Since The Pitt first came out in 2025, many critics have embraced the term “competency porn” to describe the appeal of a show that, on paper at least, might not seem like an especially enjoyable watch. In each episode, viewers are exposed a vast array of injuries and illness. The chaos of the ER feels overwhelming and exhausting. The show isn’t glamorous or soapy. The doctors are serious people committed to doing their jobs well. And it’s been a stunning success—a show that is propulsive, heartfelt, and so committed to moral truths that criticism of the series usually comes back to how the writing can, at times, be a little didactic, offering viewers plainly stated morals over ethical ambiguity.

But is competency truly at the heart of The Pitt’s overwhelming appeal? I argue the real reason so many have tuned in every week is that watching physicians painstakingly clean a patient’s wound is that it acts as a cultural palate cleanse. The Pitt’s emergency room offers an antidote to a prestige TV landscape dominated by shows like The White Lotus, Succession, and Industry, about self-involved narcissists. Instead, here’s a serious show, equal parts heart-wrenching and funny, about characters who are so deeply devoted to caring for others that they sometimes forget to care for themselves.

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In second season of The Pitt, the work of caring for others isn’t portrayed as easy or aspirational as the term “competency porn” might imply. It’s depicted as both meaningful and draining. Each character wrestles with bodily and mental exhaustion. There is little time for rest or attend to personal concerns or to even take a break to eat or use the restroom, as more and more patients are wheeled in and all the computers go down.

Over the course of the season, Dr. Robby, the senior emergency attending physician, evolves into an increasingly thorny main protagonist. Though deeply devoted to his patients, he is also shown to be increasingly reckless. His sabbatical plans involve a helmet-less motorcycle journey, the details of which he refuses to fully share with his colleagues. “I’m not sure I want to be here anymore,” he tearfully confides to a close friend. As tensions rise over the course of the day, Dr. Robby struggles to retain composure, increasingly lashing out at his fellow physicians rather than meeting situations with the grace and empathy he prides himself on.

It’s a daring move. To insist on the complexities of care is to demand that we see it as a skill. To do their job effectively, doctors must set aside their own personal traumas to focus on the emergency at hand. When engaging with a patient, they must be practical, pragmatic, maybe even a little cold. They focus on the body, not the soul: how fast is the pulse? How much oxygen in the blood? They need emotional distance to look at a gaping wound and not just start sobbing.

This is the opposite of doomscrolling. At a time when social media has conditioned us to sift through portraits of human suffering quickly, numbing us to their full effect, The Pitt instructs us to not just see the humanity in every injured body, but to stay present with them.

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Nowhere is this clearer than in episodes like, “No Time for Goodbye” where we watch beloved patient Louie die after having a pulmonary embolism. It’s a harrowing and heartbreaking scene as we witness doctors who love Louie rush to try and save him. When they fail, the camera doesn’t stop filming. We watch nurses clean and care for the body and prepare him for viewing. “May his memory be a blessing,” Dr. Robby says, invoking the heartfelt Jewish expression of mourning, while the newest nurse on the team tentatively reaches for Louie’s hand.

This isn’t frictionless “competency porn” created to reassure viewers that responsible adults exist; it’s deeply human storytelling. Throughout the show, we see how doctors and patients aren’t perfect, that real-life choices are marked by their complexity, and that actions have consequences, many of which are irreversible. If the show moves you to action, it’s not because you’ve been manipulated. It’s because the narrative invited you to pay closer attention.

I would argue that it’s also the show’s insistence on hope that has stuck a particular chord with viewers. At a time when we are often given two storytelling options: cheerful comfort viewing to zone out to, or emotionally exhausting narratives that highlight a slew of social and cultural problems, The Pitt both refuses to eschew complexity, while also resisting a culture of despair. In the final moments of Season 2, we watch Dr. Robby cradle an abandoned infant, “You’ve got so many wonderful things to see and so many people to love ahead of you,” he says, as the little one drifts to sleep, and Robby slowly starts to reimagine his own future.

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An odd feeling sets in when you’re watching an old movie and the details feel relevant to today. I don’t mean that it addresses the general, timeless themes of life and the human condition; I mean the story speaks specifically about the way we live now. Characters in dated costumes talk as if they’ve been looking over your shoulder as you scroll on your phone.

