PSL Everlasting
Plus: Snail Girls, The Furby Organ, Fat Bear Week, Toxic Masculinity, and Will Ferrell's DJ Set 🎃 🐌 🎶🐻🏆
Welcome to your mid-week quickie! This is your bonus, even-less-strings-attached newsletter to get you through the week.
What’s On My Mind
I went to Fear Farm this weekend and saw a bunch of teen boys degrading the actors. They made homophobic slurs. They walked with feigned bravado.
They were much scarier than anything we saw in the haunted houses.
That, coupled with war news, climate change findings, my grandma’s health, and still having to do my silly little job on my silly little laptop has made October feel a lot like this:
But also, a lot like this:
We contain multitudes.
Weekly Reads
“My Brother Is So Far Gone”: How Male Influencers Turned The Men In These People’s Lives Toxic 🏴☠️
On the topic of angry boys - here are personal accounts from people close to men trapped in online echo chambers. This post was made in 2022, but it’s just as relevant (if not more so) this year.
My father has gone from a man who minored in women’s studies in college — who was kind and in touch with his emotions and who treated all people, men and women, around him with kindness — to a man who says that whenever he sees an “effeminate” male stranger, he gets an overwhelming urge to murder them.
A new week, a new era. This is the slow, slimy lifestyle I’m trying to emulate:
A snail girl takes her time and creates to create. The speed at which everything is put out into the world is just getting faster, but she doesn’t care. She’s running her own race, and maybe that race isn’t going anywhere but home and back to bed.
The Vanishing Family 😶🌫️
A gut-wrenching profile of a family diagnosed with early-onset dementia.
How do you keep living when you know that everything that makes you a conscious person could disappear? If you were going to lose yourself — in a year, or two, or 10 — would you even want to know?
The Pumpkin Spice Latte Will Outlive Us All 🎃
Like we needed the New York Times to tell us this.
The P.S.L. has evaded irrelevance by appealing to our need for a reliable marker of passing time.
One-Liners
😬 Yikes. The Furby Organ will haunt me forever
🍿 Get Your Tickets: The Priscilla bio-pic hits theatres on November 3rd.
💇♀️ Chop Chop. This filter tells you if you look better with long or short hair
🎾 TBR: A curated list of sports romance books from The GIST’s book club (co-run by me!)
🐻 Aww. The winner of Fat Bear Week 2023
🏆 Dad of the Year. Will Ferrel showed up to DJ his son’s frat party
💕 For The Ladies: Happy International Day of The Girl!
Serotonin Boost
Watch this kid learning about trick-or-treating 🍭
Final Thoughts:
