what i've been reading: (+ my fave girlhood essay of them all)

Just a little reading list for you as I finish fending off a strep/cold/wtf pinkeye????/total burnout combo—what else is new, eh?—but I hope you all have a calm and RESTFUL end to 2023. 

If you MISS me miss me, you can catch me on my friends Mic and Jenny’s “Asian Not Asian” podcast last month. There were also these nice reviews in Times (UK) and the Guardian (wellll it’s mostly nice lol) of Central Places, of which you can now buy in the UK and in paperback! And for Vanity Fair, I did a fun, slightly unhinged profile of Mindy Seu, who’s for sure the coolest and most glamorous digital archivist you’ll ever meet. 

Also, if this time of the year usually leaves you feeling a bit sad and fragilé too, I highly recommend following @clownlifeizzi on Instagram, who creates extremely heart-warming cartoons that now make up 90% of the content that I’m hitting the groupchats with. (The other 10% is this TikTok of an enviably exuberant turtle.) 

xoxo delia 

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Links:

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The actually interesting details from TIME’s Taylor of the Year cover story, in my opinion, are actually about her training/tour regimen, because let’s be real, the only mystery left about Taylor Swift is simply where does she get the ENERGY? Apparently she used to run on a treadmill and sing her entire set list aloud every day; and after a run of shows, she gets ***one*** day to lay in bed. Which seems not enough? Unless three people are Theragunning her whole body throughout said day? (Honestly, no wonder she’s dating a professional athlete!)

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Ian Urbina’s investigation into long-distance Chinese fishing ships is the rare New Yorker piece you *should* read online, not in print—the interactive has helpful maps and photos to orient you across a completely ghastly story. Also, Urbina’s reporting methods are pretty unforgettable: 

​​When permitted, I boarded vessels to talk to the crew or pulled alongside them to interview officers by radio. In many instances, the Chinese ships got spooked, pulled up their gear, and fled. When this happened, I trailed them in a skiff to get close enough to throw aboard plastic bottles weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions. On several occasions, deckhands wrote replies, providing phone numbers for family back home, and then threw the bottles back into the water.

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Kate Lindsay, in her always good newsletter Embedded, wrote about the bleak state of “millennial meme marketing”—you know, the funny niche internet joke → soul-killing corporate advertiser copy pipeline:

It’s easy to say it’s our own fault for pioneering these tropes and buzzwords in the first place, but these things didn’t start in some kind of millennial company all-hands. They started in forums and Twitter discourse and through other kinds of authentic collaboration for nothing more than the purposes of humor and self-expression. The issue is when capitalism—specifically, brands and public figures—try to brazenly profit off of these things while severely underestimating the creativity required. What we get are lazy, empty invocations of the lowest common denominators of our culture, pitched to a person who doesn’t really exist.

I also think SNL has started playing a huge role in picking up internet trends and magnifying them to a mainstream (and probably perplexed) audience, though with something as shiny and well-produced as Jason Momoa singing about the Roman Empire, the joke doesn’t even need context to work. (Would we go as far to say SNL is “stealing” viral meme culture if they’re just packaging internet jokes inside slick execution like this?

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Underrated Fran Lebowitz zinger: “The level of comfort that people seem to feel they need is like a level of comfort that you would have while taking a bubble bath. You don’t need to be that comfortable all the time.

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I finally read Joe Bernstein’s so-dunkable-it-hurts writeup of the Praxis bro trying to “build” a “society” where cryptodudes can thrive and drink Austrian water all day, lol; the audacity-idiocy combo on display is just…

Internal Praxis documents outline three “persona groups” who will populate the Praxis city. They are “warriors,” who are “muscular” and “clean” and protect society from threats; “priests,” who are “very thin,” and “define the values and beliefs of society”; and “merchants,” who are “portly” and “bearded,” and include venture capitalists and cryptocurrency professionals.

Baby boy seems to be confusing “starting a society” with “writing characters for a children’s fantasy book,” except that’s honestly a disservice to the amount of thought it takes to actually write a children’s fantasy book. Personally, I am rooting for Praxis to happen. If tech guys are gonna drag civilization down with them, at least let us WATCH out unfold in the open. 

