Happy Sunday! I don’t really have anything fun to say here to be honest, because I’m mostly just sad about Sydney being in lockdown (although video chats and government-sanctioned walks have definitely been helping). Sorry! Here’s a good song though:
Onto the links:
Katie Baker of The Ringer putting into words what many of us have been feeling for years: the internet is bad now, actually. It feels like everything is just content where someone’s selling something to us in one way or another and so many of the good, fun websites that existed just to make us laugh or entertain us without selling to us are long dead (I’ll be sad about Grantland forever). The final nail in the coffin for me was the recent launch of Tumblr Premium - not because I think it will really take off, but it just really cemented the idea that communities can’t just be allowed to exist on the internet, they have to be monetised, or else what’s the point?
The internet lasts forever, the internet never forgets. And yet it is also a place in which I feel confronted with an almost unbearable volume of daily reminders of its decay: broken links, abandoned blogs, apps gone by, deleted tweets (miss you always, ah-well-nevertheless!), too-cutesy 404 messages, vanished Vines, videos whose copyright holders have requested removal, lost material that the Wayback Machine never crawled, things I know I’ve read somewhere and want to quote in my work but just can’t seem to resurface the same way I used to be able to. Some of these losses are silly and tiny, but others over the years have felt more monumental and telling. And when Google Reader disappeared in 2013, it wasn’t just a tale of dwindling user numbers or of what one engineer later described as a rotted codebase. It was a sign of the crumbling of the very foundation upon which it had been built: the era of the Good Internet.
A short story by Curtis Sittenfeld, the author of Rodham, about a young woman who babysits for a fictional version of Jeff and Mackenzie Bezos in the late 90s.
An exploration of the discourse around cesareans.
When I first encountered the taxonomy of “cesarean mothers” created by the cesarean-prevention movement in the early 1980s, paraphrased in Wolf’s book, I couldn’t help wondering where I fell: “The ‘cesarean mourner’ had never made peace with not having a vaginal birth. The ‘cesarean victim’ suspected her surgery had been unnecessary. The ‘cesarean learner’ was now empowered to seek a vaginal birth the next time around. The ‘cesarean surrender’ had given up the fight. The ‘cesarean gratitude’ was thankful for the surgery that had saved her and her baby. The ‘cesarean activist’ was determined that no woman ever have unnecessary surgery again. The ‘cesarean phoenix’ rose ‘victorious from bitter ashes!’”
A short look at the history of Jimmy Eat World’s album Bleed American, which has just celebrated its 20th anniversary.
Some tweets:
+here’s a very good cover of a very good song:
That’s it! As always, @ me or email me with any thoughts, good links, etc!