Last night I went to Middlebrow’s party held in celebration of their 100th podcast episode, which brought together a nice mix of audio folks, writers, comedians, plus advertising creatives and other distinctively better-coiffed members of the creative economy. We were gathered in Chinatown at Vitra, a furniture showroom (or, quite possibly, an events venue masquerading as a furniture showroom, as a banker visiting from London theorized) which immediately became the center of conversation for its unexpected hugeness, soaring ceilings, capacious view of the Manhattan Bridge, and even better, its abundance of funky, comfortable seating options. (Let’s be honest. You and I would both like to sit more at these things, no?) Taking a turn on the $30,000 Verner Panton Living Tower, apparently popularized by Lil Yachty, was itself an excellent icebreaker. (No surprise that the producer behind this party was none other than your fave and mine, Rachel Yang.)

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The room-temp gossip in the publishing world is that the incoming Rachel Cusk novel, Life of M, is about the actor Natalie Portman — at least, according to UnHerd, which is sort of like an older, British-er The Free Press-type of situation. (Between this link and the next, it seems it’s a slow summer in the lit world — both Life of M and Emma Cline’s Switzy are more than a month away!)

The parallels between the “M” character and Portman do sound convincing, but I’m curious if this info actually whets anyone’s appetite to read the book. (For the record, the review of the book itself is quite positive!) But the novel-as-secret-celebrity-character-study premise alone doesn’t really do it for me personally, as someone who thought the celeb interview bit in All Fours was the weakest part. To make even a thinly-veiled fictitious celebrity work, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time world-building out the nature of their fame and ubiquity first; otherwise why wouldn’t I just read fanfiction or like…. @popcrave?? Give me a real fake person (celeb profile) or a fake fake person (fictional character) to care about, but not a fake real person please!

Elsewhere in literary tidings: Not one for resting on her laurels re: critiquing the spiritually Dimes Square novelistas in Look Mom, I’m a Hegelian E-girl from February, Grace Byron tackles Emma Cline’s upcoming Switzy, and a bit of Moshfegh by way of “It-girl” novelists’ masculine revisions in HouseHouseMagazine. It is interesting to wonder how critically acclaimed female authors might get taken more seriously, especially if they made their name writing about cool hot girls in the first place — that is, will they still call you a hot girl writer once you put Harvey Weinstein-esque older dudes in your cross-hairs? (AKA the opposite of Natalie Portman??)

These dramatizations of men don’t avoid the debates about women novelists or “commercial” fiction, but they do reflect the productive tension of their construction. They dissect the pressures of authorship in a world where many believe literature is headed towards a cliff. By inhabiting the world of men, Cline and Moshfegh are able to examine the pressures of womanhood from the opposing side. They are relief sculptures, portraits of lack. Bucking the pressures and labels put on contemporary fiction is a Herculean task that doesn’t guarantee aesthetic depth or freedom to, perhaps only freedom from.

Seems…maybe no. A shame that there are only two genders in literature…

Three pieces I recently read in The New Yorker felt in direct conversation with each other on the inadequacies of human connection. The first, Jessica Contrera’s portrait of a single mother and her daughters relying on chatbots, initially appears to be a predictable (if worrying) depiction of regular people relying on AI for emotional/therapeutic support. It initially made me think of Katy Waldman’s review of the lost art of the bromance, which at one point analyzes the nature of friendship (à la Jackass) as a kind of mirror to the self, which doesn’t sound unlike using AI trained on our whims and preferences to reflect back what we want:

Many of the men and women in McCarthy’s and Smith’s books suggest that the consummate friend is a kind of augmented second self. The terms they use are reminiscent of the mid-century psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch’s concept of an “ego-ideal,” an older peer whom young girls idolize and identify with. The worshipful wish expressed by same-sex crushes—“That’s what I want to be like,” as Deutsch phrased it—is less about possessing an object than about transforming oneself into a different kind of subject.

