“Virginia Heffernan and Paul Ford have never met, but have often crossed paths — we live in New York City; were editors at Harper’s Magazine; write about technology; and write for The Message on Medium. For no particular reason we’ve started sending emails to see who can make the other person experience the most profound sense of dread and panic.” — Here is a link that has the power to permanently and completely ruin your inbox.

That Long Island City Look

Not to be one-upped by Brooklyn, Queens shows off its architectural near future.

by The Concessionist

The Concessionist gives advice about the sordid choices of real life. Trouble? Write today.

Dear Concessionist,

My girlfriend is making kind of joking noises about how I’ve “given up.” But it’s not that I’ve given up. I guess that I never really even started. For example I’ve never been to a gym. Did I maybe give up even harder? Is this bad? Is she going to dump me? Is this how women warn you before they throw you out? We’ve been together over a year now and I love her.

Sincerely,

Yo Ben and Jerry

Yo BJ,

Ha ha, yeah, it’s mid-February now, so what your girlfriend is saying is that you are actually six to eight weeks away from getting dumped. As soon as winter is over, and your lady sees some hottie’s ankles on the streets, it’s curtains for you. Say goodbye.

WE CAN SAVE THIS RELATIONSHIP THOUGH. Probably.

It’s just, it’s your fault. So.

Already, you are doing your part around the house, and like, being thoughtful, and doing surprising nice things, and being supportive, and asking questions and listening, and all that happy relationship garbage, right? That stuff is all super-attractive. Wash a dish, you’re on. GO OUT IN THE SNOW AND GET THAT MILK BUDDY.

But there’s also just… attractive.

Disclaimer: BEAUTY COMES IN ALL SHAPES AND SIZES. It’s a fact. You’re great as you are, and that is it, period, the end. Even better news? Men have it extra easy in this department, because many women that I know have told me they will trade off any ideas about a man’s body shape for other WAY more desirable qualities (such as, “cool, he doesn’t interrupt me every time I talk” and “he doesn’t openly degrade other women in front of me!”).

Also??? Many of us who date men (as I do) like an “untraditional” man! There’s something about a really big dude that’s so cozy. You’re probably a lil’ chunky right now, and it’s good for extra warmth in winter. In April, however…

When you say that you “never started,” I know exactly what you mean. I was like you! So here are the THREE THINGS EVERY MAN CAN DO to superficially improve his relationship which then results in non-superficially improving his relationship.

1. YOUR HAIR

Go to the barbershop. Immediately! It’s fine that it’s your usual hole in the wall that costs $16. That’s where I go, and I look amazing. You know how? While I wait, I leaf through GQ and Details. There’s a reason those magazines are sitting there. Last time I was there, I found an ad with a guy in it with a great haircut. He looked adult, mature and handsome. When it was my turn I marched up to my barber and sat down and he was like “Okay what are we doing?” and instead of being like “Um I dunno mumble mumble,” which is what I always say, I WHIPPED OUT THE MAGAZINE and was like “CAN YOU DO THIS HAIRCUT?” And he was like “Of course!” It was really embarrassing. And I lived through it.

And then when I went to work someone said “Wow that is literally your first age-appropriate haircut, you look good.” AND someone else told me, “Wow you look ten years younger.” How both those things are true I don’t really know but I’LL TAKE IT.

2. YOUR HANDS AND FEET

Yeah, listen, your gross feet and your gnarly hands, they’re fine when you’re like picking someone up and everyone can pretend you’re a mechanic or a satyr. But that’s not for relationships. If you do not get manicures and pedicures, you are too shy to go alone probably. I am also shy! I needed someone to take me.

But you can do it. Just get the VERY BASIC THING on your first trip. Like walk in and say “Yes, manicure and pedicure please” and they’ll have you sit in some chair-thing and just sit there and wait and then they’ll be like “BUT DO YOU WANT A SPECIAL MASSAGE PEDICURE” just be like “No thank you, just the regular” and that’ll happen like three times, then it’ll be fine. If something hurts REALLY bad say “ouch” and they’ll make it stop hurting. The only other thing you need to know is move your feet and your hands when they tell you to and TIP IN CASH. Tip $10 on a $40 mani-pedi. Tip $20 if your feet are gross though, hello. Then come back in one to two weeks. Then you’ll be brave enough to ask questions and try new things.

