by Julia Lipscomb

“If you’re getting great news or funny videos without paying, odds are someone is paying for your attention.” This is one of the fundamental truths of the attention economy explored in Do Not Track, a new seven-part series from documentary filmmaker Brett Gaylor about the way our personal data is collected, manipulated, sold, and deployed against us on the internet.

As much a web app as it is a documentary — and perhaps horror film? — Do Not Track shows viewers who agree to share their personal data via cookies a real-time look at how their identity is being tracked across the web. Its first two episodes premiere today; the rest of the series will roll out over the course of the next two months, wrapping up on June 9th.

I recently caught up with Gaylor, who was formerly the Senior Director of the Mozilla Foundation’s Webmaker initiative, on the phone to talk about just how intensely our movements are tracked across the web — and why even people who don’t have anything to hide should care just who winds up with their data.

Hi! So what motivated you to create Do Not Track?

When I first started on the web, it was a very fun place. Even the language at the time, like “surfing the web,” gave you a sense that you could go from link to link and find some eclectic piece of art or crazy philosophy page or weird store in a city you’ve never been to. That has changed a lot because advertising serves to consolidate the web. Advertising works for people who get big numbers; nobody wants to advertise on a page that nobody else will see. So how do you get those big numbers? You have to have on your webpage things that everybody likes. That, by definition, means that you will have less of the wonderful websites than you used to find. Then you layer on top of that these very large consolidated behemoths, like the Facebooks of the world or the modern media, the idea of personalization. We’ve replaced a lot of the gatekeepers that we used to have with broadcast models as the new gatekeepers.

The idea of personalization seems appealing, but it comes at the cost of having our personal data mined by all kinds of trackers — which people are vaguely aware of, but don’t really know how it’s done.

Let’s say you go from the New York Times to BuzzFeed — if those share the same advertising network, then both of those sites will be able to see that you went from this site to that site. Just extrapolate that over the course of the entire day. If you are someone like me and spend eight hours a day on the internet, there is an incredible volume of information collected that shows which sites you go to, what types of sites you prefer. You don’t necessarily need to know someone’s name to know who they are; you are very unique by these habits as you browse the web.

There is a famous case where this flashlight app was asking for people’s contacts. Why does a flashlight need your contacts? Why does Angry Birds need to know that unique device ID? Probably because they are selling that information to an advertising network. The other thing that I’m worried about is because there are these web startups competing with other web setups to basically build a database on what they can know about you. If you look at Pinterest, how do you think this business has valued in the billions of dollars?

In the first episode, danah boyd said that when you volunteer your data, it’s being used to assert power over people and monitor others who may be under constant surveillance. How does data tracking puts those people at risk?

Oftentimes when you talk to people about this issue, abstractly, they may be uncomfortable with data collection, but they assume that they are not criminals, or that they don’t have anything to hide. But only people in positions of privilege can make that statement. What Dana was saying was you really have to understand that you are a part of a system of data, so by being that person with nothing to hide and being complacent in the system, you’re not thinking about how that might affect someone who does have a good reason for their information to be kept private.

Some of the trackers discussed in Do Not Track are large corporations that people will recognize like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but most you probably won’t recognize, right?

Who are these people? [laughs] It is a varied ecosystem. There a lot of different players. You have some folks who are called data brokers. The largest works for a company called Axiom. They combine large data sets and make those data sets available to paying customers. These companies are basically the evolution of direct mail marketing. The way that direct mail marketing worked in the past is they would manually [collect data] or purchase large sets of records about all kinds of things — people who own cars, people who own houses, people who have hunting licenses, people in the US who are registered Democrat or Republican — where people have volunteered their data or were required to do so under law. The data brokers purchase these data sets and sell them.

Whether or not these data brokers have information about you depends on where you live. In the US, Axiom has records on almost all American citizens. In Europe and Canada, regulations are more restrictive as to how much data they can collect about you.

