pop crave? more like FLOP CRAVE 🤭

On the landscape of audiences and fans salivating for failures and revisiting our great media illiteracy issues.

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German far right hails 'historic' election victory
Not again. Meanwhile, Macron is like, “Wait, I can do that”

Roadblocks over whether war can end before Biden leaves
Tens of thousands take part in anti-government protests
The situation in Israel “took a turn” (Yet again.) as Netanyahu is dragging his feet on a ceasefire.

Trump lobs same insults in Penn town hall
Trump Media shares erase 2024 gains
Trump Bombs His Speech Debuting Elon’s Commission
Boring! Loser! Also simping for the wannabe chad vote via apoint Elon is v flop.

Georgia Suspect’s Family Faced Eviction, Turmoil
This is an awful framing on my behalf but “what stands out about this shooting” (Ew.) is that so much of the story is about how a poor family life and the very American pressing against the wall drove people mad. It’s interesting that this shooting’s narrative has been framed around “that,” despite this being the story of many a violent situation.

Woman in France Testifies Against Husband
One of the most brutal reads of the week, which explains the case of Gisèle Pelicot, whose husband (Of 50 years!!) drugged her for a decade, allowing other men to rape her. It reads like a movie which, unfortunately, reveals how life is so much more cruel than fiction.

Strava, Letterboxd Surge as Users Crave Social Refuge
Do we actually believe this? I have my doubts but I feel like niche social networks are getting more specific with better communication tools — and people are finally seeing in such specific spaces.

Appeals Court Upholds Decision Against Internet Archive
Huge loss for public access to information and, generally, for the logging of present media. A dumb decision that I can see evolving in the favor of the Archive!

Princeton, Yale See Dip in Asian-American Freshmen
Circling back on the end of affirmative action. As someone said, you played yourself.

Super Typhoon Yagi kills four in Vietnam
Looks very bad, and also comes shortly after Japan’s big typhoon.

In CA Town, Worsening Landslides Force Power Shutoffs
This is bad and a lot of people are complaining about Newsom doing nothing — but this comment on the post says it best: “You live in a shifting or high risk natural habitat...If you choose to live there you can pay for expensive insurance and have community drives etc, but the burden shouldn’t fall on the general public.”

Phoenix Marks 100 Straight Days of 100-Degree Temps
We wanted global warming — and we got global warming!!

Did cave people watch each other get hurt for fun? Did they enjoy seeing someone take a spectacular spill? Or accidentally maim themself? I’m starting to think this may have been the case and, while literally craving blood is not a thing, there is scientific evidence that human violence is evolutionary, becoming more pronounced with the rise of states and chiefdoms that have class and caste systems. Violence is bad, obviously, but our little ape brains crave the spectacle of human harm, to enact superficial violences hard enough to fall public figures. You could call it hysterical schadenfreude, the German idea of getting pleasure from another’s pain. But again: why do we do this? How did we end up here? “Because humans are constantly comparing themselves with one another, status lies at the heart of schadenfreude,” Matt Davis observed for Big Think in 2019. “We enjoy it when something bad happens to high-status people; taking others down a peg can make us feel like we ourselves have gone up a peg.” See also: the 2022/2023 trend of public humiliation.

This summer has been marked by blood is in the water, which has everyone salivating. Not literally but culturally, as we grip hammers and nails and search for persons to put on crosses. Trends about the failure of artists is a small symptom but larger examples include the (pre-Cleotrapa drama) giddy flop parade around Ice Spice, salivating at Chappell Roan stepping in it, the gleeful peeing on Katy Perry’s album roll out, the ongoing public execution of Jennifer Lopez, the “Where is she?” of Dua Lipa, and, to lesser degrees, persons like Shawn Mendes, Omar Apollo, Tate McRae, and Normani getting dunked on as turns of phrases like “i wish i could support her in a way that doesn’t involve listening to her music” emerge. There’s also the “female rappers run shit but make no money” thing and “the pop girls are in their flop era” thing, not to mention Drake’s riches of embarrassments and Nicki’s performances of questionability. These are all on the mood board of our downfall crave.

