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

» "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

They are not so chic, these kids.

“The sixties, unlike previous decades, seemed full of teenage money. No recession, no sense of danger. The young could run free, indulge themselves in whatever treats they wished. But now there is shortage once more, just as there was in the fifties. Attrition, continual pressure. So the new generation [of the seventies] takes few risks. It goes through high school, obedient; graduates, looks for a job, saves and plans. Endures. And once a week, on Saturday night, its one great moment of release, it explodes.”


Finally getting around to reading Nik Cohn’s iconic 1976 cover story for New York Magazine, “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” on the growing disco scene in the outer-boroughs of New York.

Pretty much encompasses all my favorite longform journo angles into one: cultural thinkpieces, character studies, musings on a movement, etc.

"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.

» "The Inside Story of the Decline and Fall of Saturday Night Live."

New York Magazine, March 13, 1995