★★ A studiously unchallenging placeholder. The previous day’s snow maintained its pretty positions on the tree limbs and the corners of the balcony railings, while largely yielding its claim on the streets and sidewalks. Not entirely, though. The schoolyard had yet to be shoveled. A jaywalker, arriving at the far side of Lafayette, cut through the Citibike rack, hit a thick ice patch, and lost control of his sagging pants as he went into a slide. The trains home were halting or tight-packed with puffy coats.

“We don’t acknowledge that one exists. But if you wanted to shoot and kill a Bigfoot in the state of Texas, you would just need a hunting license,” Major Larry Young of Texas Parks and Wildlife told the Houston Chronicle. In response, a representative for PETA noted that, “As an organization we do oppose hunting of any kind. It’s cruel and unnecessary and can damage populations and ecosystems.” Fair enough, but we’re having a hard time finding any scientific citations for the claim that shooting Bigfoot could damage the ecosystem of Texas.

“Representative Renee Ellmers, who ran as a Tea Party candidate in 2010 and barely squeaked into office, has dismissed [Clay] Aiken as unable to win “Idol” and thus ill-equipped to unseat her. Mr. Aiken suggests that his humble beginnings and time working with children with autism best qualifies him for a seat in the House.”
 — Sick burn, Clay Aiken! Also, Clay Aiken is running for Congress in North Carolina’s Second District. Let’s all try to live our lives as normally as possible for as long as we have left.

by Jeva Lange

“I’m not one to pray/But I’m one to sing and play.”
 — “Pray for Newtown”

All great music should tell a story. Some musicians tell those stories more literally than others: Mark Kozelek, currently of Sun Kil Moon and formerly of Red House Painters, is one such musician. Last week, as a kind of foreword to his forthcoming album Benji, Kozelek outlined a list of themes, events, and influences for the record in an Opinionator piece for the New York Times

. He signed off the op-ed with the comment, “This song, like the rest of the album, is a thank-you to those who have inspired me along the way, and an apology to a few, as well.”

However, when I listened through Benji, I didn’t read it so much as a thank you or an apology; instead, I read it as a kind of Great American Novel — and note, I choose the word “read” here intentionally. That’s because great albums can function like novels — or, in the case of Benji, like memoirs (Bob Dylan, as an example, has been suggested for the Nobel Prize in Literature; the Times once designated the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street “rock ’n’ roll’s version of the Great American Novel”). What makes Benji even more novelistic to me is, when you get right down to the songwriting, the words and structures aren’t lyrical. Kozelek’s lines rarely end in rhyme, there are almost no choruses, and there seems to be little consideration for the sounds and rhythms of the words he sings:

“Yesterday morning I woke up to so many 330 area calls, I called my mom back and she was in tears and I asked and I spoke to my father, Carissa burned to death last night in a freak accident fire.”
 — “Carissa”

Instead, the writing in Benji sounds as if Kozelek has opened up his diary and is reading it aloud. It’s not that the music is confessional necessarily, but rather there’s the impression this record is an account, a document, a reflection and, eventually, a meditation. Occasionally, the words are jarringly prosaic, such as when Kozelek references Panera Bread or Red Lobster mid-verse. But this is just another reason why I found myself so deeply interested in Sun Kil Moon’s latest: because it is a collection of short stories more than it is a collection of songs — if the two must be insisted on being exclusive.

With most of the album centered in Ohio, Kozelek features rednecks, criminals, growing old, sex, friends and family, loss, heartbreak and mortality. And what’s remarkable is, I put my complete faith into Kozelek’s histories and his truths. The reason Benji is successful is not because it’s a monument of storytelling or because it’s a lyrical masterpiece — although it is, in fact, a kind of masterpiece. Instead, Benji works because it is true. And beyond being true to Kozelek’s personal experience, it is, at its heart, an encompassing and convincing contemporary American portrait. To this end, Kozelek has no hesitation in name-dropping brands or inserting unrecognizable locations to create a sense of place, because of the very fact that the album is autobiographical. To weaken Benji would be to confess fictions and fabrications.