(Then there’s the [rightful] driving out of TikTok creators like Bee Better — who has been this month’s most canceled after an impressively bad take on Kamala’s campaign that outed him as being subsidized by Trump [A reader pointed out that this is false. I, too, am not immune to media illiteracy 😭] — and MoschinoDorito, who has taken the white Bushwick liberal identity politic to a breaking point. Then there are the Alix Earles and the Brooke Schofields and the Cody Kos, who legitimately did bad things and should be shooed away.)

This top-of-the-pops-to-flop pipeline is the definition of celebrity culture but it has turned social media into a soup of fickle, bored, insecure, without-a-life fans who are constantly refreshing Pop Crave and Pop Base, praying for a flop as they evolve cancel culture and our great political volatility into an hourly act. As more fancy themselves critics while real criticism dissolves, the gestures of Perez Hiltons and Diet Pradas have been adopted by an aimless jury of stans demanding respectability, that public figures be perfect, thoughtless, sexless, mute beings. This is where the pre-Kamala (and current) movement by the left to not vote comes from: cancel political participation because the results aren’t binary. Cancel Biden because he’s boring! You can say the same of the “early days” of the Israel-Gaza conflict, which was reflected on (Western) digital timelines as part reality show, video game, and social game that turned geopolitics one dimensional, where wars end because enough people downvote it. “I want it that way,” they say. “But why isn’t it that way?” they ask. “Well, it’s not that way — so fuck you,” they conclude. If you — a public figure, a co-worker, a friend, a family member, a benign stranger — act in any way that goes against the defined saintly behavior of the audience, you are cast as a sinner. As James Factora wrote for Them on this contemporary relationship to public figures like Chappell Roan, “putting people on pedestals…is its own form of dehumanization.” Paired with the decay of interpersonal relationships and digital life flattening discourse, everything becomes binary, like or dislike, +1 or a -1 — never neutral. This isn’t new, of course, but the pop cultural body keeps a score and, sheesh, it’s a villainous scorekeeper.

The Dua Lipas and Jennifer Lopezes will be fine as they have business infrastructures behind them — but all the little Joeys who have been working on their debut novel? They’re fucked as they are subject to this same evil grading system: our craving for downfalls is a product of the media (via “business”) constantly shitting new this and new that down our throats, so that the artists and art are only as valuable as their popularity and by how much they crank out shit, as if a person could become Temu. Again: this is the name of fame, but the value system is increasingly about empty calorie and empty headed consumption. Vulture’s 2024’s Comedians You Should Know, the XXL Freshman Class, GQ Recommends, the Wired Gear section, Eater Heatmaps: you’re in or you’re out, bought or sold, in heaven or hell. We will reach a point where this behavior becomes too exhausting as this too is another symptom of the “too much stuff”-ness phenomena. This is why The Atlantic’s story on the people who quit dating is getting attention: “quitting dating” is a canary in the coal mine, an expression of how exhausting normal human acts like dating have become because they’ve been flattened by apps and (consumerized) transitions versus being the genuine interactions that they’ve been since the dawn of people.

“Confidence and kindness go hand-in-hand…insecurity can breed a lot of ugliness in people,” one creator said recently, capturing this phenomena. “Social media has turned all conflict into morality plays,” another creator added, digging deeper into this. But this TikTok by @aamirazh was the best summation of what’s happening —

If we can appreciate these great works of art for what went into them, not just what they are, if we can free ourselves from the aesthetics and abstract tastes of capitalism, suddenly we see the effort in everything. The plumbing in our house, the musicians on the street, even our text message conversations: everyone, every day, is pouring themselves into the world around them.

So much of our creativity and our labor and our humanity goes overlooked, in favor of our taking tiny little knives to chip away at people big and small, dehumanization as the hot new love language in the villa. All this because some apes hundreds of thousands of years ago found pleasure in the bringing down of another.

