“She was one of Australia’s greatest female rock voices, who shocked audiences across the globe with her risque image and lyrics. Former Divinyls singer Chrissy Amphlett has died aged 53 after a long battle with breast cancer. Amphlett died at home in New York surrounded by friends and family, including her husband Charley Drayton.”

Today in New York City: women discuss programming — cultural programming! — at Housing Works, dudes discuss Brecht at the 92Y, Nicole Krauss and André Aciman discuss assimilation and there’s nice things to do for kids and for your ears.

★★ The sky was solidly overcast, but the glare made it hard to look at. The wind was pushing darkness and unpleasantness into the middle of the day. It must have rained, while other things were going on; the door out of the office led to wet ground and chilly air. A dropped scarf lay in the street. The sidewalks smelled but the water in the gutters had been rinsed cleaner. Gratuitous light-wasting decorations on top of an apartment building left twin spots on the low clouds in the night.

FALSE REPORT>>> RT@thematthewkeys: Just in: Suspect 2 on the ground at gunpoint.

— Mike Hayes (@michaelhayes) April 19, 2013

…perhaps if I was in a real newsroom with access to my work email, instead of shut out a month ago, I wouldn’t be working out of a bedroom

— Matthew Keys (@TheMatthewKeys) April 19, 2013

“The important thing, I think, is to — as soon as you know something that you sent out is incorrect, you correct the record. And it’s OK, I think, to make mistakes in these circumstances. You — everyone will make mistakes, and it’s kind of almost impossible to avoid them.”
 — Slate’s social media editor, Jeremy Stahl.

Over the last few years, most media companies have taken on social media editors, lots of them young-ish, lots of them “digital natives.” (Some neither, of course!) Many of their jobs are construed as helping newsrooms do social media best: working with writers, working with official social media accounts, those kind of things. Some of them are more like lone Internet addicts. At the more “straight news” outfits, most of them play it pretty straight. Some of them misplace their resources: for instance, there was a big vogue for media organizations moving onto Tumblr. And then everyone found out that, while it was nice to have a stand-alone Tumblr publication, that it literally didn’t do a single thing for a news organization. Didn’t bring traffic, didn’t bring non-Tumblr attention: they operate in a black hole, essentially. If you like reblogs of your gifs, great! But this was a thing news orgs had been sold on. At lots of media organizations, decision-makers don’t know where to start with social media. And lots don’t know where their social media editors should stop and start in their work.

Over the last 24 hours, we’ve seen a lot of different approaches. For instance, Liz Heron and Rubina Fillion were busy keeping the WSJ Twitter fairly dry and rumor-free. There was a 15-hour silence from Daniel Victor at the Times. Eric Carvin likewise is busy at the AP, working.

And all around them, other real news organizations were retweeting or sharing inaccurate information.

Others were saucier, and appropriately so.

Cease your angsty thinkpieces. The FBI believes in the power of the crowd. How they nabbed Whitey Bulger: sfgate.com/business/bloom…

— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) April 19, 2013

There was a good bit of self-referential whatnots. That makes sense, kind of: social media is sometimes where you put the kind of things you’d say out loud in a newsroom.

Btw for those just joining us in AM, this is what last 12 hours have been like — ask @moneyries @buzzfeedandrew @antderosa

— Craig Kanalley (@ckanal) April 19, 2013

But then it’s not like most people in newsrooms know how to behave anyway.

If you know either of the #Boston suspects and want to talk please DM me.#manhunt

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) April 19, 2013

And then there’s the… more aggressive sort of social media editor, like the infamous Ant DeRosa at Reuters — or the Daily Beast’s Brian Ries, who just pummeled Twitter relentlessly.

Why? He has 4430 followers. What does anyone gain? It looks like work, maybe, but it’s not. (Is it? Maybe it is!)

Even so, he was doing a better job than most of the people on TV. Except, you know, they were distributing half-baked semi-information to millions, instead of dozens.

OK everybody, big time out. Have to shower. We’ll pick this back up in 10 minutes. Thanks for your participation and understanding.

