stuff worth looking on your phone this weekend
Stacey Duigid’s mad memoir, Sam Bankman-Fried on trial, why Freud is back and how online dating is murdering the 'meet-cute'
British style writer Stacey Duigid’s new divorce-and-dating memoir is an agonising, hilarious, legs-spread rendering of what it means to be a hot mess tearing through London in the second adolescence of your forties.
“I’m a middle-aged woman, abandoned in a hotel room, amid a seedy scene of empty vodka bottles and cocaine debris. Next to the expensive lace body suit, discarded on the floor, he’s left a pile of cash. He said he’d pay for room service. I suppose he can’t have it come up on his card, in case his wife finds out.”
The precocious crypto magnate Sam Bankman-Fried is currently standing trial for one of the largest financial frauds in US history. His Stanford law prof parents reject the accusations against him in spite of the mountain of evidence to support it. Sheelah Kolhatkar’s brilliant New Yorker feature on Sam and his family is a brilliantly reported study in tribalism, privilege and wilful blindness.
‘I asked [Sam’s mother] whether she had ever felt compelled to ask her son if he’d done any of the things he’d been charged with. She replied no—she didn’t need to ask. Her son was incapable of dishonesty or stealing, she said. “Sam will never speak an untruth,” she went on. “It’s just not in him.”’
Becca Rothfeld tears a strip off pandering public intellectuals in The Yale Review.
“If the academic humanities too often address only siloed experts, then pop philosophy too often addresses an audience of imagined idiots. And condescension is an especially risky vice for public intellectuals, because it conflicts with the very practice of public thinking.”
Music writer Ted Goia of The Honest Broker, offers some fascinating stats and analysis on why pop music is getting sadder and sadder.
“The slow tune is no longer dreamy music for couples, but sad, lonely music for the isolated and depressed. It doesn’t help that handheld devices, earbuds, and other pervasive technologies have turned music into something consumed alone, not communally as it was in past.”
Helen Lewis in The Atlantic pokes fun at the proliferation of inanely over-the-top blurbs in contemporary publishing.
“If there’s one thing authors love more than procrastinating, it’s praising one another.”
How is it even possible that I’ve actually written several romantic comedies and yet had somehow never heard of the plot device “meet-cute” til now? Lauren Forsythe explains how online dating is destroying it in LitHub.
“Do we exalt the “meet cute”—arguably the endangered species of the contemporary dating world—because it’s aspirational, or are people simply clamoring for stories more diverse, more “romantic” than the ones they so often hear about?”
Freud is the new black. Stamped it no erasies. The Journal of Higher Education says so.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
I’ve never heard the phrase “meet cute” either although I sort of have one...
My hubby Stewart and I met when we simultaneous visited a mutual friend in hospital after the birth of her first child. It was over the lunch hour. I’d had a day at work where I’d literally locked myself in my office to write a presentation. I hadn’t done my hair and whatever make-up I was wearing had most certainly worn off. I cursed when I found the room and saw 2 guys in there who were also visiting Linda. If I’d seen them before I’d entered the room I’d have lurked outside until they left. That’s how terrible I looked!
The next week, I got a call from Linda asking if I remembered those guys and that one of them wanted to ask me out (the other, who is now a great friend, I learned later, had advised against it😂).
Although I was in my early 30s I was still pretty picky about my dates, preferring to meet someone and have our friendship blossom into something more. This was effectively a Blind Date, something I was not at all interested in. But I couldn’t insult Linda and her husband Brad (both of whom I worked with), who was a childhood friend of Stewart’s.
We had dinner, drank way too much, and had a night cap at my place. (I learned later that Stewart asked Brad why he hadn’t told him I’d been married before. I hadn’t! But at 33 I did have a nicely furnished apartment with a set of antique dishes in a display case. Stewart mistook these for my “wedding china”😂).
I could bore you with the story of how our second date almost didn’t happen (ever heard of the 5 Day Rule?) but instead just tell you that we celebrated 30 years of marriage this past May.
And for many years we returned to Le Paradis to celebrate, at my insistence, the Anniversary of our First Date, where I never failed to tell the waiter that our story began there.
Feel free to use this in your next romantic comedy!
I’m old so this really hit home.
The slow tune is no longer dreamy music for couples, but sad, lonely music for the isolated and depressed. It doesn’t help that handheld devices, earbuds, and other pervasive technologies have turned music into something consumed alone, not communally as it was in past.”