Recency bias plays into this. We go into a movie with a head full of ideas and anxieties. Sometimes we watch to forget about whatever is on our mind. Other times we need movies to make sense of our uninvited and untamable thoughts; to polish the lens we can never lift.

Still, prescience is striking. When a black-and-white movie describes how you watch Instagram videos, or when a voice from a cloud of Aqua Net outlines a reckless political project that’s still underway, it can bring about a feeling of hopelessness. Nothing changes. We had the diagnosis and we let the illness spread.

In this case, I’m thinking about two movies—Ace in the Hole and Network—that shone the projector’s light on two of our most malignant tendencies, namely our love of the lurid and our willingness to ignore the goals of the whoever feeds that love, to the point that we’re numb to anything except titillation and revulsion. Watching these movies again, I’m not so sure about that metaphor I just used. Maybe they didn’t diagnose a disease, they described our basic biology.

These movies were released a quarter-century apart, the first seventy-five years ago, when the television was more novel than the iPhone is today. They portray the audience’s craving for violence as a social ill and the media’s willingness to provide that violence in an abstracted, easily consumed way as cynical. They make the audience complicit in the most craven acts, up to and including murder. The message can’t be missed, but it can be ignored. And it was. The way we lived then is the way we live now.

Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal the endings of the two movies.

Spoiler alert, part two: There’s a tiny bit of hope at the end of this piece.

The world of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is cluttered with newswire machines, typewriters, and pre-interstate tourist traps. But the happenings of this world are familiar.

The journalist Charles Tatum, played with arrogant menace by Kirk Douglas, has been chased out of every New York newspaper and is trying to remake his reputation in Albuquerque. When a man taking artifacts from abandoned cliff dwellings is trapped under a fallen rock, he becomes Tatum’s titular ace in the literal hole. Tatum hypes the story. He fudges details to make the man seem more sympathetic, spreads rumors of a curse, and pushes the rescuers to use a slower but more visually dramatic method to get the man out. Soon the desert is full of onlookers—other newspapermen, radio broadcasters, and hundreds of civilians who camp next to their cars.

There’s not much to say about seedy journalists now because there aren’t many actual journalists left—seedy or otherwise. And Tatum isn’t a stand-in for the news writ large (Wilder himself had been a newspaperman before he started making films). Tatum is the sensational side of any media—a side seen still on TV and in text, but now largely reserved for social platforms. He’s after attention and nothing else matters. He’ll do whatever he can to get readers and to keep them excited. He would’ve used memes had they existed at the time. He’d have a subscription offer with exclusive interviews and the paywall popup landing just as the story gets good. Other hustlers would have follow-along podcasts.

Tatum doesn’t give the crowd the truth, he gives them an abstraction of the truth, one where death is real but the person dying isn’t. The trapped man becomes the story of a trapped man; one story among many, with many more to come. “It’s a good story today,” Tatum says. “Tomorrow they’ll wrap a fish in it.”

The public gives Tatum the fame he’s after and asks for more spectacle in return. The rescue scene becomes a media circus and a literal one, with carnival rides for the kids and stands selling snacks. Does the crowd realize what’s at stake? They must; that’s the drama of the situation. But this doesn’t stop their party. Through layers of Tatum’s interpretation, what was once a life-and-death struggle becomes something like the ferris wheel or the hot dog cart—another distraction to enjoy while you can.

In 1976, Sidney Lumet’s Network dropped an office full of Tatums into the world. Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen sees the world as a TV show—a drama that follows a predictable narrative, full of stock characters and rattled only by shocking, visceral novelty. Success—of a program, of a life—is measured in ratings. When aging newsman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, says he’ll take his life on air, the ratings climb.1 When he begs for a chance to go on the next day and apologize, he again goes off-script and says his earlier outburst was because “I just ran out of bullshit.” He then puts a finer point on it: “Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living.” Beale spent his life in front of the camera, but he’s come to believe he wasn’t informing his audience, he was pacifying them—offering a vision of the world that fit in their living rooms and didn’t bother their day-to-day lives.

