Hello all,
First some brief housekeeping: if you aren’t seeing these emails in your inbox, make sure this email address isn’t being marked as spam, and/or check your “promotions” inbox if you use Gmail (sometimes my other newsletter subscriptions come through here).
Secondly, Substack is now providing a handy little “insert paywall” feature so we can all Gaslight, Girlboss, and Gatekeep. Which is to say: I’ve been thinking for a while about how to better divide paid content from free content, as currently I use the paid subscriptions as a means to support most all content being free. (Subs get the sweet satisfaction of being subs.) But that is not really how this is supposed to work, so I would like to create exclusive content for people who pay because you are generously paying for this very newsletter. (THANK YOU! TO FREE AND PAID READERS I CAN’T BELIEVE PEOPLE–A LOT OF PEOPLE!–ACTUALLY READ THIS, THANKS IT MEANS SO MUCH, REALLY!!)
TLDR: I’ll be experimenting with having half of the emails paywalled. To pique your interest, today I’m linking to some Good Newsletters I’ve previously written, with timely updates from very smart people (not me, lol) that I found enriching to the topic. Behind the paywall, a timely review of Don’t Look Up and general thoughts re: the efficacy of contemporary political satire. Can political satire still work in such a chaotic and self-parodying landscape? That’s after the break. (I’m leaning in!)
The rhetoric of “Just Google It” has moved from cursed corners of Instagram to the upper echelons of power.
I wrote about “Just Google It” here, writing “the demand to just google it undermines itself before the prospective Googler can get off the ground. Google is not a search engine, not really, it’s a highly monetized ad service, with results coming up based on who has paid for them to be there, and importantly, organized silently around what is not shown, what is suppressed.”
Now read: Googling Covid in Poor America, Sick Note by Libby Watson. Here’s a really good excerpt:
The casual laziness of telling us all to Google it is reminiscent of the times our politicians tell us to ‘talk to your doctor’ about Covid, or vaccines, or anything else. Talk to my who? In 2015, only 75 percent of Americans had a primary care provider; for 30 year olds, it was just 64 percent. Everyone should have a doctor, but not everyone does. Millions of people use the emergency room or urgent care instead of having a doctor; millions are uninsured; millions couldn’t afford the bill for even a simple check-up, or believe they couldn’t. There is a sickening presumptuousness of the people in charge of ensuring we have necessary things, having failed at that task, addressing us as if they aced it. It’s insulting and dismissive of the very people they’ve let down most.
Re: “Confessions of a Former Pandemic Shamer” - read here if you missed it.
I like this thread below a lot—it’s a good balance between understanding our new reality while also pinpointing the sort of structural solutions we would need to happen to live with Covid that is not the terrifying “we’ll all get it, so whatever” refrain.
Last week I wrote about viral dating content and social media as hellhole, i.e. talked about West Elm Caleb. I really liked this article in Real Life Mag that touched on similar themes. Here’s a great quote:
As we’ve all experienced, to one degree or another over the last two years, fear and the sense of abandonment by powerful authorities can drive compulsive behavior online: from doomscrolling, to sharing a viral TikTok in the desperate hope that it’ll save someone’s life. Young people — facing just as many threats, but with less power to protect themselves — are just as susceptible as their elders.
Here are some other things I am reading:
Okay, I watched Don’t Look Up.
Apparently, people are divided about this film. At least that’s what the reviews say, which I am just now reading. I will use context clues to assume that yes, people online are still talking about this film, and feel all sorts of ways about it. As The Atlantic put it, “Critics, audiences, and activists have both savaged and praised the movie, and the backlash has highlighted the difficulty of conveying an urgent message with comedy. Has political satire lost its power? Or has reality become so absurd that it’s now beyond parody?”
Maybe I’m just an asshole or I can’t let people enjoy things, least of all myself. Needless to say, I don’t think this film highlights how political satire has lost its power, in large part because the film is not especially funny, nor does it make any salient political observations whatsoever.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Please Clap to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.