“I was a junior in high school when I turned the TV on, James Huberty went to a restaurant and shot everyone up with a machine gun, he was from my hometown, we talked about it ’til the sun went down, and everybody got up and stretched and yawned, and their lives went on.”
 — “Pray for Newtown”

Writing his extremely positive review for Pitchfork, critic Ian Cohen Googled the locations in Benji and fact-checked other references, concluding that at least a large part of the album, if not all of it, is true. Cohen writes, “Kozelek’s reaction to both aerosol can-related deaths in his family are basically, ‘you can’t make this shit up.’ But what if he did make this shit up?” While Cohen goes on to state that, in his opinion, such imagination and persuasion would make Benji all the more remarkable, I think the stories would feel hollow without their real, and not imagined, honesty. Benji as fiction would be clunky and insubstantial, amusing where it shouldn’t be (“you don’t just raise two kids and take out your trash and die”).

It’s funny that I have such an insistence for truth on this particular record. Clearly not all artists are as rich in authentic experience and emotion as Kozelek. A book lover myself, I know best that the most real stories are often the ones that have been made up. I think it is the rawness in Benji that makes me need every word to be real — being lied to by Kozelek would be like being lied to by a dear uncle, or favorite cousin. It’d be like learning all of your family mythologies were made up for the sake of entertaining you.

This leads me to my next question — would Kozelek make a great novelist? I’m not sure; again, the lack of obvious consideration for words and sounds makes me think that Benji is closer to Kozelek’s heart than it is an attempt at being a great piece of literature. To that end, I sure would love to read Kozelek’s memoir. Then again, maybe I already have.

by Jeva Lange

“During the recent mild weather butterflies are reported as having been seen on the wing in various parts of England; and doubtless as many of them as possible were killed. It is a common rustic superstition that to fail to kill the first butterfly one sees abroad in spring is to earn bad luck for the year; and, like most such superstitions, it is based on misunderstanding. It is reasonable to kill queen wasps in the spring, if it happens that you do not like wasps. From an economic point of view it is at least arguable whether the wasp does not do more good to the agriculturist than harm; but it would be idle to pretend that wasps are popular and, to speak generally, it may be said that every queen wasp which lives through the spring means a nest of wasps later in the year. It is doubtless on the same principle that the countryman kills early butterflies. Inasmuch as caterpillars eat cabbages and caterpillars are undoubtedly the children of butterflies, the more butterflies which go unkilled, he argues, the fewer cabbages. Unfortunately the earliest butterflies of the year are not of the kind the caterpillars of which are cabbage-eaters.”
–The Times of London, February 5, 1914.

Butterfly by Natalie Sayin

“New research discovers a strong link between teen consumption of high-caffeine energy drinks and use of alcohol, drugs, or cigarette smoking. Investigators found that nearly one-third of US adolescents consume high-caffeine energy drinks or ‘shots.’ Researchers believe the same characteristics that attract young people to consume energy drinks — such as being ‘sensation-seeking or risk-oriented’ — may make them more likely to use other substances as well.”

Dear Polly,

I have a problem that’s common to some extent for everyone but lately it’s beginning to be unmanageable for me: I have terrible anxiety.

Background: I’m a gay 29-year-old male who’s been working at a crappy data entry job for the past couple of years. I’ve never been in a relationship and since coming out, I’ve somehow gotten into the habit of having sex only once a year.

As you can imagine, growing up I used to be a nervous little queer kid; scared of being called a faggot, I cultivated this deep monotone speech pattern and tried my damn hardest to keep the camp to a minimum. As the years passed and I moved into high school and then college, this way of living killed what little self-esteem I had and my anxiety got progressively worse. I waited until I was 23, when I was already out of college (sigh), to ever so slowly begin the coming out process only to people I trusted. At first this felt like a huge relief and it coincided with me getting placed in a kick ass internship. But then? My anxiety jumped into high gear and it seemed like I couldn’t focus on anything; unable to continue going forward in my career and personal life.

