by Helen Holmes

It’s been a tumultuous year for One Direction, the British band that’s been inspiring fainting spells, fan videos, and unchecked worship since they were formed in the primordial fires of TV’s The X Factor. In March, after years of releasing perfect pop hits as a quintet, actual human vessel of divine perfection Zayn Malik decided to leave the band. This was bad.

On July 29th, after months of laying low with his maybe-friend maybe-producer Naughty Boy, Zayn announced on Twitter that he’d signed a solo deal with RCA, and crowed about how excited he was to start making “#realmusic.” Two days later, post-Zayn One Direction released their latest single, “Drag Me Down.” A sample lyric: “ All my life you stood by me when no one else was ever behind me / All these lights that can’t blind me /With your love, nobody can drag me down.”

As it turns out, Vine is the perfect platform for One Direction devotees. I’ve found clips of the band fist pumping wildly to crazily remixed horns, snatches of Harry on Jimmy Kimmel spliced with scenes from 50 Shades of Grey, and of course, rampant speculation in the comment section about which members of 1D are secretly in love with one another. For fans of such a popular corner of pop culture, Vine acts as a salad spinner for millions of slices of content. Honestly, given the evidence, Larry Stylinson seems really plausible.

I’m very blessed to have been able to speak to 1D patron saint trill tarah, who also happens to be Vine’s funniest teen, over the phone last weekend.

What does One Direction mean to you personally? Why do you like them so much, in so many words?

Well, I started liking them my freshman year [of high school], and I was in a really bad place. I was not really in the popular group, and I didn’t feel like I belonged in the group of friends that I had. I had this other group of friends that I wasn’t really close with yet who were obsessed with One Direction, and they really got me into it. They became my best friends. Andrea was in that group, and she’s my best friend.

It was kind of like we just isolated ourselves, but like, not in a bad way, and we became really, really close because of them. When I made my account, I met so many different people, and I got to talk to different people. It’s not solely just because of the band that we like, but all the similarities that we have and everything. I don’t know, they just really brought me to this new…like, I wouldn’t have anything that I have now if it wasn’t for them. I wouldn’t even have a Vine. I wouldn’t have all these people looking up to me for…I don’t really know what reason [laughs]. I’m really thankful for them and they’ve just done a lot for me in helping me meet people and making it fun.

So would you say you made your Vine account because of One Direction?

When I made the Vine account, I made it because I had my One Direction Twitter account, and Vine became big in, like, 2013 when everyone was just making vines not because of how big [Vine] is — because no one knew how big it was going to get. I think it was at the end of 2013 when Midnight Memories came out and I made a bunch of vines, and I started getting re-vined by big accounts, so then my vines started exploding. And ever since then I’ve just vined about everything.

How did you feel when Zayn left, and how do you feel about his signing a record deal?

Well, no one really thinks about March 18th, which is when he went on his break when they were about to go to South Africa and Dubai and all these places. (Well, I think he had already left by Dubai.) They were saying he was going to come back for the South African shows, and all this stuff. I was at my best friend’s birthday dinner on March 19th, and I was just in the most depressing mood, because I had this gut instinct that he wasn’t gonna come back. Then on March 25th, I was actually looking for college apartments, so I was in the apartment complex doing a tour when I found out. My best friend Andrea was with me and she was freaking out, and I was trying to calm her down, which doesn’t make any sense, but I was trying to calm her down. I didn’t really process it until I left the apartment, and I kind of just like fell to the ground and started crying, and I was screaming…it was just dramatic, I’m so dramatic all the time. That day was just pretty much me crying. The next couple days, until like April something, I missed a week of school because I couldn’t get out of my bed. Obviously, it’s not as important as other things happening, but it was just so bad for me, because he was the only constant in my life.

Everything’s changing in my life, and I have really tough things that I go through, so when he left, I felt like, oh my God, I don’t have anything anymore. People were crying and stuff for attention and notifications, but I was actually in agonizing pain. I deactivated [my Vine account] and then I tried this thing on my personal: I tried not liking them anymore, but that didn’t work out. In like May, I didn’t accept it because I still don’t accept it, but I kind of just stopped… No, ok, that’s wrong. I convinced myself that he was gonna come back from March 25th until the day he posted a picture of him signing the RCA papers. I completely convinced myself that he was gonna come back.