— Brian Ries (@moneyries) April 19, 2013

And then there was Matthew Keys, Deputy Social Media Editor at Reuters, once “considered a wunderkind of new media.” His livestream today of any word, rumor, idea, anything: just absurd!

That’s a minute’s worth of Tweets. The sheer amount of useless, misleading and random noise put out by this account is unreal.

RT @wgrz: Police source:2 Russian nationals pulled over in Niagara Falls; 4 suspicious backpacks in the car, robot & bomb techs on scene.

— Matthew Keys (@TheMatthewKeys) April 19, 2013

Okay, never mind the map.

— Matthew Keys (@TheMatthewKeys) April 19, 2013

@freemrktcptlst I’m watching him on television.

— Matthew Keys (@TheMatthewKeys) April 19, 2013

On the noise v. signal test, that’s a lose.

Also? Most of these people were just watching TV, just like you. At least if they were in a newsroom, they had more than one TV on, so I guess that’s a mild service?

What’s the point? The point is: most of this sucks for your news brand. Is it not stressful enough that your whole office is trying to verify and break news, to then have these people babbling on?

Anyway. Crazy days. Who knows how to behave? Not most of the folks on the TV. Or most of the people on the Internet. And it could be worse!

Dear fellow Jews, please stop saying nice things on television about your classmate the terrorist murderer. Thank you.

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) April 19, 2013

And, to be fair:

Can we shut up about whether Reddit helped or didn’t help already? Let’s discuss the future of journalism, I don’t know, in the future.

— Jared Keller (@jaredbkeller) April 19, 2013

We could say the same about this. The fellow makes a good point. We can pick this up next week!

Thinking it might a good idea to turn off Twitter, turn of TV and wait till tomorrow’s edition of the @nytimes with actual, reported news.

— Adam Rapoport (@rapo4) April 19, 2013

An update, from the next day:

@felixsalmon @buzzfeedben yes, it was, but generally in that blog post @choire has no idea what he’s talking about

— Anthony De Rosa (@AntDeRosa) April 20, 2013

This week, two — possibly three, or maybe more — not particularly bright asshole millennials discovered a terrible new way get attention. Then, for an encore, they figured out a way to shut down a mid-sized American city today.

After shooting some people and robbing a store last night, like total morons, one of the idiots actually managed to simply disappear, despite being in a shoot-out with police, in which the other main numbnuts was killed, and despite every law enforcement person in New England looking for him.

TV news spent most of the morning trying desperately to not be underfoot while people were actually trying to do their jobs to find the remaining asshole. Also trying to find out the difference between Kyrgyzstan and Chechnya. Or maybe Turkey? No, wait, definitely someplace.

Anyway, they’re assholes.

“He won’t get very far if he pokes his head out,” said someone on the TV.

“Something just happened,” said someone on the TV.

“Clearly you can’t look at a backpack without being nervous right now,” said someone on the TV.

“We’ve got a dog,” said someone on the TV.

“That’s why they’re being extra special cautious,” said someone on the TV.

“They’re from a certain part of the world,” said someone on the TV.

“CAN YOU HEAR ME, JAKE TAPPER?” said someone on the TV.

“I don’t smell smoke anymore,” said someone on the TV.

“Self-radicalized,” said someone on the TV.

Some things are now happening. Or are not. Check back later with whatever news source seems at least moderately useful.

Usually appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. “Because time is running out!”

Dear Polly,

I am, by all accounts, a relatively happy, well-off, 21-year-old woman. I exercise regularly, eat well, have good friends, a great boyfriend, and I’m about to graduate from a shmancy private college in NYC debt-free (thanks, Mom and Dad!). Here’s the thing: lately, while I’m lying alone in bed, trying to go to sleep, I can’t stop thinking about death. I’m pretty sure it started when I took an astrophysics class last semester, and read an article about the “eventual heat death of the universe” where everything just sort of peters out and then there’s no energy in the universe and everything is cold and lifeless forever. FOR. EVER. For the past few weeks, just as I snuggle into bed alone and try to drift off to sleep, I have been having a mini-panic attack about the fact that I (and everyone I love) will be gone someday. They’ll just be… gone. Not to a better place, not to a worse one. I started thinking I should be more spiritual, and maybe that would help, but I’m not really one for religion.

