contextless wonder in a soup of trash

Is "The Day of the Jackal" good? Hard to say

Ugh I left an old lemon in my fridge for two weeks, and the mold somehow penetrated through the Ziploc bag and infused everything inside with the taste of raw penicillin. I threw out my Brita filter because the water kept tasting bad and got a new one, but that one is now tainted too!! I was a fool to think it could be that easy. Am now resigned to an inevitable fate: cleaning out the entire fridge.

---

Caitlin Dewey, an OG links newsletterer, put together a fun roundup of “Your favorite newsletterer’s favorite newsletters,” which she also turned into a great visual map of the entire network. Deez is on it so we love it already, but it’s overall a very shrewd project and execution, and proof that not all newsletter content needs to be so textual.

---

Mark Zuckerberg reveling in masculine energy after experiencing (1) quality time with the boys is unfortunately about to be everyone’s problem, but more broadly, I do think this is just the latest example of our tipping point into a newly intense gender essentialism, where doubling down on the masculine/feminine binary has become the favored sensical sorting schema for understanding human behavior.

This piece from The Guardian on the femosphere, where women are coaching each other on how to better wield feminine energy and eschew “unnatural” masculine energy is a look at the flip side of this retrenchment. Very bleak and jarring, especially for anyone who grew up in the “Anything boys can do, girls can do better” era of gender relations though can we say that was entirely helpful???

---

My latest view of Twitter is that it’s successful in becoming a tightly walled garden: Now that so many apex posters have left the platform and linking out is de-incentivized, there’s this new style of posting that I call “contextless wonder in a soup of trash,” so it’s like, yeah you might stumble across a random amazing Byung-Chul Han snippet but god help you if you’d care to know even a little more, i.e., what the title is of the actual work or whatever. Your job is to simply appreciate said snippet at face value, and then let its impression on your consciousness melt as soundlessly as a snowflake, so that you can move on and find the next not abjectly terrible thing to look at for 0.005 seconds. And so on. Don’t think about it too hard, kitten!

---

All of your queasy feelings about Anora are finally expanded on in this LARB review by Sam Bodrojan. A taste: “With each passing humiliation, it becomes clearer that the film will insist on torturing Ani to the very end. Why Baker is so keen to inflict pain on his heroine, however, takes a bit longer to reveal itself.”

I remember watching this movie and feeling oddly that there was never a gun involved or even threateningly brandished, which you think would not be in short supply re: devious henchmen and like, general American violence. Now I’m considering how the lack of a gun feels a bit perverse, as if the film knew that its inclusion would ruin the “fun” of otherwise teasing out Ani’s torment guilt-free.

---

Is it a TV show or a long-running Warby Parker ad……. hard to say

I have never felt as shruggy yet committed to a TV show as I did about The Day of the Jackal, which I just finished out of…spite? morbid curiosity? sunk cost fallacy? (Peacock, 10 episodes). The only discernible edge this show had for a Euro-trotting hitman’s tale was its choice of Eddie Redmayne as the titular murderer. I suppose it was kind of fun to watch the show toy with Redmayne’s inherent British softboy-ness—is the archetype of a “gentleman killer” just a sociopath by other name?—but I otherwise found it to be a very nihilistic show that seemed fixated on belaboring the point that “tbh, everyone is a bad person if you think about it,” which is just…I don’t know, man. You want to spend 10 hours on that?

There were a few interesting character chess pieces: the renegade Northern Irish gunsmith whom Redmayne works with, and the billionaire tech entrepreneur (played by The Crown’s Khalid Abdalla) who wants to release an app that will ensure global financial transparency, which, ok! There’s some world-building that’s much more compelling than sending Tom Cruise to battle AI! But Lashana Lynch as the ruthless MI6 agent and terrible mother was similarly suspect empathy bait; the worst character of all was Nuria (played by Úrsula Corberó) the very Spanish wife of Redmayne’s character who mostly stands around and looks angry in a naive way while inexplicably dressed in Madewell basics. Interesting choices made all around. I will probably devour Season 2 like a hopeful fool.

---

TikToks Before We Lose It Forever

• It’s all about timing!
  

• When I ask myself what I think Romania is all about, I am mostly informed by their TikTok strategy
  

• Sometimes I forget platypuses are real and not extinct yet
  

• What a gift, to understand the logic of light so well
  

• Not to be too Babygirl about it, but my 2025 resolution is to sort of submit and accept the forces more, and this girl is a great model of what I hope this will look like

Discover the quirkiest, funniest, and most fascinating science stories of the week with Friday Findings by LabX. 🧪 From mind-blowing discoveries to uniquely weird studies, we deliver the perfect mix of fun and facts.

➡️ 3 stories. 1 email. Every Friday.

Join thousands of curious minds. Sign up now and never miss a discovery.

---

Writers! Feel like you need an extra brain to organize research, draft freely, and revise creatively? Want to use Scrivener but find the software intimidating?

Scrivener for Creative Writers is a 90-minute live course that will show you a more organized, easier, and more creative process.

2/15 at 1pm ET. jaimegreen.net/classes

---

Wanna get your project in front of 25,000 Deez Links readers? All classifieds are half off for January!