I talked to @Patrick_Wyman about Bro Culture + Joe Rogan + Yakima, WA + Local Gentry + Empire in Decline + Going from a PhD to doing public history on a podcast & a newsletter. A real fucking delight:
@Patrick_Wyman "The militarization of the police and the ideology of the Thin Blue Line are archetypal products of this extended Bro Universe, because most police are archetypal Bro subjects."
On the weirdness of analyzing the culture we both grew up in:
"Either one failed to live up to that particular masculine code, or succeeded - the idea that there might have been an alternative way for a Guy to Be a Dude was genuinely foreign"
I wrote about what's actually going on when your day is filled with meeting after meeting after meeting and no one's paying attention and then you have to schedule another meeting:
When I started looking at this graph it took me awhile to realize that the big jump about 2/3 of the way into the year coincided almost perfectly when kids went back to school — people started scheduling *even more* meetings
To me, this gets to the heart of constant-meeting-culture: scheduling meetings feels like a way to assuage concerns about productivity (and precarity); in practice, more meetings almost always just makes you feel less productive, more like shit
Unmanageable traffic, neglected public transit, no parking downtown, roomy homes with backyards a solid 45 minutes away in traffic, untenable extended summers, you know, the dream
I loved my old picture palace in Lewiston, Idaho growing up, I loved the cinder block multiplex with 4 screens that's now a doggy daycare, I love shiny new mall 20-plexes with 17 escalators and I really love tiny indie houses figuring out how to make it work
I love my weird rituals (no one touches the popcorn until the credits roll), I love previews, I love the weird AMC quasi-commercials, I love shushing the person behind me, I especially love going to the movies by myself
Overwhelming email feedback that I somehow left the Mom labor of Elf on the Shelf out of this piece; what can I say, I'm an Old Millennial without Kids, I don't know any Elves on any Shelves
Fascinated by how many women have now told me that they have holiday cards that they made from previous years and just....kept in a drawer b/c they lost steam
The federal govt has refused to act & 26 million don't have enough to eat. I spent the week talking to ad hoc orgs & mutual aid groups filling in the ever-widening gaps in the social safety net. They are *remarkable* & I hope you'll share their stories:
In South Philly, Syona Arora helped launch 2 community fridges:
“Every day, the fridge empties out. Every day, it fills back up again. We hold ourselves to a high standard with what goes in the fridge, & we have a high level of respect for each other"