“The departure of a Philharmonic music director, and the search for a replacement, is the classical music world’s equivalent of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary rolled into one. As the orchestra organizes its search committee, handicappers and kibitzers will weigh the pros and cons of potential candidates. Another young American in the Gilbert mold, who is open to new music? A wunderkind, like the young conductors who lead orchestras in Los Angeles, Boston and Philadelphia? Or an éminence grise with roots in Europe’s concert halls?”

There something in the production of every Dodos album — the guitars? — that gently removes my brain and puts it on a soft pillow, and for this I am grateful.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing that BuzzFeed has constructed over the last three years is less a model for generating enormous amounts of traffic than a company culture that is thoroughly upbeat, in both ethos and practice, an optimism that can, at times, feel rigorously enforced. (“No haters!”)

But it’s easier to have a uniform culture with a hundred employees shoved into the same office, or at least the same building, than it is with eight hundred employees spread across multiple bureaus around the world. The monolith breaks down, and people might occasionally act on their own behalf, rather than the company, because who knows what the company is anymore. Employees might, for instance, express a modicum of (perfectly reasonable!) doubt about the content boom to a Wall Street Journal reporter, like, “I don’t think anyone should fool themselves into thinking that we have this completely figured out yet. It may not be so easy to dial things up a lot further.”

Or, they might actually leak something newsworthy, like why Buzzfeed, which has formed a fairly large group to produce content that will never exist on its website, but exclusively on other companies’ platforms, isn’t a part of Snapchat Discover — one of the most naked (and anticipated!) attempts by a social network to host editorial content, rather than merely point to it. And there is some genuine newsworthiness in the fact that negotiations between BuzzFeed and Snapchat “fell through at the eleventh hour” because of “creative differences.”

Rather than get angry — because anger leads to hate, hate to leads snark — BuzzFeed has responded to these tiny breaches with what could only be characterized as parent-shaming. It is not mad at these individuals. It will not punish them. (After all, those remarks could’ve made to Wall Street Journal reporters at a dinner that the BuzzFeed employees mistakenly thought was off the record, in which case it would obviously be nobody’s fault, because those kinds of mistakes happen all the the time.) But it is very, very, very disappointed.

Anonymously tipping a reporter to something a colleague says in a meeting isn’t a violation of business or journalistic ethics. It’s an issue of personal ethics. It makes it harder for us to trust one another.

And next time, bad things might happen:

But breaching confidences is something we take seriously, and the sort of thing you can get fired for.

This an outsized reaction! Consider, for one, that it’s extremely difficult to call the comments made in the first Journal story a “leak” with anything approaching a straight face. Let’s be honest: It might not be so easy to dial things up a lot further. And that’s okay! You can just change the metrics for the dials. Secondly, the more genuine leak in the Snapchat story — the artboards — came from within Snapchat, not BuzzFeed. (Not to mention that there is immense political value for BuzzFeed in the Snapchat leak, since BuzzFeed looks like the upstanding party who would not cave to the giant social company because of editorial integrity or whatever.)

Most importantly though, who cares? BuzzFeed has won. Every day is a victory lap. Don’t be so defensive! Enjoy it! It will go away one day, but not because of leaks. So let them flow! Everything will be okay.

Disclosures: The current editors of The Awl, after being bred together in a small petri dish in the back of the refrigerator that holds the cold brew at BuzzFeed, resided there for a time, producing a technology vertical from underneath a stack of seltzer cans.

★★★ Great lightweight sheets of ice came flipping down through the air from the very top of the glass tower, end over end over end over end, to shatter on the pavement far below. The sky was gray with a few blue weak spots in it. Out on 67th Street, ice from a treetop clunked on the roof and windshield of a parked Budget van. A man at the back of the crowd boarding the 1 train turned and spat a thick white clot toward the base of the station wall, narrowly missing or not missing a boot cutting through the space behind. At Columbus Circle, another man, not just full-grown but graying, waited on the platform with a salt-and-grime crusted red plastic scooter. Downtown, puddles in basins of curbside ice reflected the dull sky. Chips of ice perched in the branches of the planter-boxed shrubbery; ice bulged at the top curve of the dripping bodega awning. Nowhere was the snow deep or soft enough to kick clean the toe of the boot, just in case. By afternoon, something like sun was shining, and then outright sun. By late day the streets were so wet with meltwater it seemed a shower must have just passed.

