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Only Good Things
Did someone say "sports"?!
Look, it’s been a rough week in tabs. Just in this first full week of the season, we’ve had McCreesh doing dialect, a new Allison P. Davis discourse bomb, and Nick Bilton blasting stream-of-consciousness directly into the Vanity Fair CMS. If you made it here to Gentleman’s Friday with me, I think we both deserve a treat. So today, it’s only good things.
If you don‘t get any further than this, please at least read “James Frankie Thomas on Discovering His Trans Identity While Writing Fiction” in Lithub.
It happened in this order: I started writing a novel. Then I found out the novel was trans. Then I found out I was trans. Now the novel is coming out, and so am I.
To come out as trans is to come up with an answer to the question How did you know? Many trans people can recall knowing as early as age five, or three, or even before they were neurobiologically capable of forming memories. When I browse the FTM subreddits I sometimes detect a certain competitive dick-swinging element to these origin stories—tranecdotes, if you will—but I’m just bitter. I don’t have any of my own; I simply didn’t know. I’m about to recount an incident that happened around the time I turned thirty-one, by which point I still didn’t know.
Go read the rest, all of it is that good. Then come back, because Verge editor Kevin Nguyen profiled U.S. Open breakout American tennis player Ben Shelton for his former employer, Gentlemen’s Quarterly magazine:
Considering the sudden emphasis on athletes’ mental health in professional sports, shouldn’t leagues be encouraging players to express themselves? To emote? To relieve the steam valve? Naomi Osaka, the brightest young star of tennis, dropped out of the French Open over a year ago citing burnout… So why is reacting to the highs of a win frowned upon? After a loss, when athletes are at their lowest, why are they forced to do a press conference? Can Ben Shelton, one of the brightest young stars of tennis, just be himself on court?
In Curbed, Adriane Quinlan pulled off a classic piece of investigative journalism, definitively answering Casey Lewis’s question: “Who’s Selling a Condo Staged With Tons of Acting Awards?”
The listing for the white-walled, three-bedroom condo in Williamsburg advertised for $1.899 million seemed to show the usual: plenty of teak mid-century furniture, jewel-toned velvet couches, and subway tile. But what was that glimmering from a corner fireplace? An eagle-eyed former colleague of ours, Casey Lewis, spotted five statuettes: two Emmys, two SAG awards, and, atop the mantle, a Golden Globe.
It’s Jeremy Strong, but it’s fun to see how Quinlan gets there. Also Jeremy Strong had three babies stuffed into one Brooklyn nursery? Truly, “[I]f Golden Globe winners have to squeeze all their kids into a single bedroom, then it’s hopeless for the rest of us.”
Would you believe I have not just one but three good tabs that are about Elon Musk and the present-day wreckage of Twitter? I also would not believe that. But I do!
Yesterday Tom Scocca took a panoptic view of Elon’s numerous overlapping scandals and outrages and pointed out that: “When the facts have a chance to speak to one another, the chaos has a chance to take form.” I leave it to you to imagine what form the chaos takes, but I will say it was a popular form in ancient India that has become much less popular in the West since the middle of the last century. This is a paid post, but you should pay for Indignity, because it’s virtually always worth reading and, selfishly, I’d like it to continue to exist.
John Herrman built on the example of the utterly bogus two hundred sixty-something million “views” that Twitter claims for Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump’s GOP debate counter-programming snugglefest to point out that all the other metrics in social media, and even the lack of metrics in streaming media, are equally fraudulent and useless.
The internet promised, among other things, absolute audience surveillance, full measurability, and perfect knowledge of who was watching what, when, and for how long. What it delivered, instead, was metric tons of metric bullshit.
Now that’s some hot Herrman. And finally, did someone say “sports”?! Defector’s David Roth wrote that “Linda Yaccarino Is The Last Funny Twitter Bit Left.”
That’s it, there’s no other tabs! Stop reading. Go on about your life happier, better informed, not drinking too much, comfortable, sleeping well (no bad dreams). It’s all good things.
Today’s Song: Otis Redding "I've Been Loving You Too Long”
Somehow Music Intern Sam picked this song without any information about the rest of the newsletter today, that’s how tuned in he is to the vibes. If you want to be tuned in to the vibes, or vibing to the tunes, or stuffed in a tube full of vines, subscribe and join the Tabs discord. Subscribers, I have an idea for tomorrow but I don’t know if it’ll work yet, so we’ll see.
Are the normies all gone? Ok you hardcore rage sickos, here: “The food industry pays ‘influencer’ dietitians to shape your eating habits” and “Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player ‘Useless’.” Just don’t tell anyone I sent you. And stay mad, comrades. ✊
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