Let’s go back to the idea that participation was what attracted people to the internet — that people are not just interested in being consumers, but creators. Is there hope for that ideal?

I am guilty of being a techno-utopian. Often people will describe the internet as if it had laws — “the internet was meant to be free” — but the internet is not free. The internet is whatever we want. There is room for all kinds of different webs, different internets. If you are a person who is interested in independence and serendipity, then what you need to do is support creators. You need to visit their websites, support them monetarily, and make choices about where you spend your time online.This is cheesy, but I do think it is similar to choices that we make in our food and diets. Often times you are going to have in your kitchen a bottle of ketchup. It doesn’t mean that ketchup is food that you should feed to your children regularly. You can augment it with food that is grown locally and organically. Sometimes that food costs more to buy; it is because it costs more to create and it is not made for everyone.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Ashkenazic Jewish cuisine has a real thing for foods so sweet you can feel your teeth crying, and raisins, by which I mean those little red boxes of Sun-Maid raisins, are exactly the right level of cloyingly sweet to tickle the sure-to-be-temporary teeth of American Jews. Noodle kugel often has raisins in it. Challah and rugalach do too, sometimes. After Shabbat services there’d always be a tray of painfully sweet and Negev-dry cakes and breads and cookies, many of which had raisins embedded within, for the kids. I loathed them.

I think a lot of Americans, Jewish or not, have a memory of digging fingernails into a congealed clump of sticky raisins deep within that red cardboard box, knowing that once you finally got the little fuckers out, you were only going to be disappointed, because they would still be raisins. When the choice was oatmeal raisin or chocolate chip cookie, we all know which one to grab. Why get a fruit cookie when there’s one with chocolate right next to it?

Raisins also suffer the curse of being healthy — crazily high in sugar, but sugar that can be broken down by the body into energy easily. Raisins are also high in fiber, vitamin K (good for blood clotting), vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin E, and many more, plus a pretty decent amount of protein for a fruit. Basically anything a parent insists is healthy is going to taste like poison to a kid, even something that has more sugar, by weight, than a Hershey bar.

But raisins have a long history of use in savory dishes, everywhere from Cuba to India, and if you treat them right, they can be pretty spectacular, adding a kick of fruitiness and sugar to balance out acidic or umami flavors.

There are a bunch of different types of raisins. Your typical Sun-Maid raisin is made from, surprisingly, the Thompson seedless grape, which is your standard supermarket green grape. The drying process — not done in the sun, to avoid introduction of bacteria and other gross things — turns the grapes a dark red. This presents a weird question: what the hell is a golden raisin then? Golden raisins are made from, um, also Thompson seedless grapes. During the drying process, some sulfur dioxide, a preservative, is added to the grapes, which kind of bleaches the skins back to yellowish and also changes the flavor to be a bit drier and more tart.

There are two more main types of raisins you might see, both of which are misleadingly named. The easiest to explain is the dried currant, which is not, as you might think, the dried version of the small round fruits called currants, but is actually just a raisin made from a specific type of small grape called the Black Corinth (the name of the raisin is a corrupted form of the name of the grape, not any reference to the real currant). You might see the Black Corinth grape sold at farmers markets and fancy supermarkets as “champagne grapes,” though they’re not used for making champagne. (The naming of foods is a real mess of etymology and history!) Dried currants are tiny and very sweet, and are especially common in baked goods in the UK, like scones.

The other, even more misleading, type of raisin is the sultana. So, there is a pale green seedless grape that originally came from the Ottoman Empire — a very popular variety whose proper name is “Sultanina,” but which is commonly known throughout the raisin industry as either “sultana” or “sultana of commerce.” This is very confusing, because there is another variety of grape made into raisins that is called “sultana,” a mediocre grape that had a brief run of popularity in California in the mid-nineteenth century. This shittier raisin is sometimes called “inferior sultana of commerce.” And you might recall that the most popular variety of grape for American raisins is the Thompson seedless. The Thompson seedless was introduced to America in 1872 by William Thompson, a UK-born grower, in Yuba City, California. Thompson renamed this grape after himself, because why not, but he grew this from a vine he brought back from Asia. That vine has another name in the rest of the world, and that name is…Sultanina. The Thompson seedless grape, basically the only raisin Americans can easily find, is also known as the sultana. Which is not to be confused with the sultana. Good lord.

