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At Least It's Not Tuesday
Devotion to the object, luck, timing, what is shown, what is performed, what is held, and what remains mysterious, a juicy, woody fragrance.
The It Girls! The It Girls are writing books and throwing parties. The It Girls are Lit. The Lit It Girls are having parties when they publish their “addictive-as-a candy-flavored-vape short story collection.” When they release their “sharp, salve-for-the-spirit short story collection.” On the launch of their “edgy, whip-smart novel.” To roll out their “sly and insightful novel.” To build hype about their “gorgeous and unflinching bestselling novel” which is gorgeous and unflinching, has a “juicy, woody fragrance,” and is already bestselling but is possibly not as whip-smart or candy-flavored as it could have been.
“It's almost like being a Lit It Girl is like the formula that you devise for perfume,” [Claudia] Dey tells NYLON. “The elements are: Devotion to the object, luck, timing, what is shown, what is performed, what is held, and what remains mysterious.”
…The narrow venn diagram sliver where the illusive It Girl label lies is when an author’s personality can aid in self-presentation in a natural way.
I seem to be having some kind of frontal lobe seizure. Are the Lit It Girls actually selling any books? There’s probably no way to know. But I bet everyone is being extremely normal about this online.
Oops there’s that seizure again! It figures that just when my executive function and ability to comprehend language are both offline, Intelligencer decides to publish a Brock Colyar mini-profile of Dimes Square’s one-man Washington Generals Mike Crumplar, whose “My Own Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation Ritual” was apparently an actual Substack post and not a bad dream I had last summer.
“Avoid all robots until further notice” is the kind of warning a movie time-traveler would encounter upon arriving in the future to efficiently establish that it’s a dystopia now, but this is the only world we have and we can only time travel at the speed of time so we’re just gonna have to wait it out.
The news is extraordinarily bad today. Republicans finally chose the bayou insurrectionist Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House. Johnson, the DALL-E output for “Deloitte but make it a person,” is best known for writing both the primary legal document supporting Trump’s attempted 2020 coup and a national Don’t Say Gay bill. And if the House leadership crisis was politically unprecedented, David Wallace-Wells calls the year in Canadian wildfire “ecologically unprecedented,” but it’s actually more a repudiation of the whole concept of precedent:
By the end of September, more than half of the world’s countries could fit inside the land burned this year in the Canadian wilderness. Since the 1970s, the average area burned in the country had already doubled; this year, wildfires consumed that average six times over. The modern single-year record had been set in 1989, when almost 19 million acres burned across the country. In 2023, the total has passed 45 million.
…In fact, here is a list of countries that, all together, have a smaller carbon footprint than this year’s Canadian fires: Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Estwatini, Ethiopia, Fiji, Finland, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, North Korea, North Macedonia, Norway, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Sudan, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Western Sahara, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Try to read every country on that list. The Canadian fires have released more carbon than all of them combined, much of it coming from remote regions of forest where fire control and suppression would be simply impractical even if it wasn’t also, for reasons of forest ecology, inadvisable.
I’m sorry to drop that entire list of countries on you but it’s impossible to grasp the scale of it without seeing all of them. The 2023 state of the climate report is out, and it agrees we are…
…entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.
In an “unfamiliar domain,” anything can happen. A tropical storm can gain one hundred ten miles per hour of windspeed in less than a day, and make landfall as category five hurricane. Jerds of javelina can rampage through an ill-placed desert golf course feasting on earthworms. The banks that loaned Elon Musk thirteen billion1 dollars to ruin Twitter might be able to sell that debt at only a 15% discount. We’re off the map here, people! Avoid all robots until further notice.
But hey, they found a glass octopus in the wild:
It’s a rough day in Tabs but Intern Meggie managed to find a heartwarming Harry Potter related story? I know, I also wouldn’t have thought it possible.
Daniel Radcliffe is teaming up with his stunt double David Holmes to create an HBO documentary about Holme’s life. Tear jerkingly called David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived, the movie will follow the life of Holmes before and after the 2009 stunt on the set of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 that broke Holmes’ neck and left him with a debilitating spinal injury. The movie will have testimonials, candid personal shots, and behind the scenes footage of Holmes’ stunt work, detailing his beginnings as a prodigy gymnast in Essex, England and the whirlwind his life became when he was cast in Harry Potter at age eleven.
The Boy Who Lived has been in production for four years, according to Holmes’ Instagram. However, this isn’t the first post-Potter project Radcliffe and Holmes have done together. In 2020, they launched the Cunning Stunts podcast to highlight the work stunt doubles do behind the scenes in Hollywood to make actors shine. The podcast, in tandem with the film, features interviews with people in the industry putting out the message that stunt doubles frequently work in unsafe environments where they risk injury. Holmes and Radcliffe bring awareness to how dangerous the art is across all media and I love them for that! Protect the Harry Potter crew at all costs!
The documentary will be released November 15th on HBO Max. I will be craning my neck up at the TV ready to cry!!
—Meggie Gates’ Patronus looks just like George Santos.
In Longreads Megan Marz wondered why we don’t have the same respect for online writing that we do for books, and she takes it all the way back to Justin Hall’s Links from the Underground just in case you doubt her qualifications on this question. Whether you’re an Internet Old or just internet old at heart, you will be delighted by this #longread. And coincidentally, Neal dot Fun just opened a Museum of Internet Artifacts, which also includes Justin Hall’s genre-defining links.net, as well as the first MP3, the Morris worm, and the iconic AOL dial-up screen w/modem sound. I don’t think I can link directly to it, ironically, but go to 1991.
Also today in #longreads, in The Verge Erika Hayasaki has a harrowing story about a stalker who is targeting Asian college professors. I say “is targeting” because (spoiler) no one has really done anything about her, she’s just still out there making death threats! Cool, cool. COOL. Cool. Very cool.
Also cool, in the sense of not at all cool and in fact horrific: an off-duty cop in Jackson Mississippi hit and killed thirty seven year old Dexter Wade with an SUV and despite knowing his name and his mother’s name, they simply buried him “in a pauper’s field at the Hinds County penal farm” and never bothered to contact his mother while she spent the next seven months searching for him.
What a downer Tabs is today, I’m sorry. At least it’s not Tuesday.
Today’s Song: Tanukichan, "NPC"
I don't know what kind of algorithmic sin I’ve committed but whenever I play any music on YouTube now, it’s automatically followed by an endless playlist of nothing but Lil Peep. I feel like this is somehow Music Intern Sam’s fault.
Tabs was mentioned in both Money Stuff and Garbage Day today so if you’ve just arrived from either of those newsletters: I’m sorry. Yesterday someone emailed and asked me to personally unsubscribe them, which certainly was bracing! If pity motivates you, I could use a replacement subscriber today. Or you could just tell me I’m doing a good job, that’d also be great. Ok I’m gonna go listen to twelve to fourteen straight hours of Lil Peep now, apparently.
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