Reading List: Bad Blood, Adolescent Trauma, Dating Site Hell
Darlings! I report to you today from Scranton, PA, here in the electric city for the wedding of a dear friend. My red-eye from San Francisco was uneventful and sleep-filled and I even remembered that I’d left my luggage at the EWR Hertz when only mere minutes away in the rental car, not when I got to my destination two hours later! What can I say friends, I’m killing it: the sky is blue, the trees are flowering, and no, I never watched The Office, so I have no idea what you are going on about.
As I mentioned yesterday, we’re doing an event with TheBridge next week in San Francisco, which you’ve obviously RSVPed for already cuz, you know, it’s on MY BIRTHDAY. But as if you needed another reason to subscribe to TheBridge, they featured me in yesterday’s newsletter, spouting off “words” of “wisdom”. Come for my Mum’s advice on setting the temperature in a room, to why I’m really not great at working from home, to how SV needs to get its shit together when it comes to EQ in the workplace. Thank you Allie for profiling me, and to my forever work wife Amanda for nominating me.
TO THE LONGREADS!
Kashmir Hill: Pray for the Souls of the People Sucked Into This Dating Site Hell (Gizmodo) Online dating sucks. But it especially sucks with sites like Trump.dating stealing the identities of “a Florida realtor, a teacher in Shanghai, a gay bodybuilder on the West Coast, a Bay Area realtor, and a Floridian who died in a mass shooting” for spammy profiles. Never trust the internet, folks.
Sopan Deb: ‘Arrested Development’: We Sat Down With the Cast. It Got Raw. (New York Times) Have you ever wondered what would happened if you shoehorned a TV promotion junket on the end of a disgraced actor’s #metoo apology tour, left the cast in a room alone with a New York Times reporter (seemingly) without a press handler, a reporter who then asked about said actor’s misdeeds against his costar who was in the room, and then said costar broke down remembering it, and then said cast’s male members started telling her why she shouldn’t overreact because hey, that’s the industry baby? Sure you have! You need to read the interview to fully get the full cringe scale of it, but to crassly boil it down in the words of actor David Cross, who was in the room and participated in the “actually…”s before his wife and costar told him to get his shit together, "Being in a room with a NY Times reporter is perhaps the last place on the planet you should start going into psychotherapy with your cast.” UM YA THINK? Sigh.
Felix Bohr, Cordula Meyer and Klaus Wiegrefe: Interview with an Auschwitz Guard: 'I Do Not Feel Like a Criminal' (Der Spiegel) There is nothing to joke about here, but if you want to better understanding how a normal person could work in a killing center like Auschwitz, this interview in Der Spiegel with a former guard shows just how easy it is for someone to compartmentalize amongst great evil while aware of the death and destruction nearby.
Robyn Pennachia: Texas Shooter Had History Of Harassing Girls Who Weren’t Interested In Him. Imagine That. (Wonkette) This is continued reading after last week’s rant about Incels and the bullshit idea of redistributing the sexual economy in order to prevent violence. Bear with me, there’s a through line. Fun fact, my friends: at a spring fling dance in ’98/’99 (#old), all of the boys in my junior high school class got together beforehand and made a pact to say no if I asked them to dance. So later at said social event, when I would walk up to a boy and ask him to dance because I’ve never had patience for inefficient gender roles in the first place, each and every one of them said no. And I know this because a few of the boys later apologized to me in high school for that, and other times they bullied me. So to recap: a group of classmates from the opposite sex LITERALLY CONSPIRED to deprive me of romantic interaction and humiliate me while in my formative adolescent years. And it goes without saying (I hope): I have not murdered anyone. So to all of those attributing this violence to the shooter being bullied, or to a girl deciding to tell him to leave her alone, or really to any social pressure in his life, stop. Because while so many of us endure that sort of cruelty, we don't shoot people. His adolescent experiences do not excuse his horrific actions, and speaking about them like that only fuels the rage of that garbage pile corner of the internet.
And finally, John Carreyrou: A New Look Inside Theranos’ Dysfunctional Corporate Culture (WIRED) I CANNOT WAIT to read Carreyrou’s book “BAD BLOOD: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” but since I have three books ahead of it in the Kindle queue, we’ll have to start with this excerpt.
Be kind to each other, my darlings, and have a great weekend. I’ll be out on Monday.
Amy