Anyway this is all to say, don’t pay more for something that brands itself a “sultana raisin.” All the raisins are sultana raisins. Your garbage Sun-Maid stuck-together clump of black grainy raisins are sultanas.

But you SHOULD spend whatever mild price hike is attached to golden raisins. It might seem like a dumb bit of color-based marketing, but golden raisins are no Crystal Pepsi: There is a definite difference in flavor and texture to golden raisins, even though they come from the same grape as dark raisins. Also, if you can get yourself to a good Indian or Middle Eastern market, there’s a pretty fair chance there’ll be a few different varieties, sold by the pound rather than in packages. Get these. They’ll have various names which probably aren’t standardized and might not mean much of anything, but try one and see what you like. I tend to like the biggest ones, which are less sweet and more acidic than the super small dense ones. And I like them to be as plump as possible: this indicates a higher water content and probably a less intensive drying process, which usually correlates to a tastier raisin.

A basic and yet EXTREMELY FANCY-SEEMING technique for increasing the tastiness of a raisin is rehydration. Put a bunch of raisins in a glass tupperware. Heat up some kind of liquid — water, maybe, or vinegar, or wine, or whiskey — until near-boiling, then pour the liquid over the raisins, enough to cover them. Put a lid on the tupperware and wait a few minutes. The raisins, being all dried and thirsty for the water so cruelly leached from them, will drink up the liquid and become plump and tender and flavored. No matter what I’m doing with raisins, I rehydrate them first; if I don’t want to add any flavor, I just use water, because the texture of a rehydrated raisin is so superior.

Roasted Broccoli With Raisins, Pistachios, and Fried Rosemary

Shopping list: Broccoli, golden raisins, pistachios, shallots, garlic, white wine vinegar, bulgur wheat, lemon, olive oil, sugar, goat cheese, rosemary, canola oil

This treatment of the raisins is basically a quick pickle. Place a handful of raisins in a glass tupperware. In a saucepan, heat white wine vinegar, water, and sugar in a 1:1:1 ratio, give or take. (Feel free to throw in some star anise, cloves, a cinnamon stick, peppercorns, or a bay leaf, but you don’t have to.) Bring to a boil, then turn off the heat, pour the liquid over the raisins, give a quick stir, and cover.

Pre-heat the oven to 400 degrees. Slice onion in half through the root, then place cut-side-down on the cutting board and slice width-wise into thin half-moons. Peel and cut about five garlic cloves into a few pieces each, and add to a big bowl. Chop about a head’s worth of broccoli florets, making sure each piece is at least an inch by an inch and has a sizeable flat side, where you cut it. (RESERVE THE BROCCOLI STALKS FOR LATER.) Throw them in the bowl too, along with maybe an eighth of a cup of olive oil. Toss thoroughly and spread on a baking sheet, making sure the cut side of the broccoli is down. Throw in oven.

Measure out a half cup of bulgur wheat, put in another glass tupperware. Boil a cup of water (I use an electric kettle for this). Pour the hot water over the bulgur, along with a pinch or two of salt. Quickly stir to mix and cover until the water is absorbed.

Put a small saucepan on the stove and fill it up maybe an inch high with canola oil. Pick a few sprigs of fresh rosemary, getting the leaves off the stems. When the oil is hot — test by throwing in a rosemary leaf, and if it sizzles a lot and makes frying sounds and smells it’s ready — throw in the rosemary. Fry for a minute or so until crispy, then strain out with a spider and put on a paper towel to drain.

