Morbin' Monday

Sony, mistaking a mass mobilization of Morbius-mocking memes for a movement of Morbius-motivated moviegoers, re-Morbed myriad movie theaters. But Jared Leto’s misguided monster movie again miscarried, making just $85,000 on Friday and a mere $300,000 for the whole weekend. The Morbin’ Man himself mortified the Morbing masses and mercilessly murdered the merrymaking by making his own Morbius meme. If you don’t want to watch Morbius (and you don’t) but you have 16 free minutes, here’s a recap that is much more memorable than going full Morb:

From Morbin’ to Mormon:1 “What on Earth Is Going on With Mormon MomTok?” The Cut’s Danielle Cohen and Olivia Truffaut-Wong explain the meltdown underway in a corner of Mormon TikTok where a group of couples were quietly “soft-swinging,” which apparently means anything goes except “the Full Moroni,” until Taylor Paul posted “an unfortunate announcement” and chaos ensued. Reddit’s recap is characteristically more complete but less coherent [content warning: severe pronoun agreement problems]. Why any of this matters to anyone outside of a few blocks of Draper, Utah remains a mystery.

Elon Musk, having waived the right to due diligence in his offer to buy Twitter, is back on his bot bullshit in a resumption of what Laurie Voss called “the great Wriggling Out Of It.” Jon Blistein in Yahoo! News: “Elon Musk Threatens to Ditch Twitter Deal Over Fake Accounts.” And they say men don’t read fiction. Matt Levine’s expert analysis is “no, come on, stop it.” See also: Last Week in Elon, feat. “a super bad feeling.”

Roe wasn’t repealed yet today, leaving the increasingly popular practice of deciding whether to be pregnant or not still technically “protected” by “the Constitution” or whatever, but Oklahoma has banned abortion in five mutually contradictory ways in the last year, and Insider’s Nicole Einbinder and Caroline Haskins report that “district attorneys and the attorney general couldn't say which laws would be enforced post-Roe.”

And wrapping up Depp v. Heard (for now) is the multivalent New York Times, which published a very good take on the trial by A.O. Scott, who correctly identified the media frenzy around the trial as the Zoomer GossipTok Gamergate. Meanwhile, over in Opinion, the Times also published Maureen Dowd’s “Johnny and Amber: Trouble in Paradise,” which is just an indefensible piece of shit. I try to be wittier than that but MoDo has defeated me with this one, where she explains the abusive trial which continued an abusive relationship as an allegory for the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. What if the Times only published the good articles? A.G. give me a call, I have a foolproof one-step plan to accomplish this.2 

Bertrand Fan installed a payphone in his house so his daughter could call him from her room. Jude Doyle reports that Hamish McKenzie killed someone. Hard to know what to think about this story, except that I’m definitely allowed to write “Hamish McKenzie killed someone” here on Substack. Séamas O’Reilly on the time My Chemical Romance thought his son was charming. Frenchman bounces successfully. Brits bounce less successfully. Robin Sloan: “The thing to know about the AI language models, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fundamentally bullshitters.” And finally, some good ass news for once.

Hey Read This: “Theory of Knowledge” by Jess Zimmerman.

Today’s Song: “I Miss You” by Blink-182

~ Don't waste your tabs on me, you're already the voice inside my head ~

Do you like music? All the songs of the day are in a playlist on Spotify. I’m a little biased since I literally pick them because they’re all songs I like to listen to, but personally, I like to listen to them. Let’s meet back here in this little corner of your email inbox tomorrow, I’ll bring some chips.