You know, he might.

Why do you say that?

Because it all seems too perfect to me. Like, as soon as he signs a record deal, One Direction drops this single about nobody being able to drag them down in the face of adversity. It seems shady.

Oh yeah, the whole situation is shady. I liked the single, obviously, but I couldn’t really allow myself to genuinely be happy and freak out about it, because when you look at iTunes it says that the song is supposed to be released on August 7th. The day after Zayn signs the record deal they release the song. It just made me really angry, because it’s kind of an indirect way for One Direction to say, “Oh, you signed the record deal and all the attention’s on you, but we want the attention on us.” I don’t really understand how he could just get out of a contract and just sign to a new label in the span of four months. I don’t really know the legal aspect of it. I still have that 0.1 percent chance feeling that he might come back, and now I’m just trying to accept it. I mean, I’m still going to On The Road Again.

There’s a missing ingredient.

Yes, thank you! And everyone still likes the four of them. It’s just hard to be online, because I still feel really, really depressed about the situation, and when people make fun of him, like when Naughty Boy released the No Type video — I don’t even know, I didn’t even watch it, I didn’t need to watch it — that night, everyone was like, attacking Zayn, and I just started crying. The next day, when he tweeted Naughty Boy again, everyone was like, “Oh my God, I love you so much, you’re my everything.” It’s just so fake. People either didn’t like him when he was in the band, or they just hate anyone that would have left the band. If Harry left the band, oh my God, fuckin’ shit would blow up, the world would stop rotating, everyone would die, but then when Zayn leaves, everyone’s like, “Oh no, but they’re gonna do great things, the four of them are gonna be the best they’ve ever been.” It’s just funny how [Drag Me Down] is their best sounding single now that Zayn’s left, and I’m just kind of bitter. I’m gonna admit it, I’m really bitter about it. But I’ll get over it.

It seems like you have something against Niall — do you not like Niall? What’s up with that?

No, I do love Niall, I get that a lot. A lot of people genuinely think that I don’t like him when he was — ok, I don’t want to say that he was my favorite, but he was like literally next to Zayn during Up All Night, like he was definitely my favorite. But I just like fucking with him. I don’t know what it is, but I think people genuinely think — like, if I ever met him I’d probably cry. I just find it funny. When I talk about loving him, everyone’s like, “Tarah, are you ok? Are you alright? Are you sick? Did someone hack your account?” I can’t even make fun of it. I don’t even get hate for making fun of him. People are like, “Oh, that’s just Tarah.” I don’t really understand the concept at all, but whatever: I don’t hate him and I don’t dislike him.

I totally get what you mean. He looks like someone that you could fuck with. He’s got a face that is just begging to get an egg thrown at it.

He does! He really does. He’s funny. He’s a funny guy.

There is nothing so stupid that it isn’t actually, on reflection, even stupider than initially suspected. This is true, of course, of life, but boy is it ever true of the Internet.

The Caesar is the most popular; the Cobb has its devotees; and I’m sure somebody must love a Waldorf, but the Greek is my favorite in the pantheon of classic American salads. Crunchy raw vegetables, theoretically juicy tomatoes, raw onion, dried oregano, and the salty/sour punch of feta cheese, olives, and maybe capers or pickled peppers — it’s a powerful, flavor-forward salad that’s hard to mess up.

Like many other classic American dishes (ground beef tacos, spaghetti and meatballs, General Tso’s chicken), the Greek salad is a domestic creation with a vague reference to some other country. It is common to find excoriations of the American Greek salad that claim that a dish called horiatiki (pronunciation is close to whore-YA-tee-kee) is the truly authentic Greek salad, the one Greeks love, the reason that any real, authentic, Greek person from Greece and not America would look at an American Greek salad and think, “Pah! This is not authentic!” (Horiatiki is a salad of roughly chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, and sometimes sweet green pepper, with feta cheese, olive oil, olives, and oregano. It has no lettuce.) Ahhhh, authenticity.

