Li'l Thinks
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...
Classism
Fun fact: when you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re probably talking about class. I’d say half of what seems to be racist and sexist and xenophobic is classist and allowed to be because nobody gets into it, and nobody wants to. Classism in...
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.
Realness, to the Extreme
Couldn’t the consistently shitty foundation of almost everything we are and live with be some kind of necessary substructure of checks and balances? Like, a carefully evolutionary-ed trias politica, in the interest of maintaining a relatively stable...
Me Vs. “Me”
Disassociative identity politics is when anyone decides to cast a Hail Mary vote, maybe on the basis of likability or on some imagined basis of a very different Future Me or something, thus avoiding the participatory requirement of their minitribe in...
Next Level
Futurism isn’t what it used to be. In late-1950s and early-60s U. S. of A., the sensibility was entirely optimistic. The reasonable adults who had infested city-adjacent farmland, creating car-contingent lifestyle paradigms, wondered when they’d be...
Witness the Whiteness
America isn’t so white. But because the collective consciousness moves as fast and elegantly as you do jogging in a hot tub following diazepam and margaritas, whiteness remains understood as this abstract, almost-imaginary but deeply embedded dominant...