Moving.Office since ’09. Best memory: finding my lost wedding ring in garbage bag full of cigarettes.Worst: past week pic.twitter.com/6GGnR1dySU

— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) July 22, 2015

Jim Cooke

Andy Orin

Leah Beckmann

Emma Carmichael

Adam Pash

Matt Hardigree

Jason Parham

Jia Tolentino

Ashley Feinberg

Caity Weaver

Jason Torchinsky

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Jane-Claire Quigley

Tina Amini

Casey Chan

Taylor Berman

Kate Dries

Hamilton Nolan

Kirk Hamilton

Leah Finnegan

Tom Scocca

Alan Henry

Michael Hession

Clover Hope

Rich Juzwiak

Brian Ashcraft

Patrick George

Damon Lavrinc

Whitson Gordon

Sam Biddle

Bobby Finger

Meg Neal

Kara Brown

Rob Bricken

Hillary Crosley Coker

Erin Gloria Ryan

Attila Nagy

Lauren Davis

Sean Hollister

JK Trotter

Natasha Vargas-Cooper

Madeleine Davies

Jay Hathaway

Stephen Totilo

Kelly Faircloth

Máté Petrány

Alex Pareene

Kaila Hale-Stern

Jordan Sargent

George Dvorsky

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

Dayna Evans

Luke Plunkett

Thorin Klosowski

Charlie Jane Anders

Kelly Conaboy

Raphael Orlove

Alissa Walker

Anna Merlan

Eric Ravenscraft

Andy Cush

Shep McAllister

Ellie Shechet

Jane Marie

Allie Jones

Michael Fahey

Gabrielle Bluestone

Robert T. Gonzalez

Kristin Wong

Hudson Hongo

Michael Ballaban

Brendan O’Connor

Matt Novak

Evan Narcisse

Lacey Donohue

Patrick Allan

Esther Inglis-Arkell

Mario Aguilar

John Cook

Miklós Vincze

Melanie Pinola

Jason Schreier

Tim Marchman

Barry Petchesky

Rob Harvilla

Timothy Burke

Puja Patel

Albert Burneko

Andrew Liszewski

Adam Clark Estes

Kevin Draper

Leslie Horn

Greg Howard

Samer Kalaf

Jamie Condliffe

Patricia Hernandez

Kate Knibbs

Tom Ley

Dave McKenna

Diana Moskovitz

Annalee Newitz

Sam Woolley

Darren Orf

Tara Jacoby

Jesus Diaz

Chris Person

Kyle Wagner

Good news! NASA “has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the ‘habitable zone’ around a sun-like star.” EARTH 2.0! Looks like I’m done recycling!

Are invisibility cloaks possible? If you have ever walked down a street muttering “Keep it together” to yourself under your breath while squinting your eyes at the corners to hold back the tears and doing whatever you can to think of anything other than the persistent pain that pushes down on you with its endless insistence that everything you’ve ever done was wrong— if, during that regular ramble, you’ve looked around to see if anyone else is glancing back at you and taking note of your anguish — you will already know that not only do they exist, but that you’re wearing one.

“A Tesco shopper had her tooth shattered after biting into a rusty blade which had somehow got into food she purchased from the supermarket giant.”

There’s an hour a day that you don’t want to die, but they spread out the minutes so you won’t do the math. Your mind has an interest in keeping you conned, to prevent you from seeing how much sadness goes on. The little things that briefly bring you joy are inflated in such a way that you never quite comprehend just how hopeless everything else is. A song like this, which is perfectly pleasant and actually a bit better than it has to be, could, in the right moment, seem like something that might make your whole morning worthwhile. I mean, I hope it does: You need all the help you can get to keep going. Enjoy. [Via]

