Reading List: Dickensian Clairvoyants, Last Day Eff Yous, and the Poop Emoji War.
Dearest darlings, as Fall creeps closer to Winter, and Franken Frappuccinos give way to Chestnut Praline magic <— the best Starbucks holiday drink, don’t @ me — let us gather ‘round the glowing lights of our Kindles and let the long reads warm our chilled hearts.
But one news bit: in a last-day “fuck you” that will echo through the ages, an exiting Twitter customer support employee deleted Donald Trump’s account. And while we’ve all had a good chuckle over how that individual should get a parade in their honor, or something, it sure doesn’t feel great to know there’s not much stopping someone from hijacking the account with an errant tweet and sending the stock market plummeting. Or, you know, goading a certain terribly-coiffed child-leader into nuclear war.
Article I really, really needed to read this morning: BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel looks Inside The Great Poop Emoji Feud.
I’m halfway through the 1951 classic on the psychology and motives of mass movements, “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer. There are times while I was reading it that I forgot it was written 66 years ago, passages like this: “in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed.” See: GamerGate and Milo.
Because I’m still on a ghost trip from Halloween: Ghost Club: Yeats’s and Dickens’s Secret Society of Spirits. The role of spiritualism and religious movements in the wake of the Industrial Revolution is one of my favorite topics - see the Oneida community - which only makes me wonder whether we’ll have our very own homegrown religious movements in the wake of our current technological state.
And once again, McSweeney’s just nails it: Just To Be Clear, The Witch-King Of Angmar Was An Insignificant Volunteer In The Great Army Of The Dark Lord Sauron.
Toodles, darlings. Have a lovely weekend :)