emergency deez: notes on those 3 (yes I said 3!) Cut essays

I've dreamed of discourse like this.

Picture me crawling to my desk in the throes of food poisoning and/or the world’s most dramatic reaction to an MMR booster vaccine, wiping applesauce and saltine crumbs from my chin, valiantly muttering to myself with the conviction of a war vet, “but The Cut essays discourse!! We can’t miss out!” and you have a full picture of the state in which I am writing to you on this cruelly sunny Sunday afternoon. There is gonna be little to no editing on this. Editing is for people who can manage solid foods. I’m really laying it on thick, but don’t actually feel too bad for me. Have you ever vomited up prime rib and lobster into your bathroom sink? You have to take pride in certain things.

Anyway. Okay. Well, congratulations to The Cut for the splashiest special issue in recent memory, in which THREE good, old-fashioned personal essays have gone viral and taken over every timeline and dinner party in New York this week. You’re obsessed. I’m obsessed. (And in case you haven’t actually read them yet, oh boy oh boy let me be the one to introduce you). Let’s just get the pleasantries over and pretend we’re cornering each other in a tasteful Bed-stuy apartment and discuss. We will start with the scammer story, obviously:

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The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger by Charlotte Cowles 

• There has been a recent trend where outlets are putting a extra info in staffer bylines to describe their jobs, presumably to incite trust from the reader, and this might be the first documented case wherein that extra byline info—i.e., the revelation that Cowles is The Cut’s financial advice columnist—does, um, the opposite. Yikes!
  

• I like that Cowles made sure to tell you how nice the box was that she put the $50K in. That’s how you know you’re reading The Cut. They never sacrifice style over there, do they?
  

• So obviously, this shit is crazy, and the reception has been going nuts. (Is there anything the internet loves more than judging an affluent white woman’s financial choices?) But overall, I kiiiinda think Cowles threw herself/got thrown under the bus a few times here—the metaphor/quotes at the end about how dealing with a scammer is not unlike undergoing a prolonged interrogation get buried under everything else, and I think they’re the best part.
  
  Like, there’s definitely a story to tell about how our increasingly complex world is leading to increasingly complex ways to get scammed in the silliest ways (and how Googling helps but also doesn’t? See next bullet). Cowles could have also gone at it from an angle of less like “wow, it happened to me?” (which I think is what also got her a lot of shit) to “of course it happened to me” and hit her own profile harder as say, a consummate rule-follower, rich person with resources who assumes they can solve most problems, stressed mom, basic overwhelmed denizen of the world who has to field off like 15 spam calls and fake Amazon delivery texts a day…these things happen! Your parents and mine are certainly not going to think about checking r/scams!
  

• *As someone who falls regularly for the IT department’s test phishing emails, let me volunteer the info that I once almost fell for a similar scam! Someone called me from the Brooklyn PD’s number saying there was some car registered in my name that was wanted in an accident; I remember the slightly accented English and also the fact that he got annoyed when I asked some questions. I Googled the number (which was faked, of course, but I didn’t know at that point how the technology had evolved lol) and got more confused, and then I just kind of panicked and hung up because my most lizard brain reminded me, from watching hundreds of episodes of SVU, that if the police really needed me, they would find me. Alternatively, once I got a letter from the IRS that said I had bonus tax refund money coming my way, and I Googled it, and the internet said it was a scam, but it turned out it was legit? (My accountant sent me a two-word email—“seems fine”).  So, what I mean is, I think neurotic people are probably a perfect mark lol.
  

• More on the sympathy note: I could have sworn to read a similar scammer story, either in The Cut or elsewhere, a few years ago, where I remember one detail that stuck out: this woman, I believe, was buying a bunch of Visa gift cards at like, a CVS? And the CVS person slid a little sheet of paper that had “signs you’re being scammed” printed on it over the counter, and this woman recalls reading the sheet while she was on the phone with the scammer and I remember thinking, okay, wow, I bet when you’re in that mode the logic neurons are just noooooot connecting. (Also slightly overlooked in Cowles’ piece - the scammer said/threatened that a stranger was coming to her home, where her kid was! Bro. I would have thrown my social security card and passport out the window if it meant keeping my kid out of it.)
  

• That said……I’m still fascinated by the responses to this essay that have ranged from basic schadenfreude (if you had $50K to lose and your life isn’t completely leveled, you’re gonna be hard-up on internet sympathy in general) to memery to conspiracy-level theorizing that there’s no way all this could be true (which is probably why only The Cut could do something this dishy and have it be mostly trusted—the New York mag fact-checking game is one of like, the last four remaining in the biz…). This comment keeps making me snicker purely for the line “You think Amazon will white glove you over to the CIA in a few minutes?” Not even a room full of Succession writers could have dreamed that up.