★★★★ Clouds thickened over a humid morning. An immense bead of sweat slid down the three-year-old’s face as he test-pedaled a bicycle on training wheels around inside of the rental shop. The children rode slowly back home, and then the bikes had to be parked in the living room for protection. Thunder boomed and the crape myrtle tossed. The floor vibrated. White sheets of rain slammed into the parking lot and buffeted the deck like wave spray breaking over a ship. A solid sheet of water poured down the kitchen window. The children fretted about whether the house was genuinely waterproof. The storm held at its peak for a good while, then subsided. A lesser shower followed and passed too. There were puddles in the bike lanes. Another mass of clouds built up, but then the sun broke through. The late sky was clear; laughing gulls flew by, tinged pink.

by Helen Holmes

Like several great memes before it, this one began at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which has since its inception been ripe for rabid online ingestion via themes of humiliation, fear, and triumph of the adolescent spirit. It’s a live television event akin to the grammatical Hunger Games, wherein wee sprouts still small enough to crawl into the gears of a massive piece of industrial hardware in order to fix it from within are tasked with correctly spelling increasingly challenging words. You know the drill. We tune in for the joy and the sorrow and for the chance to witness the occasional mortifying cultural fissure.

A viral video from the more temperate seasons of YouTube (2008) comes to mind — an adorable blonde cherub of a boy from North Carolina is tasked with puzzling out “negus.” Clearly unfamiliar with the word, which indicates the sovereign of Ethiopia, and immediately chastened by what it rhymes with, we watch him struggle to do a backbend over a century-plus of internalized racial epithets before finally spelling it correctly. It’s of course extremely awkward, making for top of the line Internet chow.

Scripps owes its recent re-appearance within the plastic ball pit of viral content to a Vine whose subject is 5th place finalist Dev Jaiswal of Louisville (the Bee’s first winner, a patent lawyer born in 1913, was also from Louisville). Dev is 13 years old, bespectacled, and the owner of a truly tragic bowl haircut. Coming into the finals with a perfect score, he immediately wins over the crowd with his easy, goofy smile and unbridled enthusiasm for the game. When asked what word best describes him in a sidelines interview with USA Today, Dev replied: jovial. “I love having fun and just being myself and enjoying every moment that I can.”

So, just what exactly did Dev do? With a chance at eternal Bee glory at stake, Dev was charged with spelling the word “iridocyclitis.” In this one crucial moment all of his trademark giddiness vanishes. He clutches his oversized name card in his left hand, stares down the judges, and enunciates each syllable with the care of an apothecary casting a spell upon his bitter herbs: “EER-IH-DOH-CIH-CLY-TISSSS.” I believe that within the parameters of English verse and meter that Dev’s interpretation would count as Dactylic, but what seals the perfection of the moment is not his rhythm, but the slight hiss that he utters at the end of the word, as though milking a particularly stubborn tube of toothpaste. In longer videos found on YouTube we find out that Dev spells the word wrong, replacing the “y” with an “i.” Upon hearing the bell that signifies his mistake, he smiles grimly — someone in the audience can be heard keening out in actual pain.

Dev would never lose his composure like that. “Thank you so much, everyone,” he says sincerely, grinning as the audience collectively rises to give him a standing ovation. Dev for President.

On Vine, Dev’s utter and pervading sense of chill is mostly lost in favor of focusing on his legendary, practically letter-by-letter articulation of iridocyclitis. In the clip that originally blew up back in May, someone can be heard choking with laughter while filming their television, upon which sweet Dev can be found. That is pretty lame, in my opinion, but understandable. Dev’s perfect focus and concentration in that moment is on par with that of heart surgeons scrubbing in, or 17 year-old teenage boys about to call for pizza while stoned out of their minds. As is the custom on Vine, the clip was quickly and uproariously dubbed into hit pop songs of the moment, scenes from Spongebob, and other viral Vines. Once one spends enough time swimming in eternal loops, the patterns tend to become pretty familiar.

It’s a classic viral meme, but one that I find particularly noteworthy for its almost universal unwillingness to descend to the racist, sexist level of humor that stews in every app designed to hold digital media creations by teens. Dev’s head photoshopped onto the heads of dinosaurs as John Williams’ eternal theme plays in the background; Dev’s voice layered into the grinding bars of a Skrillex song; Dev’s perfect pronunciation swapped into Hermione’s famous “it’s Lev-i-OH-sa, not Lev-i-oh-SAH,” scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone — it’s all delightfully tame, and, for the most part, not mean-spirited.