by Ariana Kelly

The last home a carpenter finishes is his own, though he never really finishes it. My father built the basement first. We lived in it for ten years before he had enough money to build a house above it, in time for the birth of my brother. The house has remained partially sided, painted, and insulated for twenty-five years. Cedar siding periodically gives way to knotted plywood; scaffolding obscures the north face; and a deck wraps around three-quarters of the first floor and then free falls into nothing. Like its inhabitants, the house has been in a constant state of construction.

We lived on seventeen acres of undeveloped forest in central New Hampshire, with no neighbors to speak of, save the lights of a distant farm. The advertisement for the land described it as a high woodland tract and emphasized its possession of “good views of distant mountains” as well as “hundreds of cords of hardwood.” In the previous century, this acreage had been worked by farmers, as had much of the land in the surrounding town, until World War II took the farmers away and left the land to be reclaimed by the forest. So for two years, before building the basement, we chased the ghost of an old logging path, cutting stands of birch, elm, oak, and maple, carving a road through the forest that would eventually connect our property with Route 4, built in 1925, when the area was booming. We managed to clear one acre out of the seventeen, and the forest leaned up against the edges of the opening like a watchful elder. The only other people I remember seeing on the property besides my family are the people my father worked with: plumbers, electricians, framers and finish workers, plain spoken but physically articulate. Anyone else appeared in the form of letters and telephone calls, and when people stopped having enough money to make long distance calls, or the energy and time to write, they disappeared.

A basement is what allows houses and people to maintain their appearances. But what happens when the foundation becomes the house itself? The basement was half above-ground, half below, extending like a pier across a sloped sea of grass with a door that opened to the outside and a flat roof made of shingles and tarp. When it snowed heavily, the roof sank under the weight and the snow needed to be removed quickly, or the ceiling would collapse. My mother and I worked swiftly and silently against the falling snow and falling light, moving methodically towards each other from opposite sides of the roof, sweeping snow onto the ground in great heaping mounds. Sometimes she would furtively raise her head, like a threatened animal, and sweep me off the roof too because she believed vampires were near, a fear that arose from inhabiting an isolation so thorough it became supernatural. I never remember her wearing anything other than black, and when I asked her years later if she wore black totemically, as a preemptive strike against demons, she had no idea; to her it was simply an appropriate response to the life she found herself living.

A series of letters my father wrote to his parents as he and my mother were settling in New Hampshire reveal how elemental life was, largely determined by the exigencies of weather and money. In a letter from early May 1980, just as he was beginning to build the basement, my father writes, “Still no sign of work anywhere…I think the boom days for a great deal of the industry are over.” In the autumn of the same year, he noted the progress being made on the basement: “The cellar floor is the next big project. June and I have been creosoting all the joists.” The most pressing worry at the time was not money but water, the Upper Valley not having received “any significant amount of moisture” in more than twelve months. In a rare letter written by my mother a few months later, she describes a recent onset of rain: “It is good in one way in that it helps the water shortage we all have been having, but in another way it hasn’t been so welcomed…So many of the roads have been washed out that it literally means that there might be no way you can reach your home. Angus had to drive eighty miles out of his way to come home last night.” I could transpose these emergencies — droughts, unemployment, vanished roads — to where I live now, in Los Angeles, but they wouldn’t define the landscape in they way they did for my parents, who seemed to live with only the most insubstantial gauze separating them from total economic ruin. On Halloween 1981, the basement was on the cusp of being finished. My father writes, “By the second weekend of November we should be in our own house…I almost have to pinch myself! I can’t believe we are this close.”

Two years later, after we had moved into the basement, the harshness of the weather and the comparative flimsiness of the shelter were taking their toll: “I honestly don’t know what else we are going to have to put up with this winter,” my father writes. “We just came through the second coldest January in the state’s history. Three and a half weeks of below-zero temperatures…There has not been much time for anything else but plowing and shoveling snow. The basement almost looks like a natural contour of the land it is so buried.” Later in the same letter, my father gives thanks for what he can, namely that he will have carpentry work through the spring and is not yet “one of the casualties as the result of our dear Mr. Reagan.” The letters go on in this vein, with a couple of tidbits about how I am progressing or the odd movie, but mostly circling back to work, finding it, keeping it, losing it.