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Many, many year-end takes on the “girlhood” trend in culture (which seems to have reached a fevered apogee via bow memes this week?). I wrote one in July lol, but this one from Wired sticks out the most to me: Everyone Is a Girl Online from Alex Quicho 

Maybe you, too, are a side character in the story that supposedly ends all stories: the emergence of the postpolitical, delivering a smooth and tranquilized subjectivity so dispersed that it feels nothing and is moved to no action in spite of the Real delivering destruction to their door. The rise of the “NPC influencer”—smiling and spiritually lobotomized, fine-tuned for an increasingly instinctive response to live cash stimulus—is the endgame for all that terrifies people about digital culture and how it affects human minds. Be not afraid of this other type of angel, the super-evolved brainless doll slurping dollar-pegged ice cream at the end of the infinite scroll.

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Note how studiously The Cut did NOT promote their package on Age Gappers (relationships with a big age difference) during the whole May December mania lol……..sorry that’s just my conjunctivitis humor talking…..………anyway it’s a provocative piece, but I wish they’d used the interviews with these couples to parse some more interesting points about how different kinds of partners play different roles.

For example, there’s one woman who discusses how she wanted a “family man” at one point in life versus an “adventure man” later. Those are different skill sets! She’s not wrong! Also, my friend Kyle pointed out that the “older partner taking care of the younger partner, then later in life, it’s vice versa” dynamic should be examined more as a feature, not a bug, of these relationships. There’s so much more interesting stuff to mine than just how these people look sitting next to each other in bed!  

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Speaking of which, Kyle and Nate Gallant started a new newsletter project called One Thing that’s very fun and accessible to read if you miss blogging. A recent post on “finished basement-core” aesthetic has been a fave.

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Charlie Warzel on how AI Is About to Photoshop Your Memories. I have a theory that the smartphone camera has surpassed some weird uncanny valley threshold, where all our photos now reliably look a little off because the lighting is already so algorithmically determined. (Spookier still: when your phone camera ends up denying the reality of wildfire smoke!) 

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BONDY by (La)Horde (a dance performance video) — I was hoping to do a story on this French dance collective, but even though that didn’t work out, I enjoyed getting to know (La)Horde’s ethos about democratizing movement and incorporating even TikTok and video game movements into their body of work. This video is a good starter into their whole deal. 

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As ever, Dirt continues to be doing interesting things with the newsletter-publication format. I loved this essay that’s roughly about “Dogtooth,” “Aftersun” and home, but their collab with Triangle House to discuss the Future of Fiction is also worth a read. (Tl;dr, it seems the only way to have any fun at all in literature or media going forward is to band together with some friends and start a little zine/press/project.) 

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This piece from Hannah Baer in Artforum makes a case for AI’s more transcendent possibilities (and us humans’ comparative lack of imagination): 

Why do we believe intelligence is a license for domination and violence?  …. I want to live in a world where deep transformation—creating something that connects us more deeply to ourselves and one another, redrawing our self-image—is the tendency. I have a wish for wonder to give way to advancement, rather than domination and extraction.

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I’ve been reading Rob Horning’s newsletter, Internal Exile more and more. This post on Instagram competitors and Spotify genres includes probably the best description of what role Instagram actually holds in our daily lives is exactly right: 

When people need a sense of what success and social inclusion look like, in their immediate circle and in the concentric rings broadening out toward their aspirational horizons, they look at Instagram. It is where users can consume normativity. They can scroll until they have struck some sort of balance between anxiety and reassurance about where they fit into society, and then they can close the app … Instagram confronts us with our perpetual inadequacy, our dependence on influencers and other kinds of commercial communication to orient ourselves, how all the people we know seem to fall right in line. It’s always there, always refreshing; the feed never stops. 

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And finally, two resources I’ve genuinely relied on and found helpful in recent months: this three-part podcast explainer sketching the basics of Palestinian and Israeli history, and honestly? Semafor’s Flagship newsletter, which has become a go-to straightforward source for daily news updates on Gaza.