how many subscriptions can a subscriber subscrippen
Plus: the least believable part of "Anora"
This edition of Deez Links is brought to you by Garbage Day, the award-winning internet culture newsletter written by Ryan Broderick. Ryan is throwing a big election event—called “America, The Final Season”—on October 23 at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Get tickets here!
Plug: Print magazines, at least the kind being launched by dating apps, are alive! For ELLE last week, I talked to Feeld CEO Ana Kirova about the very cool “A Fucking Magazine” they just launched, as well as her views on dating app fatigue + the mainstreaming polycurious moment. It was a nice convo, particularly at the end, which I think got at the tension of wanting to endlessly define/jargonize/optimize modern dating, but at the end of the day, that shit (human connection) is still….. a lot of work. And no app can erase that!
The most fun tidbit from Charlotte Klein’s cover story for New York mag’s (media) power issue? That Puck is on everyone’s mind as maybe the most interesting media company of the decade, which makes sense seeing as We Live in Newsletter Times. (A great quote: ““I think they know their audience and are doing work that you don’t find elsewhere. But it’s really just for wicked little gossip … And I think that’s a thing I could see building a business around.”)
The most foreboding? Everyone wondering how many subscriptions a subscriber can subscrippen.
A sustainable business model for journalism is going to need people willing to pay for five or seven or ten new subscriptions instead of one or two,” explains Columbia Journalism Review’s Sewell Chan. “The Times or The Wall Street Journal presumably, or maybe CNN if they’re wildly successful, is spot No. 1. And everybody else, from Vanity Fair to the Miami Herald, is competing for spot No. 2. That’s not sustainable for our industry.”
Neon’s Uncut Gems-meets-Hustlers new film Anora is so fun—spoilers in the next paragraph—but I felt a little jaded seeing this video of people lining up for…the film merch? Like this branded thong I guess? I’m all for people lining up for experiences (whether it’s genuinely for the sense-feel of it or simply to harvest internet material is another matter), but so much of (especially New York) culture boiling down to….Standing in Line to Buy Stuff That Makes You Feel Like Part of Something is…interesting. As if our only means of social participation is through consumption of signifiers, and now physical objects (such as a limited edition thong, or tbh a dating app’s print magazine) become inordinately prized for that tangible “I-was-there-ness,” like a non-fungible goody bag that you can exchange for social capital on the infinite online, or an undeletable souvenir serving as proof to someone, maybe ourselves, of life that is being lived.
As for the movie itself, I loved Mikey Madison and was transfixed by the first ⅔ (Anora should win awards for the Best Comedic Use of Being Put on Speaker in a film at the very least), but I hated the ending for puncturing Ani’s self-assuredness in a pretty boring, YA fanfic-y way. Also, there was something off-kilter about the stakes: we’re supposed to believe that Vanya’s family is wealthy enough to have private jets at their disposal, but they somehow do not employ competent security? No one has a gun? The hilarity of Ani getting threatened and pushed around Brighton Beach by her parents’ goons works only because you realize (as she does) that there seems to be no real danger. It’s more of a wholesome fairy tale than we realize, I suppose.
Naomi Klein wrote a really long piece in The Guardian, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war”, analyzing the queasy purpose of Oct. 7 remembrance media. It’s easily the smartest analysis I’ve read, particularly from a sociocultural lens, about the way “memory culture” (what you might call propaganda in some cases, or memorialization in others…) works. Here’s a taste…
With very few exceptions, the primary goal of these diverse works seems to be the transference of trauma to the audience: re-creating terrifying events with such vividness and intimacy that a viewer or visitor experiences a kind of identity merger, as if they themselves have been violated … All efforts at commemoration aim to touch the hearts of people who were not there. But there is a difference between inspiring an emotional connection and deliberately putting people into a shellshocked, traumatized state. Achieving the latter result is why so much 7 October memorialization boasts that it is “immersive” – offering viewers and participants the chance to crawl inside the pain of others, based on a guiding assumption that the more people there are who experience the trauma of 7 October as if it was their own, the better off the world will be. Or rather, the better off Israel will be.
Finally, at NYT pop critic Jon Caramanica’s birthday party a few weeks ago, I was like ????dude what do you think of Chappell Roan???? not realizing he’d just filed this piece on her Franklin, TN show about it all. It is the gift of the New York media scene to be given conversational homework, but I liked his differentiation between IRL and “URL” fandom, plus this part:
We tend to think of standom as uncomplicated idol worship — not a fickle embrace, but a fixed one. But the phase of stan culture that’s been emerging in the past year or so is far messier and contingent. Online fandom can swarm rapidly, and provide an unrepeatable boost. But it’s also impossible to fully tend to, and loyalty can collapse along myriad fault lines … Fandom is supposed to be a form of obsession, a dedicated cataloging of adoration, but in these videos, Roan was asking, in essence, how can you be a Chappell Roan fan and understand so little about Chappell Roan?
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Garbage Day, the award-winning internet culture newsletter written by Ryan Broderick, is throwing a big event for the election this month. It's called “America, The Final Season," and it's live at the Bell House in Brooklyn on October 23rd. Memes! Music! Laughs! Niche internet references! Trauma bonding over the last 10 years of American politics! It's got everything. There's also going to be a bunch of special guests, including writer Magdalene J Taylor, Semafor's Ben Smith, podcaster Akilah Hughes, and Morning Brew's Dan Toomey.