When it comes to career stuff, the internship I scored dealt with public policy, and my goal was to immerse myself and see if it was an area I could see myself growing in, but the sad truth is that I never could find out because my anxiety was so overwhelming I had to keep my head down to make it through the day. When I was at work, I couldn’t bear having people call attention to me because I would instantly blush beet red. I can handle women talking to me one on one — the conversation flows and the end results are positive, but I’ve been finding as I get older that I get incredibly embarrassed when a man, especially if he’s attractive, attempts to make conversation with me in a well-lit setting. At my job, there are fluorescent lights everywhere so when I’m approached by my office’s Tom Hardy, I get super red and I just have to end the conversation. Here’s what goes on in my head when Hardy talks to me: He’s looking at me; I’m getting red now; he can see all the pores in my face; I’m getting redder; I must look so uncomfortable to him; his nervous smile shows me he’s noticing how red and embarrassed I look.” How can someone progress in a work environment with those kind of shitty social skills?

And that isn’t even the worst of my problems at work; I have a horrible public speaking phobia. I’ve sucked at speaking in front of a group since I was a child, but now it’s gotten so out of hand that I’ve had 3 separate panic attacks in front of my department. One was especially mortifying because it occurred not only in front of my co-workers but also colleagues from outside organizations at a state conference. I ran out of the auditorium, went into a restroom and started bawling. I’ve spent years beating myself up about public speaking but I can’t seem to approach it with anything but sheer terror. What really trips me out is making eye contact with the audience, especially with men. I start to panic, have trouble breathing, and blush. When I see those eyes, it feels like they’re beaming their thoughts into my head: you’re fucking stupid; you’re worth nothing; who do you think you are; you’re getting red.

When the internship ended, I had spent so much time dodging attention that I failed to make a mark in front of my superiors and had to take a dead end position at the company. Now I sit here in my cubicle wondering how I could have fucked up so much. This job requires nothing of me so my brain has nothing better to do than over-think and jump start my anxiety.

In terms of my personal life, everything is whatever. I struggle with gay shame everyday. I have a good set of friends, and I should be grateful to have them because 10 years ago I thought if I came out of the closet I would be left with no one but myself. The problem is with my family. I’m an Asian American with immigrant parents who I know would be devastated if I told them the truth. I’ve worried about breaking their heart and disappointing them since as far back as I can remember, but keeping this secret from them is killing me. Sometimes when I’m commuting I’ll wander off in my head and imagine different scenarios of how the coming out scene would play out; it never ends well. Obviously, I’ve never brought a girl home. During each holiday season, I spend my time carefully steering conversations so that my uncles don’t ask me in front of my parents if I have a girlfriend yet. I can tell it embarrasses them that their almost-30-year-old son can’t seem to find a date to save his life. This year after both Thanksgiving and Christmas, I went back to my apartment with my back aching.

I’ll be 30 in 4 months and I spend my nights tossing and turning, dreading that my life will look exactly the same in 5 years. How do I change… me? Look, I know that I can’t change the fact that I’m gay and I know I can’t change that I have an over-active nervous system; but how can I keep my shame and my panic attacks from leading me into a life of nothing?

Big Nervous Mess

Dear BNM,

A life of nothing comes from not wanting to be any of the things that you naturally are. You grew up in an environment that makes you feel that who you naturally are is bad. In disguising your true self, you not only lost any chance to express yourself authentically and naturally, but you cut off your connection to your most brilliant impulses, your most vivid and dynamic streaks of insight and genius, and your most tender and heartfelt moments of empathy and love and joy. I know you don’t really need me to state the obvious on this front, but I do want you to really acknowledge at a deep level what this act of hiding and masking and pulling away did to your soul, because it’s unbearably sad. Your anxiety is a symptom of your injured soul.

