apps won't make you friends :(

On the rise of friendship apps and the state of meeting people and one literary trend that has to go.

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Harris Won Debate. Undecided Voters Not Sure.
What undecided voters thought
Some undecided voters not convinced
Who won debate? We asked swing-state voters.
All these stories are so bad and I am tired of them, because these people are always like “idk lol 😊” It’s very “his silly rabbit.” The last one (from Washington Post) is good though. Also, if you are an undecided American voter, reply to this email because I want to talk to you (less about who you are voting for and more to understand indecision) (and, honestly, if you consider yourself generally indecisive) (also — sorry, not to harp — but this is what every one of these interviews sound like and I want to verify that).

Harris' debate bump: $47m raised in 24 hours
This made me do a double take.

Will Taylor’s Endorsement Affect the Election?
I don’t actually care about the Taylor endorsement, but I do wonder what the impact will be. 400K people did go to Vote.org!!

Trump ‘crypto platform’ launches next week
Trump Media’s Stock Plunges After Debate
Things are looking good in Trump world! (But also: he ain’t doing that bad — unfortunately — as he was centimeters ahead of Kamala in the polls, pre-debate.)

More bomb threats hit Springfield
One echo of the debate is unfolding as, um, hate in Springfield after Trump said the “eating our dogs” thing. Bomb threats have been happening and — allegedly — the KKK is flyering.

OpenAI releases its first model with 'reasoning'
Keeping an eye on this.

Google AI To Help Decide Whether Unemployed Get Benefits
What could go wrong? Surely nothing!

Apple, Google Lose Multibillion Fight With EU
Tech regulations? In this economy?? We stan.

"report on EU competitiveness doesn't mince words”
EU competitiveness: Looking ahead
I have not read the full report but the linked recap says it all and, living in Europe and looking for work, you can feel it: the opportunities are quite slim and the pay is not-great.

Elon on pace to become world’s first trillionaire
This should be illegal. But, regardless: no amount of money won’t make him not look like a sack of flour that was just dropped on the floor.

Photos show devastation from wildfires in CA
Trying not to stress out about the California fires.

Kamala Harris's Patriotic Spin on Climate Action
A key ally in climate change? People over 60
Thinking about this instead, RE: the fire.

“Are you guys talking about Drag Race?” the boys at the table next to us asked. We were indeed talking about Drag Race, lamenting about how bad this year’s All Stars was but that this year’s regular season and all its many talented characters (Plane Jane! Nymphia! Sapphira! Mirage! Xunami!) was a return to form. Our tables turned toward each other and we got into a sharing of favorite queens and seasons which led to our talking about where we were all from which had us finishing our meals and wondering what we were all doing afterwards, which took us to drinks and talking until an hour I hadn’t been awake for in months.

This felt so normal, that it’s possible to meet people without doing anything other than asking a question or saying hello. This is also something that I — like many of you — struggle with, kneecapped by a mixture of lifelong introverted shyness and an inability to speak up for myself: in my mind, I can turn to someone whose outfit I like and give a compliment or turn to the person next to me at the bar and ask them about what they’re drinking. In my mind, I can do that, I can be brave enough to say a few words that will last only seconds in my life. In reality, I do not, operating better via cold emails to people who I want to talk to versus being able to do so “out in the wild.” This is my toxic trait, achilles heel, mundane stupidity, etc., etc., etc.

And I know it’s yours too. It’s the world’s! Our generation! While much has been said about the end of dating and the failure of apps, an obvious and surprising trend has emerged of app-based efforts to help you make friends. Bumble BFF, Timeleft, and Geneva are some of the bigger examples that are getting press which are happening in tandem with the run club and climbing gymification of friendships. These are crashing into lesser efforts — & The Table, DISCONNECT, Matchbox — and the supposed use of spaces like Strava and Letterboxd to serve as community sites, as the tables with which we ask each other about Drag Race. Don’t want to talk? Try Silent Book Club or Offline Club. “There are just so many,” a woman I met with at a Creative Lunch Club lunch said, listing many of the aforementioned apps, most of which I had heard about from previous Creative Lunch Club meetings. In fact, one or two of these persons were developing apps and concepts that intended to connect people with people. It’s an idea that’s in the water.

In theory, this is beautiful. Using the great connector of the internet to connect! How fabulous? But like these apps did for dating, they are doing for friendship by preying on our techno laziness: further divorcing each other and or confusing organic acts of communication into business-ified gestures that turn friendship into networking and vice versa, while disabling you from doing the work of bettering yourself in the name of connection. Creative Lunch Club is a good example, which I’ve participated in for the past few months and find myself leaving wondering…why? Everyone is nice, all the time well spent, but each entry into this series is a means for people to get together and talk about their creative work — but the majority of the time is spent talking about how we’re not meeting people, how we want to meet people, that we are people who are empty and are clinking ourselves against each other with nothing in return. Planned fun is only so fun, it seems. “The same coping mechanisms that you developed that once kept you safe at one point in time are now outdated and actually causing you more harm than good,” Self Experimenting’s viral TikTok professed, reading this situation so clearly.

