“How Aging Millennials Will Affect Technology Consumption”

Mad Men ended before I had the time, or desire, to catch up. What follows is a mercy kill; a humane alternative to a twenty-hour life detour in service of completing an increasingly grim show, executed in work chat on Monday morning.

ME: I’m disappointed the internet hasn’t spoiled Mad Men for me yet

I want this to be over

Won’t someone tweet the fatal tweet

CHOIRE: John I can spoil you so hard

Actually (lol ACTUALLY) it’s so worth watching because there’s like eight white bit-part characters who are all acting their faces off because they’re like IM IN THE FUCKING MAD MEN FINALE.

Like they made $450 and did a day’s work and probably got beaten with a bag of oranges by Matthew Weiner but they did great work.

ME: Is anyone. ANYONE. Dead?

CHOIRE: Ready?

Everyone turns out okay.

ME: Nooooooo

CHOIRE: Except Bob Benson who’s in fag heaven somewhere.

And Betty lol RIP

Oh and I guess Sally who turns into fucked up Betty Jr

ME: What did Betty die of

Betty died of being hated by her creator

Just as we all will

ME: To be clear, Don didn’t die

CHOIRE: His body remains alive yes

ME: Is Peggy president of the United States or is Joan

CHOIRE: Close enough YES

ME: Is PETE dead at least

CHOIRE: Joan is basically white Oprah

Pete is basically Elon Musk

Peggy is Mary Erdoes

God I hope [coworker also in group chat] has watched this or I’m a dead man.

Unlike Don.

Who is alive.

And not dead from falling of a building as foretold.

ME: This is terrible news

CHOIRE: I’m so sorry.

ME: did Sal come back

CHOIRE: No gays were harmed in the making of this episode.

This episode refused to put the dick back in Dick Whitman.

I’m sorry for that cheap joke.

ME: Megan: dead?

CHOIRE: Megan’s probably hanging from the rafters in Laurel Canyon.

ME: did any of the characters’ family members die, perhaps offscreen?

Did anyone get any alarming phone calls at least

CHOIRE: There were many alarming phone calls but they were telephonic icepicks designed to break through various emotional glaciers and so for instance Peggy can have sex with a man again now.

Thank god otherwise what’s the point of life am I right ladies.

ME: I looked up the top songs from 1970 and I have a few questions

did the show use:

RAINDROPS KEEP FALLIN’ ON MY HEAD

No.

WHOLE LOTTA LOVE

No.

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER

Yes but only where we couldn’t hear it.

ME: Nice

Were there any flash-forwards to, say, a Brand Newsroom

CHOIRE: There was a glimmer of the horror of the future for sure but mostly it was drowning in the metacommentary of each of us lazing about drinking corn syrup in front of our TVs.

ME: So in a way, we are the ones who die

CHOIRE: There’s only one way out and it involves moving to California except now everyone’s already done that so yes we’re dead.

ME: Ok

Thanks.

It took me a couple of listens to Ludovico Einaudi’s Taranta Project to really get into it, but I stuck with it and I’m glad I did. You will, of course, have a different level of appreciation and/or commitment, but that’s what makes it such an interesting and diverse world, don’t you think? Anyway, if you’re not a fan of Einaudi’s usual neo-classical approach be assured that this is something very different. I won’t say much more so you can come to it fresh and, hopefully, enjoy.

“Congestion could someday plague the information superhighway, thanks to all the Netflix we’ve been watching. There’s only so much information that can pass through internet cables at any one time, and we’re starting to edge towards that limit.”

★★★★★ A chatter of machinery, punctuated by a truck-horn blast, came in with the cool fresh air. A distinct stripe of tan separated the green on the Jersey bank from the water of the Hudson. The leaves on the shrubbery were shiny and the sun was almost hot where it landed directly. A girl scootered by wearing a paper crown over a pink helmet that had built-in kitten ears sticking out. Long rolling whitecaps moved up the river. Inland, on the Lincoln Center plaza, little ripples ran across the black pool. Shadows and reflections went back and forth across the ramp outside Alice Tully Hall. The concrete seats extending above the sidewalk were warm to rest on and the light was warm on the face. The bright towers of Broadway swelled and flexed in the windshield of a passing bus. A policeman rested his forearm on the sill of his open prowl-car window, a small cigar smoldering in his hand. A housefly kept vanishing whenever the flyswatter came to hand, then finally letting itself get caught by a straight downward smash as it hunkered over a crumb, a cartoon of a fly and a flyswatting.

“Only one-third (34 percent) of Americans age 18 to 35 say that they’re a ‘millennial,’ according to PRRI’s millennial report, while the remaining 66 percent say that the term doesn’t describe them well.”

by Safy-Hallan Farah

Geniuses is a series where we interview geniuses from all walks of life. For our first installment of Geniuses, we’re talking to Twitter sensation and sad girl @sosadtoday.

Do you consider yourself a genius?