3. YOUR OUTFITS AND YOUR JUNK

It’s time to turn the mirror on you for a moment right now. It’s time to look close at what you are, instead of what you want to be. Do your clothes fit? Do you smell bad? Are you wearing the same thing all the time? Are you busting out of your jeans? Are your boxers sad and droopy? Has your lady ever told you about how she prefers your body hair? And have you ignored her? Do you have a beard or mustache or a frightshow of pubic hair that she hates? (She may not! Don’t ever make assumptions if you don’t know.)

Maybe literally take some photographs of yourself and then look at them. Are you like, OH NO THAT’S ME??? Then, let’s keep this simple:

A. Shave what should be shaved regularly.

B. Wash what should be washed every day.

C. Go to the Uniqlo or the Top Man or the Carhartt or the Levis store or the H&M; or the JC Penney, I don’t care, and buy a few cheap staples like t-shirts or casual pants or socks and underwear that 1. suit you 2. fit you 3. make you feel good that 4. are not made of polyester. (They should be, generally, made of cotton.) Do the magazine trick again! If you see something, then say something — to a salesperson.

WE WILL STOP RIGHT HERE. That is way more than enough. DON’T BE OVERWHELMED. Pick one thing here and get started. We can deal with the rest later.

Wait, though, one more thing tiny thing. Start carrying gum. It’s like, a 1000% improvement when you’re suddenly like “Oh your terrible breath is finally gone, wow, let’s just make out all the time.”

Okay now that is more than enough. You do NOT need to spend very much money to get yourself right. Just a little. BE YOU, too. Keep being you, buddy! Just be you with a little bit of like “Hey I’m gonna keep myself looking a little tasty right now.” I believe this is in one sense what they mean when they say “treat yourself.”

Look, maybe you are going to get dumped, maybe not. In the end, it’ll work out fine. But why not bring the spiffiest you that there is to the whole thing?

Once I weighed about 30 pounds more than I do now, which wasn’t really a big deal, but I went home with someone who had A LOT OF MIRRORS IN THE HOUSE. And I got some views of myself I did not regularly get! And I was like “Oh hmm so that’s what that looks like, WELL, now that you mentioned it, that was not who I planned to be” and then I joined a gym and it was horrible and I hate gyms. I expressly went for vanity though. I did not go for my health. I did not go for longevity. I only went because I wanted to look thinner when I was doing strangers who had too many mirrors. That is a valid if maybe slightly gross and shameful life decision. I don’t care though, it’s my life.

Just remember that men are basically bad in every way and that anything you can do to be less of a “man” is an improvement. There you go, sport! Best of luck!

The Concessionist is an adult human in New York City who is somewhat worn down and willing to make a good number of sacrifices for a peaceful life. Is it decision fatigue? Or just ennui? That’s probably a question for a psychiatrist. Anything else, ask me.

★ The smartphone on the floor by the outside wall was so cold that its glass fogged over when picked up by bare hands. The wind moaned inside the building and rattled on the outside. A tattered plume rose from the top of the glass apartment tower and lurched this way and that as it was ceaselessly torn apart. There was sun out there, at least — enough sun for the three-year-old to complain about getting a faceful of it. Then the sun was gone, down behind two walls of gray like mountain ridges, with an orange valley glowing between them. Outside, in the evening, the air hurt. The doorman and desk man were watching out the lobby window as a tow truck out on the cross street started lifting an SUV, hauling it backward up and over the ice banks that had walled it in. The vacated parking space was strewn with cardboard, the remains of a failed attempt at getting traction.

“Wayne Flynt, a professor emeritus at nearby Auburn University, dismissed what he called ‘the conspiracy theory’ about the new novel, and said that Harper Lee ‘obviously isn’t demented.’ He said that he visits with the author every month, and that he saw her the day before ‘Go Set a Watchman’ was announced, though curiously she never mentioned it. Lee, Flynt said, has ‘always had a lover’s quarrel with Monroeville,’ and he suggested that some of the town’s response has more to do with that than any concern for her wellbeing. ‘I’m absolutely astounded by what I’m hearing from down there,’ he said.” — Awl pal Casey Cep visits Monroeville, Alabama.