The network doesn’t care what Beale says, they care about the reaction he gets—hundreds of thousands of phone calls and millions of viewers. When Beale next goes on the air and tells his audience to open their windows and scream “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” Christensen smiles from the control room. “We struck the motherlode!” she says. She knows people are mad and she knows it’s more valuable to give them a place to vent than to give them a way to solve their problems.2 As long as people can tune in every night and be angry, it doesn’t matter what they do.

It all unravels when Beale gives his audience a target for their feelings. He tells them to block a buyout of the network’s parent company. This leads the head of the network, Arthur Jensen, played by Ned Beatty, to warn Beale that he has “meddled with the primal forces of nature.”3 That is, he has stopped distracting the audience and instead encouraged them to upset the operations of the corporations that run the world. Jensen continues:

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

…

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Inspired, intimidated, and in the throes of a mental breakdown, Beale focuses his rants on Jensen’s message, telling the audience night after night that the individual doesn’t matter anymore. Ratings tank. People know they’re mad, they don’t want to be told the brutal truth of the world. Christensen and her colleagues arrange to have Beale killed on air so they can get more viewers. The truth is boring. Death gets ratings.

Like with Ace in the Hole, the target of Network’s satire is hardly the powerhouse it once was.4 But also like Ace in the Hole, the precise target is less important than the primary message. The network to worry about today isn’t a news network—it’s a social media network (a remake of Network might be called Platform, but there’s no need to update the film). We all carry around a medium that lets us provoke or be provoked—to make ourselves mad as hell or to shout about it. This is how our boredom is amused.

The most deft users of the platforms aren’t journalists or news networks, as the news business’s continued decline makes clear. The modern Tatums and Christensens are the trolls who build up their numbers and names through truth-bending provocation. The modern Jensens are the tech leaders who make money selling ads against feeds that are full of this provocation, as well as ample distraction and the occasional video that is, essentially, a snuff film.

And this is where I think something is breaking.

Over the last few years, these apps have increasingly offered views to killings—often state killings, police and other law enforcement ending lives; the act captured on camera and presented as Content to scrolling eyes.

As this happened, an odd type of conversation became common. It went something like, “I know there’s a video of a person being killed. I know it’s in the news. But I can’t bring myself to watch it.” This is untenable for a society. A person used to be able to go their entire lives without seeing another human being die. Now it’s hard to go a month without it. And some number of people feel a kind of democratic obligation to witness a person taking another’s life, to replay clips of human beings being shot or choked or otherwise maimed. All of us who are online have had to take a stance on whether we watch these clips or not. The apps that present this video to us take no stand. Views are views. Death gets ratings. And the ratings are even better when some portion of the audience can write off their viewing of snuff films as an activity on par with watching the news.

But just because the images are raw doesn’t mean they can’t be twisted. On one side of this, an industry of right-wing trolls solidified its strength by abstracting the killings until they became stories they could spin and use to their own ends. The story they tell is a false one that explains the killing—justifies it. Their posts spread easily among their followers and easily among their opponents, with screenshots moving messages from platform to platform. Trolling won elections. Provocation is now an official communications strategy. Government departments call people—living and dead—nasty names and repost memes with roots in racist and violent movements of the past. When a killing happens, thousands of people insist the video doesn’t capture what it so clearly captures. A quote from 1984 (“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”) regularly goes viral. 1984 feels just as prescient as the movies I’ve covered here. Another prescient book, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued that it wasn’t Orwell’s 1984 we were living in, but Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the public welcomes its oppression by unplugging from reality and opting for distracting entertainment.

But on the other side, something else happened. Something more hopeful. For some viewers, the footage was too raw to be abstracted. In the 1990s, Jean Beaudrillard argued that the Gulf War was so made for media, it wasn’t a war at all. The violence online is so clearly real, it can’t be mediated. With each video, even the most privileged or isolated avoiders of information could no longer ignore what they had long heard was happening. There was no need to watch each successive video of murder: Knowing that it not only happened, but happened in plain sight, captured by onlookers, and that it happened over and over with little to no consequence, revealed a truth that overwhelmed any attempt by bad actors to abstract it. The upsetting reality is no foundation for a spun-up narrative. And even the attempts to spin seemed like II transparently callous.