It’s hard to explain how much these letters matter to me, or even what they mean. My grandfather saved them and my aunt gave them to me a few years after my grandfather died. They are the primary documents of my own early history, along with two photo albums containing the only photos my parents ever took of themselves and me as a young family. As a teenager and college student I spent long hours pouring over those faded prints and Polaroids, staring at the Edenic portraits of my parents sitting dreamily in tall grass in a park, or working on the basement. At some point I asked for those photo albums, which also included snapshots of my mother’s brother before he died, and at some other point — in moving gradually westward, first to Colorado, then to Utah, Washington and, finally, California, I lost them. That those letters survived the past forty or forty-five years, that they were carefully stewarded through time so that I could have them, means as much or more to me than the content, which is partly the product of the books my parents brought with them from the suburbs: the collected works of Thoreau, Lopez, Abbey, Ginsberg, Snyder, Kerouac, the entirety of the Foxfire series as well as The Gulag Archipelago, The Tropic of Cancer, a smattering of Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, The Rubaiyat, The Sand County Almanac, Them. I have found similar collections in other households, although not, notably, in any of the households of other people who lived in that area. It was a library shaped by the aspirations and concerns of people who came of age in the late sixties. That reading these books was at least part of what led my parents to forge their own particular breed of isolation in some of the least forgiving landscape in the country is a causality one tends to find more often in America than elsewhere.

New Hampshire was the first of the thirteen colonies to separate from Britain, the ninth to ratify the U.S. Constitution, and the first to have its own state constitution. And yet, its colonists had not arrived with a political or religious mandate; neither were they led by a charismatic leader like John Winthrop. Rather, they were adventurers and opportunists, individuals looking for new possibilities and clean slates. Midway between the White Mountains and the paper mills of the north and the urban densities of the south, central New Hampshire was settled by people who wanted to keep the wall between them as they went. They were not interested in experimental living; they were interested in surviving. Many were hunters; many were poor; most were living in houses in various stages of construction. If I wanted to inhabit some place complete, I went to a book.

As rich as Rome in ruins, at least for a certain temperament, the area is better characterized by traces of former greatness than evidence of current progress or future possibility. The industrial decline has been long and painful, all the more so because the people who remain have very little in the way of skills to offer an information economy. Their inclination is to not do much, or move away. Cradled in the valley of the Smith River, the region had once prospered by virtue of its mining, agriculture and timber industries, and by being a station on the Northern railroad, but by the time my parents bought their property in the late seventies, the mines had closed, the fields gone fallow and the mills moved further north. In 1982, the Great Northern Railroad run on a thousand cords of wood per month, was closed for good. Since World War II, when the government stopped stockpiling minerals and military service had required many to give up their farms, much of the town had been reclaimed by the forest. It wasn’t so much untouched by modernity as passed over.

A labyrinth of dirt roads that once connected all of the farms in the town now connects disparate patches of forest. Abandoned properties trail off like unfinished sentences, evidence of a kind of rural exodus, cars and buildings gradually decomposing like deadfall back into the ground from which they came. Monuments are sparse, conferred only by time and infamy. My friend and I used to joke that the cemetery was the most densely populated part of the place. Someone was paid to take care of it, though, and its perpetually trim grass and fresh flowers stood in stark contrast with the unkempt nature of everything around it. People moved here to flee corruption, not fight against it, and years of that kind of escapism have left the town in a peculiar state of stasis. It is a landscape utterly devoid of idealism and yet full of ideology. Live free or die, as the state motto commands.

