Feels like the opening credit sequence to a teen movie

This new single from Brooklyn’s Charly Bliss sounds like the opening credits to a teen movie where we’re all crammed into a car and laughing during a montage. Kids are walking up the front stairs to our school, hot people are convening near a fountain, nerds are pushing their glasses up the bridges of their noses, and this plays:

I’m late to math.

Right?

Over at the Washington Post, Jon Gugala would like us to know that being a single white male isn’t the 24/7 bonefiesta we’ve been envisioning all these years.

Single men are having less sex than you think

Sure, he’s free to explore the singles community in his area with services like Tinder and OKCupid, but he’s exhausted of the process (and looking for something a little more serious). Plus, he’s made it this far without STIs he says, so now more than ever he feels cautious about sleeping with new people at all.

This hands-off approach seems to be making him comfortable as an individual, which is great. Live your truth! But there’s one piece of disparity within the article’s structure that ends up being funny—at least to me. It’s that the headline—“Single men are having less sex than you think”—speaks for all “single men,” and yet the piece exclusively includes information about only the author’s sex life. There are no interviews with other singles, no research data. Just intimate knowledge of Jon’s personal habits. At one point, he writes:

Well, I masturbate a lot, if you really want to know. Single guys are doing it way more than you might believe possible, if that is possible. Doing it seems to help, as not — by my own trial-and-error — can lead to embarrassing texts of the “U up” type. I do CrossFit and play volleyball (a lot and a lot).

How do we know “single guys are doing it way more than you might believe possible”? He just told us he jerks off a lot, but there’s no quote from “Brian, 35” corroborating his claim. It is a piece, in essence, that shouts, “Because I am not having a lot of sex and I am a single man, we can say conclusively that single men are not having a lot of sex.”

On the one hand, I feel for the guy, because writers don’t usually have final say over the headlines for their pieces, and editors are interested in getting as many people as possible to click through to read, so depending on who your editor is, your sweet personal essay about finding your dad’s old flip flops in the attic may end up being entitled “Bikinis, Booze, and War” or some shit.

On the other hand, hehe :-).

Put That Elf Back On The Shelf

I miss when celebrities seemed inaccessible and impossible to know.

Coming into fashion in 18th-century France, the modern definition of celebrity, in perhaps its most basic and depressing reading, describes someone who achieves fame and is subsequently separated from their authentic self while being made into a public commodity. A celebrity belongs to everyone, especially those who want to buy what the celebrity is selling, be it a book, movie, song, or vision; this often comes at the cost of the celebrity’s pre-fame identity. Sometimes it leads to death.

That’s from today’s Leah Letter (which one cultural commentator has called “the best bit of opt-in dyspepsia available these days”), which is largely about our mad desire to shove politics down Lady Gaga’s throat and then pat her belly, but also reminds about Donald Trump (not that I ever forgot, for ignorance is a dangerous drug). Specifically, it reminds me that, not for the first time and certainly not the last, we have a truly bizarre kind of celebrity in the White House. While of course every president is a celebrity, I mean something more specific. I mean we have whatever the opposite of a clippers-in-hand 2007 Britney Spears looks like.

It looks like a man with hair for a hat. It looks like a man tweeting from a gaudy gilded room, early in the morning and late at night, before and after a seemingly not-quite-long-enough-to-tackle-all-the-issues-he-could-have day attending meetings with government officials and takings calls with heads of state. Let that sink in for a minute: the man is NIGHT TWEETING. Whatever happened to “Who has time for that nonsense?” Whatever happened to “Not tonight, Michelle, I have so many briefing books to get through.” Whatever happened to “I’m literally the President of the United States of America I have WAY WAY WAY more important things to do than to fire off petulant tweets.” No one is there to peel that guy away from his very personal vendetta against the New York Times. Even Rupert Murdoch has Jerry Hall.

