There’s a newly reliable source of shit-stirring in town:

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My humble contribution to the Lena Dunham press tour: for CULTURED magazine’s Cult 100 issue, I visited our favorite girl at her home in New York and had a lovely conversation about her new memoir, Famesick, and her overall oeuvre.

While reading Famesick ahead of our conversation, I found myself having a hugely intense reaction. It becomes unnervingly clear, in Dunham’s telling about her Girls years and what came after, that the kind of success that has made her career a kind of millennial gold standard also carried with it a deeply taxing burden on her health and her relationships, to say nothing of the public scrutiny. As a member of the cohort (confessional New York woman writer, amongst others) expected to aspire toward the Dunhamian template, I found her honesty about its costs almost a little too bracing. Later, I told a friend that the memoir did well to essentially cauterize any latent ambition one could have about wanting to work in Hollywood.

It’s an interesting time for Dunham to invite us to revisit those years with her, at a moment when millennial nostalgia practically dictates the cultural agenda, and also when so many aspects of her ambition are revealed to be startlingly prescient — Girls is nearly flawless, yes, but also remember Lenny Letter, the original magazine-as-longform-newsletter??? (At lunch, we talked about Substack, of course, and how Hannah Horvath would have loved the platform <- a detail that makes it in the piece, though some classic Dunham riffing on Hannah’s Substack life was sadly cut: “She would have published a lot at an aggressive cadence and acted like she was running a media empire, but she would have had between 150-300 followers, and that would have been enough.”)

In our conversation and in Famesick, I found it startling how specific Dunham’s memories of young womanhood can be, whether she was recalling the all-white Betsey Johnson set she wore to prom or other important milestones of the 2010s hipsterdom (A perfect quote also left on the cutting room floor when we were talking about her looking back on her old journals: “I have a diary entry that’s like, ‘I tried this amazing new thing at a place called Iris Cafe in Brooklyn Heights … It’s called ‘avocado toast.’”). These kinds of details, this level of noticing, is what sets her art apart, clearly, but I also would like to think that the resulting cover story helped both of us work out a Theory of Lena Dunham and Girlhood, and the way that remembrance, reimagination, and fictionalization work together to give us the kind of double (or triple, or quintuple, etc.) lives that we as artists have the privilege of pursuing.

Give it a read, then give Famesick a read, and tell me what you think?

Monday night, Chris Murphy brought me as his +1 to The Devil Wears Prada 2 (I thought it was just a press screening and brought heels for fun; found out on the way to Lincoln Center it was the world premiere so shoutout to the heels). You should just read Chris’s report on the event to get a sense for what a grab bag of New York society it was who showed up, or how the premiere resembled a veritable Disneyland of brand activations. (My favorite was either the Zillow-sponsored set with a working “Runway” elevator that you could get inside and then be photographed walking out of, or the Diet Coke station where I think you could get a leather soda can holder custom-embossed. “You’re witnessing luxury in the making,” a sign informed me.)

After the movie — more on that soon — we helped ourselves to the buffet and then wandered around the giiiiiant pavilion they’d set up to enclose the Lincoln Center fountain, so that the interior smelled vaguely of pool as everyone milled about, taking photos and looking longingly toward the VIP section that was curtained off (Inside there: Justin Theroux, Amelia Dimoldenberg, nicer charcuterie plates, a fleet of velvet upholstered furniture). The sensation of all movies as now brands and this particular movie’s marketing budget was overpowering; later when I went home — me and my branded Tweezerman tweezers took the train — I read Coleman Spilde’s Salon piece about the campaign, which directed me to the original movie’s original 2006 trailer, which as Spilde points out, was essentially a 3-min clip of just one perfect scene, barely edited down. Less used to be more, it seems.

Some questions I have today…

• Did you read about the media newsletter that was using AI to aggregate other media newsletters incorrectly for $8/month, and then a different media newsletter caught on and broke the news, and then the other media newsletter broke the whole kerfuffle down?
  

• Why is West Coast status anxiety somehow always more fun to read about than East coast status anxiety?
  

• They’ve unleashed TMZ upon DC; could this quite possibly be good for the nation? Have we ever thrown two apex predator institutions like TMZ and the federal government in a pit together like this?

Let’s start with Thursday night, which was such a treat: My dearest Rachel Yang invited me to the new Pietro Alexander gallery in Soho for a staged reading of “Summer with Dianne,” a play written by Seth Zvi Rosenfeld (Netflix’s The Get Down, HBO’s How to Make It in America). The reading was directed by Chloë Sevigny and produced by Rachel and David Potters; the cast included Industry’s Myha’la and Sofia Black-D’Elia (no relation).