But hiding was also a survivalist’s choice, and maybe a smart choice for someone with your wiring and your lack of interest in being in the spotlight. Coming out and being yourself and taking on immediate outsider status wasn’t something you could stomach, with your family, your circumstances, and your nature. Who knows what kaleidoscope of hellish outcomes might’ve sprung out of taking a riskier path? I want you to feel real empathy for the scared kid who kept the camp to a minimum and made his voice monotone. I mean, what a tragedy, that a naturally dramatic and vivacious boy would have to imitate the dull heterosexual trolls in his midst! The sheer loss of that! To have all of this exciting, vibrant potential, to be a unique flower in a field of milkweed. No, dillweed. There you were, a blossoming, glorious purple iris, with nothing but dickweed as far as the eye could see! And you had to hide your gorgeous purple and yellow blooms and imitate dickweed instead.

OK, I just Googled milkweed and it’s kind of a raggedy-ass plant, but it’s got all these orange and yellow or hot pink flowers on it that attract butterflies. (It’s the only thing monarch larvae eat!) And dillweed is just green, but it has those cool little green blossoms, the kind that look great in a big glass vase. Or in a giant pot on a sunshiney back patio, the sort of giant pot of weird green plants that makes people say, “Jesus, what ARE these? I need to know what they are! I MUST GET SOME OF THESE.” So let’s just admit that even the seemingly dull, monotone-speaking heterosexual men of the world are ALSO plucking their own pretty flowers, just to please an unkind universe that favors DICKWEED over the other, far more exuberant and melodious and electrifying varietals.

The most anxious guy I ever knew was this incredibly smart, creative, interesting guy I met in college. He looked and sounded like your average frat boy until you got him a little drunk, and then he’d come out of his shell and talk in winding, artful, bizarre circles, always with deeply mournful undertones. He could also play guitar and sing, but he didn’t sing in the usual faux-scratchy Bob Dylan voice that everyone else did. He had a sweet, clear, high voice, and when he sang Kris Kristofferson’s “Casey’s Last Ride,” he could make a whole room full of drunk assholes weep big salty tears. I’m not exaggerating. It makes me weep big salty tears just thinking about it.

He did the ROTC thing to pay for college, which meant he had to keep his hair very, very short and he had to act like a gruff macho dude in order to avoid unnecessary attention. Although that probably doesn’t sound like much of a hardship, a lot of depression and anxiety and loneliness bubbled up around it for him. He was tall and had big shoulders and he would look in the mirror and say, “God, I look like such a typical frat dirtbag.” A few times, he put on fake facial hair and a long-haired wig and a hat and went out to bars like that. He would marvel at how mean people were to him, in his disguise, but somehow looking like a misfit and seeing their meanness felt like seeing the world as it really was for the first time. It was punishing, and it felt cathartic, to be acknowledged as a misfit. That was his strange way of escaping the lie of his identity.

Eventually he graduated and joined the Navy and things got even worse. His anxiety and depression skyrocketed. I remember visiting him on his ship in San Francisco during Fleet Week. He talked about feeling desperately unhappy and fearful that things would never get any better. Even if he survived the Navy — which didn’t seem all that likely to him — he’d get out and live a life of nothing.

This is probably where you expect me to tell you that he killed himself. But he didn’t. He moved to San Francisco, grew his hair long, got a series of great jobs, fell in love with an amazing woman, had some kids, grew some weird facial hair, started wearing hats, sang in a gospel choir, started writing his own music, and he’s about to put out an album of crazy old-fashioned gospel-influenced music that sounds like something that would fit neatly into the soundtrack of a Coen Brothers movie.

And here’s how strange life is: Last fall, someone sent me a link to an awesome “Breaking Bad” tribute scored with… my friend’s music.

He is not living a life of nothing. And maybe his challenges were minor compared to yours. Maybe just being poorly suited for life on a Navy ship is laughable, compared to what you’ve dealt with. But to me, it doesn’t matter. His basic nature made his particular circumstances unbearable. HE WASN’T WIRED FOR HIDING. He had to bury his authentic self for years, and it almost killed him. His salvation came in the form of shedding his dickweed disguise and letting all of the colors of his true exuberant, melodious, electrifying soul spring forth, for all the world to see.

You aren’t wired for hiding, either. You have to stop blaming yourself for that, and for the blushing and the panicking and the bawling in the bathroom. I can only imagine how it feels for you to have fundamentally reshaped your entire personality to match the colorless, lackluster demands of your habitat. You weren’t built to live a lie. Few people are, but as a smart, sensitive kid, you are particularly ill-suited for it.

