URL and IRL
Some of my writing is meandering internet navel-gazing bullshit. Some…isn’t. They share a certain set of sensibilities. Here is a running list.
Hector Banana-bread and the Prison of Banger-Hunting
For longer than anybody cares to remember, the most retweeted post in Twitter history was a selfie taken by Bradley Cooper and posted by Ellen DeGeneres from the Oscars. It was a cheap gag, essentially—a hack bit in which Ellen intentionally set out to create the most-retweeted post of all time and correctly predicted that a photo of a group of movie st…
SCAM AMERICA 777
Some housekeeping: The guys over at Nothing But Respect were gracious enough to have me on to talk about aura, Ball Don’t Stop, and whether we outmeated Shai. It was a fun conversation, and if you enjoy my basketball writing you should check it out (and subscribe to their show
Quick thoughts on the Young Thug trial, plea, and sentence
Young Thug is home—a cause for celebration after his two-and-a-half-year odyssey behind bars—but he is not free. Regardless of the conditions of his release, which I’ll talk about below, it’s something of a miracle that Young Thug got to see his family and sleep in his own bed last night. The trial against him, which continues to proceed against his few…
Did You Know That There's an Airboat Tour in Des Allemands, Louisiana
My parents were coming to town—town, longtime readers will know, being New Orleans—and my father told me that he’d never been on a swamp tour and would love to try one. I hadn’t either, swamp tours being the sort of thing like seeing the Eiffel Tower or going to brunch that decency encourages one to avoid when living in a city home to attractions. The s…
Brat Summer and the Millennial Imagination
In recent weeks, the cultural conversation has revolved around memes far too much. I’m wary of contributing to that undignified phenomenon. But there’s something worth interrogating about what happened once “Brat Summer” became the progressive millennial iteration of “Hawk Tuah” in, at most, two and a half months’ time. These are not sentences that feel…
What is Aura?
V.I. Lenin once remarked that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” Last week, someone used the word “aura” in a scouting report of Kentucky prospect Rob Dillingham. If modern basketball fandom is an exercise in symbiosis with the online discourse surrounding the game itself, then seasons can be neatly short…
Against RapGenius
A spectre is haunting criticism – the spectre of Poptimism. Whether or not poptimism as it’s currently understood is responsible for the decline of popular culture into a sort of soulless, algorithmically-generated slop is incidental to the fact that it has become the default critical posture during the exact moment that all culture became pop and all n…
The Hate-Read Crisis
Every piece of viral writing over the last few months has been bad. That is neither a putdown nor some great revelation—those essays that have gone viral have done so explicitly because they are bad. Their obvious flaws, and their writers’ preening self-righteousness, invite easy critique from (and often inspire genuine rage within) their readers. Peopl…
Matthew Lillard and the Dead Internet
Something exceptionally strange is happening in the replies to a tweet about Matthew Lillard and his children. The tweet, from the verified, purposeless content-aggregating account “DiscussingFilm,” is as close to the platonic late 2023 tweet as possible—incoherent engagement-bait on a site that has come to monetize engagement, an insignificant “news hi…
The Casuals Won't Be Addressed
Last week, Damian Lillard was finally traded by the Portland Trailblazers. In keeping with Lillard’s disposition, his farewell to the city of Portland was equal parts earnest and embarrassing; it, of course, included him rapping. The trade mercifully ended what had become the most tedious story of a tedious NBA offseason—by its end, everybody, including…
Giving up the GHOST
It’s a weekday, which means another early morning workout. Before leaving the door, I scan for the essentials: work bag, change of clothes, lunch, an array of probiotic beverages I’ve come to believe are essential to my wellbeing. Crucially, two scoops of whey protein powder in a blender bottle. I sift through a series of nondescript, nearly-empty black…
The Jersey Shore is all you need
My first thought, upon seeing video of a feverish throng swarming Beach Haven’s Dock Road, was that it looked like an only slightly exaggerated teen night at Ketch. Then delighted amusement; then disbelief; then tremendous pride. For a brief moment, Jack Antonoff, Margaret Qualley, and Taylor Swift—whose pious worshippers turn highways into parking lots…
PATIENTLY HATING #4: Letterboxd
A spectre is haunting criticism – the spectre of Poptimism. Whether or not poptimism as it’s currently understood is responsible for the decline of popular culture into a sort of soulless, algorithmically-generated slop is incidental to the fact that it has become the default critical posture during the exact moment that all culture became pop and all n…
Elf Bars and the End of Adulthood
It’s Jazz Fest, and it’s raining – pouring, really – like I’ve been told it always does. The type of soak that sends people scurrying for cover, panting. Then, as if some cosmic punishment has been doled out and satisfactorily endured, the drops begin to slow from torrential to tolerable to pleasant. Before the sun can even think to poke out, the air is…
The abyss
Look at those assholes, ordinary fucking people. I hate 'em. - Bud, Repo ManThanks for reading Never Hungover! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
The Wellness Economy
It is a difficult time to be well. The National Alliance on Mental Illness has it that one in five United States adults experiences mental illness. More than forty percent of American adults are obese. Contemporary life is overwhelmingly sedentary; the workday has expanded, creeping further into the personal lives of those lucky enough not to hold multi…
You May Like
In his 2019 Harper’s essay “Like This or Die,” critic Christian Lorentzen derisively describes the (as he fashions it, imaginary) audience to which establishment media organs instruct their book critics write:
Sympathy for the Sigma
If you’re a young guy who spends too much time on the internet, you have encountered him: Patrick Bateman schizo-posting his way to Dorsia, Travis Bickle sans weekend plans, a bloodied Ryan Gosling facing down the abyss. The sigma male.
That's a Wrap
It’s Spotify Wrapped day today. You have seen the posts, you have posted your own. What’s the verdict? Are you neurodivergent? Basic? Are you a Sad Girl or a Sigma Male? Did you see the colors? Were you in the top 0.5% of listeners? How is everybody you know a top 0.5% listener? Did you listen to Art Pop? What does it mean to be in the top 0.5% of Drake…
We're all normies now
What is so repulsive about the normie, the poor soul who appears to have built their identity around mainstream, lowest-common-denominator culture? You know them: they quote The Office; their pillows remind them to live, laugh, and love; they are fluent in sarcasm; you should not talk to them before they have had their coffee. They are cringe, they are …
There is no After Twitter
Well Elon Musk bought Twitter, which is bad, and now bad things are happening to Twitter, including advertisers pulling money, essential staff being fired or leaving on their own accord, and key functionality components failing in real time. There appears to be a non-trivial chance that Twitter, like every Musk project before it, will crash and burn as …