However, for me, the flawlessness of this Vine meme in particular is cinched in its wide distribution of “iridocyclitis” itself, a word so obscure and fun to say that it’s become pop culture canon in less than a few months. Teens are repeating and internalizing new hyper-specific medical jargon! We’re all out here learning new things, thanks to one heroic Louisville teen who refuses to indulge the haters (if he even has any).

“Iridocyclitis” refers to the inflammation of the iris and ciliary body within the eye; it’s often associated with joint swelling in the spine.

I Heard It Through The Great Vine is an occasional column about Great Vines.

by Lindsay Robertson

Everyone is like, “Do not sleep with your phone! “Keep Your Phone in Your Backyard at Night!” “Sleeping with your phone is literally killing you!” “iPhone 5 Burns 2-Inch Hole In Teen’s Forearm While He Sleeps!” (Gross pic, also maybe fake.) But you probably still sleep with your phone anyway, so here are several ways I have found, through trial and error, to actually use my phone to avoid thinking about mortality and the future and the terrible Internet and fall asleep in under five minutes.

(Background: last fall, when I realized the government would soon be knocking on my door to find out why I hadn’t started meditating yet, I downloaded the Headspace meditation app and used it for ten minutes each day for five days. Each time I used it, typically mid-morning, sitting up straight, I fell asleep. Even when I wasn’t tired. Eureka! What follows is my journey toward the perfect use of non-music phone audio to fall asleep.)

Sleep Apps

After the Headspace Incident, I realized there must be actual apps for this. After reading reviews, I chose one called iSleepEasy (five dollars). It has an un-sleek, kind of like, Wiccan interface, but it worked for me the very first night. Basically, you choose from a variety of guided audios ranging from short ones (two to five minutes) like “Belly Breathing,” in which you learn that it’s “fine” (everything is “fine” in this app) to pretend to breathe from your belly, to longer ones like “Darkness Meditation,” where you think about how dark it is or isn’t in your bedroom for a long time. When I first started using this app, I told everyone about it, because I was obsessed with the narrator and her voice. I’ve decided she’s the bassist in an all-girl band, that she lives in Portland (Maine, obviously), has ZERO tattoos, is Wiccan (seriously this app is so Wiccan!) and might be a robot. The main thing about her voice is that it’s extremely, almost impossibly disaffected. Oh and the very best part of the entire app is this one audio called “Wee Hours Rescue,” in which Audio Chick tries to make a slow, disaffected-yet-strident case for the absurd idea that it’s actually good to have woken up in the middle of the night. (“It’s the middle of the night, and you’re awake. It’s fine… know that it’s a good thing that your body is throwing off stress and tension. It could be that there are some very strong emotions present…”) (I always took that last part to be a euphemism for “fuccccck I’m awake at 3:36!!! Strong emotions present!!”)

Poetry

After I got bored with the guided audios and memorized them, I decided that if I was going to fill my brain with subconscious messages during my sleep, I wanted to get a little more intellectual than “My left foot is warm and heavy. My right foot is warm and heavy.” So I decided to try poetry. This is a little tougher, because you have to go to YouTube, basically, and find a poem that isn’t shitty. And then the poem is invariably too short, and also usually read by the poet, in 1947, angrily, and literally every poem is about mortality and that’s what we’re trying not to think about, right? I mean, “Howl” was nice and long and comforting in that “Ah, ninth grade!” sort of way, but I kept getting impatient for the Rockland part and impatience is not sleep-conducive. Maybe someday I will make a seamless hours-long playlist of good-yet-calming poems for this purpose but who are we kidding, because I found The Answer!

Books!!!!!!!!! Audiobooks!!