When the broccoli is tender and the cut side is all nice and caramelized, take it out of the oven. In a bowl, put in some bulgur, then raisins, then some pistachios, then some crumbled goat cheese, then the broccoli/garlic/onion, and top with the fried rosemary. Squeeze a lemon over the top, along with some more olive oil if you want.

Sort Of Israeli Fried Rice Thing With Parsley Oil

Shopping list: Rice (or quinoa), golden raisins, almonds, walnuts, canola or vegetable oil, parsley, olive oil, cheesecloth, lemon, green beans, garlic, chili flakes, feta cheese

The night before you want to make this (I know, sorry), place like an entire bunch of parsley, stems and all, into a mason jar (I know, sorry). In a saucepan, heat up about a cup and a half of the olive oil until it’s very hot but not smoking. Pour the olive oil into the jar, covering the parsley, screw on the top of the jar, and let it sit out overnight. Also, cook about a cup’s worth of rice or quinoa in the regular way: two to one ratio of water to grain, bring to boil, cover and turn heat to low until done. Put the rice in the fridge.

The next day, unscrew the top of the herb oil jar, pop off the lid, place some cheesecloth over the top, and screw the ring back onto the jar. Invert to pour the oil through the cheesecloth into some other container, throw out the parsley, and keep the oil, which should be nice and green and fragrant.

Rehydrate golden raisins the usual way, but just in hot water. Chop some almonds.

Slice three or four cloves of garlic thinly. In a wok on low heat, pour in a tablespoon or so of vegetable oil, and when it’s hot, throw in the garlic and a pinch of chili flakes. When the garlic has turned golden-brown, turn the heat to high and throw in a handful of green beans (I usually chop them into inch-long pieces). Using a rubber spatula, toss the beans for about a minute, then throw in the rice you made last night. (Old rice is better for fried rice. I’m not sure why but it is.) Stir and toss rapidly to fry it.

When the rice looks like fried rice, turn the heat off. Toss in the drained raisins, the almonds, and a bunch of crumbled feta, and stir around. Squeeze in like half a lemon’s worth of lemon juice, at least, and add salt. Taste to make sure the seasoning is good, then serve. Drizzle some of the parsley oil on top and around.

Secret Fun Morning Oatmeal With Bourbon-Rehydrated Raisins

Shopping list: Rolled oats (sometimes called “traditional”), golden raisins, milk, brown sugar, bourbon, vanilla extract, pecans, cinnamon, allspice

Place golden raisins in a small glass tupperware. In a saucepan on the stove, heat maybe a half cup of bourbon and five drops or so of vanilla extract (more or less depending on how good your extract is). Just before boiling, pour the bourbon/vanilla mixture over the raisins, stir, and cover.

In the same saucepan (why do any more dishes than you have to?), heat up about a half cup of milk and a third cup of water, along with a pinch of salt. Just before it boils, throw in a third of a cup of rolled oats. (I prefer rolled oats to Irish/steel-cut, but if you like the latter better that’s fine, just cook according to package instructions.) Reduce heat to low and cook, stirring the whole time to avoid a horrible mess on the bottom of your saucepan, for maybe five minutes until the oatmeal is cooked and thickening. Stir in brown sugar to your liking. Turn off the heat and let sit for a minute.

Heat a dry cast iron pan to medium heat and toss in a handful of pecans. Watch them carefully while they toast, tossing every once in awhile. When fragrant, maybe two minutes, remove. Drain the raisins of their bourbon. I think you can probably still drink it although it might be gross, I’m not sure.

Plop the oatmeal in a bowl. Top with the raisins, the pecans, and a pinch of cinnamon and allspice. You can also add a little yogurt here, if you want.

Raisins, it turns out, are a formidable force, especially, I think, when paired with salty things (try them with anchovies!). And when rehydrated, they turn from a one-note gooey sweet ingredient to a plump and appealing hit of fruit and sugar. I haven’t tried tackling a raisin-filled noodle kugel since I learned to love raisins again, but I feel like it could totally be good, as long as the raisin is treated with the respect it deserves.

