the unpredictable Out There and our growing preference for In Here

Do you think the tradwives are watching "Handmaid's Tale" like... aspirationally

On a freak protein-pilled whim last week, I freestyled something I decided to call “jacked pesto,” which involved blending half a pack of silken tofu in with the usual ingredients, because some influencer somewhere told me you could just do that with “any pasta sauce.” It wasn’t…bad. But it wasn’t good. -D

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At a recent book launch party (one with a rare open bar!) in Brooklyn, all anyone could talk about was Andrea Long Chu’s review of not so much Ocean Vuong’s new novel, but more so Ocean Vuong’s overall schtick, which is really the ALC specialty. The funny thing is that Andrea sounds overall positive about The Emperor of Gladness, but doesn’t let that get in the way of heartily eviscerating certain aspects of Vuonginess that have roiled the diaspora literary discourse in the six years since On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous came out. It’s wild. You have to be a real sicko (complimentary) to be able to sic someone’s use of their mother language right back onto them, and that is why the Pulitzer Prize for criticism was invented, probably:

“But there is a world of difference between being accosted on the street for not speaking English and being asked by an attendee at a reading to explain something that you, a very famous poet, have just read aloud. In these cases, Vuong is clearly more interested in inflicting the language barrier on his American audience than in employing Vietnamese to, say, communicate with other Vietnamese people. This is fine as far as revenge goes.”

Some People Are Saying that Andrea might be working overtime to tear down Asian writers specifically (see: The Hanya Hit), but this Asian writer believes that criticism often works best when it’s an inside job. Anyway, if this is the kind of linguistic thrashing that really powers you during our last allotted AAPI month, you should also read Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility by Som-Mai Nguyen (h/t Steven Duong). Those groupchats will simply hate to see you coming…

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In an ideal world, we would be on like heat 4 of the Lena Dunham leaving New York essay takes tournament, but alas, even that source of once sustainable energy has become depleted over time. But there were two recent newsletters that made me think about our one true millennial avatar and her latest life stage. The first was Kyle’s note about how "A lot more people seem to feel like Dunham these days: They’re not in the city to collide with strangers but to consume its signifiers and then seek safety, which doesn’t leave much left for the city to be” (which is an observation you could honestly copy and paste into deeper discussion on the West Village Girlies).

The second came from trend forecaster Sean Monahan’s newsletter about vacationing and this modern desire to both be freed from our digital lives and yet also to be freed so that we can consume more of it (he notes, re: that viral college student ChatGPT story, that what the kids are doing all that cheating for is….so they can spend more time looking at screens some more): “All that GDP and what does American life look like for the next generation? Cavernous white condos where we hide under microplastic shedding blankets with our phones on Do Not Disturb while we scroll and scroll and scroll, waiting for the DoorDash delivery to be left at our door with a ghostly knock we are too agoraphobic to answer.”

I’m not totally equating Lena Dunham’s decision to leave the noise and chaos of meatspace New York with college students’ pursuit of increasingly screen-smooth lives, but there is a connection there to me regarding our modern relationship with the unpredictable, un-optimizable Out There and our growing preference for In Here. We go outside only to have a slightly better inside experience. Consume signifiers, then seek safety. I’ll be thinking about that for a while.

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she got it from the Gilead Hill House Home outlet

The last time a new season of The Handmaid’s Tale was airing, it was still 2022 lol. But I am finding Season 6 to be relatively non-taxing on the memory recall (plus there’s always The Handmaid’s Tale Wiki and the option to speed-run the plot of The Testaments on Wikipedia if you, too, read the sequel back in the day and are perturbed that the 432-page sequel left not a single trace impression).

But the actual interesting thing about this final season, of course, is its timing against a totally new cultural context (compared to Season 1, which dropped in 2017); now that tradwives, international birth rates, MAHA and increasingly vexing obsessions with nuclear family supremacy reign at the top of our cultural, if not political concerns……….are the pro-natalist girlies watching Serena Joy…aspirationally? In retrospect, the idea that Gilead required a violent coup in order to set up a fratty patriarchy and tightly control the national supply of fertile uteri may have been an overreach of imagination on Maggie Thatcher’s part. Turns out we voted it in ourselves and rather like the aesthetic of it on TikTok!

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Finally, to keep you from losing all hope: A new Tractor Beverage Company-sponsored quarterly magazine called Tractor Beam is exploring the possibilities of “soilpunk;” Mixed Feelings (Condé Nast’s most interesting publication at the moment) is seeking pitches for their medievalcore print issue. Media is always dying, but cool things are always happening, too.