And it’s not JUST that your nature is ill-suited for it. You have a long history of burying your true feelings, your true self, and the trauma of that accumulates. You have been injured by the repeated feeling that your parents will not love you if they know who you really are. The pain of that suspicion, the pain of having to hide under those circumstances, must be almost unbearable. Maybe you don’t feel the pain, and instead your brain does backflips whenever you talk to a man. That bad energy has to land somewhere.

But did you notice how wearing an ACTUAL freaky disguise, and being treated with contempt for it, was a relief to my friend? Oftentimes the ACTUAL pain that you anticipate for so long is nothing, compared to the imagined pain in your head. And, as my friend demonstrated, sometimes we stumble on artful ways of releasing our spirits from the conformist forces that threaten to blot out the sun entirely. Sometimes, a little free-flowing freakiness is just the ticket. Sometimes, veering into a realm that’s completely unfamiliar and a little scary, that sounds at once alluring and repellent, can clear out the cobwebs and get the spontaneity and authentic joy flowing for the first time.

I know that you hate public speaking, and you feel incredibly scrutinized and paralyzed when you have to present to a group. MOST people feel that way. The major difference for you is that you think this means there’s something wrong with you. And WHEN you feel anxious about speaking, you almost get PTSD because it kicks up all of the trauma of hiding — hiding your true voice and sensibilities in high school, hiding your true self from your parents your whole life.

Someone with less trauma over this, but with the same fears of public speaking, would simply tell people, “I can’t present to a group — I don’t like it. I’ll write a report but I won’t present it, because I’m not comfortable with doing that.” Maybe that’s not ideal, but it’s better than forcing yourself to do something you’re not ready to do. You don’t HAVE to be exactly what the world wants you to be. The world can fucking adjust to who you are right now, and so can you.

Should you do toastmasters or practice your public speaking in a safe group, among other people who freak the fuck out when they’re asked to speak publicly? Maybe. Or maybe you should find a different job, with people who are more flexible, and see clearly how smart and talented you are, and how absurd it is to have you doing data entry. Can you imagine a setting that might free you up and make you feel more accepted? Isn’t it possible that there are jobs in your field where you might work around other gay men, in a more casual and nontraditional environment?

At the risk of replicating some gay-man version of the magical negro here, I have to tell you that I suspect that your natural self is the best kind of glorious, generous, vibrant, dynamic, exceptional kind of self. If you didn’t have to hide anymore, you would open like a beautiful flower and you’d feel the rain on your face for the first time and you’d say, I WILL HAVE A LIFE OF EVERYTHING. If we could find the right vehicle, the right outlet for your soul, we might coax you closer and closer to this kind of happiness and raw thrill at being alive.

Maybe you should write poetry. Maybe you just need to go to some spoken word events, to watch other people feeling nervous but letting their souls shine through anyway. But you definitely need something strange and wild in your life, that frees you up and makes you feel more genuine.

And what about embracing your introverted status, but doing it with other introverts? What about engaging in something creative that allows you to quietly be in the company of other interesting men? What if you took up something you’re terrible at, just because? What if you set out to make friends online, and you made it very clear in your profile that you are PAINFULLY SHY AND AFRAID? I feel like you need to accept your weirdness and shyness enough that you can show it to other people.

It’s going to take some time to find your path, and you need outside help. You need to find a therapist immediately. You simply must do it, no matter what. I can’t describe to you what a difference it will make in your life. I would see a male therapist, in fact, because that’s where you need healing. You need to feel accepted and supported by a man. I can tell you right now that THAT ALONE will turn your life upside down — in an good way. And of course a good therapist will be totally comfortable with your stress and blushing and crying. THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE THERE TO DO. Don’t forget that. Therapy is all about having your worst reaction in the company of that supportive energy. You’re SUPPOSED TO bring out the ugliness and the weakness and the shameful everything. That’s how you reach past a life of nothing.