Photo by Christian Schnettelker, via

Angie (who insisted on using her first name only), just 24, already employs a handful of writers and a brand manager. Over dinner, she sketched out a brief bio for me. Her family is from Nigeria, and she settled in Los Angeles. After college, she took a job in an accountant’s office in L.A. but was fired for playing hooky to attend a screenwriting workshop at Sundance. Still, her time in Utah paid off. She won a grant to pursue filmmaking. Rather than return to pencil-pushing, she started an entertainment site in her spare time. It was to be a blog in the vein of MediaTakeOut or TMZ, but with one crucial difference: The Shade Room would be published entirely on Instagram.

The future is always incredibly obvious to someone.

★★★★★ The boys went sprinting and bouncing out through the plaza and up the street in the glad sunshine, little dark shapes against the near-white pavement. They stayed happy and tractable the whole way downtown and back again. A sunbeam found even the gap between subway cars down inside the tunnel. Something off in New Jersey was a row of sparks. Shouts from the playground two or three blocks away came in through the window; sirens came in through the window. The sun hitting the wall between kitchen and dining table felt like it got behind the eyes and inside the frontal bone. A plate of rice was all translucence and shade.

“Teen pregnancy pacts, teen ISIS, teen truthers are proof of teens radical nihilistic impulses.

The brands try to talk like the teens. The brands fail.

Teens only care about the immediate culture. They are not stuck in dead-time nostalgia. They have never heard of Missy Elliot. They do not care. That is OK. Teens plow their carts over the bones of the dead.”

by Matthew J.X. Malady

Portland coffee shop: “You can shower in our bathroom but don’t use Herbal Essences.” @meaghano help

— Mike Dang (@reportermike) March 29, 2015

Mike! So what happened here?

I spent a few days in Portland, Ore., a few weeks back for a conference. It was my first time there, and I think like a lot of people who’ve never been to Portland, my ideas of what the city is like have been colored by the sketch comedy series Portlandia — this kind of DIY-hipster enclave full of liberal, zany characters. But I spent my first few days in Portland at my hotel, where the conference was being held, and it didn’t really feel as if I was actually in Portland since conferences at hotels tend to feel the same no matter what city you’re in. I knew this in advance, so I planned to stay an extra day with my friends Meaghan and Dustin and their baby, and they were going to show me around so I could get the full Portland experience.

After I checked out of my hotel, Meaghan suggested that I walk to a small coffee shop located near Powell’s Books. I ordered a cappuccino from one of the two baristas staffing the coffee bar and sat at a table while waiting for Meaghan to pick me up. Then, a young woman walked in and asked if there was a bathroom.

“Can I take a shower in your bathroom?” she asked.

“Yes, of course you can,” one of the baristas replied. “We’re totally coooool about it.”

The bathroom just had a sink and a toilet, and the small coffee shop’s only garbage pail, so I wasn’t sure how she was going to go about showering. But after some time, the lady finished, the door swung open, and she emerged fully “showered.”

Even that part alone seems quite Portland-y, but where does the Herbal Essences thing come in?

Well, the barista, who was formerly totally cool about this, became irate.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Did you use Herbal Essences?”

The lady would neither confirm nor deny. “You told me I could shower in there,” she said. And as she ran out the door, the barista yelled:

“You just ruined the aroma in the coffee shop!”

Now that’s the stuff, I thought. I’m in Portland!

In retrospect, I don’t think he actually meant to direct his ire at the brand, Herbal Essences — I think it was more about shampoos with strong scents. Or maybe he did mean Herbal Essences! This was the first time I witnessed a public confrontation about shampoo use, and of course it took place in Portland. The other barista was laughing during all of this, so I think everyone understood how absurd this situation was. I mean, the smell of shampoo after showering plus coffee just reminds me of mornings at home. The coffee shop aroma returned to its natural state pretty quickly.

