Is that…a microscopic trickle of glee??

Plus two fun indie media pubs for LA

It’s Primary Day in New York, and while “cautiously optimistic” feels a bit strong to say, I do think everyone is allowing themselves a microscopic trickle of glee in watching Zohran Mamdani’s campaign crest so brilliantly. I’m most fascinated with his strategy of teaming up with Brad Lander—their tag-team on Colbert last night is definitely worth watching (also, whoever did the glam on Zohran for the spot…great work), and every successive photo I see of Brad looking fondly at Zohran makes the democratic project feel fresh and actually interesting again. Could ranked choice voting be the procedural quirk that saves us from abject tribalism? Bon chance to us all!

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Harper’s is really killing it lately? I saw chunks floating around on the internet of their recently published Karl Ove Knausgard essay on the endurance sport of finding meaning and beauty in the world, and it absolutely delivers:

There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world; it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and the experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes.

It also made me realize that a highly underrated aspect of reading Harper’s online is how nice their page layouts are for something so gargantuan…the former marketing associate in me is pained by all the white space that could be converted to more display ad territory, but it isn’t, and it’s…so nice. And that font! My reading is so Substackified that raking mine eyes over beautiful serif letters feels like diving into a pool.

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Meanwhile, I found it kind of weird that Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder, would be so credulous about using Midjourney’s AI to animate an old photo of his late mother, but the pile-on in his QTs was swift and downright alarmed. Reading through it introduced into my vocabulary the concept of “AI necromancy”—which, if we’ve learned anything from the dire state of “AI romance” (or that deeply upsetting Domhnall Gleeson episode of Black Mirror), sounds terrifying. Ryan Broderick wrote more on this for Garbage Day with a characteristic clear eye of where we’re going down this road:

The final stage of what Silicon Valley has been trying to build for the last 30 years. Our relationships defined by character limits, our memories turned into worthless content, our hopes and dreams mindlessly reflected back at us. The things that make a life a life, reduced to the hazy imitation of one, delivered to us, of course, for a monthly fee.

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Does gossip beget a scene, or is it the other way around? In any case, literary LA is growing a fun new crop of dishy indie media, including the tabloid-vibed On The Rag and a hyperlocal Substack, The East Side Rag, of which one of the latest posts is “Is Lauren Sherman the east side Anna?” Amazing.

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And finally, just a pure and perfect blog on culture as a horse race (derogatory), from Defector: Toward A Theory Of Kevin Roose by Albert Burneko. I’m trying to think of a catchall term for this cohort of male journalists/peers of Kevin’s—would count Derek Thompson (recently absconded from The Atlantic, though it’s not a clear cutting of ties, which is probably very wise), Nate Silver, and Ezra Klein here and the ways their careers as former digital journalism boy wonders have borne out into enduring, if kinda less exciting brands.

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Submission Call for Inglenook Lit: new literary magazine for magic and mysticism seeking CNF and short fiction. An Inglenook is a hearth, a place to gather and reflect. Inglenook Lit is a space for wonder-filled curiosity, open minds, and open hearts, where imagination and life experiences gather by the proverbial fire.

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The Garbage Day newsletter is doing a three-night residency at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn next month. We’re going to try and save democracy in America. Or, at the very least, figure out how we broke it. Each night has a different theme and different guests. Click here for tickets to night one (July 8), night two (July 15), and night three (July 22)!