I’ve gone to a couple of staged readings before done by friends for funsies; this was my first time experiencing the table read as an industry event, where the room was full of commercial theater and film producers. Rachel and David have been doing these amazing renegade theater readings with their crew via @goodevening.rep for as long as I’ve known them; I think the second time I met Rachel was at a reading they put on inside a menswear store downtown in 2023. (That event was so packed that night that I literally fell to my knees and fainted; some nice Australian girls helped me up). It’s been a point of pride to work with Rachel on Deez Links events ever since. Nothing is better than working with friends, or seeing how they raise the bar for New York’s cool factor every time. PROUD OF YOU RACHIE!!

Then yesterday, while killing time before lunch, I wandered into a few galleries on Henry Street and wound up at Lyles & King, where they were showing photographer Aneta Grzeszykowska’s “Daughter” series. I skimmed the photos before reading the show’s press release, which made for a funny reveal: What at first glance looked like some sweet pictures of two teen girls — maybe sisters? — swimming in the ocean, sitting at the beach, arranging flower crowns on each others’ heads — turned out to be photos of Grzeszykowska herself, wearing a literal mask of her 14-year-old self, along with her daughter. (In this photo, for example, you can see where the edge of the mask is visible along the chin.)

When I looked at the images again, they gave me such a delicious shiver of the uncanny, both from the juxtaposition of Grzeszykowska-as-girl next to her daughter as the “real” girl, and from the tension between her docile, blank-eyed mask of youth and Grzeszykowska’s body — her obviously older hands, for example. The show runs through May 9. Go see it!

Meanwhile, uptown at the Museum of the City of New York, I finally got to see Joe Macken’s model of New York City, which opened last February after Macken became a TikTok sensation. (Per this Artnet story on him, Macken himself had never actually seen the entire model city in one piece until it was displayed at an upstate fair last summer — he’d been stacking the panels in a storage unit, which is some real Doing It For The Love of the Game shit.)

There’s an easy, obvious appeal to Macken’s work: Everyone loves getting their brain tickled by miniatures of the familiar, and New Yorkers are, of course, famously obsessed with new ways of looking at themselves. But I loved loved loved how the museum set up the exhibit so that you could only get physically close to certain edges of the map along the Rockaways, the east side of Jersey, and above the Bronx. There was such a palpable itch for everyone in the room to try finding a better view of all the sexy parts of Manhattan; at least one woman was reprimanded for dangerously too far over the edge, her shadow looming Godzilla-esque on the balsa wood buildings.

But that effort proved amazingly futile. You could pick up a pair of the provided binoculars to try your best to zoom in on the “good bits” — the skyscrapers, the usual landmarks, Central Park. Nevertheless, those familiars remained tantalizingly, pleasingly out of reach. The resulting sensation therefore hewed loyal to both Macken’s own upbringing in Middle Village and to so many people’s experience of the city from an outerborough perspective. The ability to gaze at the skyline — sized down and made so enticingly twee, yes — yet still positioned just slightly of reach? Now that’s the real New York experience.

For the second Sunday in a row, I was distracted all morning by Justin Bieber’s second Coachella set, which I Airplayed to the TV off a short-lived @PopBase upload. Very much hoping The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham gets to write a follow-up to his review of the first weekend’s performance, which got at Bieber’s livestreamed intimate reminiscences perfectly.

This time around, I felt utterly enchanted by the way Bieber cozied up to the gawping, grasping crowd. Instead of being put off by the various anonymous arms snaking around him (so many phones as third appendage) any time he got too close, Bieber leaned in quite literally, at several points, pulling himself into delighted embraces. Cunningham calls Bieber “pop music’s fallen angel;” I had the thought, while watching Bieber cavort with his overwhelmed, largely female adorers with a wattage that not even Billie Eilish could resist crumpling toward, that Bieber felt so much like America’s prodigal ex-boyfriend — irresistable, intractable, yet always so suspiciously redeemable.

Should You Read That Longass Thing: Caity Weaver’s Carbo Quest Edition? Of course. It’s been nearly 12 years since her Gawker appetizer quest at TGI Friday’s; between that and her 2025 NYT Magazine journey to quit sugar at an Austrian detox retreat, I think we can safely say that Caity is our journalistic Odysseus, forever venturing out and trying to thread the Charybdis/Scylla needle between the excesses and ecstasies of American food culture.

Does that not make her our preeminent food writer? Maybe. But even that seems like a vulgar way to describe what it is that Caity does so well; which in this case is relaying a story about bread that is really a story about the restaurant industry, the publicity machine, national ideas of value, and her family. But even on the merit of figurative language alone, she’s running laps around everyone. I was so dazzled by all the descriptions of the bread — likening its coloring to shades of golden retriever was particularly inspired. But even imagine tossing off an aside about salad like this in a cover story decidedly not about salad. What an image!!