The “why” in this may be because — like dating, like working out — we’re in a world where everything has been optimized so that we can continue to work for someone else, to monetize every second of our lives. Instead of turning to each other (For free!!), we use the master’s tools to reinforce the master’s house, hoping that the same stupid tricks that did not work in other aspects of our life (dating, networking) will yield full friendships as rich as those that we made in school, in our hometowns, at our church, in our imagination. It is possible that these apps will work and our lives will be made fuller, just as anything is possible with technology. But the bigger picture is that sold disconnection and forced friendships are still points of sale, are still requiring you to work through and apply a filter to normal human functions. What Juicero was for juice, we are doing for relationships. No, I don’t want AI to automate my life. I want to have a fucking life. I want tech and AI and whatever tool to do my job so I can write more and meet people and build community and volunteer for my community, so I can talk to more people at restaurants about Drag Race, to feel their light on my face as I give them mine.

A Crisis for American Venomous-Snake Owners
Best, wildest drama of the week.

Climate change prompted scientists to reinvent chocolate
Who wants to try “climate proof” chocolate made from oats and sunflower? Looks right but…taste??

"my SS25 show"
“Wall Street NYFW show”
“Chavarria is presenting something special”
Streets are saying Willy Chavarria is the new Ralph Lauren and — You know what? — yes. I am so tempted to do a deep dive piece but am going to skip. We also need to talk about Tory Burch.

'Goonies' reportedly returning for sequel
We are at the bottom of the barrel. How is this just happening now versus ten years ago?

Kate Winslet: 'Not F—ing Brave’
She said of not wearing makeup and putting your body on camera. A queen is a queen, but this will somehow reinforce the Bravery™ factory.

Sabrina Carpenter | 2024 VMAs
Love Sabrina but this performance is flooded with fans screaming the words to the point that they eclipse her. This illustrates 1.) that MTV is so far flopped that their “subversion” now is having a live audience that dwarfs artists and 2.) that this feels so much like a Christian youth group praise and worship moment. Also, Katy  winning the “Most Iconic VMA Performance” over Madonna or Madonna is a very Viacom “Our award shows are pre-picked and rigged!” sellout moment that the audience sees through. What’s the point of this anymore? See also: Taylor’s win and the pop culture zombieism, the latter of which dovetails into the aesthetic essay from two weeks ago. RIP to my MTV.

Disney-obsessed couple lose lawsuit
"darkest thing i read"
The “Disney Adults Go Bankrupt” story sounds too wild to be true but, yes, it is true. I think this is the point where friends or family should step in and go, “You have a problem.”

”Finding Peace with Celebrity Number 6”
Biggest Reddit news in a while was that the long fabled “Celebrity Number 6” — an unknown “celebrity” who was featured in a collage of celebrities that Redditors were hunting down for years — has been identified. They’re not famous either!

"They can't do the trend."
"I don't have enough wrinkles."
Best dose of reality of the week was beauty influencers trying to do the Beetlejuice Lip trend only for it to “not work” because their fillers disallow wrinkles in the lips.

"Cannot believe this piece of glass"
"Entire beauty country"
“I hate Spirit Halloween.”
“I kinda wanna go home”
If we had the time, we would dissect the psychology of why people speaking in silly, slant versions of English are having a moment on TikTok.

📧👤📑 how to pitch 📑👤📧
Paid subscribers got a deep dive in how to pitch a story to an editor!!

⚠️ Spoilers for the books The Vulnerables, Housemates, and Blue Ruin. Read at your own risk ⚠️

I felt it first in Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables. As og readers may know, Nunez is an ongoing spiritual north star, a writer of a certain generation who transcends age, becoming accessible to any reader. I had been salivating for this book, which I didn’t get to dig into until the beginning of this year. And…it was disappointing. Her recent string of books have been intimate affairs, dramas between two people (or two “things”), that turn life inside out in the face of its end. But The Vulnerables, despite its title, felt a bit on the nose, as it took place largely in a New York City apartment as an older woman writer and a teenage boy student attempted to live together in early 2020 — spring 2020, to be exact. This older woman we follow struggled with writing in the book, given this situation. But, unlike her characters, Nunez did make her writing work.

This feeling crept up again earlier in the summer with Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemates, one of the more unexpected queer reads of the year. About making art and making yourself, you follow photographer Bernie become new housemates with a group of queer persons, most notably writer Leah. What transpires is a funny and tender investigation of collaboration, of finding your point of view while finding each other. It didn’t make me cry but it did bring a tear to the eye, the sort that tickles the cheek, making you look off into the air, toward the sun, to realize that the day rises for us all. This mostly comes from an on-and-off framing device, which is one of the better presenting of stories in recent years: the story is “from” an older queer woman, one who is seeking similar things in her life. It isn’t until Bernie and Leah share their art outdoors, masked, in 2020 that they connect. This is where I rolled my eyes, despite Copley Eisenberg’s landing the idea with minimal topical lingering.

