Dish Sullied

It’s Sullivan and not his father who comes across as the parody of toxic masculinity, Sullivan the quintessential manbaby who hopes that if he talks about his own marginalization loud enough it’ll distract people from the fact that he’s claimed far more than his share of the world’s attention and resources. The man living through a pandemic that’s killed more than four million people worldwide and felt the need to reassure readers that it “probably” won’t claim the seven hundred thousand American lives AIDS did (because only American lives matter, and American deaths) has given us five hundred pages revealing not just his inability to see the world, but his insatiable contempt for anyone who dares to point it out, let alone suggest that it can be improved—which just happens to be his life’s work. Hello, Oedipus? It’s the Fates calling. The criminal you’re looking for is yourself.

“We wish we could reply ‘omg’ to every pic we’re sent. And a dedicated community allows that exclusivity.”

That he narrowed his focus on student loans and jobs, of all things, sort of feels like an admission to the late-twentysomethings that made up his original target audience that their lives are being defined by the poor contours of capitalism.

I mean, he’s right—it’s not like we got here entirely by choice. But it’s still fascinating to see a children’s personality putting it in such stark terms. This is a guy who, all these decades later, gets his audience of millennial and Gen Z viewers, despite the fact that he hasn’t actually talked to them in about two decades. He is in a role that is immune to politics, to taste, to the changing tides of popular culture.

From the moment I entered the press, all I heard from my superiors was that the media industry will simply cease to exist someday. The finance brokers shall determine, definitively, that it's impossible to generate revenue with banner ads, and the jig will mercifully be up. Honestly that fate might be preferable to where I think we're actually headed — which is a hellish timeline where all of our favorite publications have mutated into bizarre new permutations of themselves, slowly depreciating, atrophying, and introducing unseemly blockchain gimmicks, because the demands of capital cannot allow for a dignified death.