incredible restraint in bag acquisition
Should we all geofence ourselves?
I pulled a morning shift at the Teen Vogue Fest “networking lounge” on Saturday, and it was sweet to meet so many students, especially high schoolers who’d traveled to New York to mingle with each other and learn about fashion/media. (Many were in town for Vogue Summer School; all of them were much too wise to gossip about it with me.) The funny part was how ludicrous it felt at some points to be the one dispensing advice — to the teen who sat down with her Balenciaga City bag and kept the Chanel sunnies on all morning, you are the one who’s got this figured out!
Never one to shy away from covering terrifying empires of note, The New Yorker’s Heidi Blake went all in on Andrew Tate’s systematic exploitation of women and children last month, and it’s well worth the multiple sittings that it may take to fully digest her reporting — and the extent of the allegations against the Tate brothers. The part that’s going to stick with me is the interview Heidi did with the Canadian activist and former manosphere darling Lauren Southern, who, up until her personal encounter with Tate, was famous for trolling women who complained about rape culture. After Tate flew her to Romania to “discuss a business venture,” the tables quickly turned; it’s quite horrible how immediately the irony was not lost on her:
Afterward, he sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Don’t tell the press I raped you.” She remembers saying, “My whole brand is literally talking about how stupid bitches get themselves in situations like this. There’s nothing I can say without destroying my career. So congratulations.”
Grim stuff through and through, with the craziest part being that the brothers were audacious enough to meet with Heidi in person (and vice versa?) — over cigars!
On the far more delightful end of the internet: Did you read this very sweet NYT story from Alessandra Schade about how a Chicago-area teacher brought back the “Backyard Baseball” computer game? Not sure what was more enjoyable: finding out there are “Backyard Baseball” fantasy leagues, cheering on the Kelce brothers’ lack of follow-through, or finally learning the backstory for the character of Pablo Sanchez.
The story made me think of that Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow novel — the novel of 2022 — which I remember liking only for the insights on what it takes to build (or reconstruct) a video game. If this “Backyard Baseball” story tickled your fancy, you might enjoy the book more than I did (the melodrama was just a little too A Little Life Lite for me…though perhaps the incoming fall 2027 movie adaptation will do more with the material?)
Perhaps we’ve been going about screentime all wrong in terms of making it a temporal issue — setting time limits, tracking hours spent, attempting to wrest our sense of leisure back minute by minute. Maybe it’s more of a location issue — as a recent Times Opinion column from Meher Ahmad figured out by designating an old iPhone as her “Scroll Phone” and limiting use of it to a single armchair in her living room (“the Scrolly Chair”).
It’s a sort of self-geofencing strategy not unlike the Brick, which (mostly) requires that you tap your phone against a little plastic cube that you most likely stuck to your fridge (a location that is probably more de-incentivizing if you live in a giant house and the fridge is just sooooo far away; less so when you live in the world’s tiniest one-bedroom and can almost reach the fridge from the toilet, not that I would do this). My personal update on Bricking myself from 9pm to 9am is that it does unfortunately work; I’m always annoyed to be caught on a train late at night with nothing to do, but I have detected a faint sensation of having more hours in the day than before. What can I say, leashing works!
And lo, Derek Guy (@dieworkwear) has joined Substack, which should make every fashion newsletterer quake in their boots — Daddy’s here! The official reason is that he’s doing a deliciously highbrow podcast called “The Philosophy Club” with noted fashion podcaster Avery Trufelman, which shows incredible restraint in bag acquisition if he of all people is choosing to not go down the affiliate empire route (I hope Substack ponied up, though!). Judging by his rather mild first posts on Substack Notes, I suspect the man just doesn’t quite know what to do on a non-troll-infested platform yet. Don’t worry, Derek. It’s only a matter of time! They’re coming.
Going to dive into Odyssey links later this week, but spoiler alert……I didn’t like the movie! And neither did Emily Wilson, the classics spokesperson of the hour? (That headline alone — brave!) We’ll discuss with the class.
