Reading List: Friends, I'm Voting Trash Panda And Influencer Opossum 2020
Poppets! It’s officially the third month of 2019, which is a strange way to observe the changing of time, but this is my morning newsletter and I’ll include all of the weirdly-stated calendar attributes I so desire. So get out there and play all the Patriarchy Chicken your closer-to-spring heart desires.
TO THE CONTENT!
TO LISTEN: Rebecca Jarvis, The Dropout (ABC Radio & ABC News Nightline) - If you’ve read John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (which this podcast cites often and OMG you absolutely MUST read,) you know this story. But Jarvis and her team make the entire drama around Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos fraud far more real by mining interviews, depositions and new interviews with witnesses and whistleblowers for a series of riveting audio. Case in point: one of Holmes’s hypnotic attributes that is frequently cited is her put-on low voice. Hearing her haltingly claim “I don’t know” over and over again under oath is mesmerizing.
TO READ: Jack Hitt, Inside the Secret Sting Operations to Expose Celebrity Psychics (The New York Times) - This profile of an organization of “self-appointed guardian(s) of Enlightenment Reason” is my JAM. God bless this group of humans, bent on staking every “grief vampire” providing false hope to the bereaved. These teams remind me of the pro-science entertainers at the Egyptian Hall at the turn of the 20th Century in England bent on debunking funeral-crashing mediums. I want to be friends with these people. VIVA LA RAISON!
Gray Chapman, The Cutest Animal on Instagram Is Possibly in Your Trash Can: Cuddle up to “verminfluencers,” the quintessential millennial pet. (The New York Times) - There’s nothing I can add to this. This #trend piece on pet opossums, trash pandas and rodents is all I’ve ever needed in absurdity. Case in point, this quote from a photo caption: “Amid an array of shoes and boots, Starfish nibbles from a bucket.” And can we all raise our glasses to this genuinely perplexed web editor throwing URL shade?
Zoe Kleinman, Why is the MWC tech show full of men? (BBC) - A similar story to this pops up during nearly every major tech conference, but I specifically appreciate Kleinman’s flabbergasted observations on Mobile World Congress. Specifically, the comment she gets from an analyst who observes re: the conference’s approach to women, “You are either sexually objectified or you are the housewife but you are not seen as making a decision about tech or buying it.” Coolcoolcoolcoolcool.
Kaitlyn Tiffany, Face value: How tattoos on foreheads and cheekbones turn unknown teens into internet stars. (Vox) - Regrets, I have a few. But I’m #blessed that one of them isn’t a gosh darn FACE TATTOO. FACE. TAT. TOO.
Y’all are awesome. Be kind to each other.
Xoxo Amy