He Who Lives in a Luxury Glass House Shouldn’t When the Apocalypse Arrives Because He Will Melt or Freeze to Death

How would the city’s housing stock respond, though, to a weather “event” in the near future, before we all installed triple-glazed windows — something like Hurricane Sandy or approximating it, causing power failures — during a period not of moderate temperatures, but of extreme cold or heat? What if electrical supplies had shut down during a week like this one? … But the luxury glass towers proliferating in Manhattan would also do terribly — reaching just slightly above freezing by the fourth day. During a summer blackout, glass towers, because of the intensity with which glass conducts heat, would be rough places to live; indoor temperature would get into the high 80s and beyond by Day 3. (Of course, it is the ultimate science fiction to imagine that anyone living in a $50 million apartment with wall-to-wall views would be in New York in August in the first place.)

Ever so occasionally, nature reminds us that it prefers balance.

by Awl Sponsors

Language Robbed

The emoji that could have been.

by Johannah King-Slutzky

According to recent descriptions, the bro is a straight white man who is between fifteen and thirty-five years old, “an adult male whose social life revolves around collegiate homosocial bonding,” or simply a guy who says “bro.” He is “boisterous and uncouth” and “the worst guy ever.” He wears a backwards baseball cap, a light blue oxford or femsports team shirt, cargo shorts, mandals or boat shoes, and region-specific accessories like knit caps in LA or puffer vests in the Colorado. He drinks beer. Most of these articles focus on signifiers of the bro because their authors haven’t seized on the essential truth of brodom: A bro is just a man who primarily hangs out with other men and lacks consistent taste. The absence of taste is crucial: It’s not just that he wears cargo pants, it’s that he has the audacity to mix oxfords with athletic gear.

Ironically, the bro’s inconsistency — which is not limited to his wardrobe — is also the source of his lasting appeal. The bromance casts the bro’s contradictions in the clearest light: Although “bromance” co-evolved with the bro and is its autochoric carrier mechanism, in many ways, the bromance is the bro’s total contradiction. Bromance is loving, giving, nonviolent, and un-self-serious. But there are many bro subtypes whose basis is violence, real and metaphorical. This is precisely what makes the bro so compelling: Just as the bro mixes his cargo pants with his oxford shirt, he mixes violence with affability, self-absorption with giving, and hypermasculinity with masculinity. Now that the bro is the subject of a full backlash, these inconsistencies translate as hypocrisy.

“Bro” has appeared in texts as an abbreviation of “brother” for hundreds of years, but until the twentieth century, it referred to the biological family or clergy. And, before it referred generically to “man” or “fellow,” from the turn of the twentieth century until the nineteen seventies, “brother” meant “black man.” Sometimes in this context, it was truncated to “bro.” For example, in the year of the American bicentennial, rock critic Lester Bangs wrote, “If we the (presumably) white jass-buffs couldn’t get with it maybe it was only meant for the bros.” White men co-opted and whitewashed the definition of “bro” as “male friend” around the same time, borrowing from black power and mid-century Hawaiian surfer lingo, where “brah” was a common form of address. Well into the nineties, “bro” was a frattily lambent denotation for “male bud” and hadn’t suppurated into the para-meathead we associate it with today. To document this, the O.E.D. blog cites the teleplay for 1992’s Encino Man, whose stage directions toss off (now, it seems, gormlessly) that “Stoney and Hank have been bros since grammar school.”

Scrubs popularized the bromance before there was “bromance,” instead calling it “guy love.”

