Basically
When in clone: Babs and her dog's doubles.
Verbatim
The New York Times hired self-described anarchist pacifist Quinn Norton to its editorial board. Twitter went wild and—six hours later—she was fired. It happened with the alien force of mob justice, too fast for any individual to process in real-time, including Quinn herself. So now, after the dust has settled, who better to provide the hot take than Quinn herself?
Here is your task, person on the internet, reader of journalism, speaker to the world on social media: You make the world now, in a way that you never did before. Your beliefs have a power they’ve never had in human history. You must learn to investigate with a scientific and loving mind not only what is true, but what is effective in the world. Right now we are a world of geniuses who constantly love to call each other idiots. But humanity is the most complicated thing we’ve found in the universe, and so far as we know, we’re the only thing even looking. We are miracles by the billions with powers and luxuries beyond the dreams of kings of old.
I am not, and will never be, a simple writer. I have sought to convict, accuse, comfort, and plead with my readers. I’m leaving the majority of my flaws online: Go for it, you can find them if you want. It’s a choice I made long ago.
Things
Excellent, extensive reporting from Bloomberg on Ethiopia’s turn on the bottom rung of cheap, exploitative clothing manufacture, at the behest of China. The standard cycle we’ve seen so many times – exploitative labour sort-of bolstering the greedier pockets in the local economy until the human rights groups show up, when the work moves along to a new country with new incentives to start fresh – is no different here, but China’s involvement, funding the regime’s lavish tax incentives, is a fresh twist that gives “Made in China” a meaning more complex than ever before.
In the last office we all worked in together, the bleak soundscapes (any real conversation happening in Slack backchannels more than at desks) were terrifying to any casual outsider that came in. For Study Hall, Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame) surveys the acoustic oppression of the modern open office space, and the absurd industry of acoustic furniture that’s arisen to distract you from the torture with felted placebos.
David Lynch Teaches Typing.
Each study detailing the minutiae of yet another layer of the social media underworld is fascinating. But big-data studies can quickly feel overwhelming, and slice-of-life troll profiles can be distracting, each perpetuating the confusion they describe. If news is a disintegrating reality, maybe we can find solid ground in more straightforward reporting, grounded in individual voices.
David Chang (and intermittently his erstwhile Lucky Peach compadre Pete Meehan) have pulled off something pretty special with Ugly Delicious, their new Netflix series that you may have missed amongst all the other chef-worship food porn on there. This isn’t a series about extreme eats or sexy eats – it’s about the politics of food, and the many nuances of that which we often tend to stew over in this email. It’s about erasure, identity, oppression, elitism, misguided obsessions with purity, and so much more. As Helen Rosner puts it at The New Yorker, in an article which really sums up everything we wanted to say about it, "the show isn’t about what food is, it’s about what it means, and about the choices people make that change its meaning."
In the ongoing saga of Facebook’s ever-shifting algorithm, online publisher LittleThings shuts down in one fell tweak. Oof.
Sure, Milan fashion week had the unreal Lil Miquela and drones on the runway, but London fashion week brought out the queen herself, the Queen.
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