And in your everyday life, too. You’re SUPPOSED TO bring out the ugliness and the weakness and the shameful everything. You’re supposed to cry and show the world who you are. If they demote you, fuck them. They don’t see you clearly. Your good friends see you. Slowly try to open yourself up to new people. Show them the things that make you feel ashamed. They will feel good, that you invited them in. If they don’t, forgive them and move on. They’re just letting you know that they’re not worth your time.

So: Get a therapist, consider joining a support group for young gay men, investigate activities that will make you feel like you’re coming out of hiding, look into other jobs, and of course, exercise daily in order to reduce your physical anxiety.

You say that it’s killing you to hide the fact that you’re gay from your parents. I’m sure a lot of people would argue that coming out might relieve your stress and anxiety immensely. But I know that it can be traumatic to reach for such a major change when you’re already feeling anxious and depressed. That’s really something you have to explore with your therapist. I also don’t know if you should consider taking drugs for anxiety. It’s something to consider, but I do think that you have a lot of clear reasons for feeling anxious beyond your biochemistry, so I would address those factors before trying out drugs if possible.

Above all, though, you need to know this, believe this, and say it to yourself every morning: THE WORST THINGS ABOUT YOU ARE ALSO THE BEST THINGS ABOUT YOU. Your sensitivity, your hyper-awareness of other people’s emotions, your attunement to the world — all of these things are qualities, as long as they’re not channeled into a negative feedback loop. You’re living in an illusion now, the illusion that every little awkward thing you do matters and is seen clearly by other people. You are hyperaware of reactions, like someone on psychoactive drugs. But people just don’t care that much that you stutter or turn red. They have shit on their minds, too. Once you channel your sensitivity somewhere else, all of these interactions will lose their high-pressure feeling and you’ll be able to just exist. You don’t have to keep up every conversation. You can allow silence to set in. You can say, “Alright, let’s talk about this later.” You can serve your own needs. You can be yourself. You can ask for what YOU want, instead of always trying to be what other people want of you.

YOU ARE SPECIAL. YOU ARE SENSITIVE. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. Write it in sharpie and put it on the wall. YOU ARE A FUCKING WEIRDO. YOU ARE AMAZING. YOU DESERVE TO BE EXACTLY WHO YOU ARE. Write it down. Post it on the wall. This is your work now. Your work is to BELIEVE THESE THINGS. Your work is to read these things every day, and believe them, and live inside of that belief. If you do that, your whole life will change.

And you have to get a therapist. Start cooking dry beans and baked potatoes every night for dinner if you have to, but get a therapist. Get one you suspect might be smarter than you, one who stays calm when you fidget and sweat.

Here’s what you don’t realize yet: Blushing and crying in the bathroom make you lovable. Many, many people who read your letter will feel REAL love for you. They wish they could meet you and give you a hug. They get it. We are all freaks and misfits. We all need a hug. The weirdness that you’re sure damns you to the sidelines, to a life of nothing, is exactly what makes you unique and intuitive and divine. The dickweed disguise must be shed. It’s going to take a little more work than you thought to shed it completely. But once it’s gone, you are going to love someone deeply, and he is going to feel so grateful for your love. You are about to bloom before your own eyes, and you’re going to help someone else bloom after that. You are going to have a life of everything.

Polly

Do you need to try something new, that you’re really bad at? Write to Polly and find out!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo of Asclepias welshii — which only blooms in the desert, ahem! — by the USFWS.

Quiz: What Kind Of Frightening Reminder That Humans Are Killing The Planet With Greenhouse Gasses Are You?

“Climate change is slowly but steadily cooking the world’s oceans”

Do you remember PostSecret, that project where people mailed anonymous postcards with secrets written on them to be published in books and museum installations and websites and things like that? Well, San Francisco remembers, because there have been two high-profile app versions in the past few weeks: Whisper and now Secret.

Secret, which is impossible to find by searching for it in the App Store on your iPhone (try searching for “secret” and you’ll come up with, like, “My Secret Diary” and “Best Windows 7 Secrets.” If you want to download it, go to secret.ly on your phone browser. Good start to your relationship with this app), has raised $1.4 million in funding from Google Ventures and other malcontents like Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit. Let’s not think about what that means for, like, the global economy and your own worth as a human. Instead let’s talk about this weird app!