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 The Lure of Divorce by Emily Gould

• I’ll say this about Emily Gould’s game. She shares, but she doesn’t overshare. At least, not without a book deal!
  

• This essay coming in hot right after the Park Slope mommy polyamory discourse bodes ominously, I think, for the state of the modern feminist mid-life crisis but hey, IMAGINE THE CONTENT. What happens when the originally viral blogger generation begins approaching and then rolling over the hill? We’re all about to find out.
  

• I made a joke on Twitter about how The Cut has figured out the perfect formula for virality—i.e, getting into the down and dirty about relationships and money and where the twain shall meet, so with this essay, I have this very boring, moralizing wish that Gould would have been more forthcoming certain $$ realities, like having an extra bedroom to retreat to in the first place (was this the apartment she waged an entire column on finding? WHY DO I KNOW THIS), or not, as a friend pointed out, getting CPS called on her at any point. Personal essays always feed on that niggling could this happen to me intrusive voice, but you and I both know there’s also the accompanying can I afford to have this happen to me? Though again, let’s be honest, that kind of caveating can get tedious, too. 

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How Much Does It Cost to Save A Relationship? In our case, $11,000 in therapy bills was just the beginning by Angelina Chapin

• I put the subhead in there just so you, too, could gasp in a seismometer-registering volume.
  

• Okay obviously I am running out of steam here…ugh need to eat more applesauce
  

• This essay got squeezed out by the other two in terms of discourse, but this is actually the essay I have the biggest problem with! Some of it is just total internet bait for the inner snob—where is she going for dim sum and a movie that ends up costing $120? Why are you going on a harbor cruise and dinner lol??? (This would never happen to me!”). But to me, this shit addresses a taboo that’s much eerier than a mental breakdown/almost divorce/getting scammed combined! i.e.: putting a price tag on a romantic relationship. Brave? Heedless? Extremely concerning? I’m more worried about this writer than Gould or Cowles.
  

• The mean take is like, ah, I see, someone discovers how….spending money? Eating yummy foods? Going on vacation? Having a nice living area? Going out on dates? might improve one’s conflict management and general mood, and thereby, one’s relationship. Is this not the entire premise of…consumerism? Money solves problems! (As does an expensive couples counselor!)
  

• The questions I want asked: A) is he worth it? I say that in a kind of uppity she’s-single-and-sleeps-10-peaceful-hours-a-night way, but I mean it! If we’re going to be out here publicly admitting that money is tied to domestic bliss, then you gotta kind of make the argument? Otherwise this kind of reads as like, an xoJane gunpoint situation, where you’re clearly being mined for an outrageous take that gets nerds like me yapping, but it doesn’t get quite honest enough to leave us readers wondering, at 3.a.m, how much we’d empty our retirement account in order to keep a decent boyfriend around. Like is he even nice???? Like a $11,000 solo trip to Paris will make you just as happy no??
  

• The other question, of course: B) how are you guys paying for all of this? You found out that a lifestyle upgrade makes you both happier. Congrats! But I’m assuming there was a real trade off made here, right? The writer describes herself as historically frugal, so I am assuming these $42 bucatini plates are not coming out of a sudden windfall. The story is less “how much does it cost to save a relationship,” imo, but “what are you giving up in order to keep this relationship?” Which opens some D O O R S to the universal psyche, you feel me?
  

• Okay now I really need to go take a nap, so I’ll close with this: I’ve been thinking about what it is about these essays that have really just bored a hole straight into our collective central crazy. The scammer essay, and also Gould’s essay to a degree, I think, really present twin reflections of a kind of modern woman horror story: bougie white woman has her shit together, seems to be doing all the right things, and then SUDDENLY IT ALMOST ALL FALLS APART (But also she’s mostly fine now).
  
  It’s the HBO prestige series formula, that perfect combo of high/low stakes where you don’t feel that bad for consuming and subtweeting it (or making an entire newsletter about it). Not to quote drag Griselda into this again lol, but I was thinking about a line from the show where they talked about how you only feel more paranoid the more powerful you get, and I wonder if that’s the nerve being tapped into with these viral admissions: this idea that you could have all the trappings of what most people imagine to be total success and stability, only to royally fuck up and lose it all (or just $50,000 I guess). It’s a compelling horror story about real and imagined precarity: the The American Nightmare: one wrong move, and you’re FUCKED.
  

• Lesser discussed from Gould’s essay is also the undercurrent of what she’s implying re: her and Keith’s dueling careers. This might be the American Nightmare: Feminist Version. Can two careers (much less those of two writers who rely on their shared lives for material) ever truly feel equal? Seems…no, and that the point is living with that! 
  

• The Chapin essay just makes me depressed; it’s the equivalent of the Hinge profile that says they “like traveling” when they really mean they “like being on vacation.” Turns out: love and resources remain the trickiest relationship of all! We’re not definitively detangling that one any time soon, are we?