And they said Speak Now // What's Good: Jul. 7, 2023
Posting ass, breaking rules, and Taylor Swift.
Hello, good evening, happy Friday. Taylor Swift dropped the re-recording of my favorite album of hers at 11pm local time last night and I stayed up to listen to all two hours of it. It slaps. I love her. I will be belting Mine (Taylor’s Version) from the roof.
The 4th was great, too. I had a lot of friends over and we had a lot of food and beer. Special shout-outs to my friends at Revolution and Alarmist for helping make this year’s holiday an all-timer.
Unspooled
Posting ass is a litmus test:
Threads, the Meta-owned Twitter clone that launched this week, will always be hindered by its own content guidelines. The app is dry at best, and at worst, leeching your personal data.
With 30 million downloads in less than a day of its launch, Threads is poised to compete with Twitter’s sheer volume of users.
Though countless text-based social platforms have dazzled users upon launch before fading to obscurity since Elon Musk’s takeover, Threads has the unique advantage of seamlessly integrating with Instagram. Users don’t have to start from scratch when they sign up for Threads — the app gives users the option to automatically follow everyone they already follow on Instagram. You don’t have to scour through the rubble of a brand-new social platform to find your mutuals, and you don’t have to learn entirely new features since the interface is nearly identical to that of Twitter’s.
After Meta’s new app Threads went live, right-wing and fringe figures signed up for the new Twitter alternative and began posting slurs and other forms of hate speech on their accounts in an attempt to challenge Meta’s content moderation practices.
I will stick to clearer skies.
This is not a serious man
You pay for Wachtell, you get Wachtell:
In 2022, the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz represented Twitter in a high-profile legal dispute with Elon Musk, who was trying to backtrack on an agreement to buy the social media company. Nine months later, Twitter—now run by a vengeful Musk—is suing Wachtell.
According to the lawsuit, filed in California superior court, Wachtell lawyers persuaded Twitter’s former management to agree to pay a “success fee” if Musk closed the deal—part of the $90 million in fees that the law firm allegedly arranged in the days leading up to the sale.
Maybe if you did not want to reap, you should not have sown? Just my opinion.
How does late capitalism make you feel?
When Headspace Health laid off a large number of its therapists June 29, patients were told their providers had left the platform.
What they didn’t know was their therapists had lost their jobs. And they suddenly had no way to contact them.
Several therapists who were let go from Headspace, the Santa Monica meditation app and remote mental healthcare company, have raised alarm over their treatment and that of their patients after the companywide layoff of 181 employees, which amounts to 15% of the workforce.
Relationships with a therapist are deeply personal. Getting cut off can be, well, life-threatening. This is ghastly behavior.
Who is America?
More than just the states:
On the weekends, when Roy Gamboa was a little boy, his grandfather woke him before dawn. He would pour some coffee into a bowl of rice, and that would be the boy’s breakfast. Roy knew better than to question anything; he sat quietly in his grandfather’s truck as they rumbled down the big hill from their village, Hågat, to Big Navy, as the U.S. Naval Base in Guam is known. They passed through the military gates, along a dirt road and onto the shore of a little cove, next to one of America’s deepest harbors, where skipjacks flipped out of the aquamarine water. The boy noodled with seashells as his grandfather cast. When his grandfather caught a fish, he would unhook it and throw it on the ground, and Roy would snatch it up and quickly stuff it, still wriggling, in the bag. If the fish weren’t biting at one spot, they packed up and moved to another. No one from the Navy ever stopped the old man and the young boy.
Sex work is real work
If you think otherwise, you don’t know anything about the industry:
Near the end of the 2023 Netflix documentary Money Shot, Mike Stabile of the Free Speech Coalition explains, “What people don’t realize is porn is traditionally the canary in the coal mine of free speech.”
Calling sex workers “the canary in the coal mine” is almost a cliché at this point. I myself have used the metaphor in my own writing to discuss algorithmic surveillance of sex workers. But here is where the metaphor falls apart: The canary is only effective if the miner listens to it. Put plainly, due to societal stigma against sex workers, the general population is more likely to perceive our silence as making their world safer, not less so. This is precisely why our accounts are such an ideal testing ground for Big Tech’s encroachment into everyone’s private lives.
Grifter gospel
I strongly recommend that you read this one:
Dr. Yusra Al-Mukhtar had spent the last four years building a skincare and beauty clinic on London’s exclusive Harley Street when one of her assistants came to her with an enticing proposal. Women of the City, a new magazine with a mission to “empower female-owned businesses," wanted to run a cover story featuring the Dr. Yusra Clinic, and its founder.
Al-Mukhtar had slogged through dental surgery training before starting her own aesthetics clinic while juggling a young family. She told Forbes that WOTC promised the feature would blow up her personal profile as a young entrepreneur.
Doomed
Hard to come up with a better description of the sub, if you can call it that:
The primary task of a submersible is to not implode. The second is to reach the surface, even if the pilot is unconscious, with oxygen to spare. The third is for the occupants to be able to open the hatch once they surface. The fourth is for the submersible to be easy to find, through redundant tracking and communications systems, in case rescue is required. Only the fifth task is what is ordinarily thought of as the primary one: to transport people into the dark, hostile deep.
At dawn four summers ago, the French submariner and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet stood on the bow of an expedition vessel in the North Atlantic. The air was cool and thick with fog, the sea placid, the engine switched off, and the Titanic was some thirty-eight hundred metres below. The crew had gathered for a solemn ceremony, to pay tribute to the more than fifteen hundred people who had died in the most famous maritime disaster more than a hundred years ago. Rob McCallum, the expedition leader, gave a short speech, then handed a wreath to Nargeolet, the oldest man on the ship. As is tradition, the youngest—McCallum’s nephew—was summoned to place his hand on the wreath, and he and Nargeolet let it fall into the sea.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/ServalEveryHr/status/1677494080006225920
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1677492245459550210
https://twitter.com/quokkaeveryhour/status/1677490177420439552
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1677490194226855939
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1677479345256841216
https://twitter.com/InsaneClipsHQ/status/1677461760935092224
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1677454512758444032
https://twitter.com/GoldretrieverUS/status/1677395158147407888
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
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