What's Good: Dec. 11, 2020

Dolly Parton, fabulous feet, and some very good dogs.

Dec 12, 2020

Hello, good evening, happy Friday. I’m writing this newsletter after my firm’s holiday party video call while I watch Cats (2019) with some friends. I’ve had a considerable amount of alcohol and I’m drinking a Mountain Dew for a second wind. 2020, baby!

Anyway personal news uhhhhh new beer release today, I’m going to start making beer review Tiktoks and writing additional newsletter content for long-form reviews, it was my grandma’s birthday on Wednesday, the new Taylor Swift album is great, don’t play Cyberpunk 2077. (Really.) That should cover it.

Normal country

Listen, it is not news that everything is very broken, but I think it is worth looking at specifically how things are broken and the effects that said brokenness has had on our way of life. So here’s a nice long-form piece on that:

After an initial showing of unity as the coronavirus pandemic hit North American shores, people in the US became divided over basic scientific facts about COVID-19. Then, after a horrified country watched George Floyd take his last breaths as a police officer pushed a knee into his neck, some members of the right-wing media recast peaceful demonstrators exercising their civil rights as violent thugs. And, as the year closed out, the president and his enablers smeared the simplest, most fundamental democratic act of counting a ballot as fraud.
To understand how the disinformation flywheel can catapult fringe ideas from obscure corners of the internet into mainstream political discourse, Philadelphia offers a lesson in civic breakdown.
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing right before my eyes,” said a man in a viral video who identified himself as Brian McCafferty, a Democratic poll watcher. “This has nothing to do with Joe Biden or Donald Trump. This has to do with our democracy, and I will tell you: There’s corruption at the highest level in the city of Philadelphia.”
On Nov. 5, two days after Election Day, McCafferty stood inside the Philadelphia ballot-counting center as workers behind him quietly filed paper after paper and guards circulated among them. McCafferty wore a green-and-red hat with headphones placed on top, a mask tucked under his chin, and he spoke in a conspiratorial tone that implied grave wrongdoing was happening here, just out of reach.

All bad things come in time

Too many of us had family who gathered in large numbers over Thanksgiving, despite public health guidance otherwise. Unfortunately, Christmas is slated to be worse:

In the spring, during the first COVID-19 surge in the United States, the rising death toll reached a sobering peak in April—a seven-day average of 2,116 daily deaths. This past weekend, the seven-day average of U.S. deaths from COVID-19 broke that record twice, at 2,123 on Saturday and 2,171 yesterday, according to the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.
Yesterday, the seven-day averages for all four of the primary metrics that the COVID Tracking Project follows—tests, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths—were at record highs. But deaths offer the clearest comparison with the spring surge, because in those early weeks many more cases were going uncounted while testing was slow to ramp up. If the seven-day average of deaths remains above the spring record in the weeks to come, it will soon be inarguable that the pandemic winter is worse than the novel coronavirus’s first surge.
And every indication is that this surge will continue to worsen for some time, because of the other milestones the U.S. has passed in recent days: 100,000 hospitalizations for the first time, the first consecutive days of more than 2,500 deaths (three, in fact), the first day of more than 200,000 new cases(which was followed by two more days above this threshold).

Pour yourself a cup of ambition

“You can’t have it all” is a common outcry amongst those who would dare to dash our ambitions. And perhaps we can’t all be Dolly Parton. But, damn, she certainly represents a rebuke of that refrain:

RuPaul: When you are writing songs, you’re obviously channeling something. What is that thing you’re channeling?
Dolly Parton: Well, I channel what I feel, what my mind is saying, what my heart is saying, what my emotions are saying. Certainly, if it’s things that I’m going through. But I’m also—because I am a writer and can rhyme and am able to do it musically—I can write for other people and how they feel, because I do feel for people. I really, truly love people. I try to find the good in everybody. I try to find the God light in everybody. I’m so happy that I’m touched and moved by so much that goes on in this world that I can actually write about it. It gives me great subject matter as a songwriter. Everything is a song to me. Everybody is a song to me.