Cellphone bans in schools amid mental health crisis
Schools Have a Tech Problem
France tests smartphone ban in 200 schools
Hot new trend is banning cell phones from school. Embrace tradition, I guess!

Ina Garten and the Age of Abundance
Did you all know Ina Garten has a memoir coming out in October? I feel like we all missed this when it was announced earlier this year!! Thankfully, she's starting to do press. We are blessed!

Sade: New Song as Part of Trans Awareness Compilation
NO ONE ELSE CAN TOUCH THIS QUEEN!!!!

"This was the response #JoaquinPhoenix gave"
”#LadyGaga had to learn how to sing correctly”
Did everyone see how Joaquin responded to the Todd Haynes scandal? And that Lady Gaga said “This isn’t a musical!” and then defined a musical? Then the movie scored a 51 on Metacritic? Crying. (Also, it’s my duty to report that every gay man of a certain type pinned Joaquin’s look to their mood board.) (Myself included.)

Linkin Park Selects Emily Armstrong as New Singer
This is…inspired! Look, I’m not into Linkin Park but watching this woke up a sleeper cell within me, something that anyone who went to high school in the 2000s will feel.

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
Your must read of (last) week, by sci-fi genius Ted Chiang. Spoiler: he doesn’t like AI 🤭 “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way”: absolute bangers.

Paris mayor’s plan to keep Olympic rings on Eiffel Tower
Love you, Anne Hidalgo, but this is cheesy. Take that shit down! The holiday is over!!

English Teacher Win Mercury Prize
With ‘English Teacher,’ Brian Jordan Alvarez Leaps
“English teachers” are in rn.

Woman used amber nugget worth $1m as doorstop
It’s difficult seeing someone else live your dream.

say NO to buying more clothes 🚫🛍️🫡
Paid readers got an explainer on customizing and keeping your clothes, which seems to very much be on trend as

Blackbird Spyplane

did not one but two stories this week on these subjects.

Have you seen the latest cover of The New Yorker? A Black woman sits on a bench at a playground, a white toddler in her lap. She holds up a phone to another woman, a brown woman holding a pink scooter, as a little white child with a pink helmet runs away from her. The brown woman smiles at the Black woman, at the photo of a Black boy in a cap and gown on the phone’s screen. “The LAYERS to this cover,” one person Tweeted. “Can someone explain the layers?” someone replied to the Tweet. “I don’t think people are really understanding this cover,” a viral Tweet said, which goes on to add further reading like Disposable Domestics and Alex Tizon’s “My Family’s Slave.” “Can someone explain please,” someone replied. “I don’t think people are understanding this cover…a picture is worth a thousand words,” a person said on TikTok. “If you get it, can you explain it?” someone asked in the comments.

The cover is good, as it exposes a phenomena that you find in almost every city, amidst economies of haves and have nots. It calls to mind the Atlanta episode “Trini 2 De Bone” and exhumed The New Yorker‘s own struggles with a lack of diversity. The image is deep, but only to the ankles — maybe. This is to say: it is profound, but it’s not complicated or difficult to “understand,” as either art or an idea. It wears its critique and message quite obviously, at the center of the image, on the phone screen held to viewers and viewed. And yet, somehow, there was a great debate about “the meaning,” the layers, the intention, perhaps because too many children are online or because a lot of people don’t live in cities: I don’t know. But even the title and general description — ”A Mother’s Work” by R. Kikuo Johnson — is a give, which the publication shared in myriad ways. But what could it mean? If you get it, can you explain it to me?