Since 2001, when Jason Sorens, now a professor of political science at University at Buffalo-SUNY, suggested that like-minded libertarians should move to a state with small population and take control of the government, this motto has been given new life. “Once we’ve taken over the state government, we can slash state and local budgets, which make up a sizeable proportion of the tax and regulatory burden we face every day,” Sorens wrote in a manifesto for the journal Libertarian Enterprise. “Furthermore, we can eliminate substantial federal interference by refusing to take highway funds and the strings attached to them. Once we’ve accomplished these things, we can bargain with the national government over reducing the role of the national government in our state. We can use the threat of secession as leverage to do this.” With its small population and libertarian-friendly history, in 2003 New Hampshire was voted as the best destination for the Free Staters, with Wyoming a close second. Since its inception, over sixteen thousand self-identified libertarians have declared their intent to move. Still, if you’re not born here, it’s hard to end up here.

The poet and essayist Donald Hall lives in a town adjacent to where I grew up, as did Hall’s wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, before she died. Hall inherited the ancestral farmhouse where he spent summers as a boy, moving there with Kenyon in 1975. Each writes with a degree of sparseness, something granitic at their cores capturing the way in which joy and pain in this part of the world are equally endured. “Though I loved the bright flowery borders and the white paint of the farmhouse,” Hall writes in his essay “A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails,” “I was always aware that New Hampshire was more dead than alive. Walking in the dense woods, I learned to be careful not to fall into cellar holes.”

Even in 1961, when the essay was published, Hall writes about New Hampshire as a “dying place,” focusing on the eccentric life of Washington Woodward. A hardworking, skillful man, Woodward had the kind of rural competence that allowed him to shoe a horse as well as he could make a gun. Woodward lives most of his life alone in a shack of his own construction, all of his competence and ingenuity, according to Hall, not amounting to anything at his death but a “hundred thousand straightened nails.” Visiting Woodward at his nursing home a few weeks before his death, Hall writes, “The waste he hated, I thought, was through him like blood in his veins. He had saved nails and wasted a life.”

Hall finds Woodward’s refusal to engage damning, and yet the vividness of his recollection of Woodward’s life and skills suggests something closer to admiration. Woodward built his own life, living and dying on his own eccentric, polemical terms. In contrast to the disposable culture we live in now, Woodward’s straightened nails could be read less as the useless remains of an eccentric than moving efforts at preservation. But should that immense aptitude have been directed to something else besides straightening bent nails, something that could have been used and appreciated by other people? Disconnecting from one’s community is a personal choice, of course, but it ends up having social implications. I think of the lives my parents have made, nearly forty years on the same piece of isolated property, and of what their legacy is and will be. I think of the unfathomable amount of time my mother has spent alone, how much she has read, and of the house my father built, in which I lived only briefly before I left for boarding school, how far flung I am and yet how, turn as I will, my step is toward it, or rather, the building of it. For me, home is embodied less by completion than construction.

At this point, it’s the details of the house that need fleshing out: back splashes, trim-work, closet doors, tiling, railings — the shades of the sentence that give the sentence character. As the house stills to a halt, becoming what it will, I wonder what it indicates about its inhabitants, past and present, what it will be able to indicate when it is no longer ours. In contrast to England, half of whose literature seems to revolve around houses and estates, houses and estates being ready extensions of character, America has always found more value in the act of leaving one house for something larger and ostensibly nicer. Fewer and fewer houses remain in a family for more than a generation. They are not passed down, the spectral remains of past residents lingering in coffee stains, table scratches and measurement markers, to children and grandchildren. When my parents leave I will have no reason to return.

We placed lawn chairs at one end of the basement and a picnic table at the other. In lieu of walls, we hung tapestries, cheap cotton cloth printed with paisley meant to suggest the spiritual elevations of India. In the autumn and winter we cut and stacked wood. Eight cords equalled twenty stacks, six months, the winter buried within the winter. During the summer we strung a clothesline down the length of the ceiling, pinning to it drying strands of rosemary, thyme, sage, basil, and lavender that shed leaves like confetti anytime anyone moved. Sometimes I think we made of that forest a wild place — wilder than it already was — lighting it with cigarette embers and sage, letting Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks spin out through open windows, beyond the roof, beyond the treetops, into the sky while we sank into our respective solitudes.