This growing portion of the viewing population got mad. They didn’t stop at Beale’s suggestion to yell about it. They marched. They voted. They called for action. Black Lives Matter protests grew. ICE’s deadly crackdowns in American cities have brought thousands of people to the streets, even more so after more videos of killings spread. Agents killed eight people in the month of January.

There have been shifts before, or bumps in the road of infinite scroll amusement. This time seems different. We’ve been scrolling too long on some big company’s platform to trust them anymore. Seeing the scenes of violence, and then seeing the attempts to spin them, makes it too loud and too clear that there’s a contempt behind it. Tatum and Christensen clearly despise the audience—they think the average person is dumb and just looking for distraction or maybe a little jab to be riled up. You can see it in the trolls today—they have no respect for their fellow human beings. They value others so little, death is only another way to fill up their feeds with commentary. Every event is an attempt to boost their ratings.

As a journalist, I always dreaded meeting a Tatum or working a Christensen. Their contempt and cravenness is off-putting, but what’s demoralizing is the fact that there’s a big business behind it. The network in Network justifies its actions in part by saying it gives the people what they want, but this is revealed to be an excuse; the real justification is that it makes money for the shareholders. Seeing people act like these villains without any motivation beyond attention is even more disturbing. What drives a person with only their phone to spin the news, abstract death, and chase ratings? If this is human nature, then it’s a tendency the social media age has fed and let fester.. Now, I can see signs that the moral rot is like the violence of daily life, and has become too much to ignore. The path away from it is clear. Tune out the trolls. Log off from the platforms.

The sick conflation of clout with power can’t stand under the real weight of serious politics, driven by hundreds of thousands of people marching and hundreds of thousands more using their devices not just to doomscroll, but to donate for supplies and support. Too many lives have been taken. Too many doors burst in with military gear. Too many people are unwilling to be told that individuals don’t matter. They know individuals matter, and they know individuals are stronger when they act together. The distractions that put layers of abstraction and trolling onto real life can’t keep hiding reality. The platforms that once were a soothing soma now reveal what’s been the case all along. The truth isn’t on the screen, it’s in the street.

At the end of Ace in the Hole, the trapped man dies. The drill takes too long to reach him. Tatum doesn’t hold the information to write a story and scoop his competition. He doesn’t try to build it into some kind of narrative to play with the emotions of the gathered crowd. Instead, he goes to the top of the cliff and delivers the news, then gives his last update to the crowd.

“The circus is over.”

We’re thrilled to share our conversation with cultural critic Eileen G’Sell on her first book of nonfiction: Lipstick. We discuss the many meanings behind the iconic object and how attitudes towards lipstick are shaped by time, culture, and, of course, the TV, films, and music videos we grew up with.

When we are initially introduced to Eleven in the first season of Stranger Things, we meet a child who is terrified. She walks barefoot in the woods in a torn hospital gown. She breaks into the kitchen of a diner where she finds a basket of fries that she shovels into her mouth with both hands. The first grown-up that Eleven meets provides food but also calls child protective services, a dangerous predicament for El, who is trying to escape.

In these early episodes, we learn that it’s mostly well-intentioned adults who are under the illusion that you can trust authority. The kids understand there is only one chance for real safety: finding your friends.

One of the triumphs of the early seasons of Stranger Things is its commitment to presenting childhood as equal parts tender and terrifying, a sentiment common in the ‘80s media the show emulates. Children’s narratives in the late twentieth century embraced grittiness: characters, often parent figures, died. Sometimes children did too. The moral lessons in complex children’s tales like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, The NeverEnding Story, The Land Before Time, and The Secret of NIMH are tenderhearted, but also haunting and sad.

I think one of the reasons that Stranger Things struck a chord with a wide audience was how well it captured this honest and authentic look at childhood, a mood that seems in direct contrast with today’s increasingly chipper children’s media. I don’t mean to suggest that upbeat programs with clear moral messages are without merit: the brand of emotionally resonant tearjerkers that Pixar and Disney regularly produce are often insightful and genuinely moving. But they also portray a sanitized vision of childhood, less wild, less complex, and maybe even less true.

