Woo-ghazi Exposed

Open for good articles to read somewhere else.

There are a bunch of great articles today so I’m gonna mostly shut up and send you off to read those rather than waste your time with my nonsense.

Anti-vaccination flirtation, what’s your causation? Rachel Handler blew the lid off the Aaron Rodgers / Shailene Woodley “Agree to Disagree” conspiracy (aka Woo-ghazi) in a Vulture story that will, I promise, answer every question you have about what the hell any of those words mean and many questions you didn’t have until you started reading the story.

The better question, one that respects the feminist movement and appropriately disrespects the behavior of both parties, is this: What do they agree to disagree on, exactly? Where do Woodley’s political (and astrologically sensitive) beliefs begin and Rodgers’s unchecked viral load end?

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s All the Soft, Sad Freaks. Is there such a thing as a victory eulogy? If so, Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote one for Tumblr, the website that invented “the discourse” and “bled into everything” (#freebleeding1) but ultimately died of earnestness and anti-capitalism and, more proximately, an ill-considered porn ban.

Recently, I scrolled back through the archives of my college Tumblr account to see what kinds of things I’d been reposting. Hundreds of GIFs of famous hot people. A cake with Your life is a lie in pink frosting. A cartoon gravestone that says everything was boring and I didn’t care. A now-famous (in some circles) collage created by the writer Audrey Wollen, titled “GIRLS OWN THE VOID.” A T-shirt with the message a woman’s place is in the House and the Senate. A needlepoint that reads you’re just a boy and I have galaxies growing inside of me. (What?)

At least in the Soviet Union they had free health care. Two years later, it’s clear that the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of March 2020 was just the first sign that the whole capitalist industrial economy was about to take a shit on us. The February issue of The American Prospect is about how we broke the supply chain.

But here was the bargain: In exchange for funneling all this money upward, hollowing out the industrial base, ruining competitive markets, and worsening U.S. jobs, businesses would keep consumer prices low. And low prices have a definite psychological pull. That belief in getting more for less, of perceiving that you’ve beat the system, was enough to keep people reasonably satisfied. If you are stuck with low wages, you depend on low prices. As long as shelves were stocked, and America’s desires were covered with overseas goods, this radical reinvention of the supply chain kept us fulfilled. Until it didn’t.

Just a Regular Boy. In GQ P.E. Moskowitz wrote about Kris Wilka, a football playing, Discord chatting, car liking 14 year old boy in South Dakota who would be totally unremarkable except for one thing: he thinks Lana Del Rey has “overcome hardships.” Lol. He’s also trans but that probably doesn’t have anything to do with his take on LDR. Even in the face of deranged state legislators, some kids today are growing up transgender, happy, and supported, and we love to see it.

Yes, as I predicted, the New York Times bought Wordle but in my defense I thought I was joking. “Low seven figures” lol, lmao. Someone with a right-clicker mentality might notice that you could do a file→save as and play Wordle Classique for 2,087 more days off your own horrifically cluttered desktop, but I’m sure the Times very precisely worded reassurance that “the game would initially remain free to new and existing players” means you won’t need to. Anyway I’ll be over here playing Dordle with the cool kids.

The Spine Collector doesn’t know how to print to PDF. Alex Shephard tried to figure out why Filippo Bernardini stole all those unpublished manuscripts, in The New Republic, and didn’t really come up with a good answer but it’s reassuring to see someone else confirm that the motivation alleged by the FBI made zero sense.

Even though the FBI insisted in its statement that “publishers do all they can to protect … unpublished pieces because of their value,” anyone who has spent any time in proximity to the industry knows that this is absurd. Publishers are constantly sending unpublished works to reviewers, booksellers, and other industry figures; often shifting hundreds, or even thousands, of manuscripts in this fashion... “You don’t have to steal most of this stuff,” Larissa Kyzer, a translator who was targeted by the scammer, told me. “You literally couldn’t pay people to give you books fast enough” if you wanted them for any remotely professional reason.

Grace Lavery has had enough of Our Regrettable Platform, and Liz Spiers wonders “What Does ‘Trust in Media’ Even Mean?” Kiwi Korner: “When the Taliban offers you - a pregnant, unmarried woman - safe haven, you know your situation is messed up.” “There are DOZENS of us!” insist defiant Space Force Guardians. Recruiter who didn’t ”have the bandwidth to give lessons on salary negotiation” has plenty of bandwidth now. Spotify-exclusive Gimlet podcast “Science Vs.” producers Wendy Zukerman and Blythe Terrell “will no longer be making new Science Vs episodes, except those intended to counteract misinformation being spread on Spotify.” TayLo to WaPo. It’s been fifteen years since “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” shut down Boston. Kate McKean: “So You Want to Write a Short Story Collection” (lol, don’t). And men: stop doing this.

That’s it, that’s the tabs.

Today’s Song: Public Enemy, “Fight the Power”

~ most of my heroes don’t appear in no tabs ~

Last month I gave away over a thousand packs of stickers, so if you see “You Can Always Quit” on someone’s laptop, you can be sure they’re a “fellow traveler” iykwim. 😉 The last few envelopes are headed out the door soon (I ended up exactly three stickers short lmao) so if you didn’t get yours yet, stand by. If you didn’t subscribe in time, I don’t know what to tell you. Do it now and be ready for the next drop?

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