But Contera’s piece on the family quickly turns into something more existential. I keep thinking about the scene halfway through in the church basement, where the mother, Roschelle, attempts to share a major piece of her family’s story with fellow congregants — AKA, the kind of bid for genuine connection that’s supposedly the gold standard of humanity, the thing that AI skeptics like myself like to preach about being so much better for you than talking to an Amazon Alexa.

But as the scene makes clear, the central problem is that our attempts toward human connection often leaves so much to be desired. People, lest we forget, have a pretty overall hard time meeting each others’ emotional needs. What can anyone say by way of small talk to a mother who has suffered such a loss? In an instant, the appeal of AI chatbots seems irresistible, if not totally necessary: How could we possibly expect our fellow imperfect humans to be able to tend to our greatest pains?

After all, as Amanda Petrusich reflects in her essay about grieving her husband’s death: “Spending time with a grieving person is exhausting. It requires enormous amounts of patience and generosity. After a while, people get tired of your bottomless melancholy.” Petrusich’s essay goes on to explore the personal and social challenge — or “problem” — of grief, which includes the debate among mental health professionals about how to categorize bereavement properly (is it a “normal state”? Is it a “disorder”?) and various solutions for “solving” it in some form. I’m sure it’s not a spoiler alert to tell you that no one has really figured it out, not for themselves and not for the rest of us.

The real juice, if you ask me, was learning how the truly wealthy talk about their lives and their wealth so euphemistically. (The controversial Jessica Winter excavation, for example, points out that the “small mortgage” on the family’s Martha’s Vineyard house was for $3M lol; also, when Burden mentions that her maternal grandma was famously married to Bill Paley without mentioning her by name, you’re like…….waitaminute…….). Reminds me of when Tina Brown would refer to her Hamptons house as a “shack” in her Vanity Fair Diaries, except where we’re talking about a Vanderbilt!

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I’m pleased to report that many a connection was made, networks expanded (horizontally and vertically), plus a lively round of magazine bingo was had (first and second place winners each received a bundle of one-year subscriptions to Vogue, New York, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Drift, Equator, and Study Hall, thanks to generous friends of the Deez). Per Meghna Yesudas, a writer and one of the students from the New School class that originally inspired the idea for Deez Drinks in attendance at the party: “It felt like the realization of a scene I’d carried around in my head about being a journalist in New York. Magazines, and the people who make them, are alive and mostly well.” (!) I mean, you really can’t ask for a better party report than that!

What I personally took away from the night — which will hopefully be but the first in our new event series — is that there’s still no substitute for getting a bunch of present and future colleagues in one room to catch up, nerd out, and compare notes. I was especially impressed by all of the students and early-career folks who didn’t bat an eye before marching up to the veterans in the room and introducing themselves. (This was not the kind of confidence that was in the water for Class of 2016 I’ll tell you that!) In an industry where the pathway in seems more narrow than ever, it was amazing to witness how plucky and talented and ready the next generation is to start making their mark.

Thank you to the one and only Ruth Ann Harnisch, our founding partner and tireless champion, for making the evening possible. Thanks also to the wonderful Rachel Sklar and the Smart Friends Network for additional support, to the ever-inspiring Mi-Anne Chan for being our esteemed co-host, and to the downtown events genius Rachel Yang for producing yet another perfect evening for the Deez Links Media cinematic universe. Perhaps the real Deez Links are all the friends and collaborators we link up with along the way? Something to think about…

(BTW: Deez Links readers get 20% off Teen Vogue Fest tickets this weekend with the code DEEZTVF20 + 50% off a Study Hall membership with the code Deez50. Happy linking and building!)

