What Places Do We Love?

The Lauren Oyler deep dive yesterday overshadowed Interview’s other notable interview, the Interview Spring 2024 cover interview where Rihanna interviewed her former stylist and now Interview’s editor in chief Mel Ottenberg about “being interviewed by the Mel Ottenberg.” Though it’s titled “Rihanna is Ready to Confess” I don’t think she confessed anything. For example, you might wonder if she’s working on any new music. Well wonder that somewhere else, loser:

I read the whole thing, and I genuinely don’t know if this interview is good or not. It’s like asking if Duchamp’s “Fountain” is a good sculpture. Like… was it supposed to be? This reads more like a theatrical dialogue exercise meant to destabilize and undermine the phenomenology of human communication. I mean:

This is like raw-dogging the Nixon tapes. Ottenberg started this by saying “I threw out my team’s questions because they were stupid,” and then we’re off on a mad quest to prove Edmund Husserl wrong! Good luck to him and his stupid team in the days and weeks to come.

Another Q&A that’s a lot better than we have any right to expect, given the subject and publication, is Jason Kehe’s Wired interview with Noor Siddiqui, a Peter Thiel Fellow who (at age twenty five) founded a tech-investor backed biotech startup called Orchid that claims to be able to run a full-genome assessment on IVF embryos for $2500 each and identify the ones least likely to suffer from an array of genetically mediated health conditions. Siddiqui claims they need only “[a]bout 5 picograms per cell [of DNA] in an embryo sample. That’s a really, really tiny amount.” So, uh, is she the new Elizabeth Holmes?

Yeah I guess there aren’t really any parallels, aside from all the obvious ones. Orchid “prefers [we] not utter” the word eugenics, so that takes care of that issue. Are there any other eugenic red flags here?

And Choire cannonballed into The Cut with a profile of “Brooklyn literary power throuple” Danny and Grace Lavery and Lily Woodruff, which includes bed sharing details, a digression on “lesbianism and the processing of the lesbian school,” “Killing Eve fanfic,” clown cosplay that leads to sexting, and the names Maxim Casaubon Lavery, Huckleberry Rigaud Lavery, and Rochbert “Rocco” Ozymandias Wolverine Lavery, only two of whom are dogs.¹ In classic Choire fashion, some questions remain tantalizingly unanswered: What happens between 8:30 and midnight? Are there any other ways to “have an aesthetic life?” Is quiet inherently heterosexual? We may never know.

For some reason this piece reminded me of Choire’s 2013 book “Very Recent History,” which more people should read if they still read books. Unfortunately for Lauren Oyler, they do not.

New Boeing whistleblower is nearly inaudible among all the whistles already blowing. *five seconds later* We regret to inform you “that the author of the bookforum lauren oyler takedown organized the peter thiel-funded anti-woke film festival.” Je téléphone á la police. I will never get tired of stories about honesty researchers lying about everything. “The pants are exactly the same,” they said.

Today’s Song: “Cradle” by Killgurls

Riot grrrl is back, you heard it here first. What a month this week has been. Please subscribe to this newsletter or my upcoming other newsletter. Where’s that confounded bridge.

1. My name is “Rusty,” so I’m allowed to make this joke, back off.