Maybe these thoughts are suddenly coming up because I’m about to transition into a totally new, unknown phase of my life — and yes, in a very pathetic way, the idea of graduating and giving up Tuesday naps and libraries and spontaneous day drinking feels like some sort of death for me (especially because many of my friends and my boyfriend are younger, and will still be in school while I’m trying to become An Adult). I’m sure these nightly worry-fests about mortality aren’t helped by the fact that I have no idea what I want to “do” when I graduate, either (except I want it to involve writing! Got any jobs for me? Ha, ha. Ugh.).

Since I’m pretty sure you — despite your immense advice-giving talent — cannot tell me exactly what happens when we die, can you please help me stop having these thoughts? Ending the day in a ball of existential anxiety is not exactly working wonders for me.

Sincerely,

That College Kid

Dear TCK,

Sweet Lord on high, do I hear you! I was rather innocently reading about stellar collisions the other day when I stumbled on some passage about how the sun will eventually burn out, thereby ending our happy fun time on planet earth. Even though this information is not new to me, I was suddenly unnerved by my utter insignificance in the big scheme of things, as one of a slightly advanced breed of monkey on a minor planet of a very average star (as Stephen Hawking once put it).

And while I love to contemplate black holes, dark matter, The Big Freeze, The Big Rip, The Big Crunch, The Big Rip & Freeze & Crunch (which is a good name for a 32-ounce off-brand McFlurry), sometimes I can’t quite stomach too much of these things. Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to mull over astrophysics, or think about rape culture on college campuses, or consider how undeniably screwed the vast number of kids and families living far, far below the poverty line are. When I learn that the 6 heirs to the Walmart fortune had a net worth equal to the bottom 41.5 percent of Americans combined in 2010, I don’t want to think about it. I’d rather crack jokes and pour margaritas into my face.

Graduating from college is one of the scariest things you can do. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: College prepares you for the real world about as well as the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland prepares you for international travel. You will feel like a loser, you will dislike many of your jobs and many of your coworkers. You will be deeply confused about how to spend your time, or what you want to do with your life. Post-college life is truly bewildering.

I was really discouraged and fearful in my early 20s. I wish I could travel back in time and tell myself to calm down, to stop worrying about making the right choices. A big part of the struggle then — and now — lies in maintaining a sensation of forward motion, however slow. If you want to be a writer, then write every day. Get into the habit of writing, and see where it takes you. Consider getting an internship — start looking now. Research places you might want to live. Resolve not to spend all of your time with your college friends or boyfriend. Try to map out a life instead of just falling into one.

But you also need a nightly routine that turns the worrying parts of your brain off. Either you should go to bed early and read yourself to sleep, or you should meditate and then write down three things you’re grateful for in a journal, then focus on those things as you fall asleep. Every time you think a bad thought in bed, you have to stop yourself. “I’m not allowed to think about this shit right now.” Repeat that to yourself. Clear your mind and think about something you’re grateful for again.

You have to train yourself to keep your neurotic mind from spinning in circles. Every smart person struggles with this stuff at one point or another. But you can’t let your fears swallow you whole. You can’t allow your brain to eat itself alive. You’ve got to nip that shit in the bud. Experiment with a few different methods for beating back your anxiety, and then call on them when you need them.

You will be frustrated and lonely for a while. That’s normal. Obstacles will appear in your path. Imagine how you might overcome those obstacles. Imagine your ideal career, and then think about a few small steps you might take to approach that career, very very slowly. It will take time, but every step counts, and every written word counts.

It’s true that eventually, you will grow old and die. In the meantime, though, you’re going to have an incredible adventure.

Polly

Dear Polly,

I have spent most of my adult life in serious relationships. Last summer I had a really nasty break-up, and decided to keep things casual for a time. It took a minute, but I now have a small group of lady-friends who are down for the sex semi-regularly. I got into a bit of an argument with one of my sex-friends, and am hoping to get some advice on whether I am being reasonable or not.

