Li'l Thinks
Personal Loss and Rewatching 'The Hills'
Everyone knows the moment or month or era when life happened, all at once, and established some set point of desire or values or best-ever happiness. Flash-flooded with detail, and then flash-frozen in time, it’s usually a quick, early thing: an...
Style and Shopping as a Means of Expression and Self-Realization
Girls and women (it feels so corny to consider girls and women as these separate classes of experience, right?) have, more so than guys and to our great benefit, style and shopping as a means of expression and self-realization.
Ritual
Falling asleep, I often find a convincing, semiconscious simulacrum of cozy peace by imagining a nonscientific, crayon-drawn version of a light field, and then focusing tighter and tighter on the black empty places in between the things.
Energy
If there is a single idea that can be borrowed from its original physics, or whatever context, and reapplied as an explanation for the ways in which people are shitty to each other, it’s that energy can’t be created or destroyed, only changed.
Twitter Selves
Twitter is uncomfortably easy. Like Sunday afternoons, like an unencumbered ego, anything at all can surge forward to fill the empty space, and everything will.
Riffing
Riffing is like mutual masturbation. It is essentially the small talk of anyone who, at some point in their adolescence, learned how to throw dice about their thing, whatever that may be, music or movies or whatever, instead of having regular...
The End of High-Low
By now, to say that highbrow and lowbrow—or high culture and low culture—form a false dichotomy is pretty, you know, obvs. Maybe we’ve felt it to be true for a while, that the idea of high and low as discrete and opposed units of whatever—of product or...
Friends
Friendship is a constantly self-renewing frontier of human relationships, a Wild West of emotional and temporal adventure times. The stuff of great friendships applies to kindergarteners sharing a snack as much as it does to Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks...
Limited Chaos
I have two recurring dreams. One is none of your business until I make it your business and the other you’re going to hear about even if you don’t want to: It’s about a familiar-since-forever kind of weekend beach party cum bacchanal, a performance of...
Fashion in the 90s
The 90s were perfect. This isn’t to privilege one set of nostalgics over another; the 1990s reverence felt by three small, semidiscrete generations (X, Y, Millennial) is, of course, no different from anyone else’s nostalgia for what came before, but...
Selfies
Anything that is commonly understood as the province of teenage girls or their proxies is understood to be something dumb. A “selfie” is understood to be dumb, and it really is, but it’s also the ordering feature of the internet.