In the final stages of building the house, ten years later, my father needed to tear the tarp off the basement roof in order to lay the first floor. As soon as he did, torrential rains fell for two weeks, the rains which half-drowned us every summer. Pink insulation drooped like bearded moss from wooden joists. Where once herbs had hung, cascades of water now fell, collected first in pots and then drained through holes we drilled into the plywood floor. One morning I woke up hearing what sounded like water lapping at the shore. My parents were furiously, silently bailing, squatting against the mildewed walls I had requested be painted pink. In the flood we lost food, clothes, books, tools, bedding. We lost records, photos, instruments, people. We lost everything and then we lost the basement itself. But by that time, the foundation for the basement’s reconstruction had been laid, and it had been laid within me.

I was talking to someone who works on one of those half-dozen or so apps that we tend to associate with teenagers: the ones that were built around some novel concept that distracted us for a few years while they settled into their roles as slightly different ways to text. He mentioned something, offhand, while describing his anxieties about his job, that to him felt obvious. In his weird zone of the internet, he said, the concept of a large publication seemed utterly hopeless. The only thing that keeps people coming back to apps in great enough numbers over time to make real money is the presence of other people. So the only apps that people use in the way publications want their readers to behave — with growing loyalty that can be turned into money — are communications services. The near-future internet puts the publishing and communications industries in competition with each other for the same confused advertising dollars, and it’s not even close.

This is a stray observation from an app bubble within an investment bubble. But if you listen to what the internet’s best-capitalized and savviest media companies — which themselves exist in a (separate) set of Matryoshka bubbles — are saying, and watch what they are doing, you can tell that they don’t think it’s crazy.

Here is a question worth asking of any large media company, as well as an answer:

Disney has given Fusion a lot of money to launch. What does the company see as a successful return on that investment? Traffic goals? TV audience? Influence?

I think it’s all of the above. Part of our overall mission is to be a lab for experimentation and innovation for our parent company. Univision and ABC want Fusion’s help in figuring out how to reach this incredibly dynamic, diverse, and digitally connected audience, so we’ll be investing heavily in audience development and technology and transferring knowledge to the parent company about what we learn.

This might sound a little deflating to Fusion’s newly launched site, which surely doesn’t think of itself as a market-research arm for an entertainment conglomerate, but it’s not, really. This is a journalist and manager speaking the language of her business, acknowledging Fusion’s particular relationship with the capital that keeps it running. If anything it should be read as comforting. It suggests a mothership that is more interested in observing than meddling, at least for the time being. (The startup’s equivalent answer: “Sale or IPO, idiot! And in the meantime…”)

Fusion is fun to think about because it exists very slightly outside the weird new Zones of Content. It isn’t an established print publication trying to revamp itself under the same name for the fifth time in fifteen years, nor is it a VC-funded company that people started paying attention to a few years ago and that’s speeding toward some sort of liquidity event. What does it want? To build “a new kind of newsroom to greet the changing demographics of America” that is also “a little bit outside of the media bubble.” When does it want it? As soon as possible, but, whatever.

Another thing that Fusion does not have to do is decide what kind of company it is, because it is a literal extension of much larger ones that already know. For Fusion to talk about “promiscuous media” and “build[ing] our brand in the places [the audience] is spending time” — as opposed to publishing everything on a single website and hoping it spreads from there — is not strange in the context of television companies. They’re used to filling channels that they don’t totally control.

Meanwhile, some of the most visible companies in internet media are converging on a nearby point. Vox is now publishing directly to social networks and apps; BuzzFeed has a growing team of people dedicated to figuring out what BuzzFeed might look like without a website at the middle. Vice, already distributing a large portion of its video on Google’s YouTube, has a channel in Snapchat’s app, along with CNN, Comedy Central, ESPN, Cosmo and the Daily Mail.

So, for the sake of thinking things all the way through, let’s grant this: that, for a publisher that wants to grow dramatically, websites are unnecessary vestiges of a time before there were better ways to find things to look at on your computer or your phone. What happens next? What does a media that knows or believes this look like? This is an incredibly obvious question that nobody seems to have taken much time to talk about??? I mean you have the “director of audience development” at Vox telling trade publications that “in general, we do see higher sharing rates from the native-only posts” and then its “global vp of marketing and partnerships” dropping this excellent quote:

The great thing about Facebook leaning in to the new video strategy is that publishers on average are seeing a lot more views and a lot more engagement with that video content. This could theoretically be a pretty massive revenue stream with publishers when and if they do enable monetization around this inventory.

