Media knives do still come out on Twitter
& Recommended reading on group relations while we wait for "Pluribus" to unspool
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How brave of Tatiana Schlossberg (Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, which yes, makes her Jack Schlossberg’s older sister) to open up about her leukemia diagnosis in an essay for The New Yorker in a way that openly politicizes her illness in the wider context of RFK Jr.’s takeover of public health and, hopefully, makes his impact unmistakably tangible. That critical chemotherapy drug she counts on? Derived from studies almost certainly reliant on government funding. The misoprostol she needed amid a postpartum hemorrhage? Colloquially known as (one half of) the abortion pill, now “under review” by the FDA. The vaccines she has to re-up now that her immune system has been obliterated? You already know how her cousin feels about those.
What Schlossberg’s essay makes clear is how the administration’s policies are chipping away at the national health apparatus at every level, no exceptions. How horrifying it is to be so sick at all; how needlessly nightmarish it will also have to be for so many others.
Since it appears that I’ll really never log off, it is now part of my duty to inform Deezers who think of Media Twitter as a half-remembered dream of the odd bits and scraps that still come up there. Today, it’s Isaac Chotiner trading barbs with Ben Smith over a recent opinion piece published by Semafor Gulf, which from the pov of this American reader, does read quite bizarrely (the gist is roughly are we really gonna let one dismembered journalist ruin the vibe???). You can lurk on the whole exchange here.
Also did you know that Wong Kar-Wai is getting quite definitively cancelled in China? I was talking to a cinephile friend about WKW’s new 30-part (!) TV drama Blossoms Shanghai, which premieres in the U.S. tonight exclusively on the Criterion Channel and then will be dribbled out each Monday, three episodes at a time. But apparently there have been some serious accusations of exploitation and abusive treatment made by a young screenwriter who worked on the project and had, at least for a while, the audio recordings to prove it; a World of Reel blog describes the fall-out as “career-ending backlash.” Much as the western world loves to hate our own Machiavellian auteurs, it’ll be interesting to see if this picks up any traction at all with folks outside of the Chungking Express matinee creative crowd.
The funniest take so far about Wicked: For Good is Jason P. Frank’s blog for Vulture about Elphaba’s sex cardigan, which absolutely flummoxes the brain even more when you see it within the context of the movie. One supposes that cloaking Cynthia Erivo as much as possible is a practical constraint of the whole green skin thing, but it is sartorially most unfortunate. She’s wearing such a nice filmy head-scarf/travel cloak thing at the end; wish that we could have had more of that!
Are you watching Pluribus yet? Who’s watching Pluribus?? The show is starting to fill the niche in my soul for brainy television in the style of The Watchmen / The Good Place / 3 Body Problem, but I feel like the premise (everyone in the world suddenly is infected by an alien-transmitted virus that links them into a hive mind, except for a random few exceptions including our protagonist Carol) is leading to a plot that’s still too in love with the individualist arcs of the characters who were left out (it’s basically The Leftovers, But With A Different Problem).
What I really want to know, CC Vince Gilligan, is how the hive mind works, and what kind of reasoning it subscribes to when, for example, “everyone” decides to turn off all the lights at night to conserve energy but also decides it’s fine to restock an entire grocery store purely for Carol’s benefit (Is it utilitarianism? Some kind of new religious orthodoxy? It certainly seems almost religious the way they cater to Carol’s whims). I just think it seems like a creative cop-out to simply say, okay, all minds are linked, and then only be interested in that so far as to the eerie effect it has when everyone greets “Hi Carol” in a simultaneous chorus, to serve as this mysterious immovable group antagonist.
I hope we find out more, but I also suspect that Pluribus is a show that’s not actually interested in putting forth radical ideas about collectivism, which is fine, but also is why I really enjoyed reading Lily Scherlis’s piece in N+1 about group relations (and their political potential), which includes her foray into something called a “group relations conference” where strangers are lumped together for days with no real agenda except to, I assume, not kill each other:
In study groups, you don’t talk about what happened last night or last year; you don’t discuss art or TV or the news. Instead, it’s customary to speak about the “here-and-now,” to try to pin down your instantaneous emotional response to the room. In response to a comment from a neighbor, you might turn to him and say, “I’m jealous of how everyone just listened when you talked,” or “You remind me of my abusive stepfather.”
The point of sharing your experience is to learn about the group as a whole: by speaking this way, you offer up your feelings as a collective resource for everyone’s observation. Even so, many of us fantasize that the ability to detect and name trickier feelings will prepare us to handle ourselves better in other, less experimental group settings, as though group relations were a kind of boot camp for self-awareness — “CrossFit for group life,” as one member described it. Once you’ve seen yourself project your feelings onto others in the closed environment of a conference — and been used as a screen for others’ feelings — it’s easier to spot these phenomena in the wild, and to take things less personally.
Now there’s some ripe material!
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That Semafor piece is one of the grossest things I've ever read.
Must Mohammed bin Salman be judged so harshly because he had a journalist tortured, bone-sawed, and stuffed into a piece of luggage? Can't we instead say thank you to him for bringing the comedy stylings of Andrew Schulz to Riyadh?
Ben Smith has always been dicey, but I thought hiring Benny Johnson to write for a mainstream publication would be his nadir. The bar has been lowered.