The specifics are fuzzy, but the phatic “bro” definitely got its start among outsiderish slacker sport cultures (skateboarding or surfing). When “bro” was discussed in the late nineties and early aughts as a funny idea, it took refuge in houses of ill repute like Urban Dictionary and The Complete Broisms Dictionary, which is devoted entirely to bro puns and portmanteaux. Besides “bromance,” standouts include “Bilbro Baggins” (“Your bro who’s obsessed with Lord Of The Rings”), “best in bro,” (“Awarded to the bro who gets the one girl in a party full of bros”). It is at home among portmanteaux partly because, as the OED blog avers, it is an “an instantly recognizable consonant cluster…[that] lends itself not only to compounding, as in bro-hug…but also blending…[such] as bro-down (from hoedown).” “Bromance” is thus sometimes traduced as an epigone of the bro, but it’s not; it’s essential to the bro’s formation. According to a 2007 article in The Age, “bromance” was coined by Dave Carnie in skateboarding mag Big Brother some time in the nineties, although I couldn’t find the original article or confirm this through additional secondary sources. “Bromance” may also have been coined by surfers; the magazine Transworld Surf published “The Complete Broisms Dictionary” in 2001 after running a successful column called “Significant Surf Slang” for two years. The bro belongs to a broader project of lampooning masculinity through speech that exceeds “bro”’s specific consonant cluster; in the aughts, we liked to knock masculinity down a peg by combining silly words.

Although bros do actually exist, the bro has always been parodic. The bro’s comedic core makes it especially vulnerable to irony and, eventually, charges of hypocrisy. Perhaps most illustrative of this point is the seminal bro meme, 4Chan’s ASCII “brofist,” a copypasta in the shape of a fist that originated in 2006 to depict two guys fistbumping through the computer screen. According to Encyclopedia Dramatica, the brofist was a response to YouTubers who left ASCII art of a raised middle finger in videos’ comment section. (To make the new ASCII brofist, simply delete the offending digit.) The brofist was eventually popularized on /v/, 4Chan’s videogames sub, where, to quote Encyclopedia Dramatica, “people…say the phrase ‘PUT UP YOUR BROFIST.’ to act like they have a ‘network’ of friends despite them spending 12 hours alone watching 1 person playing a retro game.” The machismo is parodic, ironic, and rooted in outsider status. It is a greeting with a touch of violence made possible by irony.

“Bro,” the social category, finally emerged in the early millennium, perhaps in response to George W. Bush’s dick-swinging foreign and domestic policy and the ensuant atmosphere of American machismo. One of the earliest mainstream uses of this new form of “bro” can be found in a 2000 Los Angeles Times article about George W. Bush, written by a former frat brother, titled “The Bro I Can’t Vote For.” Though unnamed, this bro was popularized by violent franchises like Punk’d (which began airing in 2003) and goofy male-on-male friendships in programs like Scrubs (2001–2010); its nearly decade-long affectionate no-homo gags weren’t formally tagged as a bromance until years later, after the release of Judd Apatow’s Superbad in 2007, which made us realize that the bromance, heralded as a pop culture and IRL phenomenon — we’d been living with it namelessly for years.

Outside the internet, the bro is almost always described in the language of Hollywood. In their article “Jeah! We Mapped Out The 4 Basic Aspects Of Being A ‘Bro’,” NPR’s Code Switch proposes that the four totems of brohood are James Franco (Stoner-ish), Armie Hammer (Preppy), Tim Tebow (Jockish), and Andy Samberg (Dudely). Code Switch’s other examples include Matthew McConaughey, Will Smith, Neil Patrick Harris, Ben Affleck, Channing Tatum, Ashton Kutcher, and Kal Penn. There’s also the “Frat Pack,” whose box office earnings publicists chatted up by selling bros as the latest in a lineage of Hollywood stars following the mega-alluring Rat Pack and Brat Pack, this one bundled together on the basis of their shared bro qualities.

The media theorist Richard Dyer famously calls the cinema star “structured polysemy.” Stars are accumulated discourses which combine often contradictory signs and reconcile contradictions in the public’s collective wisdom. I thought of that often while writing this essay: Many of today’s stars have become successful because they are bros, and the bro is perfectly suited to Hollywood entertainment because he revels in contradictions about the nature of fraternal, platonic, and romantic love. This, for example, is the allure of Will Ferrell, whose characters quickly alternate between violence and dopey affection. His turn as Chaz in Wedding Crashers issues a creepy slacker intensity which he uses to pick up chicks at funerals. When he meets Owen Wilson’s character from the foyer of his mother’s apartment, he stomps in full silhouette down the stairs, whisper-shouting, “What the FUCK do YOU want?” Wilson responds, “I’m John Beckwith, I’m a friend of Jeremy Gray?” and Ferrell quickly shifts gear. “Goddamnit, why didn’t you say so? Come here, brother, give me a hug!” With this news Ferrell’s whole face changes; he’s ecstatic.

