turns out elections can feel communal!
Tech media beef...such a rare and delicious cut
I saw Bugonia and thought Jesse Plemons’ styling in the movie—that hair alternately leonine then limp, thighs bared as he biked crazily down the street, the overall warehouse worker grunge look—stole the show. Hard to outshine bald Emma Stone, but he does it!
Also, if you’re in New York and trying to hang out / pick up some books for the holidays, I’m doing this “Rec Room” event + fundraiser with Yu & Me Books on Nov. 17!
It’s morning in Mamdani’s America New York, and the entire city feels like it’s recovering happily from a hangover. So far, I found the most interesting take on Zohran’s phenomenal mayoral campaign to be this NYT piece by Emma Goldberg and Benjamin Oreskes about the campaign tapped into young people’s desire to be out and about—and to feel like a part of something big and real. It was truly impressive to observe how the Mamdani campaign felt like a rolling social event in the city; it was wonderful how Hell Gate got in the spirit and provided not only an Election Night livestream but also a list of bars for voters to take in Tuesday night together. (I wound up at a random brewery deep in the Commie Corridor to watch the acceptance speech, then danced a bit at Gabriela’s election night party; if you also saw someone light a firework somewhere along the Williamsburg waterfront around 2 a.m., no you didn’t :)
Elsewhere, Hamilton Nolan’s dispatch from the official Mamdani party at Brooklyn Paramount reads like a dispatch from a lost decade; I haven’t heard a Gawker alum call something “beautiful” since it was reported that the BuzzFeed office had bedbugs.
As everyone preps their big election night take, Ken Klippenstein offered a refreshingly blunt analysis primed for soundbite insertion at the Thanksgiving table; Eddie Huang is also getting on the Woke 2 train and passing on sage and necessary wisdom on how we should consider the richies in general, politically and practically:
Rich people are a lost cause and your life will be better if you realize that rich people are basically giant grand fruit trees in our society. They’re like the Cherry Blossoms in D.C. You don’t yell at the cherry blossoms, you don’t ask them to hurry up and bloom, you just marvel at the beauty their surgeon has crafted and wait for fruit to drop.
Something to think about!
In the tech media realm, you may have missed Ed Zitron and Casey Newton trading barbs in this Wired profile on the former the first time around, but now you don’t have an excuse. Frankly, I didn’t think Casey had it in him! But “Temu Kara Swisher” is worth a Platformer subscription alone.
There’s a new prestige indie mag in town called Equator that actually seems smart and cool and has a website! (Notable to me is the involvement of Krithika Varagur, an O.G. Drift editor with the kind of lit girl credentials that has you modeling J.Crew x New Yorker merch). This personal essay from Soyonbo Borjgin about the absurdity of working as a reporter at The Inner Mongolia Daily is a must-read, written with such a dry sense of humor that it feels borderline satirical. (“I even ran a series on the dating lives of young Mongolians – an idea I copied from The New York Times’ ‘Modern Love’ column.”)
Speaking of The Drift and humor, you’d think we’ve long since left the realm of “funny ways of writing about Trump,” but Erik Baker’s meditation on modern self-help begins with an instant favorite opening graf. The rest of the piece gets a little mired in the weeds, but first third is fantastic.
Finally, Vanity Fair’s Erin Vanderhoof interviewed Jane Pratt (of xoJane and now Another Jane Pratt Thing) and shrewdly turned it into a conversation about Evie, the trad women’s magazine who apparently think they’re really cooking by slapping a “This content is for married women only” disclaimer at the top of their sex articles. Get ‘em Jane!!!
How good are you at spotting lies on social media? How many times a day do you wonder if that thing someone posted is true, or if that video is AI? On the Question Everything podcast, journalist Brian Reed (S-Town, This American Life) investigates forces inciting lies, and sets out to fix the internet. He knows exactly where to start.