One of my favorite sex-friends called me last night, wasted at a bar, to complain about a “rapey” Canadian who was forcing himself on her and was bad at making out. She claimed he would not leave her alone, no matter how much she rejected him. She asked me to come and scare him off with my presence (I’m a boxer and am no small guy) or take her home with me. Of course I realize that my sex-friends will sometimes pick up other guys, and I accept that these girls will only keep calling me to the extent that I am more skilled in the amorous arts than your average bar bro. It did not bother me at all that she had been out picking up dudes. Honestly, I was a little smug about the fact that she had to hit me up to get the good lovin’. I was in the mood so I decided to swing through and pick her up. I called her as I entered the bar — expecting to quickly leave and smash. That’s when the situation turned a bit strange.

She came over to give me a big hug and thank me for rescuing her from the “rapey asshole.” I suggested we leave immediately, since swooping in to scoop a girl out from under a drunk guy is a recipe for drama. For professional reasons, I would rather not get into stupid bar fights. She agreed that we should leave, and told her lady friend that she was leaving. Her friend insisted that she say goodbye to the rapey Canadian, and I was surprised to hear her respond “of course I’ll say goodbye — I really like him!” After repeatedly emphasizing to her friend how much she liked the guy, she walked over to say goodbye, which consisted of a lot of making out and heavy-petting. The contact was obviously completely consensual — and initiated by her. She kept at it for some time, in which time I turned around and left the bar without her.

I declined her confused phone calls, and sent a quick text explaining that I was a grown-ass man who was not amused by her little-girl games. Her attempt to set me up for public drama was far too transparent and obnoxious for me to play along. She proceeded to send me a million angry texts, accusing ME of being the dramatic game player. I turned off my phone, and went to sleep. This morning I texted her, offering to meet up sober and explain my need for a few ground rules for moving forward with our FWB arrangement. She said she had no interest in following any “rules set by a fuck-buddy,” and said I am being a drama-queen (king?).

In my opinion, it is reasonable to set a few boundaries with sex-friends, like: (1) no sexual contact with other people while I am present; (2) no talking about sex with other people, even though we both know it happens; (3) no coming over to screw me right after you just screwed other people since that’s dirty… etc. What do you think? Is it unfair to impose rules on people who are sex friends with no potential for becoming a girlfriend? I don’t want to be controlling: just keep my natural instincts in check through the creation of social norms that avoid triggering the possessive caveman inside me. Assuming you side with me and think that rules are acceptable at all, do you have any other suggested regulations to keep things casual and classy? Your advice would be much appreciated.

Best,

Lorenzo P. Scrodge

Dear Lorenzo,

First of all, I want to thank you for offering what is now my all-time favorite sentence from any “Turning the Screw” letter:

“It took a minute, but I now have a small group of lady-friends who are down for the sex semi-regularly.”

It. Took. A. Minute.

Anyway, let’s skip over ultra-classy sex-friend regulations for the moment and state the obvious: This lady is a Dementor who will suck your soul straight out of your face if you let her. Normally, I’d admire her swagger — clearly she’d like an upgrade from sex-friend status to elite frequent flyer status, but she doesn’t want to communicate this using words. Somehow, grinding up on this rapey Canadian is supposed to do the trick. But: Enlisting your help and protection, using the R word, and then throwing down with the guy? That is major league crazy cakes action right there. She gives the self-respecting sluts of the world a bad name, not to mention the fact that her actions are an insult to the many, many people who’ve suffered sexual abuse and then been labeled “confused” or “reckless” as a result.

Frankly, the fact that you’re still willing to fuck her doesn’t reflect well on you. If I were you, I would run away as fast as my pumped-up boxer’s gams could carry me. If she wants to understand just how offensive it is to characterize someone as a sexual predator, ask for protection from that person, and then make out with him, she should be directed to the many, many articles about the rise of rape culture and the myriad of ways young women find their souls sucked out of their bodies by men who don’t give a flying fuck about them.