Audiobooks, guys: They’re the answer to everything! I may never even try to sleep again without an audiobook in my ear! I know people listen to audiobooks in bed all the time but not specifically for the purpose of sleep, right? Anyway, you must follow these rules three:

1. The audiobook cannot be a book you haven’t read or haven’t read recently (unless you, like, never want to read it? But that would be strange. It actually might be a good way to say you’ve read “Infinite Jest” without technically lying, though.) It should be a book you’ve read and enjoyed, preferably more than once, that didn’t make you cry, and that you feel comfortable dipping into at any part, because that’s what’s gonna happen to your relationship with this book for the rest of your life together, just you and this book, every night, listening out of order and all over the place. (My choice is my favorite audiobook: “Snobs” by Julian Fellowes. But listen to it awake first! It’s sooo good.)

2. The audiobook cannot be (the otherwise excellent and acclaimed) “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End” by Atul Gawande, because THE ENTIRE BOOK IS WHAT WE ARE TRYING NOT TO THINK ABOUT SO WE CAN FALL ASLEEP. I learned this the hard way.

3. This goes for all the above suggestions, but obviously, if you wake up to an alarm and that alarm is the phone, you should either listen with the phone face-down on the pillow next to you (especially if there’s another person’s head there, lol), use an old iPod, or set a separate alarm. With enough practice/experience, you’ll actually be able to reliably pull the earbud cable out of the phone just before the moment of sleep, but this “pullout method” is, like others, not to be depended upon when the stakes are high.

If you have any questions, I will be answering them below in Kinja.

Photo by ddqhu

by Vijith Assar

Last year’s putative “Song of the Summer” was a national embarrassment; as a result, American songs — and for safe measure, all songs in English — are no longer eligible. Each month, until summer has died, the Awl will present alternatives.

“Bare Min” by Morgan Sulele
#1 in Norway (VG-Lista)

Check it out, I brought you a Scandinavian bizarro-world Jason Mraz clone! You’re welcome. Much like summer flings, summer pop songs are certainly allowed to be both appropriate in the moment and absolutely insufferable later; this one drafts a few dozen schoolchildren into a caterwauling choir almost as if to peer pressure you into enjoying it. The kids probably just don’t know any better, but their maestro’s unreasonably cheery spirits are probably going to be the song’s undoing when winter and seasonal affective disorder show up in a few months. In the meantime, you are still clearly better off than you’d be with the regular Jason Mraz, whatever he’s up to.

“A Noite (La Notte)” by Tiê
#6 in Brazil (Shazam)

You may catch a whiff of Belle & Sebastian in between the piano and the shivering drums — specifically, a peculiar childlike exuberance that should be logically impossible on a professional endeavor. That’s what makes this strangely self fulfilling: If she’s not yet cynical enough to roll her own eyes at a trick like the elongated vocal trajectory during the chorus, perhaps we shouldn’t do it either. In a world teeming with earnest YouTube bedroom confessionals, maybe finding the good ones becomes more rewarding? Everybody please take care when stampeding down to the pawn shop to buy ukuleles.

“Playback” by Juju
#1 in Japan (Tokio Hot 100)

It may be sparse, but this entire production is obviously constructed for the sole purpose of highlighting her vocal tic — which is one for the ages, on par with the New Age Girl barking or Eddie Vedder’s most incomprehensible fits of steamroller mumbling. Count yourself lucky that she lapses back into English for that most important split second, giving you a lyrical handhold so you won’t feel like a jerk forever after it imprints in your memory purely phonetically.

More in August.

“It has become harder over the last 130 years or so to see Van Gogh plain. It is practically harder in that our approach to his paintings in museums is often blocked by an urgent, excitable crescent of worldwide fans, iPhones aloft for the necessary selfie with Sunflowers. They are to be welcomed: the international reach of art should be a matter not of snobbish disapproval but rather of crowd management and pious wonder… We have a problem of seeing, just as we often have a problem hearing (or hearing clearly), say, a Beethoven symphony. It’s hard to get back to our first enraptured seeings and hearings, when Van Gogh and Beethoven struck our eyes and ears as nothing had before; and yet equally hard to break through to new seeings, new hearings. So we tend, a little lazily, to acknowledge greatness by default, and move elsewhere, away from the crowds discovering him as we first discovered him.”
 — Julian Barnes on Vincent Van Gogh? Yes please.