Secret begins by asking you for MUCH MORE INFORMATION than you’re comfortable giving. It needs your email address, it needs access to your contacts, okay, that’s relatively normal, at least normal in a way that would have felt egregiously invasive ten years ago and will feel portentous in another ten years when we’re all living in a Mad Max desert because the apps have ruined the planet, but normal enough. Then the app asks for your phone number, which it wants to even further connect you with people, and possibly to sell to telemarketers, who knows. I have never seen this before. How scary, I thought. How weird, I thought. I can’t imagine that this is really necessary, I thought. This seems problematic, I thought. Anyway, I gave it my phone number.

Now that you’ve given away all your personal information, you can scroll through a series of short, text-based “secrets,” on a white or colored background or, sometimes, a photo, which you choose from your own photos. You don’t choose a username. You can “like” or comment on each secret, and the comments section of each secret is populated by anonymous commenters, each given a random icon as their avatar.

The difference about Secret is that these secrets are from people you know, or people they know, or people those people know. Secrets are typically, at most, two or three degrees of separation away from someone in your phone’s contacts. This is supposed to be alluring; it’s an odd combination of privacy and intimacy, given that nobody knows who anybody else is, but is pretty sure they would know who the other people are. Whisper, a similar app, shows secrets from around the world, though you can filter by proximity to you. That makes Whisper much weirder; there’s much more data coming at you from all over the world, which means the app mutates and finds its natural niche faster and in interesting ways (who knew it would be used as a hookup app? Example here). Whisper also automatically attempts to find an image to match your secret, and does a terrible/great job of it, which adds another level of internet randomness on top. Secret, in contrast, is much cleaner, more streamlined, better designed (whatever that means), and not nearly as interesting.

The problem is that it relies on the creativity of your friends rather than the swarming mass of humanity. My experience of Secret, unfortunately, is full of tech bloggers making tech jokes on a tech app. And also, thankfully, a whole bunch of trolls making fun of each other (or, really, making fun of Sam Biddle).

So why does this thing exist? Secret is just one more app pursuing the reactive goal of the ephemeral internet, which its creators write about at length (on Medium, ha):

As social networking has become universal, we’ve become increasingly sensitive to what we share online. Speaking on a stage in front of a mixed audience of family, friends, and acquaintances makes it hard for us to be our most authentic selves. As a result, we tend to share only our proudest moments in an attempt to portray our best selves. We filter too much, and with that, lose real human connection. We built Secret for people to be themselves and share anything they’re thinking and feeling with their friends without judgment.

The idea is, our online personas are no longer frivolous and fun. Post an Instagram and it’ll be there for your kids when they Bing you on their FutureZunes in the year 2040. Employers, according to various trend-pieces, screen applicants by browsing their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Scary! So this has birthed the ephemeral internet, led by Snapchat. The goal is to bring back that carefree anonymous joy of not giving a shit about what you do online, whether because it disappears or because nobody knew where it came from in the first place.

Which makes Secret all the more odd! Because it’s a hybrid: it’s incredibly invasive when making your network, but then anonymous during actual use. It’s a tease: anonymous, but it only shows secrets from people you might know in real life. And when you’re making an app that takes a stand against the status quo (lol, like any of this is serious at all), I’m not sure it makes sense to have a hybrid or a tease; it feels like too much of a compromise. But who knows, I thought Twitter was pretty stupid at first too.

Another good app is this game called Mr. Crab. It’s about a crab that jumps. I like it more than Secret.

“[W]hooping cough is resurgent: just under fifty thousand people caught it in 2012. This is mainly because protection from the current shots wanes over time. But, as the bug circulates, it is also morphing. Last February, researchers identified mutant strains of the bacteria in eleven patients in Philadelphia. These mutants, it turns out, appear to be the dominant form of the bug in this country. Whooping cough has evolved in a way that vaccine-preventable diseases rarely do.”