The Today in Tabs Struggle Index

Girl I can't feel my face.

🟢 General Dynamics: The world’s fifth largest weapons manufacturer looks to gain fresh cultural cachet as “presenting sponsor” of this Fall’s Kennedy Center opera “Grounded,” reports Connor Echols in a Responsible Statecraft post which I double checked enough to be pretty sure it’s not a joke. “Grounded” explores the challenges faced by one former “hot shot F-16 fighter pilot” to balance her life as a new mother with her work killing Afghan civilians by drone.

🔻 Ali Alexander: The “Stop the Steal” organizer and Trumpworld degenerate got dimed out by fellow MAGA perv Milo Yiannopoulos for trying to get “jack-off material” from a fifteen year old Future Fascist of America. Literally everyone involved in this story is the worst, including the victim who “has since become a relatively high-profile member of [Nick] Fuentes’s racist “America First” movement, going by the name ‘Smiley,’” reports The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer.

🔻 David Choe: Delia may have “started watching Beef, the new top Netflix show, last week with zero context aside from an Asianly duty To Support,” but context has caught up with the show’s featured graffiti artist and edgelord David Choe who is now using DMCA takedown notices to try to limit the spread of “a podcast from 2014 in which he seems to explicitly describe sexually assaulting a massage therapist.” TW on all of this, it’s pretty repellent.

🟢 Eliud Kipchoge: My dude ran the Berlin Marathon last year in 2 hours 1 minute 9 seconds.¹ Do you have any idea how fast that is? Scott Cacciola put it this way:

Well, you could head to your neighborhood track and try to run a 400-meter loop, which is roughly equivalent to a quarter-mile, in about 69 seconds — and run an additional 104 laps at that pace. Or you could attempt to run a 4:37 mile, then do another 25 of them.

A 4:37 mile pace is so fast that most people attempting to run it at all, even for a moment on a treadmill, simply fall down and get spit out the back, including Olympic distance runner Mo Farah.

🔻 F. Murray Abraham: Turns out the “White Lotus” actor wasn’t really acting.

🟢 Millennials: They’re actually doing just fine and should probably stop complaining so much, according to Gen Xer and “scholar of generations” Jean M. Twenge in an excerpt of her new book for The Atlantic. There’s a sentence with enough red flags to safely land a CH-47.

🔻 Dianne Feinstein: The sundowning California Senator may or may not be aware that by preventing Senate Democrats from confirming any judges she is currently torching her legacy as a pioneering woman in government in exactly the same way that Ruth Bader Ginsburg did. Marisa Kabas writes:

As more and more Democrats call for the 89-year-old’s resignation, her defenders have spoken up. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who’s the former Speaker of the House, says sexism may be the real culprit. Pelosi’s statement doesn’t acknowledge the fact that Feinstein’s absence is blocking what could be crucial wins for feminism.

It seems like if DiFi (or whoever is writing her statements) opts not to resign, there’s simply nothing anyone can do about it, and Dems don’t get to appoint any more judges. Will that be good for women? Who can say.

Not not🔻, but also 🟢 maybe? Frank Ocean: The beloved but frustrating crooner and Chipotle refusenik played his first live show in more than six years at Coachella Sunday, kind of. He started an hour late after melting his set, allegedly hurting his ankle, and cancelling the live stream. Variety described the performance as “messy, loose, and a near-disaster that will likely go down as one of the most divisive in Coachella history,” although Ocean did confirm there isn’t not a new album (but not yet). For all that mess, his opener “Novacane” rips, as does “White Ferrari.”

🟢 but on second thought maybe a little🔻 Willy Staley: Opens his readable and interesting NY Times Magazine feature “What Was Twitter, Anyway?” with an amusing anecdote about the time he accidentally did a sexism online and everyone got mad, but then goes another eight thousand words without quoting a single woman except Maureen Dowd once, secondhand. It’s a good story but I can’t help but wonder if it could have been better.

🟢 The Soviet Space Program: From “The Painting: A Weird Space Story” by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, an illustrated anecdote about reading cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev’s diary of 211 days aboard the Salyut-7 space station:

Click through for a speculative stick figure diagram.

🟢 Just Stop Oil: Did a protest at the World Snooker Championship. Absolutely hilarious.

🟢 Food Disgust: Thanks to Butt Praxis this food disgust test is going around. I’m a sick little freak who will eat anything.

🔻 Andi Owen: Video leaked of the office furniture company CEO telling her staff to “leave pity city” and stop thinking about little things like whether they’re going to get paid for their work, and focus instead on what matters: the $26 million she needs them to earn for her. Then she got up and did a little dance to REM’s “Losing My Religion.”

🟢 Luis: The Best Croissant in Paris.

Today’s Classic Tab™: This is from 2017 but Tabs was on a brief five year hiatus at the time so it’s new to me. Alissa Nutting’s Grub Street diet is the most advanced case of Hot Girl Eating I have ever seen:

If I’m really bored, sometimes my brain does this thing where it tries to trick itself into feeling high by having me eat things that people would normally only eat when they’re high. I make several Jack’s frozen pepperoni pizzas and cut up thin slices, so I can try a lot of weird toppings. It brings me pleasure to place circular things atop the pieces of pepperoni, so on one I do dill-hamburger chips (sour), and another I top with unscrewed Oreo cookies (sweet). Then I do crumbled Doritos on one, and Goldfish crackers and sriracha hot sauce on another (savory).

Today’s Song: The Used, “People Are Vomit”

🟢 SotD Intern Sam Gavin.

This was gonna be a little format gag for the first couple items but then it just kept going. If you want me to keep going, please become a paid subscriber. If you’re already a paid subscriber, please share Tabs with friends, enemies, and strangers. If you already share Tabs with everyone, just go enjoy your life I guess? You’ve done enough! Thanks!

1. 🔻 Me: I originally misread the Times story to be saying Kipchoge ran this time in Boston on Monday. I was too busy goggling at the treadmill videos. We regret the error. Kipchoge actually finished a not-that-impressive (for him) sixth in Boston.