All Yesterday's Parties

For the overwhelming amount of talent on display between writer and subject, nothing else you’ll see today compares to Jazmine Hughes’s profile of Lil Nas X in the NY Times Magazine. For example: “Some people seem to enjoy defining what a Black man should or should not be,” is a sentence that appears without much fanfare in the middle of the seventh paragraph from the end, but lands like the jet engine in “Donnie Darko.” Can you be a great artist without a great celebrity profile? Can you be a great celebrity profiler without an artist worthy of your skills? How many colds can Frank Sinatra have?

All Yesterday’s Parties: Fire up the lo-fi glug glug mix (but don’t do that because it’s oil industry advertising, but maybe do because it kind of slaps anyway?), pick up some Teletubbies (canonically now susceptible to human disease, but vaxed!), and head to the cultural Lower East Side (West 52nd Street & 8th Avenue, somehow) where Caroline Calloway and her premium-content nipples are partying with The Drunken Canal and “hordes of very white, very young, very online people” (but I repeat myself).1 Bridget Read tried to find out if there’s actually fentanyl in the cocaine, and concluded: ”There is almost certainly not one or even more than one ‘bad batch’ of cocaine going around Brooklyn right now,” but also “the illicit drug supply may have reached a tipping point, at which no drug bought off the street is truly safe for consumption.” Are Teletubbies susceptible to fentanyl? Or do they just stick to the acid gummies? Anyway, Blackstone Group, “the private equity firm that is buying and renting homes en masse all over the country has also just bought one of the most popular Pokémon card grading companies” along with Jay Z. That sentence is my drugs.

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Defector managing editor and fart recognizer Samer Kalaf pulled all the threads of a confusing sports-media and media-media story involving ESPN, the New York Times, and “Vichy Deadspin” together in “The Current Version Of Deadspin Can’t Even Eat Shit Correctly.” Facebook for hyperlocal racism Nextdoor plans to SPAC, with ironic ticker symbol “KIND,” reports Mike Isaac. Former Dollar Shave Club sponcon Mel Magazine will be resurrected by Popular Science and Field & Stream owner Recurrent Ventures, and retitled either Field & Creem or Popular Dildonics. Jack Denton put together a fairly chaotic collection of newsletter writers recommending other newsletters for The Cut and I guess also the July 5th print issue of NY Mag? I’m no publishing genius but does print seem ideal for this very link-heavy premise? As a noted Dirt stan, I recommended Dirt, but you’ll never guess what Bari Wife’s recommended. I can’t believe Kendall Roy actually says “peepee fucking poopoo” in the new Succession trailer.

Today in Maine: You may fall off the flat earth somewhere way f*ckin out past the three mile line—all the way out towards Canada, you’re gonna have to dodge the toxic browntail moths, our unofficial state drink is the 60-proof speedball version of what Food 52 recently called “the most chaotic drink on record,” and Bloomberg claims that all the good pizza is in Other Portland. But Maine also just adopted a budget that feeds every school kid breakfast and lunch for free. Dirigo, bitches.

Lyz Lenz on Carmela Soprano and white feminism. Reese without her spoon (her spoon is media company Hello Sunshine). “Researchers Got a Bunch of Fish Hooked on Meth, for Science.” hErE cOmEs the ✨𝐵𝑜𝓎✨. The Kaseya ransomware attack may have affected “fewer than 1,500 businesses in total.” Is that good? All of them need the #HugOps Song.

Today’s Song: "Vax That Thing Up,” feat. Juvenile, Mannie Fresh, and Mia X (via Rolling Stone)

~ Tab that thang up ~

The header image today, “Me and the Lads Hit the Tampon Aisle in Tabs City, 3021” is courtesy of VQGAN+CLIP initialized with the normal header image and told to make it “futuristic cyberpunk vaporwave photorealistic.” If you want a robot to dream for you, instructions and tools are right here. Thanks also to David Nichols for reminding me to try it.