- Popsugar: The Viral “Clean Girl” Aesthetic Is Really Isolating For Me. I’m glad I’m too old and too sick to really care about this aesthetic. On the other hand, I’m lucky and have “good” skin and/because I don’t wear a lot of makeup. So I’ve been doing this for a long time and it’s finally on trend.
- Simone: What If We Made Advertising Illegal? A radical proposal that requires some thought.
- Fansplaining: Bridgerton and Period Drama Fandom’s Enduring Racism Problem. I haven’t seen Bridgerton (I don’t have Netflix and I bounced off the first book hard) but this sure sounds like other fandoms I know more about.
- O Caftan My Caftan: Letter of Recommendation: Victorian Visits. Stay for a few weeks, why don’t you? This is the dream.
- The Conversation: A 1930s movement wanted to merge the US, Canada and Greenland. Here’s why it has modern resonances. The “Technocracy” movement of the 1930s was all about running things by data, which of course resonates with the modern movement to destroy government data sources. Just saying.
- NY Times: Living Car-Free in Arizona, on Purpose and Happily. I’d love to live in a community like this, but maybe not in Arizona, where it would be too hot to get out during most of the summer.
- By Hand: Published Doesn’t Mean Paid. I was thinking of my friend who is a published genre fiction author and being glad her spouse has a remunerative day job.
- NPR: Why would a musician join OnlyFans? Because making a living is only getting harder. Fascinating and depressing.
- The Problematic Author. An illustrated (comic) zine about J.K. Rowling written in 2019 and updated in 2023. I was never that into Harry Potter as anything but a setting my friends wanted to roleplay in. The thing that I found most interesting about the setting was the difference between its nominal values and the actual values presented in the text. Once Rowling outed herself as a bigot, there wasn’t anything to be interested in in the text. I’m sorry for the folks whose hearts she broke, though.
- Wall Street Journal: The Tactics Elon Musk Uses to Manage His ‘Legion’ of Babies—and Their Mothers. I wanted to take a shower while I was reading this. Gross. If you don’t want to give the WSJ a click, Jezebel also has the details: Ashley St. Clair Just Spilled All of Elon Musk’s ‘Harem Drama’.
- ProPublica: An Indian Drugmaker, Investigated by ProPublica Last Year, Has Recalled Two Dozen Medications Sold to U.S. Patients. Looking to see whether my prescriptions are on the list, like you do. (They were not, or at least not from the affected lots.)
- Separated by a Common Language: Anglo-Saxon. About the political connotations of using “Anglo-Saxon” in Britain and America. Spoiler: the American usage is ethnoracial. This is a problem I knew about from having been in grad school in medieval history, though my period of greatest interest was well post-Conquest.
- Food & Wine: Scientists Just Figured Out How Food Aversions Actually Form. Useful to know because I definitely have developed some and they’re hard to get over.
- Studio Notes: The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952-1967. One of those fascinating little niche histories that you run across on the internet.
- AP: Historic domes of Hagia Sophia being renovated to protect landmark from earthquakes. Just over one minute of video, subtitled.
- The Flytrap: #DeathTok is Actually Full of Life. About the community of people with terminal diagnoses on TikTok, particularly younger people.
Skip to content
News and opinionating from the Metroplex.