I miss the days when celebrities were not Just Like Us. Because you know what? They are not. At all. I mean sure they’re people, yes, but celebrities are doubly cursèd humans and we should feel sorry for them, not wish to know the horror show that constitutes their interior lives. The two greatest evils on earth are, in this order: fame and wealth. Celebrities have a double pox upon their beautifully symmetrical and microdermabrased visages, and it corrupts them deeply. They are in every way different from us, and they know it, and they abuse it. It’s not their fault; it’s only human. You and I would do the very same if we were pumped up full of Instagram followers and cash.

The late aughts brought us many things including a bald Britney Spears, but they also ushered in the age of handheld social media, which immediately thrust the celebrities into our palms, where we could pet them and starve them of our love like so many Tamagotchis. They live their lives entirely for us, doing romance walks with each other and wearing bikinis on vacation for our cameras. We have stolen them from themselves, they belong to us now, and you know what, they love it because we make them richer!

But I for one have seen too much. I have seen every marriage which was never quite real in the first place dissolve into distant memory. I have reveled in spotting his DNA and her DNA in so many celebrity babies like I was some sort of sick eugenicist championing the cause of a very tragic race of humans. I have seen way too many vag shots of celebrities getting out of limousines with Paris Hilton while not wearing any underwear. I have followed Ms. Tina’s Instagram, and, well, you’ll see. I have seen so many who-lebrities celebrating X-million followers proclaiming to “love” each and every one of them, with a thank-you caption like a Sally Field acceptance speech. I am horrified by the level of access I have to these people because it shows me that they are just people under a microscope and they are just as afraid of dying (aka wrinkles) as I am. Except they are really screwed up in the head, and it’s not their fault, it’s mine. What did I expect?

The Britney Spears head-shaving incident occurred on Februrary 16, 2007 (or maybe the 15th, I dunno, I’m not gonna split midnight hairs). So where does that leave us now? After a particularly intense decade of celebrity worship, we have reached its logical endpoint; we have crossed the uncanny valley into celebrity revulsion. And who do we meet there at its nadir but a square-handed, pouty-faced Donald Trump, pivoting his entire upper body from the hips to look the crowd over, as though he’s got a rod in his back, bouncing everything that’s ever said about him back to us because he’s rubber and we’re glue. “What can I say,” he says, “I’m here because of you!” And in a sense he’s right.

I want to go back to a time where the president was too busy taking care of my country to tweet. I want to go back to a time when bosses were enigmatic and hard to profile and get access to. I realize that perpetuating a kind of secrecy creates its own kind of celebrity (thank you “Young Pope”). I’m not advocating for more secrecy, just a sort of being-above, to get downright Heideggerian about it. And I’m not saying politicians shouldn’t tweet at all, either. I just want to go back to a time where social media was a frivolity and not a necessity—marginalia rather than source. I don’t think any of this stuff was built with bad intentions, but I do think we humans, as we do with most things, have really let it get out of control.

Who is America’s financial industry looking out for?

So:

I saw the boom of the aughts firsthand while working at J.P. Morgan’s investment bank, watched the debt bomb of the 2008 crisis blithely constructed by one-dimensional business-school graduates who rarely questioned the market gospel that a hedge fund manager deserves his vast billions just as surely as a Malaysian sweatshop worker deserves her vast miseries. Beyond lamenting their diminished bonuses, most were unbothered by the destruction they had wrought and profited from; they don’t teach haunted self-examination at the Wharton School. But at least with the 2008 crisis there was deniability… Trump’s inaugural stock rally is a more disturbing phenomenon, bringing us to the grossest of Trumpian revelations— Which is that American money is done pretending that its interests and those of American society are remotely aligned. The market’s silent hands have raised up a garish, glass-condo fifth column, filled with investors all cheering unfolding political catastrophe, because in the short term, it may tend to enrich them.

There’s more, but even if none of it comes as a shock — or could, somehow — it won’t leave you feeling happy about anything happening now. Not that that was ever on the cards anyway.

Witness Donald Trump’s Wall Street Enablers Grinning as He Prepares to Gut Dodd-Frank

Why would you run an argument in support of something everyone knows is wrong?

The engagement is amazing.

