Vol. 31 of Thursday Third Things
Do I look like an Anja?
I have no context for this, it was just the funniest thing I saw this week.
Vol. 31 of Thursday Third Things
The Christmas Episode of The Bear
I know, I’m really late to the game on the Emmy award-winning show The Bear, but holy shit, the Christmas episode. We have to talk about it.
It took me all day to watch this one episode. I doled it out in 20 minute doses, completely overwhelmed by the anxiety of it. It’s triggering and human and fucked up and beautiful and is one of the greatest depictions of family dynamics I have ever seen. It may be the single best episode of TV ever in existence.
I immediately went to the internet to look for write-ups on this episode and while there were some okay hot takes also agreeing that this was a really great piece of TV, I actually think this Reddit thread captured it best. I liked reading all these strangers’ connection with the episode. And it made me feel deeply sad and also deeply intertwined with the world knowing so many of us felt impacted by this one episode.
When Donna, the mom, breaks down in the kitchen just before everyone is about to sit down for the dinner she made and says, “I make things beautiful for them. And no one makes things beautiful for me,” I broke.
Do I Look Like An Anja?
Okay, so basically people looked at adults’ faces and tried to guess their names and were right a statistically significant number of times. But when people looked at children’s faces, they had a harder time figuring out what their name was. The takeaway? Our faces change as we become adults to better fit our names in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way. (Machine learning also provided the same results).
What does this mean? I’m not exactly sure because the article really doesn’t explain it well enough. What makes a John look like a John? How do our bones, our flesh, change to do that? But there are implications that social constructs affect us in ways we never thought possible.
"Social structuring is so strong that it can affect a person's appearance. These findings may imply the extent to which other personal factors that are even more significant than names, such as gender or ethnicity, may shape who people grow up to be."
In My Opinion Fatigue Era
It’s been a little over a month since I left Instagram and thus far, I don’t miss it one bit. There was a period of time that first week going cold turkey where I really craved the mindless scrolling, and then a few days later the urge pretty much disappeared. This is also officially the longest I’ve ever stuck with my commitment to get off the platform.
I’m extremely biased and probably being extremely self-centered in my perspective here, but I’m getting the sense that social media is on its way out. I don’t mean the platforms are going to collapse tomorrow. I just think over the next 2-3 years, we’re going to look back on this heightened social media decade and ask ourselves, “What the fuck were we doing?”
I especially think we’re going to be extremely embarrassed by our constant public commentating and whataboutism that we just couldn't help but blast out there for everyone to see. If the “youth” are even starting to burn out on this, I think it’s only a matter of time before we all move on to something else.
Without social media, my anxiety is down because I don’t feel like people can “see” me as easily anymore. But it’s also down because that urge to form snap-judgment opinions and share them with the world is also down. I didn’t realize how pressured I was feeling I had to form opinions constantly until I was no longer looking at the endless-opinion-generation machine. As a writer, I am still (clearly) sharing some things with an audience. But on Substack and in long-form writing, it’s not as tense. There’s more space for nuance. And it just doesn’t seem to have the same culture of attacking people for the sake of attacking.
“Because a tweet from 2016 looks the same as one from last week, it’s perhaps hard for viewers to conceptualize the passing of time, and changes that may come with it. Public opinion around a topic can shift but is then sometimes retroactively applied to internet opinions formed long before this new consensus…For social media to become less fraught, and for people to feel comfortable sharing opinions again, it’s the users who need to change — starting, Adedeji says, with the understanding that an opinion can change, and should never be considered an indisputable truth.”
Hail The Size of An Energy Drink
Because of my Instagram break, I miss some really funny content and that sometimes makes me a little sad. But just a little.
Because then I see that creators I really liked, like Tobin Mitnick (AKA Jews Love Trees) has his own newsletter, and is working on all kinds of other artistic things like screenplays about redwoods and that makes me really happy.
But also, this quick piece about the hilarious sizes of hail is just so silly and lovely and what I think the internet should actually be for and what I suppose I wish social media was.
Politics Section
Based on my open rate last week, we ARE NOT loving the politics section of the newsletter. Or at least not loving having it right up top. So here’s a little test to see if putting it at the bottom where you can easily stop reading makes this better?? There’s just so much funny political/election stuff happening!
Welcome To The Shitpost Election
Even if you’re not into politics, this post from Casey Newton pretty well demonstrates the problems that the shitstorm of social media, AI, and identity politics are playing in the world right now.
“But Americans have gradually become inured to the idea that political actors will attempt to manipulate them on social media and elsewhere. The naivete of 2016 has been replaced with a kind of wry cynicism. As Max Read wrote in 2022: “The thing about misinformation is, it won.”
When you have resigned yourself to the ubiquity of misinformation — and when platforms have aggressively downsized the content moderation teams that might otherwise prevent you from doing so — you shitpost.”
Christians Never Have To Vote Again
Here’s a quick recap if you missed it:
At a Christian rally, Trump said, “I love you. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
Dems (and many others) took that to mean Trump, if elected, was going to attempt to stay in power forever and not follow the democratic process of elections anymore.
In a Fox News interview with him a few days later, Laura Ingraham was like, yo man, just like please clarify that you didn’t actually mean you are going to crumble democracy if you get elected. And in super Trump fashion, he just said other words that didn’t mean anything and weren’t coherent sentences AT ALL. So of course Dems doubled down and were like, SEE! WE KNEW IT!
The way I see it is this. Trump said a dumb thing at a rally because his head consists of nothing more than five tiny raccoons frantically pulling levers and pushing buttons and “You’re never going to have to vote again” just seemed like a cool thing to say at the moment. And then it came back to bite him. But he never redacts anything because that would be “showing weakness” I guess?? So the raccoons in Monday’s interview with Laura Ingraham glugged down several shots of espresso apiece, pulled every lever and pushed every button at the same time while simultaneously shooting off confetti cannons and several t-shirt guns trying to win back support and made the whole thing worse, which is to say Trump Trumped all over the place, as he usually does.
But also, five tiny raccoons should not be running the country and I think we all know that and are very worried, which is why the media takes these crazy statements and says, “See, this guy is planning to destroy democracy!” Because if we don’t do that, the five tiny raccoons will run this country!