Blue Ruin was another very anticipated book for me, as Kunzru has a knack for nailing a specific moment in time, to write with of the contemporary in direct ways that somehow feel light (despite the fucked up twists his narratives often take). I planned to buy this book, to read with my eyes, but opted not to because of one line in the description that tugged up my shoulders and drew up the corner of my upper lip: “having survived Covid.” But I did read it, finding that — like Housemates — it was a delicious exploration of what it means to make art and to be an artist, as the book follows a man named Jay and his becoming and unbecoming as an artist. It’s through the 2020s that the book’s story is presented and climaxes, thanks to the spirited literary meet-cute that came with masked delivery drivers and the unmasked rich.

You know what’s happening here, as it’s the same feeling that came when Carrie Bradshaw says “Remember when we legally had to stand six feet apart?” within the first few seconds of the Sex & The City reboot, which is the same feeling — but worse — as the on-the-nose productions of “Zoom shows” like Connecting… and Social Distance. This feeling is an ultimate cringe, where history is reflected but distorted, sanitized and or sanctified in ways that feel both forced and unfun in the face of something that “just happened” and was so deeply awful — despite this situation continually being not-normal for many. It turns a time of deep, relevant struggle and pain into devices, as proof that one was able to look out from their tower of safety and mine material. (It’s to be noted that the most egregious is Michael Cunningham’s Day, a book so tweefully Covid that I had to give it back to the library after a few chapters. An absolutely miserable craft project dramatization of the time.)

What’s worse is that, unlike the rushed “Zoom shows,” these are works whose elegance is bungled and sullied by time, by trying to prey on a nostalgia for a specific, bad time versus for the people we were before this Big Bang. This is because, unlike the “Zoom shows,” the literary machine takes years to crank, meaning that we’re only now starting to realize that so many writers were cranking out “masterpieces” while we were all crying at our desks between meetings. “This body of work radiates a desire to be useful,” Katy Waldman observed in The New Yorker. “The result is a class of novels about the need for memory which display symptoms of denial themselves.” This is true but they fail to do their job as considered, imaginative stories, particularly The Vulnerables (and Day) which use Covid as a setting versus a moment to move through, briefly or not. Everyone lost something “during the pandemic,” be it our personalities and sense of fun or our inability to do hard things (as is often expressed through fashion). This literary trend takes that for granted.

These all get at a cross that I have been carrying for years about modern writing: don’t write advertising into your work, which is to say writers and artists should strive for timeless versus the time-marked. This is particularly egregious in myriad works that involve repeated mentioning of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and Target and La Croix and Diet Coke, where the noise and images of brands have the dizzying effect of anti-escapism, reminding you of this stupid world we’re in and the weapons that are deployed against our freedom. If you’re searching for examples of books that effectively and effortlessly side-step these traps of today, Patricia Lockwood’s — THE ICON!!! — No One Is Talking About This handles tech and extremely online-ness in one of the most elegant and beautiful manners while Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience situates a book in place and present while enabling the imagination, for readers to feel that she’s writing about the past, present, and future at the same time, while speaking about where you live and where the rest of the world lives. These times are hard, as we all know, and yet the people upstairs feel like we want to constantly look into mirrors of the past instead of windows toward the future. Perhaps the worst of these works are over but, somehow, I feel like this is going to be a stain on our lives, progressively cuteifying this time so that we forget that these plot points actually have a death count.

"Can’t believe I’m watching the debate"
“what your coworker shows you”
“Nobody:”
"is she allowed to summon"
“what is going on man”
“Baby, you can’t”
“i just wore”
"always a banger"
Best debate memes and posts.

“oh she ate him UP”
“Your smile, specifically.”
“creepy smile”
“had to”
The first one is the original, which is neither here nor there, but the Charlie Kirk Smile™ is maybe the basis of that horror movie Smile. Very horrifying! The memes are rightfully horrible/fantastic.

“Y’all peep how Palestinians”
Every time I see this TikTok, I have to watch.

"oh Humina! Humina!"
“How it feels”
These two have the same energy. (Also: I am those aliens.)

"alright man"
“Hawk Tuah or”
“amazing film”
Please send me every Hawk Tuah meme.

"showing my gen x parents skibidi"
Should I watch the whole series? And write about it? Please — Someone! — give me permission to do this!!

"You have invented a new genre"
“Orange monkey pointing” is one of the best memes of the year and, as this TikTok (And the account’s bio!!) shows, all the videos stem from someone who doesn’t work at the zoo repeatedly going to the zoo with props. Impressive commitment.

"every time i remember this tweet"
Benihana up in this bitch, fr.

"Saturn devouring"
I think about the original painting a lot so of course I love this.

“hot chips wit tequila”
Will be thinking about “take a screenshot” for weeks.

"The Mall video caused a divorce"
I need to write a story about how when I got my ears pierced in LA a very young Halsey was filming a digital show in the same studio and was such a brat to the fans who won a contest to get a tattoo of her name. It was wild.

And, finally, how it feels to read all of these links in one sitting.

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