When I see the word ‘genius’, what first comes to mind is the word ‘tortured.’ Someone who is ahead of his or her time, or operating in a different dimension, and this dimension is painful or difficult as a result. Like, I see Van Gogh alone in his room and the room is spinning and he’s like ‘help!’ I don’t want to say that you have to suffer to be a genius, but that’s what comes to mind. But I guess people who are good at reality are also geniuses. I don’t think I’m a genius. I think I’m verbally gifted. Do you think I’m a genius?

I do think you’re a genius. I don’t think every genius is tortured but I like your definition. When did you first notice you were verbally gifted and what did you to hone that ‘gift’?

A teacher in elementary school saw how uncomfortable I was in my body and in reality. She saw potential in my writing, so she gave me a special blank book in which to put everything I wrote. It was a hardcover book and it made me feel special. Ever since then, the act of writing down words, and then sharing some of them, has helped me feel a little less uncomfortable. Or at least, it makes me feel like the discomfort isn’t its own end. It can be transformed into something beautiful or funny. Later in life my mom told me that my childhood verbal IQ test came back very high. But I think the other part of my IQ was normcore.

american horror story: waking up

— so sad today (@sosadtoday) December 2, 2014

Do you think IQ is important?

I don’t know enough about it. I just googled it. In Wikipedia there seems to be a lot of criticism of IQ testing in terms of biases and outdated methodology. Also, I don’t think it accounts for emotional intelligence.

Would you say you’re emotionally intelligent? I get the sense, from your tweets, that you’re extremely self-aware and that your awareness intersects w/ emotional intelligence.

I can intellectualize a lot around my feelings. I can talk emotional truth. But when it comes to actually feeling feelings, I’m still pretty terrified of them. Yes, I’d say I’m very self-aware, but it doesn’t stop me from making the same emotional mistakes repeatedly. I love to feel high. And sometimes I reach for the wrong people to try and reach a certain emotional state — people who make me feel high or magic in the short term, but hurt me in the long term. Sometimes I am able to lie to myself. Sometimes I know what I’m doing and don’t care.

Do you consider you having a super popular Twitter another form of reaching for the wrong people? Does being vulnerable on Twitter hurt you in the long run?

I’m not sure. I was thinking more in romantic terms, but I guess any kind of attention-seeking is probably killing me. that being said, I feel just as much shame when I tweet something stupid from another way-less popular account of mine as I do when I tweet something stupid and/or vulnerable from so sad today (note: I’m not equating stupid with vulnerable) (but I feel like the most vulnerable tweets are either the best tweets or the worst tweets so there is always a chance of stupidity with vulnerable tweets) (but also a chance of “real” human connection by way of fake internet intimacy, which may not even be entirely fake — it’s just different). Like, the shame is equal for both accounts: the popular one and the way less popular one. So I don’t think it’s the popularity of the account that hurts me so much as using Twitter in general to get outside of myself. But Twitter also hath giveth me so much. It giveth and it taketh away.

your son doesn’t know where the clitoris is happy mother’s day

— so sad today (@sosadtoday) May 10, 2015

Do you ever feel like you’re uncategorizable and genreless?

Oh god, I hope I am. I remember at the end of 2014, people were like ‘2014 was the year of the sad, because of Yung Lean and stuff, but now that’ll be over.’ I was like uhhhh, I don’t know what body you’re living in or what planet you’re living on but my sadness is infinite.

So in that sense, I’m not a brand or a genre. I’m a primal feeling. And so sad today is still, more than anything, a coping mechanism.

When i was younger, I really wanted to fit into a category. Like, I never felt like enough anything, or maybe I felt like too much of the wrong thing, so I thought that if I could just get the costume right then I could find peace on the inside. I went through a few bad years of anorexia, but it didn’t make me feel like I always imagined the gamine waifs felt. I imagined they felt empowered. But I was just scared and freezing. Then I tried to be, like, a chill mountain stoner girl who went jeeping and was like ‘whatever dude.’ But I’m not chill. I’m deeply anxious. Then I tried to be a hipster but the hipsters were so mean and I’m kinda soft. Also, you couldn’t be a hipster without bangs at that time and my hair is naturally very thick, frizzy jew hair, so bangs would have been a disaster area.

I still fall into the trap of comparing my messy insides to other people’s put-together outsides, which I think is human — especially now with all the selfie filters and brows on fleek. And of course, I still don’t really feel like enough, but I don’t think I want to be anyone else, which is progress.

“For the callow reader, who might not have minded some repetitious bawdi­ness in a movie review, who enjoys ­nonfiction that reads like a novel, who has indulged in New Age metaphysics, who suffers white guilt or black anger, who fails to crosscheck the long, verbatim transcripts: It is not for such a reader to be disappointed in Adler; she has already expressed her disappointment in us.”

It’s shocking how quickly the world got used to Makonnen’s voice, which was jarring and novel on “Tuesday” but which sounds, here, not just comfortable but almost obvious. Charisma: it has a sound.

by The Awl

Can tennis change lives in prison?