The bromance is not the first movie genre to profit by knotted discourse about affection. In his study of screwball romantic comedies, Frank Krutnik argues that the Hollywood rom-com is an extended response to two basic dilemmas: First, that romance is an intense personal experience, yet follows convention; and second, that marriage is highly conventional and usually unpleasant, but still widely desired. To resolve these contradictions, the romantic comedy uses a variety of techniques to paint the central couple as extraordinary and insular. These techniques can range from the comically unhappy foil-couple to the push for nonsensical playfulness (baby talk) or whimsy in a female lead.

In romantic comedies, the bro-y love interest’s capriciousness takes the form of puerility and sudden defections to violence. The bro-ish romantic comedy’s most piquant star is Adam Sandler. Sandler is chiefly thought of as a star of romantic comedies, but with his recourse to yelling, gross-out food preferences, and baggy t-shirts, he qualifies as a bro in almost every way. (His one non-bro quality is that he usually eschews structured rituals of male bonding, like sports.) Sandler’s particular brand of eccentricity is his infantilism: He’s playful, makes up rhymes, and poorly controls his emotions. His sweetness quickly becomes anger when frustrated. After he is ditched by his first girlfriend, Sandler’s Happy Gilmore shouts through the intercom, “Beat it! I hate you,” only to flip to “I’m sorry baby, I just yell sometimes ’cause I get scared.”

Aaron Taylor suggests that it is Sandler’s childish qualities that make him such a polarizing and attractive figure. “[R]omance provides him with a forum in which his childish exuberance and imagination has restorative potential for both himself and his partner,” writes Taylor. When love does strike, the bro’s otherwise callow qualities now reassure us (and his female lover) of the bro’s purity of heart. Indeed, many of love’s most troubling qualities arise from its infantilism. Love, like childhood, makes us anarchic, emotional, amoral. How can love be narcissistic and selfless? Mature and regressive? Angry and sweet? In the romantic comedy, the bro synthesizes these opposites. This is another way the bro comedy belongs to the heritage of the romantic comedy: in both genres love is confirmed by sudden conventional but illogical shifts in affection. Among bros and romantic comedies, hate becomes love almost by fiat.

But these qualities also call forth vitriol. “If it can be agreed that Sandler is essentially an overgrown child,” writes Taylor, “then the intensity of the critical responses that he generates…is symptomatic of the discursive intensities surrounding early twenty-first-century bourgeois constructions of childhood. As an object of reverence, the child continues to signify a number of privileged values: receptivity, curiosity, purity, sincerity, futurity. Simultaneously, however, the child is also associatively encoded with qualities that are reviled by middle-class imperatives and politesse: antisociality, vulgarity, emotionality, amorality, anarchy.”

In its way, male infantilism frustrates expectations of bourgeois love. How can Seth Rogen be a loving partner and patriarch when he’s enraptured by bongs the color of neon snot? And yet we’ve made romantic comedies about man-children hundreds of times. That’s because the man-child, an umbrella term that subsumes the bro, is in line with the romantic comedy’s ideologically reconciliatory project.

The bro mixes anger with love not only through capriciousness, but also in a sustained mixing of homophobia and male/male love. As many have remarked, the bro is a paroxysm of homophobia that emerged historically in an era of broader gay-acceptance. In her article “More than Buddies: Wedding Crashers and the Bromance of Comedy as (Re)Marriage Equality,” Maria San Filippo argues that Wedding Crashers belongs to the tradition of “the comedy of remarriage,” a subgenre of Code-era romantic comedies originally described by the philosopher Stanley Cavell. In Wedding Crashers,the figurative remarriage between the two male leads is so explicit that when the two hetero couples marry, the camera lingers on Wilson and Vaughn at the exclusion of the wives-to-be: It’s Wilson, not the bride, who marches down the aisle to come face-to-face with Vaughn, take his hand, and reaffirm his commitment. But in the DVD commentaries, Vaughn is careful to explain, “It’s a real guy thing too where it’s like that’s enough, you don’t have to talk about it a lot.”

