Media & Culture

Some More Insight Into The Gen Z Coolness Crisis

There are four sort of low-level generational discourses circulating the web right now that I want to try and synthesize into a larger idea. There’s the weird backlash around the word “demure” going viral after a trans TikToker popularized it. There are millennials panicking that Gen Z thinks we all ... See more

Lana, Taylor and anti-institutional realignment

Recently, I watched the Grammys and learned more about Lana Del Rey. I had no idea she was friendly with Taylor Swift, or that she and Taylor shared the same producer. These women have been pop stars for over a decade: Taylor the establishment good girl; Lana, the anti-establishment shock and awe “othe... See more

I know what kind of work it takes to complete a book manuscript, and I want to do that work, but to arrive at the end of it and learn that what I should have been doing instead is flooding the zone on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? That is fundamentally demoralizing.

The problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage

The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play . It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on idea... See more

The thing that makes “influencer” such an attractive option in those surveys is precisely this idea that it names the outcome rather than the actual work. We don’t actually have a good word for what it means to do that work. Partly this is because there are big differences between platforms (and within platforms, for that matter), and there is no g... See more

By the time the Voice had assumed its current semi-undead form, following a 2020 resurrection, the creeping irrelevance of any bounded and singular context—including that of a town, much less “the biggest media town in America”—had become the kind of thing a person might fail to notice while engaged in the ruthless business of noticing everything e... See more