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Some people still talk about the golden era of Millennial blogging as the apotheosis of online self-disclosure, but I’ve been extra fascinated lately by the way this genre, so to speak, continues to evolve. Of course, its predominant medium has diversified, thanks to the front-facing camera and proliferation of podcast mics, though people are still doing impressive things with text and image. On social media, after all, oversharing isn’t just an art form. It’s practically good manners — a way of signalling that you’re down, you’re around, that you understand the digitized nature of your relationships and how life requires that we mediate our interactions, life updates, and every waking thought through a third-party platform. The messier ones, especially.

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*Beach meaning, wherever you are this weekend.

• I thought I had built up a pretty good resistance to personal-essay-provoked-pathos, and also I thought I did not care about Jackass at all, but Yahoo’s Kelsey Weekman writing about the healing power of the franchise at a very heartbreaking time in her life proved me wron…

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I want to keep clowning on Meta AI Glasses forever — and very much enjoyed Gabriella Karefa-Johnson diving into the fray — but after watching way too many banal Glasses clips that Kylie and her sales-reps-in-arms have been posting, I’m attempting to keep the disdain at somewhat of a remove in order to seriously consider the universal aesthetic and emotional gambits at play with the so-called “cop/pervert glasses.” All legitimate concerns of privacy and surveillance aside (and that “aside” is doing a lot of work), what is the point, for the consumer, to live in a state of eternal documentation again?

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I felt a zap of delight yesterday on the train while paging through the annual New Yorker fiction issue and landing on the new Jonathan Franzen short story, “A Talent for Seeming” — adapted, apparently, from “the early pages of a novel-in-progress,” AKA the next in The Crossroads trilogy, glory be to god! (The bad news: “I’m still far from finished,” per Franzy).

There is always something in the pacing and the density of Franzen’s storytelling that makes me feel like a greedy little thief racing through his sentences and gorging myself on the words as fast as I can, but one aspect of the story that made me stop and have a deep belly laugh is how fitting it is for “The Crucible” to figure so heavily.

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As an adult, of course, the desire to cram as much as possible into any given 24-hour unit comes from far less charming incentives. And without the structure of any kind of academic calendar (mine or otherwise) delineating my calendar, I typically feel at a loss for how to “properly” “spend” the season. The first summers in New York were full of “bucket lists” and ambitious, over-achieving field trips; the recent summers as a freelance writer have been dictated more so by whatever work schedule can be ascertained (as anyone working in magazines or fashion knows, summer is just a colloquialism for pre-fall) and a pervading feeling that free time should probably be turned into some kind of work time. But once in a while, a weekend does feel like it goes on and on, the hours as yielding as taffy. A few factors seem to make all the difference…

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Allow me to submit my particular contribution to the international You Should Visit Saigon agenda, should you need a more specific form of goading following a certain somebody’s relentless posting of the astonishing cuisine, humid cityscapes, and delightful scooter-powered pace of life from over the last few weeks.

(Note that the majority of these recs come vetted from my boyfriend Steven, a frequent traveler to Vietnam who has generously approved the un-gatekeeping of some of his favorite spots. For the extra-deep cuts, you’ll have to finesse those out of him yourself! Thank you Big Steve for the trip of a lifetime <3.) Here are some highlights from our recent seven-day adventure…

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For those of you who aren’t already familiar, Mary is one of the all-time millennial media greats: She is a screenwriter, essayist, and the bestselling author of Emergency Contact, Permanent Record, and Yolk. You may also recognize her as a former culture correspondent for Vice News Tonight and also because she now blogs in such an inimitable Mary way about fashion, style, and culture on her choitotheworld newsletter.

Like so many folks in the New York literary community, I’ve had the pleasure of benefitting personally from Mary’s hard-won advice on everything from writing to money to major life decisions. She has a generous habit of taking fledglings under her own wing and being utterly clear-eyed about The Work, so it’s very exciting to be able to pass on some of her wisdom below.

We talked about how she sold Pool House on without a manuscript; how she maintains her creative discipline amidst a million development projects and other unfinished novels; and how she cultivates a life that centers her writing, often in the most unromantic terms possible…

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