Let's blow our free articles on stuff I wrote about a month ago

riding toward that NYT paywall like Thelma and Louise

Jul 02, 2021

HELLO I wrote this weeks ago but you’re getting it now and because I’ve already waited so long, I’m impatient to tell you about this excellent article I read only I can’t talk about it without sounding stoned.

Sometimes I feel so smug that we live in the future! Think of all the things the Western world used to believe to be incontrovertibly true: ill humors as the cause of illness, the sun revolving around the earth, spontaneous generation (which I still believe, I am sorry, where else do bugs come from if not magically zapping out of thin air). Now I write this on a computer with a spare computer in my pocket, we’ve not only sent people to space but we’ve decided as a culture that it’s not even that interesting to send people to space, and of course we created a vaccine to stop a pandemic in less than a year.

And yet we’re primitive compared to what will come next! This is so clear to me thanks to this Wired article on why it took so long for the scientific community to agree that COVID transmission is driven by aerosols. It’s a fascinating article, especially the account of the painstaking research that has shown that the aerosol/droplet distinction that science has long relied on when studying contagion is, in fact, wrong. Wrong! Based on a careless mistake that the entire field then built on as foundation. This has implications not just for COVID but for how we understand disease transmission in general. It’s a great, great article and feels so significant. The dividing line between past and future.

In shallower news, I’ve been listening to the Olivia Rodrigo album, which I like, but which has unexpectedly had me reflecting on the role of ‘90s punk to Gen Z. Rodrigo is a Disney star and she is young and I expected her album to sound that way. The first hit was a sad breakup song that revolved around her getting her drivers license, so I feel like this was a fair expectation! But the album opener sounds more like it wants to be on a cassette tape with Hole (and this was before the tempest in a teapot over her instagram post). I had this moment of recognition with it and then a moment of disorientation when I realized that while it was familiar to me from living through that era, for Rodrigo, it was cosplaying a older generation. That’s a very normal thing for a teen, to get into an older era. It can act as a sign of sophistication or taste - there was always that kid in the ‘90s who made their entire personality liking the Beatles, for instance - but it just changed my reception of it a little. It reminded me how a few years ago I read the YA book Moxie (now a not very major motion picture directed by Amy Poehler) in which a Texas teen starts a feminist movement at her high school after finding her mom’s old riotggrl stuff in her closet.

After finding her mom’s old riotgrrl stuff.

HER MOM’S OLD R-

((A cold wind howls, slamming the door shut. Dead leaves spiral into the air, barren tree branches scrape at my icy window. We are all one step closer to the grave.))

Okay, so it feels a little weird but I’m glad for it. I’m glad teenagers and especially teenage girls are taking inspiration from this time. This type of music felt so IMPORTANT when I was that age. Part of it was that it was passed down to me from my older sister, which made it automatically cooler than anything I could find on my own, but it was also empowering and I think that even though the context has changed, that’s how kids hearing it for the first time are still experiencing it. The LA Public Library performance of the Linda Lindas really brought this home for me. The Linda Lindas are between the ages of ten (!) and sixteen, but their drummer is wearing a Bikini Kill shirt and their most famous song, which you can listen to in that link, is a screamed reproach to a racist, sexist boy they know. They are probably the most legitimately punk band I have ever seen, and I’m glad they exist.

And when these inspirational teens make me feel old, I remember that my friend’s toddler knows all the words to drivers license and will someday nostalgically remember Olivia Rodrigo as an influential older woman, which in turn reminds me that my bones have already turned to dust and no sense fighting it.

BTW the Olivia Rodrigo album - the rest is not so punk but it is good! To name check another ‘90s female music icon, the energetic airing of grievances reminds me of what it was like when “Jagged Little Pill” came out.

This very good NYT article about a study on “the gender gap in housework and childcare among heterosexual couples” would probably have started my newsletter on any other week. I think this gap is something people feel to be intuitively true without really knowing how to quantify it, so it was interesting to see a scientific study feeling out the contours of the gap. What the study found feels so intuitive to me, which is that while the chores may be more equal than ever before, a huge gap remains in mental load. Specifically, the study breaks cognitive labor into four steps: anticipate, identify, decide, and monitor. It found that women do the majority of the anticipate and monitor steps:

I found that in the majority of cases, decision-making that rose to a certain level was very collaborative. So, not necessarily the decision of what we’ll have for dinner, but decisions about how we’ll parent, where we’ll send our child to school, things like that. Both partners were consulted before moving forward.
But the act of putting the item on the agenda seemed to be overwhelmingly something that women were doing, as well as on the back end, following up once the decisions had been made. And that was true, even in domains of life like household maintenance, where it was pretty clear to both parties that the man was ultimately responsible for clearing the gutters.
Women’s antenna seemed to be constantly up and looking for these things. Whereas men were often very happy to help once their partner had alerted them to the issue and they might’ve gotten to it eventually on their own, but women were consistently getting there first and either doing it themselves or saying: “Hey, this is the thing you need to handle. Are you thinking about it?”

Read the interview because it’s SO interesting and illuminating. Women looking out months ahead and worrying about things that need to be done while men are unconcerned about things happening months from now explains a lot about the stereotype of the nagging wife.

Forced a loved one to watch The Great Muppet Caper in tribute to Charles Grodin on his death, and he is fucking sick of me talking about the level of horniness Grodin has for Miss Piggy in the movie, lemme tell you. But this remembrance on rogerebert.com both really hits at it and makes me laugh every time I get to this part.

Grodin’s steady intensity then turned up in the most unexpected place: as Nicky Holiday in “The Great Muppet Caper” (1981), in which he plays love scenes opposite Miss Piggy that are so filled with what feels like real anguish and need for her that his desperation has a memorable force, especially in a sequence at a fashion show where he confesses his love to her and Miss Piggy folds in her snout as if genuinely taken aback. Grodin kisses Piggy on the neck and then holds her in place and says, “Don’t put a door between us” in a voice so low and impassioned that it feels like he is ready to do a lavish sex scene with her if only Kermit didn’t come on the scene and interrupt them.

If you have a second article to burn before you hit the NYT paywall, few things are more up my alley than an investigative piece on whether animated dads are getting hotter.

Which brings me to this endorsement of one of my favorite TV shows, an animated wonder whose newest season just dropped on HBO Max. It’s called Summer Camp Island and it’s about a magical island with witches and monsters and it’s really funny and everything is both anthropomorphic and SO fucking cute. I want to throw a chair through the wall when I think of this one little animated cordless phone guy who popped up in one episode. He doesn’t even have any lines, but he has occupied my every thought for the last week because he’s that cute, and EVERY character is like that. I truly believe this is the show I would have created if I ever made something of my life, but since I haven’t, I can only tell you to watch it. It’s so pure and wholesome, it’s the anti-Bojack but equally good, and the theme song is an all-time jam.

Every episode is precious to me, but I will name a few favorites if you just absolutely cannot sacrifice the ten minutes of your own time it would take to try an episode without guidance : Popular Banana Split, Moon Problems, Hedgehog Werewolf, Feeling Spacey, Molar Moles.

The (mostly old) links!