Rookie began publishing yesterday; it’s a magazine owned by Tavi Gevinson, who is 15 and fun and scary smart. It may be of interest to you if you are a teen girl or are like a teen girl. (I certainly sometimes am.) The most interesting thing to me about it though: the return of anticipation to the web. The three stories that’ll be on Rookie’s front page today aren’t live yet; they’ll go up later, starting at 3 p.m. And then there’s the whole month lurking for you! I love it. Everything else on the Internet is so “OH THAT WAS PUBLISHED 28 MINUTES AGO.” And this is like, “Ooh we have something neat coming up next Tuesday. See you then, maybe, mmkay?” There’s literally no architecture to express that on the web, so they had to create it. Now I’m going to find a way to steal it.

You probably didn’t wake up today thinking, “Gee, I’d love to read an assessment of Garth Brooks’ career,” but that’s why life, despite all its horror and banality, still manages to surprise: “Garth Brooks is not cool. He appealed to old people and little kids, he recorded Bob Dylan songs only when Billy Joel did them first, and he knowingly walked around in public in loud, multi-colored shirts tucked inside tight black Wranglers. But guys like that sell records. And Garth Brooks was that guy at the exact moment when nobody else wanted to be that guy. The ’90s music that we’re devoting so much energy to commemorating right now — whether it’s grunge, gangsta rap, rave, or indie-rock — rose up from underground scenes and rubbed shoulders uncomfortably with mainstream tastes. We romanticize that tension, because those artists were romantic and tense, and aging nostalgists associate those qualities with their own childhoods. Garth Brooks, meanwhile, was a compendium of popular music from the ’70s and ’80s, and his accomplishment was showing how potent old formulas could still be.” [Via]

Say what you will about the death of manufacturing and the stagnation in wages that have ripped asunder the American dream: We are still beating the world in discovering new ways to insert cholesterol into our bodies. And once President Perry takes charge, the sky is the limit. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see deep-fried clouds! [Via]

Madonna is not a fan of hydrangeas.

As a human being whose personal blog is primarily about cats, I would be extremely offended by the above passage in Keith Gessen’s piece in the October Vanity Fair (the one with Angelina Jolie on the cover, zzz), except that Gessen keeps company with a person whose blog can often be cat-centric, so, he is EXCUSED! In more important news, this is a very exciting piece that breaks down exactly how Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding was agented and published. The funny thing is that the book is going to be published tomorrow — so who knows what’ll really happen with the tale of the million-dollar first novel? (Gessen reveals, among other fun facts, that the combined foreign rights sales came to about half of the novel’s $660,000 advance.) The Art of Fielding is #42 in books on Amazon currently, so that’s pretty good! And I’m sure the publisher paid for good front table placement in all the remaining bookstores out there! Anyway, this is a really excellent idea to make a book sale transparent, and there’s even some good actual gossip in it. (Also let us never forget the hilarious Bloomberg headline announcing the sale: “Unemployed Harvard Man Auctions Baseball Novel for $650,000.”) There’s also a wee bit of hagiography of the oh so brilliant editors and agents involved in the world of publishing, and of course it all ends happily (so easy to feel on publication’s eve, if you’re the one who’s the exception to the rule, and who just paid off your student loans), and all success is credited entirely to the power of the writing of the book — but really, an awesome read, and it could only be improved conceptually if Gessen announced his word rate for the Vanity Fair piece at the end. (Maybe they’ll put it online even.)

UPDATE: Oh my God. Nope, it’s really not going online: the piece is being released as an “expanded ebook.” For $1.99. Fascinating…. (Also, Alanic.)

Feeling a little down today? You might be in the throes of a terrible depressive condition.

There are few studies or statistics on the end-of-summer malaise, but therapists, career coaches — even marriage counselors — report an increase in people seeking help in early fall. ‘Change is always hard and this is a time when both nature and our lives are changing,’ says Betsy Stone, a psychologist in Stamford, Conn. A big component is what some researchers dub Post Vacation Syndrome (PVS), characterized by a combination of irritability, anxiety, lack of motivation, difficulty concentrating, and a feeling of emptiness that lasts up to a few weeks after returning to work. Some people get a mild version every Sunday night after getting the weekend off. Surveys suggest that 35% to 75% of workers in Spain, where many businesses close for the month of August, suffer from PVS.

