“The central object of your disgust over these past several weeks has not been external.”
“The central object of your disgust over these past several weeks has not been external.”
I hate Hate Read.
[Editor’s note: Today is the last day of Hate Read. What a ride! Personally, my 2024 goal was to “make something fun with fun people,” so I thank you for humoring me and our 24 perfect writers on this little project. We lived, we laughed, we snagged ~600K views…
Big thanks to Chris Gayomali, Heather Havrilesky, and Choire Sicha for being like, yes, absolutely do this, people will go berserk. (You all kind of did! :)) Thank you also to Today In Tabs, NY Mag, Line Sheet, WaPo, FastCo, Embedded, the CBC, Reliable Sources, Rachel Tashjian, Derek Guy, How Long Gone, Nolita Dirtbag, Throwing Fits, Queerty, Hell Gate i guess and everyone else who *^*engaged*^* along the way.
Will Hate Read ever return again? Of course. It’ll be back whenever Gotham/the internet truly needs it. Season 2 is only ever one (1) tasteful, good-natured sponsor away………….xoxo delia]
There is a conceit in musical theater that when a character becomes too emotional to talk, that’s when they begin to sing, and when they become too emotional still, that is when they dance. This concept applies to blogging as well; when you become too emotional to simply write, you write a screed, and when you become too exasperated to screed, then and only then do you write a hate read.
Your bog-standard sports subreddit is chock full of bile about rivals, sure, but those are not hate reads. Ask a vegan about veal and you’ll probably get an earful, but that’s not a hate read. No, a hate read takes something special, something that is liked and arguably beloved, and argues that the esteem to which it is held is wrong, that the elevation was an error, and that the true status of the subject must be reconciled one sentence at a time.
This takes a level of integrity and a clarity of vengeful spirit that many find to be in poor taste, but they are wrong: a hate read is a margin call in the take economy, and without it, our culture would be far poorer. Think of a world without hate reads. We’d all be walking around, still humming the lyrics to Hamilton.
This tried-and-true format is older than the internet, a form of artistic expression that is all amygdala. It’s an ancient thing truly, a holy thing, even. To hate is to care, and to pen a hate read is to fundamentally understand something, to dissect it, to conceive of it in its totality and find it wanting.
To consider, to find lacking, and to destroy—now that is divine.
And these past couple weeks, I have duly considered your hate reads and I find them pathetic. You don’t hate these things.
You merely hate that you got too old to enjoy them anymore.
These pieces certainly don’t lack spirit, but many of these writers wouldn’t recognize piss or even vinegar if their senescent, forty-something feet stepped in it. Would that it was so simple that you were the very first creature alive to discover that industry parties, much to the surprise of all of us, are actually bad? Or is it more likely perhaps you have accidentally, and to your utter displeasure, become the kind of person who can’t appreciate a party anymore? The orthotics in your piss-and-vinegar-coated Converses hold the answer.
They say that when you seek vengeance, dig two graves. These modest attempts at vengeance-by-paen could not illustrate this any better.
You don’t hate the clubbing scene; you just got old, and music makes you cranky when you stay up too late. You’ve just come to the alarming realization that finally getting the correctly calibrated dosage of SSRIs means you’re not whipsawing between manic and depressive like you were at 23, which probably makes the molly more boring.
You don’t hate karaoke; you hate that you’re no longer fun at karaoke. You don’t hate menswear; you just hate that society and fashion culture has inexorably moved beyond you. You don’t hate asking for photos; you just think you’re too good to do so. You don’t hate boygenius; you just hate musical evolution, and the discovery that not everything is for you now that you’ve aged out of the lucrative 18-29 demo. You are even too old to tolerate whimsy, or suprise, or god forbid, delight of discovery.
I insist, you don’t even hate American Fiction. You just hate that a different blogger won the golden ticket.
When you see Barbie, you don’t hate it; you simply see a younger and flawed version of yourself enjoying Barbie and cannot square that hopeful, open-minded person with what you have become. You don’t hate astrology; in your twilight years you just hate having to put the effort in to impress people who value it, to make even the slightest effort to engage in innocuous chit chat. You want to cancel Miley so that you don’t have to engage with the remaining part of yourself that loves Miley, because her music meant something to you when you were twenty and that mortifies your superannuated taste.
I assume you claim to hate climbing because you want to make a very easy metaphor for me.
The central object of your disgust over these past several weeks has not been external. None of you hate anything.
You just got old. You became a was in a world of are, and you resent the is for reminding you of how much you have become a were.
You process this rage and hope that the result is a scathing jeremiad, the kind that used to be at the top of Chartbeat, but what you’ve penned is a confession that the world has changed and you are scared because of it. You are exhausted because you have finally become the person that Hims advertisements on the subway are for. You’re attempting to maintain a rapidly deteriorating you by steering the culture away from the trends you no longer belong to. But instead you are veering into a caricature of Andy Rooney, the only true difference being that he never knew what a retinol cream was. You know who Andy Rooney is, for that matter. You’re old enough.
In your attic there is a portrait. Perhaps it is a Facebook-tagged profile photo that seems to get more and more pixelated every time you look at it, perhaps it is an Instax polaroid that darkens every year, perhaps it was taken with Snapchat Spectacles at the Digg office one time. You were young in it. It has been many years since its making. The subject of this photo has grown more and more desiccated and deteriorated each and every year, and you have spent the past four weeks attempting to blog your way out of that reality. You, like Dorian Grey before you, have failed in this attempt.
Hate reads involve finding something popular and enjoyed, and with gusto and guile taking it down a peg.
And I will close by saying: you succeeded. But not as intended. After all: You were once popular. You were once enjoyed.
—Falter Quickly
Not only did you roast us Olds, you cremated us and flushed the ashes. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
My takeaway from this is Doodle hatred is still unimpeachable.