Lesson learned (if any)?

I mean, the only thing I learned was that Portlandia is satirizing this kind of wacky culture in Portland, but just barely, maybe? This experience really could have been straight out of the show. Take this sketch, for example, where a bunch of baristas get together to create a manifesto on how customers are allowed to behave in coffee shops. I can certainly see “No Herbal Essences” on the list.

Just one more thing.

Hot tip: There were people waiting in this massive line to get donuts at this place called Voodoo Donuts near my hotel. I woke up early one morning and walked over there at 7 a.m. and the place was empty. Also, the olive oil ice cream at Salt and Straw was amazing!

Join the Tell Us More Street Team today! Have you spotted a tweet or some other web thing that you think would make for a perfect Tell Us More column? Get in touch through the Tell Us More tip line.

by Jamie Lauren Keiles

Begin by finding your face shape. Hold a pencil against your nose to calculate the arch of your brow, then add a statement necklace to transition your look effortlessly from day to night. What is your dress size? Your inseam? What is the name of the doctor who did your cousin’s nose? Squat over a hand mirror to examine your cervical mucus. Are you pear shaped? Apple shaped? Do you have your mother’s breasts and your father’s eyes, or vice versa? Are you classic? Wild? Flirty? Ethnic? A Samantha? A Shoshanna? An Abbi cusp, Ilana rising? Multiply your BMI by the cost of your foundation, then subtract the number of times in 1990 you never read Naomi Wolf. Turn this magazine upside down to tabulate your score, record the number in a softcover Moleskine, then throw it in the trash.

Welcome to the golden age of expressing yourself. Forget everything you’ve ever been taught about assembling your human for public consumption, because where we’re going, we don’t need “investment pieces” or beachy waves. This is 2015, and getting dressed isn’t just about looking good anymore — it’s about communicating an elaborate and complex theory of self grounded in reflexive post-post-structuralist ideals. In the fifties, your grandma wooed your grandpa from across the dancehall with her slender waist and shapely gams. Today, we dress to recruit other genderless entities into our polyamorous sex pentagrams so we can network with them and monetize our personal brands. Pretty is an insult used by men on the street who tell you to smile, and people just don’t accessorize with dogs like they used to — they identify as them. Log on to Tumblr and you’ll find fourteen-year-olds who can problematize Foucault under the bus. Our current cultural moment is a perverse Disneyland of subcultural weirdness, and to say that I’m over the moon about living on the frontier of identity politics would be an understatement. The constant negotiation of ethics and aesthetics gives my existence an arbitrary sense of meaning, and the rapidly expanding menu of available self-presentations makes getting dressed every morning an acid trip into a terrifying and thrilling abyss. Put down the neutral eyeshadow palette and step away from the neatly folded stack of basics. Now is the time to live your weirdest fantasy of self.

This, of course, is easier said than done. For all the liberation of identity that late capitalism has granted us, it has not exonerated us from the commandment to buybuybuy. In fact, these new identity categories might just be a way of inventing new consumables and problems that consumables can solve, but try not to think about this. The point is, if you hang around in the identity supermarket for long enough, odds are you’re going to want to buy something, like a merino wool choker from Zara for your Shaker Chair-goth vision, or a Sertraline nameplate necklace from Etsy for your nineties psychiatry babe throwback look. If you have tons of money and no conscience, then by all means indulge, but for those of us with shallow wallets and deep existential misgivings about consumerism, buying loads of disposable crap isn’t an option. Here are some free, cheap, and emotionally costly tips for optimizing your flesh prison. Use these exercises as a tool for taking your identity experiments of theory and into fabulous, flawless, or even deliberately abject practice.

