Attachments: May 2024
loads of footnotes edition!
Hi hello! First of all, thank you for the many kind notes after my last essay. It means a lot that you saw the vision in an anecdote about a splinter. I promise I was not harmed in the making of this week’s letter.
Here’s what keeps rattling around my brain cave this month, sans form or function.
(Also my pal Substack keeps warning me that this letter is too long and will cut off. I believe you can click the header image to take you to the full post in browser??)
Bring On The Backlash
1 What a bad month to be a brand attempting something new and cheeky on the Internet. I’m referring of course to Apple and Bumble, both in hot water for fundamentally misunderstanding the assignment in their respective marketing campaigns.
First Apple produced an ad that tried to convey just how much (too much?) the new iPad can do. The spot opens on a tableau of objects in the jaws of a room sized compression crusher. Sonny and Cher’s “All I Ever Need Is You” scores the steel plate’s slow descent as it pulps pastels, sheet music, computers, globes, and Space Imploder, among other things. Crushing object footage gained popularity years ago amid a movement of “oddly satisfying” videos (think pimple popping and deep cleaning) but this depiction reads as violent and uncomfortable2. In a climate where AI fears run amok and the Art Directors Guild literally said they “cannot in good conscience encourage [aspiring creatives] to pursue our profession while so many of our members remain unemployed,”3 it’s a, uhh, BAD LOOK to show technology replacing destroying the arts.
And then Bumble… woof. 45 Their campaign, accompanying a brand relaunch (….) builds on the insight that single women bemoan society’s lack of eligible bachelors and joke about joining convents instead of continuing the courtship merry go round. We chuckle through our pain. The bit, however, isn’t that funny outside of the group chat when (A) Very Real threats to our bodily autonomy lurk, (B) most women would rather risk an encounter with a bear than a random man, and (C) we’re simply trying to protect our peace. Basically this campaign was a coconut that fell out of the coconut tree and ignored the context in which it lives and what came before it!!
Anyway, I’m mostly intrigued by the response to the backlash. Very formal apologies from both brands. Yes, both ads sucked, but was crisis PR necessary? Should consumers get apologies for everything? Idk! Hire more anxiety-ridden individuals who are very online and worst-case-scenario everything, maybe. Or just, like, talk to your customer about what’s bothering her instead of jumping in with a clever solution.6
Are You Not Edutained?
When people ask me what’s so great about TikTok, I earnestly tell them that I learn so much. How else would I know that there’s a golden retriever farm in Vermont that hosts a HAPPY HOUR where you literally run around with a happy of goldens7 and drink maple syrup and watch the sun set??
Just yesterday I was directed to an 18-minute video essay on YouTube about color theory in Aladdin. “You’ll learn more about color theory in this video than a semester in art school,” one commentator promised. And I did!8
This month Business Insider predicted the rise of Intellectual Influencers. Audiences increasingly want to be entertained and educated, not just seduced into pointless consumption. I really like this! Especially given the queue of 40+min video essays on my YouTube watchlist. Online identity is one of my favorite topics of conversation and I often fuss about this weird feedback loop we have as creators and consumers. A push to edutainment makes me feel…optimistic? Less focus on creators’ personal lives and more emphasis on their skills, talents, and unique points of view! And it makes sense given similar predictions about de-influencing and micro-influencing.
Bringing Librarian Vibes to Your Murder Trial
Sorry to anyone who had to hear me yap about the Lucy Letby article in the New Yorker this week but I really and truly cannot stop thinking about it. Last year Letby, 34, was found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six others at the UK hospital where she worked as a neonatal nurse. I didn’t know anything about the case so Rachel Aviv’s essay—which maintains the case was built on flimsy evidence—was my point of entry. I walked away believing Letby’s innocence and was shocked to discover that many British citizens are certain of her guilt.
I’m not a true crime girlie by nature (I did get really into The Jinx, but more on that in a minute). It’s never sat entirely right with my soul to exploit the lives of the deceased and their families and I appreciate that there’s been thoughtful pushback in recent years. YET! I keep coming back to the Letby case, refreshing Twitter to see what fresh perspectives populate my timeline. Am I obsessing because of my similarities with Lucy? Letby is an unmarried white woman, loving parents, blonde hair, around my age. I look at her photo and say, I really don’t think she did it. I can imagine being friends with her. The case feels like a gross “miscarriage of justice,” though I’m haunted by the notion that I’m allowing my biases and the media to dirty the pools of logic.
