Wrong Answers Only

“Surrendering personal happiness to remain in an unfulfilling marriage:” is it a good idea, or nah? In yesterday’s Bad Piece, New York Times columnist and “no gays”-type Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren managed to answer this extremely easy question wrong, just like her sect did with the question of whether gays are people who deserve rights. And sure, “Fire Island” is a ground-breaking gay Asian romcom but Hanna Rosin still found a bad take on it:

Previously in Hanna Rosin: Children’s author Jan Berenstain is dead? “Good riddance!” Washington Post reporter with a genuinely unhinged Wikipedia bio Dave Weigel has been suspended without pay for a month for a bad retweet that was called out by Felicia Sonmez and immediately triggered high forum drama. It seems possible that Post leadership has not managed to fully regain Sonmez’s trust yet, kermit sipping tea dot jpg.

Keep ‘em Gessen 

The Great Spring ‘22 Gould/Gessen apartment hunt/book tour continues, first with Dwight Garner’s dissociated review of Raising Raffi for the Times. Is the book any good? Did Garner like it? I have no idea, it just seems to remind him of quotes by other writers, to no particular purpose. And in The Drift, Piper French spends a dozen paragraphs wishing Raising Raffi was a much more boring book about Ethics in Parenting Essays before finally getting into what ends up being a pretty sharp reading of the book as it actually is. Skip to the paragraph that starts “Raising Raffi’s essays progress forward in time…” and you won’t miss anything.

Let’s Learn Things

Jay Boller attended the media preview of an architecturally unsettling new Taco Bell restaurant that squats menacingly above Minnesota motorists and extrudes Crunchwraps™ Supreme® with chilling, antiseptic precision, and learned fourteen things including: “Retro Pneumatic Tubes Were Not Considered,” and “Before the Food Is Sent on Its Journey, It’s Housed In a Fashion that Resembles the Dino Egg Incubators from Jurassic Park.” Sabrina Imbler introduced their new Defector beat, “Creaturefector” (a name that I feel there is still time to workshop?) with a throat-clearing and mission-defining post from which I learned about the “deadly eel-pulling riot of 1886.” And you may already know what “Escape (the Piña Colada Song)” is about, but I still enjoyed riding along as Alex Dobrenko found out for the first time. Every generation must discover the truth for themselves.

“I could have the ApeCoin right now”

David Yaffe-Bellany reported on dominant NFT marketplace OpenSea, a cesspool of plagiarized art, overt scams, and easily-exploited bugs. Regrettably, the viewpoint character is Chris Chapman, “a former college basketball player” who now “runs a construction business in Texas” and whose ape jpeg, bought for “a few hundred dollars” sold for a mere $300,000 instead of the $1 million he desired.

My head says this is unfair, but my heart says: lol. Also Today in Crypto: “The First Blockchain Game Coming To The Epic Store Looks Like Shit.” And is there a 137 gigabyte archive of Telegram chats from crypto industry bigwigs “discussing rugpull projects, projects intended to scam the community and individuals… yield-farming projects… designed from the start to siphon funds from the majority of users” as well as “assassination, not once, not twice, but three times?” And if there is, will anyone in crypto care? We’ll find out in a couple weeks I guess.

And Finally: Eli Saslow spent a few days with Denver bus driver Suna Karabay on her route, the No. 15 bus line. The writing is gripping, the reporting is excellent, and all in all it’s a really good time if you enjoy feeling despair. Pairs well with: “I made a Realistic Lego Man and I'm Sorry.”

Today’s Song: Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill”

~ Tabs enough at last ~