On the other hand, there is no such thing as authentic food. The concept requires that all cuisines from primarily non-immigrant countries be thought of as static and unchanging, which of course they are not. Dishes are created all the time, even in countries with much longer culinary histories than ours. Existing dishes are modified. New influences change the way people eat. Regional specialties overlap, mingle with each other.

When you talk about traditional or authentic food, it’s also important to remember that basically zero world cuisines were unchanged by the introduction of New World ingredients in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It took some cuisines an extra couple centuries to figure out how great corn, squash, chiles, potatoes, and, especially, tomatoes are. Greece was one of those. Tomatoes weren’t introduced to Greece until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then a civil war further postponed widespread adoption, so it wasn’t until the late nineteenth and even early twentieth centuries that tomatoes became really popular in Greece, despite the fact that they grow readily in the sunny Mediterranean climate.

“We always have a salad, this is a thing you always have at the table,” Aglaia Kremezi, a cookbook author, cooking school instructor, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on Greek cuisine, told me. There are many ancient Greek dishes that we would recognize today as salads, one in particular taking shape thanks to the needs of farmhands. “In the original village kind of salad, it was a lunch you could take in a box and eat in the fields,” Kremezi says. You’d have a pepper, a cucumber, some cheese, some onion, and, importantly, some bread. You’d chop it all up and have a meal, right there in the field. The farmhand salad, which does not really have a name, is fairly similar to a Lebanese salad called fattoush and an Italian salad called panzanella. They all use some form of stale bread-like product (the Greek version uses paximadi, twice-baked barley bread that has a texture similar to a biscotti) to soak up liquid from a fresh vegetable salad.

Greek cuisine shares some similarities with western European cuisines like Provencal and Italian, but in many ways it’s more similar to the cuisine of Turkey, with which it shares a short border. As in Turkish cuisine, Greeks often start a meal with an array of small salads and plates — you’d have some cheese, some savory pastries, some salads, each one a separately prepared mini-dish that’s served all at the same time for you to pick and choose. These mini-dishes, when served in this way, are sometimes called meze, like the Turkish version, and sometimes called orektiko.

Horiatiki was not one of the salads Kremezi grew up eating, because it didn’t exist until the mid-nineteen sixties. “When you sat down at the tavern, you ordered tomato salad and feta cheese, and then whatever else you wanted to order,” Kremezi says. Tomato salad, sometimes with cucumber or onion, sometimes not, was its own dish. A big slab of feta cheese (sheep’s milk only, or if you must, a tiny bit of goat’s milk, says Kremezi), covered in olive oil and dried oregano, was its own dish. Olives, too, were separate. Horiatiki takes all of those disparate meze dishes and combines them into one big salad.

Horiatiki was created, and then adopted throughout the country, in response to Greece’s desire in the sixties to be considered a real urban power — a European country, not a Middle Eastern country, like Turkey. Horiatiki is a salad to compete with niçoise. And it showed off so many of Greece’s strengths: phenomenally powerful herbs, strengthened in flavor by having to struggle in the dry, hot climate; truly world-class cheese; incredible fruits and vegetables; and some of the best, strongest, fruitiest, most flavorful olive oil anywhere. If you were an American tourist in 1968 and you had horiatiki at a seaside tavern, your mind was blown. This was some good shit.

To Greeks, it was kind of silly. “My parents were snubbing it, saying this is an overpriced way of serving,” says Kremezi. “And the whole thing backfired, because tourists would order the horiatiki and nothing else. They would call them horiatiki tourists, cheap tourists.” The name is curious as well. In Greek, “horiatiki” means “village,” a term and concept that was anathema in the sixties as Greece tried to appear modern and European. “If you wanted to dismiss something, you would say ‘this is horiatiki,’ to mean, this is not good,” says Kremezi. “So for a salad to succeed with that name, it must have been a great salad!” It was, and is, a great salad, and soon it exploded in popularity all over the country. Now it’s found in any tavern, any resort, or any seaside fish shack in Greece. It’s also found year-round, though to Kremezi, ordering a horiatiki off-season is a clear giveaway that a diner doesn’t know what he or she is doing. “Horiatiki is a summer salad,” she says. “Now, of course, they make it all year round, but if people know their food, they don’t order horiatiki in the winter. In the winter we have the greens salad, mixed greens.”