One of the “incriminating” pieces of evidence that commentators point to is a series of scribbled notes found on Letby’s person, one declaring, “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them.” My first thought, of course, was my own scatterbrained journals of petulance and paranoia. And though I never write of my explicit evilness, I recalled someone who did: Author Lily Bailey in her brilliant memoir “Because We Are Bad: OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought.” Bailey painted such a vivid picture of her experience with obsessive compulsive disorder that I still think about it years later. Could a wrongful accusation have caused Letby—a sensitive and compassionate caregiver by all accounts—to come unmoored? Sound off in my inbox.
You know who else brought a harmless librarian vibe to their murder trial: Bobby Durst. The only other murderer I clear my calendar for! He too privately confessed, “What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.” He’s back in the zeitgeist because The Jinx Part II is currently airing on HBO and I’m happy/sad/confused to report that I’m still charmed but this Very Odd, Very Bad, and Very Guilty old man. Concerning and fascinating in equal measure. I’d watch a Jinx Part 26 if they made it.
Perhaps that’s where I diverge from the true true crime junkies. I don’t need a startling reveal to keep my attention—studying humanity’s hypocrisies and the way we shape stories around them is enough of a ride for me. Some of them just happen to involve homicide I guess!
Now on to something softer and squishier……
Seeking To Come Undone
I’m an enormous fan of
’s writing and I haven’t stopped thinking about her essay “through love, we are survived.” She writes in ,Love brought me to Harvard Divinity School, where in addition to finding stillness—possibly for the first time in my life—I was also undone in a manner that felt both violent, but necessary. As Judith Butler wrote, “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”
Studying hooks and Baldwin and King on my own had given me the lexicon to speak about love on a theoretical level, but what I was not prepared for was to reach the end of my own myth about love. In one of my pieces, I write, “The first act of love is surrender. God made me incomplete and anything can be a door if you’re desperate enough. This is my wound and I am trying to write my way out of it.”
Perhaps primed for undoing, I later sobbed at this comic strip “Oh to be loved by an artist.” We spend so much time worrying if our love is good enough to give away that we never consider what a unique experience it is to receive it. Not to be dramatic but… life changing.
People I’d like to be loved by, you ask? Basically everyone on the Angel Food Mag’s Earthly Connections page. All entries read like poetry. My favorites:
god's favourite girl seeks a man who is kind, funny and charismatic. a lover of midwest emo, movies with subtitles, the poetry of frank o'hara and very long walks, i have long hair, two passports, a decent command of french and an open heart.
looking for my match in sweetness and in wit. i love: making amatriciana, listening to smog, looking at fauvist paintings, wearing cowboy boots with a mini skirt, and reading jack spicer
Grad Center muppet rat film critic seeks love-crush for movie matinees and protests and "is that a kingfisher?" and lying on towels in all terrains
Seriously who needs Match.com’s portfolio of brands when we have personal ads.
Sidewalk Reporting
a flurry of things!!! launched my website , saw my girl Holly in concert (divine), ofc documented lots of flowers , oh also banana peel on ground which I thought only happened in cartoons. exhilarating !
If you need me this weekend, I’ll probably be at Pinkberry because I can’t get the phrase “froyomonium: flash mob of the mouth” out of my mind after reading Schuyler Mitchell’s very good pitch for the return of frozen yogurt. Froyo really said, “Hold my beer, lipstick. There’s a new recession indicator in town.”
Bye for now!
i’d like very much if u could sing “bring on the backlash” the way the arctic monkeys do in the song “who the fuck are arctic monkeys” off their EP “who the f*** are arctic monkeys” as that was this author’s intention
between this and Chiefs Release Day video, maybe let’s cool it on crushing videos, hmm?
75% of members (!!!!!!!!!Wtf)
or should I say WOLFE HERD ha ha ha!
so sorry I ate a pop-tart while writing this and it made me feel spunky
Boyfriend/dad/husband coded
the actual plural <3
whether the effects of the pocket size dopamine slot machine are actually corroding my brain,,,, an essay for a different time
Fabulous & thought provoking as usual!!🌷
I just love reading your writing 🥲