The rolls served at Texas Roadhouse (third place in the best-free-restaurant-bread contest by raw votes) are indisputably soft and white, roundly square, and immaculate enough to have possibly made themselves with no outside aid. Seven hundred years ago, a king might have eaten such satin-smooth bread on Easter; the Roadhouse gives it out for free, in portions that are infinite. (The first basket accompanies you to your table, like a fellow guest.) The menu items my husband and I order during our visit are remarkable in their own way—no rabbits stealing the last of the November lettuces by moonlight ever chewed a colder salad than our Caesar—but without question, the free rolls, accompanied by honey-cinnamon butter, are the only items really worth paying for (besides the lovely, big Diet Cokes).

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But I did feel mixed emotions watching him gaze at footage of his young self. For most celebs who pull this “look how far i’ve come” shtick, it works because they’re looking back at a starting point of a great, magnificent rise. For Bieber, that rise has been famously convoluted. It was easy to project a bittersweetness and longing from him for a more innocent time, or a more innocent self. “Baby,” indeed. At this point, Bieber isn’t so much a musician as an embodiment of the millennial id. In that, he always succeeds…

The other night, a fellow millennial friend and I were discussing the experience of having Gen Z colleagues at the office. What we realized is that, whether consciously deployed or not, there’s a real power move pulled any time a young co-worker compliments you, the elder, on your clothes. “Cute skirt,” the 20-something might say. “I love that scarf,” “Cool jacket, man.” (Many of them have not seen Mean Girls, so it doesn’t seem as though they are intimately familiar with the Regina George undertone of this kind of comment.)

Our theory was that for the young person, complimenting your co-worker’s outfit is an easy, generic, and therefore reliable social bid to make in the professional setting. We suspected it is also probably one of the only ways a young person can even imagine relating to an older person. (At least, that’s how I remember it; there was this wild child cool girl who was the HR manager at my first job who wore the most insane outfits — booty shorts and couture, often in the same get-up. I probably wanted to get to know her, but I was so bewildered by her seniority that all I could ever muster up was a quick scan of her outfit that day, where I’d pick one thing to compliment). And if you really drill down into it, it’s highly likely that the compliment itself is a bit less than authentic — more likely than JJ from social or Madlee the assistant actually fucking with your professor-core pashmina is the possibility that they’ve simply noticed it and are verbalizing the act out of social duty.

But what is hilarious, we agreed, was how this compliment lands with us as the “olds” nevertheless. By which I mean: It feels soooooooooooooooooo good when your younger co-worker says they like your outfit. To the degree that it really disarms you? You could be in your most Boss Manager Mode (but in a cool way right) giving orders, slaying dragons, editing da deck, etc. but the minute someone sub-30 tells you they endorse a sartorial choice you made at 8am less so out of any particular fashion-related inspiration, and more so as an ongoing project of surrender to your go-to staples due to a calcifying refusal to learn if you are a spring or autumn or whatever the fuck Kibbe type, the clouds part. Honey-hued sunshine beams down. For a microsecond you are drunk on the validation of the youth.

Then it passes, and you realize with some embarrassment that being the recipient of this kind of polite compliment definitely absolutely means you are viewed as one of the elders, and also these punks probably didn’t even really mean it in the first place. They’re just trying to be nice. Unless??

Anyway: Do what you will with this bit of Deez pseudo-psychology if you happen to want to manipulate disarm your manager or older co-workers at the office this week. It’s tough being the youngest in the office, but as it turns out, you do hold some power. Enjoy it. Wield it responsibly. Make me feel alive again by noticing my jeans tomorrow?

An item I first read about in the perfectly British and gossipy Popbitch newsletter: Buried in a Guardian story on Pet Shop Boys is an amazing quote/dichotomy from Neil Tennant about the common thread amongst the magazines that are actually doing well: “The New Yorker. The Spectator. The Atlantic. The stapled magazine opens invitingly, whereas the instinct of a perfect bound magazine is to close.” Something to think about!

Cake Zine is turning into Steak Zine for a new special issue (TBD whether it is stapled or bound…), which is already a highly pleasing riff on the magazine’s conceit. And from the looks of this essay on the legendary “Cattle Queen” of steakhouse iconography by Rachel Ossip (published in part on Substack and in full on N+1, interesting), the team is taking the subject amazingly seriously. Is Cake running circles around the slate of newish food media start-ups? (They certainly know how to throw a party and assign serious work!)

