Tara McMullin

I didn’t know that all the therapy and journaling and meditation and “work on myself” I did would eventually start to pay off, and that after a lifetime of worrying that people might not like me, I would learn to love and trust myself enough that it would finally stop mattering so much what strangers thought and I could FREAKING RELAX.

10

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The slots that books that connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to the top of the list.

That we can write the prompt or query is not an emblem of our freedom but of our surrender. We give up on what we think the words mean and let the machine process them in alien and opaque ways.

I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.

so we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter. 11 It’s a technology that will never become obsolete.