The Parent Rap

When my daughter Zelda turned one, I bought her a baby doll. I did this mostly because, after a solid 12 months of watching her fall to sleep each night in a barren, empty crib — sleep guidelines dictate that, for the safety of infants, they sleep with nothing: no blankets, no bumpers, no stuffed animals — I was looking forward to giving her a nighttime friend. I had watched her wake up to the reality that, down the hall was a party that every single night — me, her dad, the dog — that she was never, ever invited to. She seemed, I felt, a little lonely. Whether she was or not was sort of beside the point: this was about me and my guilt.

I spent a fair amount of time shopping for the right baby doll, and I settled on a small doll with plastic arms, legs, and head, made by a company called Corolle. The baby was and is, intoxicatingly, vanilla scented.

Zelda did not immediately warm to the baby, but within a few months of me putting it in bed with her every night, she began to reach around for her. She began to drag her, by the leg, around with her wherever she went. Her name was Baby.

When Zelda turned two, Baby was joined by a new baby, another vanilla-scented Corolle, this one slightly larger. They became Old Baby and Big Baby. By then, Zelda began to request “items” for her charges. She called herself their “babysitter.” I found that buying real items for newborns — diapers, pacifiers, even clothes — was often cheaper than buying things made for dolls. Now, when we took a trip to a drug store, we shopped for the Babies.

And like so many things with Zelda, she became a dedicated, by-the-rules caretaker. She mimicked me in things I hadn’t realized I was doing. She corrected her baby, she cuddled and kissed her, she changed her any time there was a sign of dirt on her onesie. She began to request spoons and special bowls for Baby. Old Baby was often relegated to her tiny crib as Big Baby, soon known simply as Baby again, took precedence.

I researched and found that taking care of dolls was a good way to develop empathy in all children (not just girls, come on). And my own eyes bore that out: she seemed to be daily learning how to actively care for someone else’s needs, even if sometimes, the baby got left nude in the dust for a cookie or a TV show. More often, though, she didn’t. Her dedication to Baby was impressive. Exhausting. Overwhelming. Once, a few months ago, we sat in a restaurant, a group of six, on an early Friday night. I overheard a group of women at another table use the word “shit” repeatedly, knowing that Zelda was going to pick up on it any minute. “Shit!” she suddenly said, her eyes opening wide. “Shit.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Shit, I left my baby at home!” she was right: Baby got left at home.

I indulged Zelda’s indulgence of Baby. I bought baby diapers and sippy cups, her own high chair, a stroller. Baby got her own car seat, which was strapped into the back seat, and into which Baby is now strapped into before each trip, adding minutes onto the processes of life each day. Zelda changes Baby’s diaper 5 to 10 times a day depending on her schedule. Each morning I watch her on the baby monitor, which has that weird sort of night vision which makes human eyes glow, as she changes the doll’s diaper in the dark, folding the used one up into a neat, tight little package.

I see that her best impulses, to care for things, to nurture, to love, to discipline, and to document, by borrowing my phone and taking photos, are all wrapped up in her “raising” of her baby. “Get the camera!” she yelled the other day, “Baby is trying to walk.” In my photo app, I name my family members so that the facial recognition piece of the software can get to work and do its job: Laura, Josh, Zelda, Baby. I have almost 20,000 photos of Zelda after three years. According to Google Photos, I also have 4,562 photos of Baby. Sometimes, she’s just there, in the shot, hanging out in the background. Maybe she’s sitting at the table in her high chair having dinner with us. But a lot of the time, she’s the subject of the photo. Because like me, Zelda can’t stop photographing her daughter.

Sometimes, I post these photos that she takes to Instagram. She’s getting better at photography. My friends make fun of Baby’s “dead eyes,” but the truth is, when I look at her now, I am overwhelmed with love. When Zelda leaves to go to school for the day, I sometimes find myself talking to Baby, or propping her up in her chair. I start to feel like one of those crazy YouTubers who is always posting videos of themselves with their baby dolls, despite the fact that they’re adults. It’s not just me, either: baby gets gifts in the mail sometimes. Zelda’s aunt knitted her a little scarf of her own.

