Issue 4: Flowers, like people, cannot grow alone
September is the worst month so let's try to enjoy that a little bit.
In my 20s I wrote a pretty bad play about SNL that drama kids at my old high school ended up admirably doing and I think about it sometimes and when I think about it I usually think “shit, wish I could have that one back.” I think that whenever there is news of SNL doing something like this Trump sketch or hiring a comedian with a history of making racist and homophobic “jokes.”
Elle Reeve’s Vice News Tonight report offers a look into how 8chan became the worst place on the internet and breeds online terrorists. Reeves, who has deeply reported on incels and white nationalism for Vice, tells us how strong feedback loops led to a cult-like subculture where extremism is the norm and how digital echo chambers, fear of diversity, and mean-spirited memes erupt into real-life hate crimes and displays of power.
“And now that you know why I'm leavin’,” a playlist.
A masked gay cowboy named Orville Peck is on the cover of British GQ Style, please see how great it is for yourself.
Zion putting on a show for everyone in Harlem.
Eva Victor as a millennial woman obsessed with her gun is really good and funny and sad. Shannon Keating’s “Against nihilism” is really good and funny and sad.
oh boy, the failure.
Sometime earlier this year, the writer Walter Mosley quit working on a television show when he got a call from HR for using the n-word in a writing session. He was the only black writer in the room, telling a story about a cop’s racial profiling, that made another writer feel uncomfortable (or guilty) enough to narc on him for talking about his experience. It’s a strange and infuriating censorship that encourages a silent type of suffering and reinforces a lack of diversity in storytelling. But, when it comes to television, the suffering is the good shit. Do you think the rooms for Atlanta, Insecure, or Black Lady Sketch show censor their writers from sharing their personal experiences?
A lot of people on Twitter trashed on this white woman in braids dancing/appropriating black culture. Not as many people on Twitter also trashed Aaron Sorkins’ terrible writing.
Natalie Beach’s essay about her friendship with Caroline Calloway starts off like a JD Salinger short story for the social media age.
At the Minetta Tavern, I told her that her fantasy of going out with our professor was dangerous and predictable. “It’s like a movie,” I said between bites of lettuce wraps. “This is Act I. Soon he’ll invite you over to his bachelor pad, fuck you, and in five months you’ll read all about it in The New Yorker.”
“Go on,” she said. “What happens to me next?”
For the next two hours, I ad-libbed the movie of her life, and she bought me pesto minestrone soup and pork belly.
The first time The New Yorker published Jonathan Franzen was July 5, 1995. It was a short story titled “The Failure,” which would later become a chapter in The Corrections, the novel that would make Jonathan Franzen Jonathan Franzen. The most recent time The New Yorker published Franzen, it was a commentary about climate change that opened with a quote by Franz Kafka: “There is infinite hope, only not for us.”
Climate scientists were pissed. Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Columbia University, wrote “Shut Up, Franzen”, in which she entertains the possibility of doom, but also leaves us with this:
But I am a scientist, which means I believe in miracles. I live on one. We are improbable life on a perfect planet. No other place in the Universe has nooks or perfect mountaintops or small and beautiful gardens. A flower in a garden is an exquisite thing, rooted in soil formed from old rocks broken by weather. It breathes in sunlight and carbon dioxide and conjures its food as if by magic. For the flower to exist, a confluence of extraordinary things must happen. It needs land and air and light and water, all in the right proportion, and all at the right time. Pick it, isolate it, and watch it wither. Flowers, like people, cannot grow alone.
header is Momoyogusa = Flowers of a Hundred Generations, by Sekka Kamisaka. footer graphic by styler.thecreator