About to Eat Some Tinned Anchovies and Call It A Meal
Featuring the ashes of Gawker, rich women doing too much, and a cure for existential dread.
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Literally Just Something I Think Is Funny
The website Gawker (2.0 version) has shuttered (some would say “again”) and with it goes the promise of forthcoming short, funny articles that make me laugh. In Gawker’s honor, I have handpicked some very funny headlines and one genuinely fun round up of 2022 to honor the website (which seems to be living on, even though its content churn will not):
Justin Goes Long for Kate “Catherine” Bosworth’s 40th Birthday
Happiest Freak on Earth Kaley Cuoco Parties at Baby Shower with 400 Drones
Girl, Caffeinated? Angelina Jolie and Paul Mescal go on a Coffee Date!
A Less Serious Item (Depending on Who You Are)
While I am the #1 hater of self-help-y type things, this article from The Cut about how to stop being so late to stuff all the time is a self-help style column that I think is both useful and properly brief. I used to be a very late person, to most things. I would walk so fast to places in college that I often strained my hip or rolled my ankle. It got a little better in my early twenties, but I used to firmly, FIRMLY pretend that it would only take me fifteen minutes to do things like “take a shower and get ready” or “get across town” when neither of those things is true. I think I can thank the pandemic for forcing me to slow down and assess how long things actually take me to do (now I have somewhat overcorrected and refuse to take showers unless I have at least 20 minutes to lie down on my bed and dry off), which is literally something suggested in the article!
“Maybe getting to work took you 20 minutes that one time when there was no traffic and the weather was perfect,” she says. “But most other days, it takes you five minutes to get out the door, because you need to figure out what outerwear to put on, then the commute itself is 25 minutes, because it’s raining and everyone’s going more slowly.”
If this is a major issue for you, tracking your time — literally logging the minutes you spend doing things (on an app or in a notebook) — can be a useful exercise, Vanderkam adds. (I tried this for one humiliating week and learned, among other things, that it does in fact take me longer than 15 minutes to take a shower and get dressed.)
Anyway, if you have a problem with being late all the time, I think this column offers some approachable solutions to NOT being that way.
P.S. Apologies to my family and closest friends, as I am still sometimes late to stuff we’re supposed to do together because I expect unconditional love and forgiveness from you.
This Week’s Theme: Are Rich Women OK?
First, we’ll do a quick foray into “The Fleishman Is In Trouble Effect.” Based on the (rather good but sad) television show Fleishman Is In Trouble, which follows a wealthy couple in Manhattan who go through a bitter divorce largely because of financial disagreement (she wants him to make a million dollars a year instead of $300k, he likes being a normal liver doctor, she is having a breakdown over trying to be a woman in society), a journalist at The Cut had many women in similar income brackets ($500k and up) reach out to her complaining about how they’ll never have enough money to keep up with the Joneses in Manhattan. It’s a completely unsympathetic piece about women who have the world’s largest blinders on and frankly begs the question: are rich women ok? The answer to that is: no I don’t think so!
Jumping off of that and into murkier waters, journalist Leslie Jamison goes long on the origins of impostor syndrome and the way the term has exploded in psychological vernacular in recent years. First she gives us the history of impostor syndrome, which is basically some interesting anecdotal evidence about largely well-off white women:
Clance and Imes’s original paper identified two distinct family patterns that gave rise to impostor feelings: either women had a sibling who had been identified as “the smart one” or else they themselves had been identified as “superior in every way—intellect, personality, appearance, talent.” The pair theorized that women in the first group are driven to find the validation they didn’t get at home but end up doubting whatever validation later comes their way; those in the second group encounter a disconnect between their parents’ unrealistic faith in their capacities and the experience of fallibility that life inevitably brings. For both types of “impostors,” the crisis comes from the disjunction between the messages received from their parents and the messages received from the world. Are my parents right (that I’m inadequate), or is the world right (that I’m capable)? Or, conversely, are my parents right (that I’m perfect), or is the world right (that I’m failing)? This gap gives rise to a conviction that either the parent is wrong or the world is.
Then we get into the recent ballooning popularity of the term, followed by many contemporary women of color sharing why they do not like the term or its popularity:
She was attending women’s leadership conferences where it seemed that everyone was talking about impostor syndrome and “the confidence gap,” but no one was talking about gender bias and systemic racism. She got tired of hearing women, especially white women—her own heritage is Indian Singaporean—comparing notes on who had the most severe impostor syndrome. It seemed like another version of women sharing worries about their weight, a kind of communal self-deprecation that reiterated oppressive metrics rather than disrupting them.
But the piece is very good at breaking down all of these dynamics and examining the fact that impostor syndrome does seem more like something that is a consequence of women living under patriarchy and less like an individual phenomenon to be examined. The woman who came up with the term say explicitly that they never meant for the term to be pathologized.
Mostly I’m putting these two articles together to say that these two phenomena (the Fleishman Effect, impostor syndrome) seem a touch solipsistic to me! It’s good to look up and around and then touch some grass!
Politics (of Eating Tinned Fish)
First, tinned fish made a comeback as hot girl food, now it’s making a SECOND comeback as climate-conscious food. It turns out tinned fish is the lowest-carbon animal protein we have - and futhermore? It doesn’t need to be refrigerated and hardly ever spoils. This Bloomberg article talks about how low-carbon tinned fish is and also about how environmentally conscious Galician fisheries are. The fisheries want to be around for as long as they can, which means engaging with solar power and other environmentally friendly ways to run a factory that is certified sustainable.
And I’ll be honest here: I fucking love tinned fish. My favorite pasta to make at home is one whose flavor is almost entirely derived from tinned anchovies. Sardine sandwiches are a frequent occurrence in my house. And now, because I eat that stuff, I’m not just a hot girl but a climate warrior, too? Huge win.
A Celebrity Thinger (In Case You Miss Football Already)
Culture reporter Caity Weaver strikes gold again with “A 90-Second Cure for Existential Dread, Every Sunday Night.” Apparently every week during NFL season when Sunday Night Football airs on NBC, Carrie Underwood sings a theme song for it. There are many, many versions of the song, as Weaver’s ace reporting revealed that “Underwood annually records 85 permutations of this line back to back in a single session.” You can hear the semi “full” version of it here, but it’s Weaver’s starry-eyed description of Underwood and her theme that’s really worth taking in:
It is this unnecessity — the fact that it exists merely for its own sake — that makes the segment so moving. I don’t mean to imply that the opening sequence could compare favorably to, say, a sunset, which is likewise “beautiful” and “capable of reproducing itself in infinite variations”; I mean to say that outright. The tremble-inducing allure of the “Sunday Night Football” song surpasses nature’s awesome generative capacity. It is a spectacle that could only be conjured from a colossal amount of money.
Would You Rather? (Tinder Edition)
Would you rather date an AI Chatbot or Leonardo DiCaprio?
A Recommendation (Funny Funny)
This week I’m recommending American Auto on Peacock! It’s about a GM-style car company based in Detroit repeatedly being bad at their jobs. SNL alum and all-time-great Ana Gasteyer stars as a crass and mostly conscience-less CEO who’s working overtime to cover up a defective model of a car. Supporting cast includes the guy who played Tracy Morgan’s fake son on 30 Rock (Michael Benjamin Washington) and Ike Barinholtz’s brother Jon. Which is to say: none of these people are that famous, so the comedy ensemble feeling is strong.
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