but they managed it.

Toot by sluttymayo@jorts.horse: “i met my wife during the debate about the "in utah" row for the related article template box about mutli level marketing companies on wikipedia”

Today’s Song: 100 gecs, “Hollywood Baby”

If I die, don’t look for me in the sunsets. I’ll be in the tabs.

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