HELLO and welcome to the 337th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can know more about Subway commercials! This “column” is less queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
You’re Not Just an Idea in Your Head: A Conversation with Miranda July. Lily Felsenthal and Debbie Ou for the Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2024
I just read July’s new novel All Fours and I fucking loved it. Then I went ahead and loved this too. (If you also love Miranda July, you might love these books too)
We’re So Back. Luke Winkie for Slate, July 2024
“‘These coaches prey on people desperately wanting to get their partner back, say that you ‘need’ to pay for their services, and that they will ‘make a plan’ for you,” said Pimentel. “But in reality we can’t control others. We can only control ourselves.”
Why Do All The World’s Best Athletes Do Subway Commercials? Whizy Kim for Vox, June 2024
Every Subway store is run by franchisees who pass on a mighty percentage of profits to the corporation, which’s a unique element of the Subway business models. Now, with stores struggling to stay afloat as Subway’s product has failed to impress in a new world containing more “healthy” options, better sandwich shops and myriad fast casual options.
Starbucks’ Digital Dilemma. Trung Phan for SatPost, May 2024
Wild to remember how often I used to go to Starbucks with my laptop in the 2000s, or to meet up with people, and how packed it’d be during the school year, how intimately I knew all the locations in my area of New York. Now Starbucks has moved away from being a “third place” and towards facilitating mobile orders via a very successful app that is also sort of a bank, making novelty pink drinks, and still charging premium prices for it all. Customers are moving to local coffee shops, which is good news. But I always love Phan’s insight on topics like this, I have kept thinking about this piece in the ensuing weeks, and I think you will too.
The Smoker. Ottessa Moshfegh for The Paris Review, February 2023
“I don’t mean that the place smelled of cigarette smoke or old cigarettes or ash or the butts stubbed out on the greasy parquet floor. I mean that there was nicotine syrup soaked into the walls. Have you ever smoked a cigarette in a small room in Providence in the summer, in the still of the night?”
Romance Bookstores Are Booming, Dishing ‘All the Hot Stuff You Can Imagine,’ by Alexandra Alter for The New York Times, June 2024
The Ripped Bodice in LA is so great, the explosion in popularity of queer romance is great, more bookstores existing and thriving is really so great! I love literature.
I Had an Affair With My College Dean, by Olivia Swanson Haas for Autostraddle, July 2024
We told ourselves she was teaching me how to love myself, how to act on my desires. This is what love looks like, we said, and I became adept at anticipating her desires—which I fulfilled, eagerly. She was my audience; I was her secret star.
Reality Bites, by Samuel Ashworth for Eater, November 2019
I was writing about this reality TV show The Restaurant for my incredible TV newsletter available to all AF+ members and then got a little more curious about it which led me here, to this piece about how 20 years after The Restaurant made Rocco DiSpirito the first reality TV chef, “his roller coaster career is sill an object of fascination.”
Between a Hard Rock and a Hard Place, by Joe Nick Patoski for Texas Monthly, January 1987
Then I continued onto my journey — The Texas Monthly is digitizing a ton of their archives, and digging into this piece about Hard Rock Cafe when it was probably like three years away from peaking, and the two men who owned the franchise and also seemingly totally hated each other! But one of them, Morton, also ran Morton’s, which was a huge Hollywood restaurant where Deals Get Made.
Un-Adopted, by Caitlin Moscatello for The Cut, August 2020 (updated June 2024)
Okay it does turn out that in fact, I not only already read this four years ago but I also included it in a TIRTL four years ago, but maybe you forgot it too, anyhow here is what I’d written about this before realizing it was a repeat: Myka and James Stauffer were parenting YouTubers, content to sell out their children for clicks forever, eager to adopt a child with special needs as it would be a good #content and I wonder if one day we will look back on this time period and think wasn’t it crazy that it was okay back then to use small children for profitable content in this way??? Wow what were they thinking??? Anyhow now it’s a movie.
The Mysterious Tyranny of Trendy Baby Names, by Daniel Wolfe for The Washington Post, June 2024
Wow what a treat for me, a person still stuck in the Sporcle Baby Names game abyss, to come across this wonderful article about trendy baby names and the ways in which parents try but fail to be original and also about suffixes, which is where the primary generational drift takes place. Right now, one in four boys have a name that ends in “n.”
Reading the trendy baby names article, I was surprised to find that neither of my kids followed any of the modern trends. But then again I spent a lot of time combing literature and history books for the names of historical queers, so apparently, if you want a ‘unique’ baby name, name your kid after the gays.
Same. I’d love to see the trends for queers! I imagine we ride different waves.
me too! i’m also curious if queer parents tend to pick gender-neutral names more often than straight parents do
On that note I’m super curious about data on people who choose their own names! For example is someone who chooses a new legal name likely to pick one that was trendy when they were born? 🤔 We all know there are stereotypical trans names but how common are they really? 🤔
I think there’s a date typo re: the baby names article (June 2024, not June 2024) (unless I’ve time-traveled)