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When I think about my own childhood, I remember finding discomforting narratives captivating. Stories like Where the Red Fern Grows, The Giver, and The Last Unicorn resonated because they didn’t feel like they talked down to me. Instead, they offered an opportunity to confront challenging emotions in a safe imaginative space. Like the best classic fairy tales, these stories resonate because they show us the real, imperfect world that exists under the veil of fantasy.

In early seasons of Stranger Things, viewers are welcomed into a similar emotional landscape, where we are confronted by the monsters from the Upside Down, as well as an array of real-world problems ranging from schoolyard bullies and absent fathers to the frightening unethical scientific experiments that El and many other captive children are desperately trying to escape.

In more recent seasons of Stranger Things, the tone shifted from introspection to action. The result is a show that eschews the heart of the ‘80s media it strove to emulate, embracing a 21^st century superhero universe instead. There were more characters, more fight sequences, more big bad villains, and more speeches about good triumphing over evil. One of the biggest missteps was shifting away from the main cast (who, in fairness, were no longer children by the time the final season was in full swing) to a bunch of kidnapped children we knew so little about that they seemed more like the idea of children than actual characters.

These new children irritated me because the more time we spent with them, the less we spent with our original protagonists, especially Eleven, a character who I always felt was the heart of the series. From the start she was unique: tiny, feminine, odd, with halting speech patterns and a love of Eggo Waffles. Season 5 often flattened El, reducing her to her trauma. But El was a beloved character precisely because she was more than her history. El was brave, kind, and funny. In the end, she was willing to sacrifice everything to protect her friends.

We don’t hear Eleven’s voice in the end. Her story is taken over by Mike, as he weaves a tale of why he believes she ultimately survived. It’s a touching tribute as well as an appropriate end to the game he and his friends have been playing since childhood. We watch as our heroes, now young adults, give up their beloved basement for a younger generation. In these final moments, Stranger Things returns to the ‘80s media that inspired it, offering a satisfyingly unsettling moral: that nostalgia comes as much from willfully forgetting the past as it does from remembering it.

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“I deleted it,” Linda said, looking over my shoulder as I scrolled Instagram on the bus, lingering only for as long as it took to register which friend’s snapshot I was seeing and feel the associated pain of either FOMO or comparison. When I instinctively went to looking at Reels from strangers, I knew I needed to follow Linda’s example.

I deleted Instagram.

For a few days, whenever I pulled out my phone, my thumb uselessly tapped the blank space on my homescreen where the app used to be. I reinstalled and re-deleted it a couple times, telling myself I needed to promote a new article I published or keep up with the zeitgeist, only to lose half an hour to scrolling and realize I’d accomplished neither goal. Then I found a way to get my fix—the browser. When I sat down at my desktop computer to work in the morning, I gave myself ten minutes of Instagram-dot-com on Safari. After a couple days, I stopped using the full ten minutes. After a week, I stopped looking entirely. The experience was so bad, it erased a decade-and-a-half of earned charm and habit.

I almost wrote this essay without the paragraph you’re reading now, where I explain why I wanted to quit Instagram. It seems self-evident. I gave the app too much time and attention and it didn’t give me back anything except distraction. I didn’t feel connected to the friends whose posts I saw. The clips from strangers ranged from forgettable to insipid. And the few pieces of actual information I got were pre-digested and ripped off from original reporting that appeared on a different website. But only the time-wasting was clear when I was looking at my phone. It took a big screen to see the whole truth.

Instagram was made for the phone in a way other social media apps weren’t. For years, there was no way to access Instagram without installing the app. There was no website to log into. There was no iPad version, either. The app was phone-first, phone-only. It was the type of choice design obsessives (like me) like to praise—giving up reach for dedication to quality.

In those days, the app was, like a lot of the iOS design, skeuomorphic; the icon was inspired by old Polaroid photos and scrolling was like looking through a stack of instant camera snapshots. The photos were small and usually hard to decipher, owing to the limited resolution of the iPhone camera and the messiness of the filters users applied.1

These limitations made Instagram the coolest of the social media apps. Facebook was filling up with family members, Twitter was never as fun or funny as Twitter users thought it was, but Instagram was where photographers, artists, and designers went to hang out. Through a sale to Facebook (Meta), the addition of video to compete with Vine, and the prioritization of video to compete with TikTok, Instagram abandoned restraint and lost its cool. It dropped the clever design and anything else that was appealing to a higher aesthetic sense and became just another app that was streamlined to gobble up attention.