Speaking of not giving a fuck: Setting boundaries with sex friends is, of course, perfectly reasonable, but only if you’re totally honest about your own behavior from the start. If you’re really rotating through 3–4 fuck buddies a week, you should probably make that clear to women you’re sleeping with straight out of the gate. As in “I have a few different romantic entanglements right now.” Or at least: “This is not going to be a monogamous thing; I’m not into monogamy at the moment.” (Which implies not just “We’re not going out and really never will” but also “I am actively fucking other women.”) It’s one thing to say “Let’s explore a no-obligation entanglement” and quite another to say “I can work you into my rotation soon, because I have an opening on Wednesday nights.” You say it’s gross for a girl to come over right after fucking someone else? I think it’s sort of nasty to sleep with a guy who’s slept with three or four other women that very week. I don’t really care whether he did it an hour or two days ago. I can’t help feeling that you want to keep your own habits hidden, while demanding a combination of full-disclosure and don’t ask/don’t tell from your partners.

Moreover, discussing your boundaries needs to include asking about your partner’s boundaries as well. Frankly, it sounds to me like you’re a little emotionally detached, a little cocky, and also a little prone to laying down ground rules, Daddy-style, rather than beginning a sensitive conversation with an open mind and an open heart, and actually listening to what the other person has to say.

It seems like you might have some control issues. Have you been extremely possessive of past girlfriends? Is one of the reasons you’re actively pursuing this very ambitious rotating fuck-buddy lifestyle that you want to avoid focusing all of your anxious, controlling energy on one person? I have a friend who battled being a jealous guy by instead being a guy who slept around constantly, and who professed often that he “didn’t believe in monogamy.” He looks back on this and feels that he was hiding from his vulnerability and fears of intimacy. I don’t know much about you, but I’m going to guess that it would help you a lot to talk to a therapist regularly to explore you ideas about sex and love and everything in between.

Because, I’ll be honest, your situation feels a little bit fraught. You’ve got to steer clear of troublemakers and state your boundaries clearly at the start if you don’t want to stir up a lot of unnecessary drama. If you keep this sloppiness up, it’s only going to take a minute for your small group of lady friends to get a hell of a lot smaller.

That said? Enjoy it while it lasts, because nothing lasts for very long in this crazy, mixed-up energy-shedding universe.

Polly

Have you come to terms with the Big Rip & Freeze & Crunch yet? Write to Polly and tell her about it!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses.

Sad robot photo by Santos Gonzalez. Bottom photo by 8one6.

★★★★★ Outdoors was better than indoors. The humidity had worked its way into the apartment and gotten stuck there: Moving around was like pushing through a shower curtain, and the clothes from the washer lay on the rack without drying. Outside, though, was gleaming. Leaves were out on the little trees on the Broadway median, and pale green new growth spread over the shrubbery. Down on Grand Street, where the subway exit fed onto the sidewalk, the massed humanity caught on the projecting fruit stands and slowed to near immobility. A little boy crouched down to peer through a flap cut in the mesh over a construction fence, at a parked backhoe. At the office, it was colder inside than out. From the roof, birdsong was general. People walking past had their jackets in their hands. Uptown, waiting at the roasted-corn cart for part of dinner, the kindergartener launched himself in big loops out across the broad sidewalk and back, out and back. “This is the biggest and the smallest adventure of my life,” he said. His brother, in the stroller, bounced and pointed: the taxis, a bicycle, a police car, the moon.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Bitterness in the Mouth

When did the word
for stranger and
bitterness in the mouth
come to mean
a kind of audacity?
I’ve seen in some
men a distinctly
American gall — 
they glide over
the rest of us
in their socks like
we’re one long hallway
and they’re late
for a banquet in
their honor. Shameless
they tell us they’ve done us
a favor. We needed
polishing. They needed
traction. Frotteurs
work like this — 
we come away wondering
if we’ve been
screwed, gorge rising
as a hard little stranger
gets off.

Leslie McGrath’s Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage was a finalist for the 2009 Connecticut Book Award in poetry.

New here? Looking for more poems? You’re in the right place. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“[H]ardcore Eno fans, who have followed his 40 year career as a cultural innovator, may have to suffer a medical misfortune in order to hear his latest work.” (It’s an ambient piece, if that plays any part in your decision-making process.)