I am a young, young person who is trying very hard
"In the same way that the internet finished normalizing nerd culture and organized both self-deprecation and self-importance into near genres of their own (what is “humblebrag,” in the doing and in the charge of it, but pathos?), the internet has made such explicit self-representation a central tenet of social media. Selfies are the first and final wall between a vision of one’s self and its actualization online. Even if they’re shitty—and most selfies are shitty, in concept and execution, with their bad lighting and worse ideas—selfies are an abrupt and indisputable realization, if not idealization, of what and how their subjects want to be seen."

— Kate Carraway for Vice on #selfies

"Beyoncé is exactly what we know, and it is more remarkable every time she just goes and does it, as if to always obscure the fact that she had to come up with herself first, before we knew her."

— Sasha Frere-Jones on Beyonce as the Alpha-Female Pop Star

» The Peak Time for Everything

nevver:

8 a.m.   - Write upbeat tweets.    
9 a.m.   - Have a tough talk.    
10 a.m. - Do cognitive work.    
2 p.m.   - Take a nap.    
4 p.m.   - Do physical work.    
5 p.m.   - Workout.    
9 p.m.   - Think creatively.    

more

» It’s hard to care about the world at large and its potential when you don’t have to, when there is no demand on the people who determine the future to be interested in it; it’s hard to feel or want to feel naive when the social emphasis is skeptical, ironic (STILL!), and turned inward, to the point where there is no—no!—common vision of the future. 

This piece is so on point that it’s scary. VICE magazine works for me just as often as it doesn’t, but pieces like this—that sort of just draw the box of an idea and ask you to color in the thoughts and points and perspectives—always resonate. 

Reading into 9/11

Today marks the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, which is slightly less significant than than the tenth anniversary, but still significant in a “holy-shit-it’s-been-thismany-years” kind of way—which is often the only way I really grapple with 9/11 as an event. It’s so clear to me just how much of my youth, my life, my political consciousness, has been shaped by September 11: it often seems that every shade of culture I choose to color my life with has either been radically reformed by or is a direct response to that singular event. 

As a longform junkie, it should come as no surprise that I think it’s narrative non-ficiton that has best captured the meaning and weight of that day. And although so much of the current political landscape has been largely defined by 9/11, the most haunting, all-consuming bits exist on a far smaller scale. Crumbled pieces of paper; emotionally distant husbands; the nameless star of a photograph. Those stories are the ones worth telling; the ethics worth questioning. Those stories are the ones worth grappling with. 

One of the most recent pieces circulating involves a note dropped from the 84th floor of the second tower, and the way it alters a family’s entire narrative when it finally reaches them ten years later. Another highlights the intersection of 9/11 and money, and who exactly is profiting most from the disaster.

Scott Raab has been chronicling the rebuilding process of the World Trade Center since plans went underway in 2005, all of which are worth reading. But it’s his seventh piece, published on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, that really captures the tangible metaphor of the noise, the second-starts and the grief that comes with the opening of the memorial.

Possibly my favorite of the bunch is the New York Times Sunday Magazine feature that untangles the complex affairs of two 9/11 widows: one whose husband was lost in the towers, and the other whose husband might as well have been.

And perhaps the most famous and fascinating of any 9/11 piece published anywhere: Tom Junod’s feature for Esquire, “The Falling Man,” which dissects and discusses the subjective and contextual limitiations of what’s been called “perhaps the most powerful image of despair at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”

Also: for more of Jason E. Powell’s briliant 9/11 remembrance photography (above), click here.

» "If, though, whiteness and expressions of whiteness meant something more definitive…and ceased to encapsulate everything that has some money and dances badly and is irritated by the World Cup, it would make for a realer, better way of contending with what things mean, and why."

—Li’l Thinks, Kate Carraway

"Facebook is the perennial threat that no one can quite explain or defeat. And an Instagram fanatic is the Harriet Tubman of social-media users, as both are equally obsessed with the underground."

— My column on the Instagram/Facebook merge, and the meaning of a simple app and it’s $1 billion profit. 

"

There are other magazines that subordinate the writer’s individual voice to an institutional voice—the New Yorker, for starters—but it’s strange for a rock magazine to do so, and even the New Yorker occasionally lets writers sound like themselves.

Pitchfork couldn’t develop intelligence on the individual level because the site’s success depended largely on its function as a kind of opinion barometer: a steady, reliable, unsurprising accretion of taste judgments.

"

—

n+1’s amazing feature by Richard Beck, “5.4”, taking down Pitchfork, and citing how its most problematic tendencies are emblematic of the current state of indie rock.

The feature’s tone reminds of that Adbuster’s piece by Douglas Haddow, about Hipsters being the dead end of western civilization (I think it was called “Hipsters: The Dead End of Western Civilization”). It has that same sarcastically dry tone, where it ends up sounding more like a dense oral history. Also, mad rare to get an entire n+1 feature online. A damn treat!

"I don’t remember a lot of specifics about watching Titanic in theaters in 1997, but I was 15 years old, which means my two biggest concerns were 1) locating romance, and 2) not dying in a nautical catastrophe. So I think we can safely assume that I fucking loved that movie."

— Jezebel’s brilliant Titanic 3D retrospective. I literally can’t right now.

I have been looking for this 1994 New Yorker article for fucking ever, and I cannot believe I finally happened to stumble upon it at 4:00am. Jay McInerney on Chloë Sevigny, downtown’s “IT GIRL” of the 1990s.
be thorough with the soap.
"There is nothing more contagious than a bad idea. A bad idea spreads in a second; a good idea takes centuries."

— Fran Lebowitz on the global obsession with money

"After I wrote ‘The Falling Man’ in 2003, I got a call from a friend of mine, who said, ‘Well, now you have a book.’ I asked him what he meant, and he told me that anyone I wanted to write about could be written about for a book called ‘The Falling Man’, because, in his words, ‘We’re all falling men now.’"

— Tom Junod writing about 9/11, his 2003 piece for Esquire, “The Falling Man”, and the debate over Mad Men’s semi-controversial teaser poster. 

» EN: So for you, is the computer more exciting than going to a new place?// TL: Definitely. I’ve never felt 1/10 as excited looking at a mountain as I do checking my email.

an interview w: Tao Lin for BOOM magazine’s BOOMBLOG.

» 'ADRIEN BRODY' BY MARIE CALLOWAY

Finally got around to reading this after all of the internet hullabaloo it stirred over the last week. Has a lot of worthy analysis re: revised notions of feminism and what anonymity and identity mean online.