Sounds about right. Here at The Awl we view our mission as one of charity. We aim to help our readers better cope with the sadness and degradation that life heaps upon their already burdensome pile. While this article suggests taking little vacations throughout the year so that the end of the summer vacation is less painful, we realize that this might not be practical for everyone, so let us instead provide you with a simple way to rid yourselves of the agonies of PVS: Take a deep breath. Look around you. Remind yourself that no matter what happens, eventually you will die. Everyone does. The stress and anxiety you feel today (and, frankly, even when you are on vacation) is a temporary condition which one only experiences if one is deluded enough to believe that what one does is actually of value. It is not. Life is a succession of meaningless gestures which all end when you are lowered into the earth. None of it really matters. If, as they say, life is a ride, it is an endless, horrible Greyhound trip across a desolate section of the Midwest which is occasionally punctuated by brief sojourns at filthy rest stops and fast food emporia, with the final destination being the tomb. So cheer up. None of it matters. You are going to die. Now return to your spreadsheets and relax.

Photo by Francis Jimenez, via Shutterstock

THE EUROPEAN CONTAGION STRIKES! Thanks, everyone but Germany. (And so long, value of Swiss francs!) It’s so nice to blame Europe for our “stock market woes” (which, you know, the standard caveats on that phrase, because, “higher DOW = better for everyone” is not a true thing).

Oh hey, in case you missed it: you should enjoy this tale of how America’s banks are papering over their tasty robomortgages of the 00s. Legal in some cases/states! Not gonna fly in others. La la la, hey right, was there a recent housing market/bank crisis that nearly undid America? Sending employment numbers now-permanently into the land of terrible? I don’t seem to recall any such thing either. HEY WHY IS EUROPE DOING THIS TO US? (Yeah, get ready for your big double dip, your delicious second scoop of America going to hell.)

“Freddie Mercury would have been 65 today. But what would have happened had he not died?” [Previously]

So, September. Somehow, we’ve made it. Seemed sort of touch-and-go there for a minute.

In lots of ways, September is one of the very best months we have. The fetid, humid wilt of August lifts into a cooler, cleaner late-summer balm. The sky is bluer and the clouds whiter and puffier than at any other time of year. Baseball games start to actually matter and corn is so sweet you don’t even have to cook it. Sure, there’s the inevitable reminder of aging and mortality that comes with tipping towards autumn, and when you were a kid, back-to-school time definitely sucked. (Except, not entirely. There was the excitement of novel possibility: Maybe you wouldn’t be such a dork this year? And new sneakers and pencils and fresh vinyl trapper-keepers into which one could carve the names of rock bands with a paper-clip. How lucky that there is an “H” in the middle of the both “The” and “Who!”) Really, if children were smarter or more honest, they would see the value in accepting human mortality, and they would realize and admit that by the end of summer, even they are sick of summer. Unless you’re Jimmy Buffet or Jack Johnson or something, September always comes as a relief. In fact, it should be a cause for celebration.

But in today’s world, it can’t really be that, can it? Certainly not here in New York. Because of the terrible thing that happened here ten years ago this month. This year, since it’s a rounder-numbered anniversary, we’re already being reminded — sometimes stirringly and eloquently, sometimes less stirringly, even by writers we admire. (If the “end of” a way of thinking can be pinned on that way of thinking’s inability to overthrow an “ever-more-powerful political-financial complex,” then many more ways of thinking than just irony have been much more ended than they have seemed for a long, long time.) There will be more gloomy remembering in the next couple weeks. There’s no way for September to escape its very recent history.

Not even in the simple terms of just enjoying a nice late-summer day. Last week, on Tuesday, we had one of those days, a beautiful September-style day in August. The brilliant blue sky, the cotton-ball clouds, the perfect temperature and clarity of the air. Then there was the earthquake. That night, my wife and I were walking on the street with her parents when we met a couple of their friends. We all told our earthquake stories, of course, and one of the people we’d just met said, “I knew something was going to happen today.”

“It was too nice out,” he said.

I agreed, sadly. I had been thinking the same thing earlier in the day. I imagine lots of people around the city had been. That’s one of the very worst things about this time of year every year now. Along with the lasting ramifications of a president launching a criminal war while at the same time cutting taxes and making everyone think they should get in on the “ownership society,” we can less fully appreciate these few short weeks of the year when it’s actually bearable to be outside.

Because we are all too busy “celebrating,” whether we want to or not, what September has become in the past ten years, a 30-day tribute to the lameness of life in 21st-century America. In 2004, we made it official: September is National Preparedness Month. As the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reminds us, this is “A time to remember. A time to prepare.”

Thanks a lot, terrorists.

Previously: August; June; May; April; March.

I am totally dying over this thread in which people are mocking the drawing of Spiderman’s Mary Jane. (Which, huh, I did not know Mary Jane was supposed to look like… that.) I believe it all started here, four days ago: “Pro tip for comic book artists: No human being alive sits like that as a way of relaxing. This is beyond ridiculous.” I’m trying right now!