In the US, Greek salad is a little different. It’s commonly found in diners, in pizza joints, and at any “American food” type chain. It’ll have a base of iceberg or romaine lettuce, feta cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes (sometimes cherry, sometimes sliced), onions (usually red), and a dressing of olive oil, vinegar (usually red wine), and oregano.

This Greek salad, not to be confused with the horiatiki, emerged at around the same time, in the sixties. (There are references to “Greek salad” before then, as early as the nineteen thirties, but these were bizarre concoctions of mayonnaise and cabbage and it’s unclear what, if anything, made them the least bit Greek.) Greek immigrants flowed into the US in their biggest numbers from around 1890 to 1923, when a law put a cap on immigrants; hundreds of thousands came to avoid the chaos of the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and World War I. Many of those found work, as immigrants tend to do, in restaurants. But Greeks, for whatever reason, managed to connect with Americans by creating or co-opting two very important American restaurant types: the diner, and the pizza joint.

Greek immigrants disproportionately ran both; most New York City diners, for example, are owned by people of Greek descent. Greek immigrants also found notable success in the pizza world. The inventor of Hawaiian pizza is a Greek guy who immigrated to Ontario, and the owner of the famous Mystic Pizza hails from Greece as well. Greek restaurant owners, while catering to the tastes of their new home, also inserted a few elements from home onto their menus, most notably in the Greek salad, an American riff on the concept of combining a whole bunch of Greek classic items onto one plate. With the success of both diners and pizza joints, generations of Americans have grown up with the Greek salad as a nostalgic touchstone.

There is no true Greek salad; horiatiki, aside from being only a few decades old, is also as fluid as any other dish. Some versions, says Kremezi, include herbs like purslane, a lemony succulent that’s also common in the northeast US, or rock samphire, an herb which grows out the sides of cliffs above the Mediterranean. Some might include sweet green peppers. She always includes capers. But what I found most interesting is what she doesn’t include: vinegar, and olives.

“In Greece we never add vinegar. Why do people add vinegar? Tomato is quite sour,” Kremezi says. “Why do they add vinegar, balsamic vinegar, these things? It’s beyond me.” She finds, as well, that olives, being very salty, throw off the balance of the salad. “Feta is already quite salty,” she says. She’s right; I never thought about it, seeing the Greek salad mostly as a salty and acidic kick in the teeth to balance out some greasy pizza, but it is not a particularly well-balanced salad. Kremezi’s version, though, is.

The basic elements of a good Greek salad are fairly uncomplicated. You need good tomatoes, in season. Heirlooms are perfect. This is a limited-edition salad, only ideal for a few short weeks in the summer, because you need top-quality tomatoes: they’re going to be supplying both acid and sugar. Get nice cucumbers (Kremezi likes either English or the curved, ridged Armenian type). Good quality fancy olive oil, preferably a heavy, fruity one. Good feta cheese — Greek, or Bulgarian, made of sheep’s milk, packed in brine. God help you if you buy pre-crumbled grocery store feta.

An underrated key to the Greek salad, whether American or horiatiki, is in the herbs. In Greece, most herbs and greens are gathered wild, and are powerful and unusual because of it. A jar of McCormick dried oregano is not really a good substitute. But fresh oregano is very easy to grow in pots, and absolutely delicious. Oregano is a key ingredient in Greek cuisine; Kremezi says there are more than twelve different varieties, all used for different things in different parts of the country, and that the best stuff is the wild type that’s never watered and is all the more potent for it. “But the fresh one,” like you would grow in pots, “I like the fresh one,” she says. “And I think it adds a very interesting touch to the salad. With the feta it’s very ideal.”

And with that, we’re ready to do the recipe. It’s simple, direct, all about the ingredients. This is my recipe, not Kremezi’s — you can find hers here, and I’d highly recommend reading more of her recipes over on her site (or buying her books on Amazon). But it’s influenced by what I learned from her.