Feet pics for the greater good

This is one of those stories that is both utterly bizarre and absolutely fascinating:

Patricia is suffering from an unexplained skin condition - but a misunderstanding about what might have caused it set off a chain of events that turned her foot into fodder for anti-vaccine activists.
The picture showed purple and red sores, swollen and oozing with pus.
"Supposedly this is a [vaccine] trial participant," read the message alongside it. "Ready to roll up your sleeve?"
Within a day, those same feet had been mentioned thousands of times on Instagram and Facebook. The picture went viral on Twitter as well.
"See they are trying to deliberately hurt us with the vaccine," one tweet read.
The feet belong to Patricia - a woman in her 30s living in Texas. And it's true - she was a participant in a trial for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that started to be administered on Tuesday.
But this is also true: Patricia never received the actual vaccine. Medical records show that she received a placebo, a small injection of salt water. (Researchers do this as a matter of routine, to compare groups that receive a drug or a vaccine with those who receive the placebo.)
Her illness had nothing to do with injections. But that didn't stop activists twisting her story to advance their own agendas. And on top of the physical pain caused by her condition, Patricia received a wave of online abuse.

A dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest

Johnny Depp sort of fell off the earth. Turns out there are some decent reasons why:

In the face of mounting bad publicity, Johnny Depp could still count on one friendly industry group — a Polish film festival.
On Nov. 21, the embattled star was poised to receive a career honor during the 28th EnergaCamerimage cinematography gala and had agreed to appear remotely from the U.S., with his virtual presence touted in the press. As an added seal of approval at a needed moment, the festival scheduled his latest film, the low-budget period drama Minamata, as its closing-night offering. But after a montage of clips showcasing Depp's "unique visual sensitivity," the 57-year-old actor failed to materialize onscreen. Instead, he sent along a bizarre picture of himself — open-shirted and with platinum blond hair peeking out from under a pair of colorful scarves. Inexplicably, he appeared to be standing behind bars in a Caribbean prison — resembling a carefree swashbuckler serving time for a crime that he doesn't quite take seriously. Minamata, featuring Depp as real-life war photographer W. Eugene Smith, never screened. MGM, the film's distributor, removed it during the seven-day festival citing piracy concerns.
Depp's absence offered a fitting denouement to a month of reputational and career devastation. On Nov. 2, a U.K. court had ruled against him in his high-stakes libel suit against tabloid TheSun over its description of him as a "wife beater." In fact, the judge made clear that he believed Depp had assaulted ex-wife Amber Heard on multiple occasions and that she frequently feared for her life. In the ensuing days, Warner Bros. excised him from its Fantastic Beasts franchise — a firing that played out publicly — while sources tell THR that he is no longer involved with a prestige Harry Houdini TV project produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, his most powerful remaining ally. Over the course of four short years, Depp has spiraled from an A-list star responsible for more than $10 billion in worldwide box office to Hollywood persona non grata, beginning when Heard's abuse allegations first surfaced in 2016 and continuing through a scorched-earth legal strategy that has seen him sue everyone in his path. The result is a tsunami of tabloid fodder as sensitive texts, emails and drug-fueled and violent anecdotes spilled out into the public view. Despite multiple attempts to contact him, Depp could not be reached for comment.

What if we just gave people money for food

This sucks, it’s heartbreaking:

Early in the pandemic, Joo Park noticed a worrisome shift at the market he manages near downtown Washington: At least once a day, he’d spot someone slipping a package of meat, a bag of rice or other food into a shirt or under a jacket. Diapers, shampoo and laundry detergent began disappearing in bigger numbers, too.
Since then, he said, thefts have more than doubled at Capitol Supermarket — even though he now stations more employees at the entrance, asks shoppers to leave backpacks up front and displays high-theft items like hand sanitizer and baking yeast in more conspicuous areas. Park doesn’t usually call the police, choosing instead to bar offenders from coming back.
“It’s become much harder during the pandemic,” he said. “People will say, ‘I was just hungry.’ And then what do you do?”
The coronavirus recession has been a relentless churn of high unemployment and economic uncertainty. The government stimulus that kept millions of Americans from falling into poverty earlier in the pandemic is long gone, and new aid is still a dot on the horizon after months of congressional inaction. Hunger is chronic, at levels not seen in decades.
The result is a growing subset of Americans who are stealing food to survive.

Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off

Please don’t get mad at me for this section header, it’s just a relevant song title that is perhaps as applicable to this story as it could possibly be:

If you spend a lot of time on TikTok, then you’ve probably come across ItsImperial on your For You page. An 18-year-old with high cheekbones, a septum piercing, and intense, dark eyebrows, Imperial has racked up an impressive 1.9 million followers in less than a year, typically posting at least once a day. Many of her videos are jokey TikToks, using trending audios and complaining about being single and showing off her studio apartment. But Imperial’s most popular videos recount wild stories about her stripping career. These have led her to go viral on StripperTok, shorthand for TikTok’s exotic-dancer community.
Often to the tune of “Dominique,” an upbeat 1960s Belgian pop song by Jeannine Deckers, Imperial has gone viral with her tales of, among other things, running into her father at a private party, being pelted with feces while performing onstage, being attacked by jealous wives and girlfriends, and getting caught in the middle of a club shooting. In some of her earlier videos, she’ll speak in an offbeat patois that sounds part American, part Australian, which disappears in her later work and which she has attributed to a speech impediment.
It’s easy to see why Imperial’s videos are so successful: Her content is funny, relatable, and more than a little outrageous, like Reddit’s infamous r/relationships forum come to life. It’s also, to some extent, lifting the veil on a profession that’s shrouded in stigma: By showing off her eight-inch platform heels or the pole in her living room to her followers, Imperial puts a human face on a career path that is often degraded and maligned by mainstream society.
There’s just one problem: Many on StripperTok don’t believe Imperial’s stories are actually true. And while Imperial’s followers tend to applaud her in the comments for demystifying sex work, many exotic dancers who Rolling Stone spoke with see her content as contributing to stigma, not detracting from it.

Hotlanta

Houses shared by young white influencers in LA are the prevailing trend in social media, but they’re not the only game in town. For black creators, Atlanta is where the action is:

It’s no secret Atlanta is one of the nation’s great culture capitals, home to many power brokers in music, fashion and the arts — a city that, since the 1980s, has produced some of the biggest names in rap, R&B and hip-hop, and over the last decade, seen explosive growth in its entertainment industry (thanks, in part, to Georgia’s generous tax credits).
This mighty metropolis is also now where some of the internet’s most important creators are living and working today.
Atlanta is where 15-year-old Jalaiah Harmon created the Renegade, a dance that took over TikTok in late 2019 and remains one of the app’s best-known viral trends. It’s where Lil Nas X turned “Old Town Road” into not just a hit single but the biggest thing on the internet. It’s where YouTube stars with followings in the multimillions record their videos and where some of TikTok’s biggest viral videos and trending challenges began at a casual weekly meet-up called TikTok Thursdays.
Atlanta’s creators are noteworthy for the ways in which they defy prevailing ideas about the influencer economy. Like most people making content online, they’re hard working, focused and have a deep understanding of the internet. But they show none of the entitlement or attitude that has come to characterize the better-known TikTok stars of Los Angeles. There is drama — it’s the internet, after all — but also an overwhelming sense of community and camaraderie.

Clever girl

Dogs aren’t just smart and cute, they’ve evolved those traits over time:

Dogs, more so than almost any other domesticated species, are desperate for human eye contact. When raised around people, they begin fighting for our attention when they’re as young as four weeks old. It’s hard for most people to resist a petulant flash of puppy-dog eyes—and according to a new study, that pull on the heartstrings might be exactly why dogs can give us those looks at all.
A paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dogs’ faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes. These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows. It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans.
For the study, a team at the University of Portsmouth’s Dog Cognition Centre looked at two muscles that work together to widen and open a dog’s eyes, causing them to appear bigger, droopier, and objectively cuter. The retractor anguli oculi lateralis muscle and the levator anguli oculi medialis muscle (mercifully known as RAOL and LAOM) form two short, straight lines, which connect the ring of muscle around a dog’s eye to either end of the brow above.