“When and if,” lmao. When and if!

So, when and if and when, it’s not too hard to imagine how Content Internet’s web abandonment accelerates. Following a brief and painful period of can’t-beat-em-join-em soul searching, companies with the most financial and operational freedom experiment with channels in apps. “More people are over there, but we are here, so why don’t we go over there?” managers will ask-splain in tense meetings. These companies suddenly reach more people than ever. Some of them figure out how to make a lot of money in the process, either from some sort of revenue sharing or through sponsored content. They begin to see their websites as Just One More App, and realize that fewer people are using them, proportionally, than before. Eventually they might even symbolically close their websites, finishing the job they started when they all stopped paying attention to what their front pages looked like. Then, they will do a whole lot of what they already do, according to the demands of their new venues. They will report news and tell stories and post garbage and make mistakes. They will be given new metrics that are both more shallow and more urgent than ever before; they will adapt to them, all the while avoiding, as is tradition, honest discussions about the relationship between success and quality and self-respect. They will learn to cater to the structures within which they are working and come up with some new forms. Some of what worked in print didn’t work on the web; some of what worked on the web didn’t work on social media; some of what worked on social media won’t work in these apps. (If you think Facebook had a distorting effect on news as a mere referrer, just wait until it’s a host.)

What was even the point of websites, certain people will find themselves wondering. Were they just weird slow apps with nobody in them?? Why? A bunch of publications will go out of business and a bunch of others will survive the transition and a few will become app content GIANTS with news teams filing to Facebook and their very own Vine stars and thriving Snapchat channels and a Viber bureau and embedded Yakkers and hundreds of people uploading videos in every direction and brands and brands and brands and brands and brands, the end. Welcome to 201…..7?

This is a huge financial opportunity, obviously! Media companies will realize the potential in the platforms’ audiences; the platforms will see a way, in media companies, to extract more money and time from the people they have already gathered in one place. (“I can’t tell you what the numbers are, but they’re fucking incredible,” says an anonymous source, already, of Snapchat’s channels.)

Meanwhile, the amount of time you spend on these channels will increase not quite as quickly as the supply of things to look at on them, and everything will be fine. Everything is always fine, when it comes to things like this, because capitalism knows better than to ever look back. (There will also be quite a few jobs, at least, which is great!)

The gaps left by the websites we stop looking at will be filled with new things, and most people won’t really notice the change until it’s nearly done, because they will have been incredibly not bored. Maybe the web thrives in a new and unexpected way as it is again relegated to marginal status? Maybe it just chugs along because nothing seems to fully die on the internet anymore. Sure, why not? Teens, whose idiot mystique will have played no small part in setting this whole thing in motion, will meanwhile begin plotting their escape.

In this future, what publications will have done individually is adapt to survive; what they will have helped do together is take the grand weird promises of writing and reporting and film and art on the internet and consolidated them into a set of business interests that most closely resemble the TV industry. Which sounds extremely lucrative! TV makes a lot of money, and there’s a lot of excellent TV. But TV is also a byzantine nightmare of conflict and compromise and trash and waste and legacy. The prospect of Facebook, for example, as a primary host for news organizations, not just an outsized source of traffic, is depressing even if you like Facebook. A new generation of artists and creative people ceding the still-fresh dream of direct compensation and independence to mediated advertising arrangements with accidentally enormous middlemen apps that have no special interest in publishing beyond value extraction through advertising is the early internet utopian’s worst-case scenario.

oh my god pic.twitter.com/iXHoud8I5X

— stefan (@boring_as_heck) January 26, 2015

And so one more obvious theoretical question for this particular view of the future that seems to be quite popular right now, in which we have circled back to TV via the internet or apps or social media or even TV itself: Wasn’t the internet supposed to be BETTER, somehow, in all its broken decentralized chaos and glory? The TV industry, which is mediated at every possible point, is a brutal interface for culture and commerce.

Within a week of launch, we’re already reading stories like this about “creative differences” with the network Snapchat:

When Snapchat last month debuted its Discover feature — a new section within the app that shows articles and videos from a range of media companies — one rumored launch partner was noticeably absent: BuzzFeed.