Greek Salad

Shopping list: Heirloom tomatoes, Persian cucumbers, red onion, fresh oregano, olive oil, black Russian bread or pumpernickel, purslane, sheep’s milk feta

Slice bread into cubes, about an inch on each side, and put in the toaster oven to toast. When they’re done, let them cool and dry out — we want to simulate stale bread here. Put into a big bowl. Carefully slice tomatoes into large chunks — irregular if you want, this is a rustic salad, go nuts — but do it over the bowl, so as not to lose any juice from the tomatoes. Slice cucumbers in half lengthwise, then chop into fairly chunky half-moons. Slice red onion thinly, and mince a lot of fresh oregano. There is no substitute. Get fresh oregano. Do the same with about as much purslane leaves — it’s not quite as strong as oregano, but you want its flavor to be less dominant.

Toss all this in the bowl, and carefully crumble a lot of feta in there. Pour on more olive oil than you think you need. Toss gently and let sit for about half an hour, then add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with olives on the side.

I will continue to get a Greek salad, with shitty hothouse tomatoes, olives, maybe anchovies, maybe hot peppers, and definitely lettuce, with my pizza, because I love it. But Kremezi’s version is a different type of salad, one that for me is as exciting as any new recipe I’ve tried. It’s not authentic, but it is delicious.

Photo by Alpha

This may be the only good reason to still buy DVDs.

Remember bodegas and laundromats? Not if you live in Manhattan you don’t.

Your day has passed. All days have passed. The end is on its way and all that’s left for you now is panic and ruin and dust. But sure, get yourself some young person blood if you think it’ll help. You might as well run out the clock with some energy.

★★★★ Sun gleamed on the paintjobs of a helicopter, a red car, a stubby airplane, another helicopter. A sunbather lay out on the roof of the new tower, which had acquired shrubs in planter boxes. The light was sharp and the heat with it was even sharper. Outside the Museum of Natural History, in the narrow dappled shade of some oaks, a stone bench baked unwary sitters with it stored-up heat. The shade in the Park was more substantial and effective. By a shaded outcropping of schist, mica glittered in the stone and the dust around it. The three-year-old attacked the rock face from above and below. Ants swarmed the wrappings of the cookies. The bridle path was strewn with fallen Cornelian cherries. A red-tailed hawk sat not very far above. A monarch butterfly fed on a patch of milkweeds, purple ones and red-budded ones opening into brilliant yell0w-orange. A short walk on the streets was much worse than the hours in the Park had been.

Black Vine is simply Vine, inescapable for anyone looking to really really engage with the platform.

by Jeff Ihaza

For roughly a hundred and twenty-five weeks, Worldstarhiphop.com — or WORLDSTARRRR!! as it’s known to anyone who’s been in a fight — has aggregated the best Vines into fifteen-minute blocks of video. These compilations, or “comps,” offer episodic glimpses into very time-specific moments in culture. Last week, the popular “What are thoooooose?!” meme was featured in its finest form: An elementary schooler calmly sets down his lunch bag, rubs his hands together and in complete, high-pitched glory, declares, “What are thooooose!” while pointing to another tiny classmate’s tiny shoes. It’s moments like these — comedically banal skits from everyday life — that thrive on Vine and make compiling the week’s best an obvious extension of the medium.

Vine, which was acquired by Twitter before it even launched in 2013, offers a uniquely democratic platform for everyday people to display whatever they want. The result is something like a never-ending Snapchat story from every person in the world, at once overwhelming and inviting, that captivates viewers with infinitely looping bits of ephemera that vary from the hyper-relatable, like culturally-specific jokes about parents, to deeply upsetting fight and prank videos.

That organizing and filing all of this cultural data falls to World Star is a testament to the site’s unique position as the internet’s de facto repository for absurd videos. Run by Queens native Lee “Q” O’Denat — who described his enterprise to The Verge as “sort of like cable television” — WSHH primarily functions as a video aggregator, pulling the internet’s strangest, and often most crude, videos and serving them up in one centralized destination.