Although “bromance” is an invention of the last decade, male/male couples are common to Hollywood cinema. Scholars have traced the bromance back to comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, cowboy movies, and the buddy films of the seventies through nineties. Many are violent. In a critical essay on the pre-millennial buddy film, Cynthia Fuchs argues that in cinema, male/male friendships absolve male friends of all transgressions, including murder, sexual assault, and rape. These transgressions can extend from the moral (e.g. sexual assault) to the aesthetic (e.g. poor hygiene or thin politesse in general). But when it comes to the bro, we might read Fuch’s equation in the other direction: Moral and aesthetic transgressions (perhaps best summarized as distastefulness) excuse the male/male friendship. Thus, poor taste excuses male/male friendships from being too gay. Again, this applies to both moral and aesthetic dimensions of taste. Two bros who gaslight women to sleep with them are totally not gay, even though they love each other. And aesthetically, it is bros’ bad taste — a preference for spending Sundays on a lawn couch with sweatpants and “the champagne of beers” that proves bros are straight.

The bro was not at his worst in 2014. Perhaps critics have seized on the bro as douchebag du jour because — correctly sensing the bro’s many contradictions — the bro is a hypocrite. Take this bro philippic in Vice, for example:

The only way to be a real man is to be a real man as ferociously as humanly possible. He goes all-in; he gets shredded and ripped and defines his life by aggression and competitions. He buys the hamburgers that comes with two other hamburgers and a chicken cutlet on top of it. Why? Because it’s three hamburgers with a chicken cutlet on top of it.

But the bro didn’t “become” toxic. Ironically, our awareness of his toxicity seems to be inversely proportional to his actual behavior. In the early aughts, he seemed fun when he was at his most violent, in Jackass style pranks and frat-bro foreign policy. Now, our bros are more like Andy Samberg than Ashton Kutcher — they’re not violent, they just think with the right wrapping paper, their dicks make a good birthday present. (Then again, maybe this signals only a shift in violence from the physical to sexual.) The hipster has replaced the bro as the dominant lampoonable masculinity; Bush is out, Obama is in.

In the bro, masculinity powers up, achieves hypermasculinity, and in so doing circles back around to its own idea of femininity: The bro is a hypocrite because he claims to be a real man, but really, he’s a woman. Like a woman, the bro is characterized by excess and peacocking. He consumes and consumes: beer, Muscle Milk, and so many burgers he’s using more meat as hamburger buns. It’s so much he’s bursting at the seams, “pulsing like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer…ready to explode through the glass.” And he’s a little dumb. Like the effeminate metrosexual, he gets ripped without survivalist purpose, delighting in his body even if it’s not a machine for war or chopping wood. Like a woman (and totally unlike the bromance, which is a revelation of true love, often against the odds) the bro is inauthentic. “It seems impossible for a human being to care this much about recreation, to care this much about celebrating something so tiny, so contrived,” writes Vice. Hypocrisy, flanked by infantilism and unacknowledged privilege, is the number one critique of the bro.

It’s the tension between the bro as guilelessly affable and the bro as violent that makes him appealing, particularly in Hollywood rom coms, whose characters have always run on capriciousness. But the bro’s homoeroticism (which critics, myself included, love to redeem as serious and worthy of study) distracts from the fact that “bro” is comedic and parodic — thus his appearance in funny online dictionaries, animal comedies, and ironic memes. To his critics, these inconsistencies morph into a critique of hypocrisy. To his fans, the same traits may be his source of unconscious appeal.

Photo by Manuel Paul

I am super, super bullish on Ivy Tripp, the new Waxahatchee record coming out at the beginning of April, which is good timing if it ever warms up again because the whole thing definitely has an emerging-from-winter feel to it. Also, the back half contains some of the sadder songs I’ve heard in some time. Anyway, get ready for this because you’re going to be seeing a lot more of it. It’s very, very good.