…

[T]he two companies were at loggerheads creatively, people at the meeting said. At issue was the fact that Snapchat’s editorial team would be involved in BuzzFeed’s content, creating friction. The two companies had “creative differences,” Mr. Peretti said at the meeting, a person with the matter said.

If in five years I’m just watching NFL-endorsed ESPN clips through a syndication deal with a messaging app, and Vice is just an age-skewed Viacom with better audience data, and I’m looking up the same trivia on Genius instead of Wikipedia, and “publications” are just content agencies that solve temporary optimization issues for much larger platforms, what will have been point of the last twenty years of creating things for the web?

These are just some of the many questions that feel impertinent as your body accelerates at the rate of gravity.

Correction: A quote originally attributed to Vox’s “director of audience development” was in fact delivered by Vox’s “global vp of marketing and partnerships.” We regret the error!

Disclosures: The current editors of The Awl, after being bred together in a small petri dish in the back of the refrigerator that holds the cold brew at BuzzFeed, resided there for a time, producing a technology vertical from underneath a stack of seltzer cans. Giph via Giphy.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

What He Ate Did Not So Much Relieve His Hunger

“We’re working our eyes off.” — Holger Sierks

Ten years a plan, the arrival precise, but with a slower landing.
The gravity lesser than where we started, turpentine sucked out

of the paint can. A negotiation of first-hand for relay, trading
one rock for another, smaller. The French president

dons his stereoscopics and we all lean back
on the collective couch. Now that the comet has us,

the industry of our concern commences its endless,
terrible orbit. The plot points predetermined, a susurrus

sound in the front rows, a reportage of all who’ve seen this
before, or something like it, a flickering of cellular

lights flickering out. Failed harpoons that cause us pause
or bounce. An aside: nights when the outlet seems too far

from bed to ignite a lean, I imagine the end of the world.
That I have the only phone left to call the only other

for which I have the number but a dead battery. Or else
I’m just too tired. A switch of tools and theatre,

whichever depending on where the nostalgia hurts
less or is less current. Arguments we could have

lassoed this princely island like a country song
written by committee while the tinker-toy pilot fish

tilts away from the sun and winds down
into failure. The view, before it goes black until summer,

unveiled to us like the universe’s oldest Polaroid. Forgotten
and found between the walls of the living house. Not yours,

but rented. The heaviest pieces of furniture abandoned
to your care because you opened the door.

All of space appears bent with no place to stand. The keel
of a shifting gaze with a black hole staked in the middle.

The eye no longer fixed or even ours, but shared. Here,
on earth, a study of children who recognize percentages

of disappointment more easily than others. Embedded training.
They spy angry wedged into the crags of everything

like love notes. Streets, doors, trees. Turn their faces
toward the sky. This filthy snowball is pissed, cringing

and waiting for the perihelion spin to reveal itself
more fully. Or maybe it’s only a chip of ice spinning,

space-born berg that will one day melt itself out
of our stare, or the reverse. Until then, a dust Rorschach

where every answer is breasts or home. Between
the morning’s forecast and messages on how

to keep the rats out, the radio funnels the hum
of our most far-flung worry, calls it song.

Dani Couture is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, YAW (Mansfield Press, 2014), and the novel Algoma (Invisible Publishing, 2011). Sweet (Pedlar Press, 2010) was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and won the ReLit Award for poetry.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Awl Sponsors

If you can bring yourself to listen past all the obvious references in Natalie Prass’ voice and musical style — and I know it’s hard, particularly the older you are — you will find an artist well worth enjoying. This freaky-ass video should help distract you, so it’s a good place to start. [Via]

★★ Thin new white accumulation lay on the top surfaces of translucent gray snowbanks, like blank highlights in an overworked pencil drawing of winter. A cheery neon-green metallic balloon lay completely crushed under black slush in the street. The sky was on its way toward brightening, with no particular urgency (shadows faded in and out on the page where that was jotted). By afternoon the sky had made it to clear blue. The ice on the fire escape creaked entertainingly underfoot. In the evening, the streetlights gleamed on the ice-glazed bricks of the churchyard wall.