Occupy Your Body

There are few non-negotiable truths in life, but the fact of the matter is, we have to occupy bodies whether we want to or not. For as long as this is the case, I encourage you to own your flesh prison as much as possible. Everyday, tons of outside players bid on the opportunity to commodify or medicalize your human. Science and doctors and the beauty industry and nervous Jewish mothers can be assets to improving your existence, but they also have a lot of opinions about which elements of your body are yours to own and change. Remember, there is no ethical obligation to contend with these pressures when they outlive their usefulness.

Start by trimming your own bangs with a nail clipper. Once you’ve got your sea legs, excise a wart from your foot in the garage. Join a gym and spend four months getting ripped. Then, spend four more becoming gloriously, sumptuously fat. Fist your own ass, or try feasting on canned tuna at every meal for a year. Eat your boogers alone at home, then eat them out in public. Do many drugs, or do none at all. Sleep for hours on end and realize that while some external conceptions of your body may be helpful, you can opt-out experimentally when you want in order to experience a previously unexperienced version of yourself.

Set An Intention

Now, do a spot check — what are your trying to accomplish with your look? Perhaps you want just want to articulate your truest self, a noble if not unachievable goal, but I encourage you to get more specific in order to make the most of this guide. Maybe expressing yourself means affecting prettiness, sexiness, intelligence, curviness, or some combination thereof. Maybe it means looking depressed, unapproachable, bitchy, or like an abject bag of trash that masturbates while checking her student loan balance online to save time. There are no bad goals. Heck, you don’t even have to express yourself at all. Maybe you’d rather wear a costume, or the flesh of the most popular girl from your high school class. The term “poseur” was coined by a Zumiez executive in 2003, so feel free to indulge your desire to be somebody else. Your aesthetic intentions need not be bound by pleasantness, nor authenticity, and articulating a goal from the outset may help you to feel more satisfied by the look you eventually create. If you aren’t even trying to be pretty in the first place, then you don’t have to feel like a failure when you aren’t.

Name It

Now that you are pretending to understand your motivations, you can give your look more credibility simply by naming it like the work of art that it is or will soon be. Nothing breathes new life into a dull closet like a concise thesis meant to establish artistic ethos. Today, we have available to us a long list of prefixes and suffixes that make this process a breeze. Soft-, -wave, -core, hard-, -queer, -post, proto-, and -sexual are all readily available appendages, but don’t limit yourself to countercultural jargon. Try something like “Twice Divorced Middle Aged Jewish Department Store Heiress” or “Sort of Imperialist Homosexual Collector of Taschen Books Lounging in His Casablanca Riad.” A single, well-phrased title will go farther and hold up better than a hundred bags of clothes from Forever 21.

Ditch Dichotomies

Man/woman, butch/femme, basic/fleek, chill/”guy who talks about raw denim too much” — the dichotomy has historically been a very popular tool for conceiving of and discussing the self. In recent times, we have expanded this two-dot model and become somewhat down with the idea of people identifying along a spectrum between the two traditional and opposite extremes. For instance, between butch and femme, we now have soft-butch and hard-femme. Where we once had male and female, we now have things like genderqueer or trans (which are not aesthetic categories themselves, but can be strong influencers of outfit choice, at least for me). Any identity you conceive of will be inherently valid, but to be honest, the spectrum as a conceptual tool generally sucks in terms of imaginative potential. It’s a false promise of limitless fantasy grounded in the inherently limiting concept of a line with two defined endpoints.

Rectify this injustice by imagining a graph with four quadrants (or for those of you just wishing someone in adulthood would ask what you scored on your SATs, a Cartesian plane). Label the ends of each axis with the two opposing points of a dichotomy, so like, masculine/feminine on X and punk/prep on Y. Observe your dumb pseudo-mathematical representation of a complex, holistic idea, then erase the whole thing. Plot some random points on the page and connect them, or don’t connect any of them at all and just doodle in the space between. The whole thing is bullshit. Welcome to the big, cool future where we are no longer limited to imagining ourselves as the reconciliation of predetermined labels in tension. In other words, we are living in a moment with more readily available quinoa brands than personal brands, and this must be stopped. Opt out of gender. Strive to be pretty and ugly at the same time. Labels are useful and meaningful for many people (including me), but they should be a voluntary opt-in situation, not something we are unwillingly bound to so that processing bureaucratic paperwork can be two percent easier for some office somewhere. Use the spectrum and the dichotomy as they are useful for your own project, but also feel free to strike out for uncharted lands.