Zelda will probably never have any siblings, and so far, she hasn’t asked for any. Recently Baby’s name morphed into Emma, and what she’s asked for, instead, are children of her own. Emma was joined by another doll who she named Liam. “I’m a good babysitter,” she says proudly. And she is. Just like her mother.

The Parent Rap is an endearing column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting.

You’re not the only one who can’t make up your mind these days.

Today: 50° and rain. Tomorrow: 60° and rain. Thursday: 30° and snow. Even the weather is all over the place this week. At least there’s no chance of sun to confuse you into thinking things might be okay.

This song, however, is a whole lot of okay. I don’t know anything about the band but I do quite like the track. Perhaps you will as well. Enjoy.

★★ The cold was supposed to have eased, but the sky was bleak. After some ancient TV reruns, the children chose to take the scooters and balance bike out to the forecourt. The air was still not far from freezing. A dog went by in a quilted vest, and it was not a scrawny or delicate dog. Still, it was boredom, rather than misery from the chill, that brought the scooting session to its end. Late in the day the dull clouds developed an undulating shimmer, and soon after they were gone, opening the way for belated and incongruous clear sun.

A guide for perplexed big babies

So how do we feel about the trend of trying to get people fired through social media?

“You’re fired” tactics make sense for the alt-right, which is crusading for a meaner society in which bullies reign and workers can be fired more easily. Progressives, supposedly, are fighting for the opposite vision. That the threat to get an interlocutor fired from her job would become a common mode of political discourse even for progressives shows how deeply neoliberalism pervades our culture. Particularly in the educated classes, many now view themselves as little managers, or entrepreneurs. Those who offend become the poorly-performing help. Their livelihoods are disposable, and they deserve to be made to feel their precarity. Only in a society with almost no safety nets, in which few people have the job security afforded by union protections or tenure, could random bullies on the internet terrify us by tagging our bosses.

There is a lot to consider in the link below, even after you deduct points for “neoliberalism.”

You’re Fired

That said, the most important aspect of this issue goes unmentioned here: All social media is irredeemable poison and it shouldn’t be used for anything. You are making yourself sick inside just by subjecting yourself to it, never mind the soul-destroying aspects that come with trying to deprive someone of their livelihood because of a disagreement over something neither of you has any fucking clue about in the first place. What a horrible nightmare the whole Internet turned out to be for everyone. Thank God we’re all going to die in the purifying nuclear fires soon enough.

(An actual species of frog, not a band name.)

In 1962, scientists found a new species of frog in a cave in Zimbabwe. They named it the Cave Squeaker and then there were no more reported sightings of it for 54 years—that is, until a couple weeks ago.

The cave squeaker returns: Rare frog seen after decades

The frog was put on an international red list for species suspected to be “critically endangered and possibly extinct,” and researcher Robert Hopkins has spent eight years trying to track down living specimens in the wild with his team. On December 3, after years of nothing, they found four at once in Chimanimani National Park:

The team found the first male specimen… after following an animal call that they had not heard before, Hopkins said. They then discovered another two males and a female.

First of all, the image of a team of scientists standing quietly in a dark cave waiting to follow the call of a frog is very sweet and pure to me. Second of all, you know what that gender ratio means: fucking. Test tube, regular— name it, these four are gonna do it. The team will take these frogs back to a lab and mold them into ardent sex-havers, so they can make more frogs, freeze fertilized frog eggs, and do all kinds of wild stuff for posterity.

According to canonical scientific database WikiHow, it doesn’t appear to be too difficult to do.

Cave Squeakers hatch as tiny, mature-looking frogs called froglets (!!!) because they go through their tadpole phase while they’re still inside the egg, so we’re really just looking at some terrariums and temperature modulation supplies-wise to get started. Could they be like pandas and end up too depressed in captivity to help the process along? Maybe. Or maybe they’ll be excited to be so close to other frogs after spending their lives alone in caves, squeaking into the void, hoping someone might be nearby and willing to touch parts. What a beautiful time.