This is an example of the deep maelstrom of cultural illiteracy that we find ourselves in. Just like not knowing how to treat a celebrity, there is a great inability to understand things, understand images, movies, shows, music, and so much more in the world of art and culture. Intellectual laziness that mimics the emptiness of aesthetic gestures, this is perhaps the fault of poor education or undeveloped taste or a general lack of experience: I don’t know. What I — and you — know is that there are increasing taps on the shoulders to ask profoundly basic questions, to solve a problem that requires little labor, words that should run through the mind before being spoken aloud as to not out you as having just fallen out of a coconut tree. An image of a happy husband and wife that got 65K+ likes despite the wife having four fingers, the repeated imagining that any cute straight man must be a little gay, a fan-made Star Wars clip where Darth Maul and Darth Vader mumble at each other, industry plant conspiracies: these are recent examples of our great (cultural, media) illiteracy. The finest example is the coalescing of thought into something the right perfected years ago: conspiracy theories. “More than one-third of President Biden’s supporters believed the assassination attempt may have been staged,” the New York Times wrote this week. “Left-wing misinformation, in contrast, tends to spread more loosely and organically among a varied collection of users and organizations, researchers have found.” Being head-empty on main is fun until you have difficulty understanding the real world without hand holding, when you can’t do any thinking yourself.

Like the way we treat celebrities, this is a matter of experience: as downfall crave can be solved by spending more time with real people, the solution for media illiteracy is doing more intellectual labor. Read a newspaper story instead of just watching the TikTok — then think for yourself, forming your own conclusion. As Insider noted in late 2023, a recent YouGov survey found audiences on TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat pay less attention to journalists on these platforms in favor of celebrities and influencers — which means we’re ingesting more information without fact-checking, playing news telephone instead of making a call ourself. This is a very 2020s storyline, as this newsletter first started chronicling media illiteracy in late 2022 which rolled into 2023 stories about how kids are mirroring the lack of a reading culture in adults, which is colliding with the present inundation and incoming wave of AI confusions. This all gets lumped into and complicated by something YR Media covered earlier this year: to read deeply, to cite sources, to do the work of understanding is now seen as being unnecessarily deep, or forcing people to “think hard” against their will. This reaction to thought shows just how exhausted our culture is, that independent thinking can no longer be pursued because we’re too tired. Instead people pine for explanations, which is met with rightful encouragement to figure it out oneself — which is then called out as gatekeeping. “What about me? Can you explain this?” people ask again and again, eyes closed, ears plugged, swinging a sword to stab whoever comes to help them.

But is thinking actually out? I don’t think so — but laziness is definitely in, as “Show me to me Rachel” has become the intellectual mode du jour. Read more, develop taste, get uncomfortable with the truth and with the world: that’s the medicine we need to take. Take a note from queer people, who can understand something like the hairline differences between the types of butches and studs: live a little, experience a lot, discover nuance. People have given up on searching for answers and understanding beyond the present, to figure out that there, their, and they’re do mean different things, that pink bows on things are the same as mustaches on things. It takes thinking, it takes going outside of yourself to look at the world objectively, to do the little labors of understanding. Just do something.

"Olympics pistol shooter Kim Yeji "
NEED to listen to Aphex Twin with her.

"my aunt and her roommate"
I would love for them to be my lesbian aunts.

“about to walk past a hot dad”
Twist ending of the week.

"jockstraps are older than caesar salad"
It’s true: they’re 150 years old.

"tatted they/them art major with a septum ring"
Can someone set a calendar reminder to check in on Barron Trump at NYU?

“they need to go to jail”
Everyone look at this god awful Prada “AI” video.

"happy this artist i love is getting recognition"
My thoughts exactly on Charli “The C Stands For Capitalism” XCX as of late. I was very tempted to write an essay on how brat’s success has been tied to the selling out of a specific type of cool, but I already kinda did. Sad! (Also: see the first essay. I too am not immune to bloodlust.)

“fashion nova just does anything”
Took me a sec to figure out what was wrong with this Beyoncé costume.

“fart like”
Love the new Le Sserafim song. (But legitimately: it’s very good, even if the video is bad.)

“3 dates with a 44 year old”
Are 44 year old men okay?

"my favourite ever Onion article"
Somehow this feels related to the second essay.

“WTF!?”
Mr. Beast taking backshots again.

"????????"
Anyone reading this in The Academy? I have a submission for Best Picture 2024.

And, finally, how I hope Tuesday’s presidential debate goes.

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