This result is obvious when you look at Instagram on a bigger screen. There is no charm, just a black hole pulling your attention to it. But shown at a new proportion, the pull is weaker than a dying Roomba’s. Instead of commanding attention, it sputters a weak suggestion.

As soon as you open Instagram on a phone, your screen is filled with a moving image, which catches your eye and invites a scroll. If you don’t scroll, you can tap on the stories from friends that float above the first image. Your thumb moves up and down or left and right, feeding Content to your eyes. This opening is the same on a browser, but static space overwhelms the screen—a menu to the left, a half-dozen options for stories, and a lot of white emptiness. Navigating it takes moving your entire hand, placing a cursor, and purposely clicking.

The image is easily ignored for reasons of size and subject. The video seems out-of-proportion to the screen…which it is. Instagram videos, like most videos on mobile devices, are vertically oriented. Instagram used to make every image square. Vertical video was a matter of debate in the early smartphone years, but became standard with TikTok. There are a few ultramodernists and technologists who like to say vertical video should be the standard because it’s how people watch. A few contrarians might be bold enough to assign some aesthetic virtue to video shot in portrait mode. These arguments come across as either fearful resignation or symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome. Vertical video is a format of necessity that rewards users’ inattentiveness and sacrifices a visual grammar that has been honed for over a century. Even when the picture is small, the eye can’t fully grasp motion pictures that are significantly taller than they are wide. Horizontal video conveys information more naturally. Instead of making something worth the mild inconvenience of rotating a phone, posters go for whatever is safest, easiest, and likely to rack up views. It’s a design choice that sacrifices artistry so users don’t have to use their wrists.

Image aside, the Content itself is, for the most part, awful. Reels run through the same few meme formats for jokes and utilize the same buggy background removal software. Even worse are the non-jokey posts, in which someone directly addresses the viewer and speaks literally and without nuance. Most of the time, in my experience, this person is commenting on an article or a trend—they rehash something the New York Times reported and then add their own interpretation at the end, or they explain some psychological concept (usually one they cribbed from Wikipedia) in an attempt to diagnose a cultural ill (usually one they’ve noticed briefly on Instagram and not in real life, such as real life still exists). If these takes were written out to be read or to be the narration for a more put-together video, they would fall apart as weighty pronouncements are stacked on flimsy logic. Otherwise, the videos are news, which is to say it’s someone who did no additional reporting talking about an article that exists on a news website. There are a few good posters out there who prioritize quality, but the platform rewards hacks and underbaked pundits, and so it is full of hacks and underbaked pundits.

The phone softens the grating edges of the worst content. It makes the slapdash nature of the content seem almost necessary. The small videos seem big because they fill the screen. And even if you sit on your couch and scroll, a mobile experience suggests mobility—a portability that excuses looseness. But no part of the technology requires sloppiness. Users can edit videos on advanced software and upload their cuts to the platform (I’ve done this for many of the videos I’ve posted). The technology, does, however, demand constant posting to keep in the algorithm’s good graces. This discourages thought and consideration. Pleasing the algorithm means doing less to please the users.

More than anything else, the larger screen invites the realization that there’s more out there. The browser’s navigation bar lingers above Instagram on the big screen. You can type anything into it—another website, a search keyword, or a question that’s on your mind. Mobile apps don’t encourage this. At first, the smartphone was a portable connection to the infinite web. As apps proliferated, they put up walls. Apps didn’t link to each other or to the wider world. To follow a link on Instagram takes a series of taps that shift the entire screen. On desktop, it’s a couple clicks that only alter part of the overall display. You can easily leave. And the more often you leave, the less appealing it is to come back.