Use Your Senses

Often we conceive of identity projection as a visual project, but go ahead and fool around with the side chicks known as “your other four senses.” Consider how you perceive others. Appreciate how a hot dress looks interesting on a woman with a lumbering gait, or how a heterosexual frat boy with a fey and lisping voice can lead you to question all you have come to believe as true. Usually, people use these non-visual incongruities to tear others down, but learn them carefully and you can harness their powers to construct the most imaginative version of yourself. Try out a swag or completely un-swag new walk. Eat frozen mango in a hot a bath while listening to Nancy Sinatra. Fart at a black tie cocktail hour, or talk louder or more quietly than you are accustomed and watch as the world changes its response. Results may vary, but it’s always good to have more weapons in your arsenal.

Retire from the Game

Projecting a coherent and awesome aesthetic vision can be thrilling, but it is tiresome work and definitely not an obligation. When we get dressed each morning, being badass and freaky are not the only considerations that come into play. Sometimes, things like personal safety, passing, group identification, and religious beliefs need to be taken into account. Make sure you give yourself permission to put these concerns ahead of any aesthetic projects when necessary. There is nothing wrong with the path of least resistance, and it is okay to wear jeans, or sweatpants, or a dumb Ann Taylor sweater set when you need to. People are racist and transphobic and otherwise violently disgusting, and acknowledging this truth to make your day easier is in no way the same as giving up or selling out.

These tips are built for a maybe-utopian future in which people can opt in and out of identity experiments as they please. Try them out and see if they work. Or whatever. If not, enter offer code “BLEAK” at UrbanOutfitters.com to receive free two-day shipping.

1. I am looking forward to 570 days of low-level irritation accompanied by a variety of outward demonstrations of disbelief and disgust that eventually fold into a deep and earnest concern for the optics of the actions of the world’s most powerful people. This period of engagement, which will produce no real effects outside of itself, will be followed by four days of pit-in-the-stomach fear that maybe all those stories about demographic inevitability were based in wishful thinking, and that those reassuring “projections” and “models” were concerned mostly with soothing their elite audiences, and that some ancient and latent political strain might suddenly activate, hurling the country, and possibly the world, into a new dark age, followed by the conclusion that none of this actually matters, because the global environmental and economic forces that will dictate the terms of the future are vastly underrated determinants, meaning that either candidate’s accomplishments will be remembered, eventually, as sad attempts to manage an accelerating entropy that will eventually dissolve and consolidate all nation-states that can only be understood, not managed, and which will be “governed” not with policy but according to theory, followed, finally, by the relief of the election of the candidate that we all knew was going to win way back in April of last year.

2. …

3. I am looking forward to the gaffes.

Stealing Sheep are one of those bands about whom any description will sound annoying or off-putting, so I am just going to place this here and ask you to come to it without any preconceptions. The whole album is terrific; it’s an odd amalgam that zips about but remains a coherent piece and is catchy in a way that surprises. Honestly, between this, the new Waxahatchee, that East India Youth record and the one from Fort Romeau, this may be the best month for new releases in at least a decade.

★ The hallway air was damp. The sky gave no hint of in which direction the sun might be. The midday gloom was almost twilight; birds had tempered their singing. At least, and at most, it wasn’t raining. A child rolled by in a stroller, a blanket across its lap, leaning avidly ahead so that the peak of its hoodie pointed straight up. The phone protested the chill by going back to its winter malfunctioning, shutting down with the battery just below 40 percent.