Whether it’s Gen Z or due to Zohran, there’s certainly a Z-fication of institutional comms in New York. Exhibit A: that tweet about hole-filling.

Exhibit B: The Brooklyn Botanic Garden on what a bad job everyone does every spring re: identifying cherry blossoms correctly.

I suppose I don’t mind this at the local level as long as these places are not trying to totes doggo on fleekify actually important information; please just list your hours in a normal way, etc. The federal government should be banned from this though. Nothing more embarrassing than being a literal world power looking for online clout. Oh wait…

Finally: Did you guys watch this last season of Bridgerton? I kind of thought I was done with the show after suffering Season 3; obviously, nothing will replace the heroic psychosis of watching Season 1 during the first quarantine Christmas (what happened to Regé-Jean’s career though? I thought he was supposed to get Elordi-ed!). But the critics were saying that this season’s Cinderella story (also okay it has an Asian lead so obviously that compelled me too) was actually good, and you know what? I had a nice time with it.

Most interesting to me was how this season (spoilers ahead) was finally actually a little interested in the class of it all; there also is a sudden death of a minor character that seems uncharacteristic for the happily-ever-after Bridgertonian vibe otherwise. There’s much to find fault about the aesthetically and sociopolitially polished universe of Bridgerton — where imperialism, racism, homophobia, and like, bad sex are simply not a thing, to say nothing of that color palette, ugh. But if we are grading on the curve of general Netflix slop, it was kind of interesting to see how the show handled death as the ultimate caveat of everlasting love. Or as Francesca puts it: “What is the point of finding love when your husband will probably die?” I mean, it’s not Shakespeare, but it’s not a bad question!

Mere minutes after sounding the call for fellow fans of the Vietnamese-born French film director Trần Anh Hùng, my friend Kevin Nguyen (hot off his paperback launch for My Documents, which included a party in Bushwick with the absolute best fried catfish sandwiches and Mary HK Choi reading Kevin’s Goodreads reviews aloud — brave!) texted me about the Asia Society hosting a special talk with the filmmaker himself for the following night. How New York! So up to UES I went on Wednesday to squeeze into the back row of a very packed auditorium. I went in expecting the standard 92nd Street Y-esque fare in the mode that most moderated conversations take in the book world — a wide-ranging Q&A with a lot of biographical disclosure and maybe the occasional commentary on current affairs. Not so!

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Here are some quotes I enj…

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The argument Kline makes about how New York has become too expensive for artists is, of course, not revelatory to anyone who pays rent, but as someone on the edges of that particular world that Kline swims in, I appreciated how he broke down the economics in granular detail. I think we writers forget that we have a fairly portable, square-foot-agnostic profession in that we mostly just need a corner and a laptop to make our “stuff”; I write off roughly 20 square feet of my apartment as “work space” every year…

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Stuff2discuss today: Is being an artist worth the romanticization, Hanya’s new play??, where the unpaid magazine internships went, “real eyes realize clanker lies.”

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The secret, I think, is entirely in the tortilla. It’s got just the right texture and stretch — when they don’t cut the wrap in half all the way, you get to pull it apart at your desk in a pretty satisfying way. NOT AN AD. Just a genuine lunch enthusiast dispatch. —D.

Stuff in today’s letter: Substack x Polymarket and the guru economy, that horrifying report on the data industry gig workers, Ryan Lizza’s long-term posting strategy, Should You Read That: McKay Coppins Gambling Edition, Ryan Murphy’s actually unimaginative “Love Story.”

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Last night’s Oscars were most interesting to me for the way Conan O’Brien made clear the ire of Hollywood — both passive aggressively and a little aggressive aggressively — re: the latest obsessions of its industry overlords: AI, vertical video, a preoccupation with Gen Z lingo, linear television’s swallowing by YouTube, Ted Sarandos. I don’t imagine one cares too much about getting roasted at an awards ceremony over the sound of billions of dollars churning next to your eardrum, but I think it would be a critical mistake for anyone to underestimate the film and television industry as not only a highly PR-sensitive, highly insular group of co-workers but also as a massive labor entity to be reckoned with, per the noisy guild disputes of 2023.

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There’s the Substack ghostwriter making $165K (it is not me, sorry to inquiring texts), and the…

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Last Thursday, we threw a party with Yahoo called “I Still <3 The Internet” to celebrate the 10th “birthday” of Deez Links. It was everything I ever wanted a media party to be: free-flowing sparkling cosmos (thank you Nightmoves!); purple lychee martini-flavored Solid Wiggles shots; piles of Chrissy’s Pizza; a giant Wegmans sheet ca…

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