The first World Star Vine Comp was released a few months after the app’s launch. At the time, the episodes were much shorter, averaging about five minutes. They spoke to the platform’s earlier, more immediate, often slapstick-style of humor, too; Vine Comp no. 1 features a clip of a toddler getting twerked on. These early compilations also had a perhaps unintended effect of authentically preserving a moment in time: The summer of 2013 was the summer of Miley Cyrus’ twerk-gate, and twerking remains a fixture in compilations to this day, with twerk Vines set to trending club hits making for oddly perfect video bookends in the new, hyper-visual and (sort of) sexually liberated internet.

Vine Compilation no. 123 features a high school teacher dancing to Nicki Minaj, a meme about trying to put on fitted sheets (it’s impossible), an animation likening Bill Cosby to a fighting game character whose special attack involves quaalude Hadoukens (ugh), and a gang fight involving baseball bats. This is the content mix viewers have come to expect, a mix most representative of real life filtered through the internet, for better or worse. Unlike YouTube, whose video sensations skew white and “dreamy,” some of Vine’s most effective users are often minorities, specifically black users, making the platform far more representative of culture than its intensely whitewashed counterparts.

This isn’t to say that the most “successful” users on the platform are minorities. In fact, according to Niche, a service that works sort of like Linkedin for viral celebrities, the majority of the most followed Vine accounts belong to white kids who look like members of a failed One Direction spinoff, aka fuckbois. Still, the cultural capital exchanged on Vine — dances, memes and expressions like “ayyy” — originate with the app’s black users. That the majority of the app’s black creators are shut out from the new celebrity status created on Vine is the entertainment industry’s systemic discrimination played out in a new sphere, which makes sense considering who the fuckboi Vine stars cater to: middle-class teenage white girls.

Still, while “Black YouTube” isn’t a thing, and “Black Twitter” exists as a nebulous idea that somehow involves Piers Morgan, Black Vine is simply Vine, inescapable for anyone looking to really really engage with the platform. The app’s format lends itself perfectly to hip hop, too. The six second loops put rhythm at center stage and as Hannah Giorgis says in The Guardian, “Blackness thrives rhythmically, and Vine puts that percussive precision on infinite loop.”

This makes sense given the rash of hip-hop hits to surface through the platform. Songs like Silento’s massive “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” or Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot Nigga” play both to hip-hop’s affinity for hooks and Vine’s repetitive hypnosis. Most of the songs to emerge on Vine are one hit wonders, sure, but they’re also unrelenting in their ubiquity. There are thousands of “whip” compilations on YouTube, as well as instructionals, parodies and every other form of online re-purposing imaginable. Bobby Shmurda might even be a major force in rap music today, were it not for the accuracy of his hit single’s lyrics.

World Star Hip Hop occupies the ground floor of this social video culture, making mini-celebrities out of kids like WelvenDaGreat, whose “Deez Nuts” meme has managed to generate a modest bit of fame, or Lil Terrio, whose “Ooo kill ‘em” video spawned a maddeningly extensive series of spinoffs. World Star’s compilations afford cultural capital to traditionally marginalized voices by amplifying their work where the platforms themselves won’t. The content creators who thrive on WSHH are, in a lot of ways, models of what companies like Vine tout in press releases: On World Star, you can become a viral celebrity even if you don’t have a name like “Skylar” or “Connor,” making the still-often despicable site the closest we’ve come to the utopian platform we’ve always hoped for.

Gosh, thus far today the Internet has been so shit-all awful that even seasoned veterans of terrible Internet days are mopping their brows and squinting into the distance, muttering, “I’ve never seen an Internet day so fucking worthless as this one here.” Let’s all take a deep breath and tell ourselves it’s got to get better. Usually that’s just a blatant lie, but honestly, with the shocking level of fuckitutde we have seen from the Internet since this morning, it can’t not be true. Nothing can continue to be this goddamn cataclysmically cavity-fucked. I think Isaac Newton proved that. Anyway, this Leandro Fresco track should be calming while we all gather ourselves together and look for things to be less bad. Enjoy.