HELLO and welcome to the 338th 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 veneer regret! 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.
Do You Regret Your Veneers? (Angela Chapin for The Cut, September 2024) – The takeaway here is more explicit than most stories of this nature, but it comes down to this: we are more bombarded than ever with post-surgi imagery of extremely rich people who can afford the best doctors to make them “hotter” than they already are, and then there’s a whole industry of mid doctors who want to convince people that they can get similar results for much less money but they can’t! This is a truth across the industry, from the smallest most non-invasive tweaks to the most intense surgeries. Anyhow my lord the absolute misery some of these girls went through.
Who’s Afraid of Mickey Mouse? (Lavender Au for The Dial, June 2024) – The most popular character at Disney World in Shanghai wouldn’t even be recognized in the states — just one example of how Disney’s place in the Chinese market bears little resemblance to its strategies elsewhere. This article might be exclusively interesting to me? I’ve been watching a lot of Defunctland lately.
Why I Left the Network (Annie Waldman, Maya Miller, Duaa Eldeib and Max Blau for Pro Publica, August 2024) – My therapist recently left aetna’s network, which means I can only afford to see her once a month or so, now, and she didn’t explain why but I knew it was undoubtedly not a choice she made lightly. Reading this I was like, my lord — definitely understand why she opted out!
Who Do They Think They Are? (Patrick Warner for the Literary Review of Canada, September 2024) – “Such complexity is usually too much to handle in real time. It is overwhelming. We are paralyzed in the face of it. Often, all we can do is fall back on something called gut instinct — where unexpurgated wisdom meets untapped potential. We react because we have to. We do the best we can in the moment. Only time will tell if our response is adequate.”
So first I read Extremely Online and Incredibly Tedious (Rhian Sassen for The Baffler, June 2024) which is about how, from Tao Lin to Patricia Lockwood to Gabriel Smith and his new book Brat, we have these “crop of young writers [decided by publishers to be] the internet-whisperers du jour, voices of generations that haven’t quite divided, cell-like, from the one previous, developing or else being assigned a purportedly distinct sensibility in the process.” Then it turns out The New Yorker also wrote about this same crop of writers so if you want more, read Katy Waldman’s The Temporary License of Literary Bratdom.
The BTK Killer’s Daughter. Gabby Petito’s Parents. JonBenét’s Dad. (Luke Winkie for Slate, August 2024) – CrimeCon is a massive gathering for true crime junkies eager to meet the families of murder victims and murderers, true crime authors and podcasters, etc. Like so much commercialization of true crime there is beneath it all the entertainers’ grappling with and trying to argue for its own redemption or purpose as less lurid and exploitative than it can obviously seem on the surface.
America Must Free Itself From the Tyranny of The Penny (Caity Weaver for The New York Times, September 2024) – Of course everything Caity Weaver writes is golden but this in particular is more copper GET IT?!! It costs three cents to make a penny, and yet we keep making pennies, that’s weird right.
Everybody Gets a Star (Jaya Saxena for Eater, July 2024) – On the ubiquity of Yelp and the rise of review culture. “If there’s one fundamental human impulse that the internet has indulged more than anything else, it’s our desire to be huge bitches. And to do it in writing feels much less real than to do it to someone’s face.”
Meet Priscilla, Queen of the RideShare Mafia (Lauren Smiley for Wired, August 2024) – All she wanted was to work and to help other immigrants work, making money for themselves and for the rideshare and meal delivery services they worked for. Unfortunately, the FBI did not like this plan.
The New Pornographers (Roxane Gay for The Bitter Southerner, July 2024) – “She can make Snickers bars from scratch and ice cream and also chewing gum. Clearly, she is doing this, in part, to mess with her very large audience, who often express bewilderment, admiration, and/or disdain as she appears in her perfectly appointed kitchen and starts cooking while wearing a lacy evening gown or other outfit that is not conducive to cooking.”
Into the Labyrinth (Dan Handel for Cabinet, Spring 2024) – Have you ever really thought about carpets in hotels and casinos and what they are trying to do? Where they are trying to get you to go and how they want you to move and how they want you to feel? Well this man has and I for one am glad that he did. Also did you know that 85 percent of all carpet sold in the US market is produced in one specific small city in northwest Georgia?? Then he starts talking about Vegas mostly, and casino carpets and layout overall and wow, I was so engaged!
