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- The Chatterton Classes
So many things that should be delightful end up exhausting, simply because they didn’t know when to stop.
For example Thomas Chatterton Williams would have delighted everyone, however unwittingly, if he had stopped writing before he ever started. We should take a moment to appreciate all the terrible but delightfully unknown writers who spared us their vapid opinions by instead becoming used car dealers or dying young. No such luck vis-à-vis T. Chatty, who is required to exist in public discourse because someone had to crack open the “liberal defender of fascism” niche so that the New York Times could live in it like a malignant hermit crab. The fact that Tom “Big Chats” Willie is the best they could find to do it says all you need to know about the value of the project.
Tommy Chatsworth has a new book out which Andrea Long Chu roasted today in Vulture with a review that would have been more delightful if a larger proportion of it consisted of paragraphs like:
Now Williams has written a book about the long hot summer of 2020. He has often imagined himself an heir of Baldwin; here, he could not sound more like Buckley. Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse offers a roughly chronological account of the past two decades, from the 2008 election to the protests for Gaza. But editorial indulgence has resulted in such a sludge of footnotes and block quotes that the eye must often dismount and continue on foot. The reader will find here no argument she could not have inferred from the titles of a dozen identical books on wokeness; nothing has been added but sentences.
It’s unusually sprawling and unfocused for Chu, but in her defense it must be incredibly boring to take shots at a target so devoid of qualities in the first place. Despite its own upper-level institutional fellowship with the alleged “thoughts” of Thos. “Chattering Willie” Williamston, The Times’ review also ended up being a roast, in which everything Justin Driver wrote about the book was overshadowed by the one full sentence he quoted from it:
For non-whites, even though the mixed-race population has become the fastest-growing segment of the American demos and, in real terms, a disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number of unarmed Black civilians were killed by police annually (typically between 15 and 25 per year from a population exceeding 40 million, according to The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database) — and indeed other quality-of-life markers have been equalizing for significant numbers of Black people since the civil rights movement — the death of [Trayvon] Martin followed by [Michael] Brown (regardless of the specific contingencies of that case), and a high-profile slate of videotaped police and vigilante killings that converged with the proliferation of camera-equipped smartphones and the pervasiveness of social media, thwarted any self-congratulatory sense of the inevitability of social progress still alive in the first half of Obama’s second administration.
Truly one of prose’s all time worst stylists. But every drop of ink shed over Chattering William was already wasted after this Saeed Jones post:
Everyone could have just stopped right there.
“Gen Z has brought us the 6pm dinner – and I am not ready for it.” Stupid, yes, but it’s also very short, demonstrating that even bad things can be a little delightful by ending promptly. Mike Isaac and Ian C. Bates made a quiz: “Tech Billboards Are All Over San Francisco. Can You Decode Them?” Just five questions! The perfect amount of time and effort to invest in an online quiz. “'Link in Bio' Ruined All Our Brains: A unified theory on the bad state of everything” wrote Chris Gayomali in his newsletter. An ominous description, but the piece is barely 700 words and pretty much just says “hey Instagram is, like, really bad for us.”
But the smart people behind IG and TikTok have refined social media into something powerfully addictive, especially when the world feels extra doomy. This shit is fentanyl, and I suspect I’m hardly the only person who feels this way currently.
Go off king, no further proof needed. And Mike Drucker says the new “Naked Gun” movie is good. It’s only 85 minutes long? Say no more. Literally.
The apotheosis of things that should be delightful but instead end up being exhausting is awards. Did you know the Webby Awards still exist, and that there are 1021 different Webby Award categories now? Fortunately this isn’t the case for the Tiny Awards, which are both awards for the tiny and tiny for awards. Public voting for the 2025 Tiny Awards is now open, and while I know that sounds tedious, what it actually means is: here are eleven delightful little non-commercial websites for you to play with.
I can’t do you any better than that today, so I’ll take my own advice.
Today’s Song: Sidney Gish, “Friday Night Placebo”
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