Weekly Culture Menu 2.20.24

Formal request for Josh Brolin to write all my IG captions

For this week’s installment of the Weekly Culture Menu, we have a sampling of content across a variety of mediums, lengths, and sensibilities so that you can dip in and out all week. Once you subscribe, you can expect a weekly menu delivered to your inbox every Tuesday. 

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Okay, team, I’ll be honest, it’s the Tuesday after a long weekend, and we are not thriving. I can’t seem to shake this half-cold, and I’m in that stage of winter where I question if I’ll ever feel warmth again. Or maybe I’m just trying to process this Christopher Nolan Tenet explainer video... it could realistically be all of the above. This menu might not fix the winter malaise, but it’ll create opportunities for thoughtful discussion with your comfy apparel of choice (as mentioned previously, mine is silk pajamas). Let’s get to the meal!

🍤 Amuse Bouche [ -10 mins ]

• 📚" Everyday is not an opportunity to improve yourself” by Nikita Gill. I found this poem via

  ars poetica
  , and it felt like the permission I needed to give myself at that moment. So here it is for you too - permission to just be, because some days that’s enough, and it doesn’t mean you're backsliding or any further away from what you hope to achieve.   

• 🎰 On “showing up.” You could say this is contrary advice to the poem above, but I’d argue they’re companions. Sometimes, showing up just literally means being present rather than retreating. I’m not trying to encourage you to do the bare minimum, but perhaps, like mine, your perfectionist tendencies need freeing today. So, not every day has to be a full-out - sometimes, just showing up consistently gets you where you need to go.  

🍟 Appetizer [ -30 mins ]

• 🗞️ The Socially Conscious Mean Girl by

  eliza mclamb
  of Words From Eliza. This piece takes a closer look at snark forums. For those unfamiliar, a snark forum is a subpage of the internet (often on Reddit, but across any platform), where users (typically anonymous) have critical (sometimes funny) and often meanspirited discussions about individuals. Per McLamb, “The snark page is dedicated to a woman, or multiple women. It’s always about women, even when it’s about men. Go ahead and look at the top posts on r/TimotheeChalametSnark — they’re all about Kylie.” While the focus might’ve previously been on celebrities, the rise of the influencer has blurred the lines of who can be the target of snark (sometimes the snark is directed at women with a pretty small following). McLamb makes the astute observation that these figures become especially open to criticism when they’ve allegedly done something wrong (ranging from vanity to accusations of serious abuse). Once they’ve committed a societal ill, they’re fair game for all criticism - even if it’s not related to the alleged behavior (because it’s okay to be mean if people deserve it?). I found this to be an interesting companion piece to
  Raquel Alvarado
  ’s “The Celebrity Plastic Surgery Approval Matrix,” where she argues (in part) that our willingness to accept how women have chosen to age is directly correlated to how we perceive or like them (see her brilliant matrix below). In short, we’ve come to agree as a society that if someone has done something wrong or we view them unfavorably, we have a hall pass for talking about anything about them that irks us (most notably, their appearances). 

The Celebrity Plastic Surgery Approval Matrix from the Solitary Daughter Substack.

• 🗞️ The State of Culture, 2024 by

  Ted Gioia
  of The Honest Broker. This “state of the union” style assessment of current mainstream culture charts our trajectory from culture as art to entertainment and now distraction, and discusses the full-blown addiction phase we’re hurtling towards (or maybe already in?). It left me thinking about how I consume culture, but it also made me even more sure of the importance of curation vs. the dopamine of endless scrolling. 

• 🗞️ Skeletons in the Closet by William D. Cohan. Anything secret society or cult related, and you’ve got my attention. This recent piece focuses on Yale students' successful attempts to diversify the makeup of the prestigious Skull and Bones secret society despite alums pushing back on their vision of the organization’s future—an interesting look at how institutions modernize in the face of opposition.

   

🍽️ Main Course [ 1 Hour+ ]

• 🎬 The Zone of Interest. I saw The Zone of Interest this weekend, and I’m still processing it. The film, shot with Big Brother-style voyeurism (there were no camera crews on set - the whole backstory behind the production is fascinating), follows the life of notorious (and real) Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig as they carry out their ordinary existences in their family home, all while on the other side of the wall is Auschwitz. On one hand, it’s a familiar story about a man trying to be successful at his job, receiving a promotion, and the promotion’s subsequent impact on his family’s life. But, his job is to test and execute means to systematically destroy the Jewish people, and his family is living amongst and benefiting from the suffering of the people he is actively exterminating. The film actively chooses not to visually depict atrocity on screen, but instead, our visual cultural memory fills in the blanks of what isn’t shown. It’s two films - the one you see (a family drama) and the one you hear (pain, suffering, and unthinkable violence in the background). It’s harrowing. Yes, it depicts how mundane evil can be, but it also forces us to ask ourselves how we are like Hedwig and Rudolf and complicit in our modern world’s atrocities. I found this conversation with the movie’s Sound Designer, Johnnie Burn, captivating. I was astonished by the level of research that went into creating the sound you hear in the film (another character in itself). 

• 📚 Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino. Tolentino’s recent piece in the New Yorker (see below) made me revisit this collection of essays from a few years ago. The collection includes nine essays on various topics, including internet culture, reality TV, perfectionism, the institution of marriage, and contemporary feminism. My favorite is “Always Be Optimizing,” which feels all the more prescient given how culture has moved since she published the collection in 2019. Tolentino has often been described as this generation’s Joan Didion, and this collection makes it easy to understand why. 

🧁 Dessert [ -1 hour ]

• 🗞️ Legal Weed in New York Was Going to Be a Revolution. What Happened? by Jia Tolentino. Another Jia Tolentino recommendation! If you live in New York or have recently visited, you’ve likely observed the many weed shops that have sprouted up on every block. Tolentino’s reporting delves into what’s going on behind the scenes, from the policy efforts behind enacting the legalization to the illegal shops operating without consequence and the small business owners trying and failing to get off the ground. 

• 🗞️ 100 Small Acts of Love. To end on a note of cheer, the New York Times asked readers to submit simple gestures of love. It's a good reminder that sometimes the little things mean the most.

And I’ll leave you with Josh Brolin’s Instagram caption summary of Dune (I had only just recovered from the poem he wrote for Timothée Chalamet - and now this?)... 

joshbrolin

A post shared by @joshbrolin

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