The wider web isn’t the same, though. It’s been diminished through neglect, laziness, and profit extraction. Designers and hosts have tried to make sites one-size-fits-all. Sites ask to send notifications, they push users to an app, and they offer AI summaries. They waste the space of the big screen and the time of the users who visit. Finding a site that’s well-made, respectful to its users, and fun to visit is difficult, but not impossible. Still, maybe the most tempting thing to do, when looking at mobile sites on a big screen, is press the shortcut to quit. Don’t just leave the site, leave the web. Go do something else. That’s what I ended up doing most of the time.

A few weeks into my experiment, I felt the need to post another link to an article I had published. I downloaded Instagram again, posted the update, and set a reminder to delete the app the next day. I didn’t need it. After my time away, the app wasn’t a place I wanted to be. The allure had drained from the little orangeish-pink icon (maybe my poor color perception helped me not want to be on the app). I kept looking beyond the boundaries of my phone, wondering what else there was to see.

The poster image for Pluribus depicts its heroine mid-scream. She gazes towards the heavens, but we can’t see the sky, only a garish yellow background. There are clues she is in free fall as her blond tresses float upwards. She looks angry and afraid, forehead creased, eyes wide open.

In the world of Pluribus, this face of defiance is also the face of hope.

Pluribus feels zeitgeisty for a few reasons. For one, this is a post-pandemic story about the impact of a “virus” that changes the way human beings feel, believe, and interact with one another. For another, it’s a story about what it means to feel alone in a sea of zombies, both the actual hive minded humans, and the surviving few who share hardly anything at all in common.

This is a modern kind of zombie tale, born of the anger and isolation that have been the defining emotions of not just the post pandemic era, but our increasingly technology obsessed culture. AI’s constant summarization of our thoughts, feelings, and ideas may look to some like progress: a more streamlined world that allows for greater efficiency and leads to better optimization. I assume there are some people who, like the hive mind in Pluribus, feel confident that these shifts are making the world better. For the rest of us, the cultural landscape has been overwhelmingly defined by grief.

It’s a profound social shift that feels crushing because no one has particularly good ideas for how to change it. You can try to resist by curating your information spaces and editing out talking points that feel particularly pernicious. You can quit social media, another form of curation that also leaves you out of popular discourse altogether. When I started to watch Pluribus, I began to realize I’ve been attempting to resist the zombification of information by becoming a ghost. I hover around different social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram, observing but not participating, an act I think keeps me above the fray of toxic discourse, but that also ends up making me feel passive. I don’t want to just observe the world. I want to make it better.

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Maybe that’s why I’ve been captivated by Carol and why I find her defiance to be exhilarating. She doesn’t care if the hive mind loves her or hates her as long as she can maintain a sense of self. Unlike many female characters who are predominantly shaped by personal traumas, Carol doesn’t give a shit about healing her private wounds. Her objective isn’t inner peace or escaping beauty standards or even dueling with the patriarchy. Her mission is to save the entire world.

I love that Carol’s scream is the iconic image of Pluribus. An angry female antihero is exactly what we need at a time when women’s emotional worlds are increasingly disregarded.

Just a few years ago, there was energy around the idea that women’s anger could be harnessed to create social change. Today, the discourse has shifted towards a different narrative: one that argues that women expressing sadness and anger are simply at the mercy of their biology. Social media is filled with video content poking fun of women crying and overeating in the luteal phase of their menstrual cycles, with many non-expert influencers offering women advice on how they can optimize their fitness and beauty regimens by taking into account their hormone levels.

To be clear, awareness about women’s cycles can be a good thing. Women are clearly eager for information about their bodies and how to feel healthy and happy at every age. The increased cultural attention given to perimenopause and menopause can be read as a necessary corrective to a culture that has historically demanded that women keep silent about their bodies.

But influencers obsessively telling women to check our hormone levels and attributing everything to our cycles end up selling women another idea: not just that the experience of being female is intrinsically fraught (that pain is “built in” as Fleabag’s famous menopause monologue argues) but that our emotional world isn’t really ours. Feeling sad or weepy or angry or anxious? It’s not that there is a lot to be upset about. It’s probably your hormones.

These talking points are sold as something new even though they aren’t. Tropes about how our biology dictates our abilities and desires have hindered our progress precisely because they argue (as Fleabag’s monologue does) that women’s biological reality renders us “machines with parts” rather than full people.

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I think that shows like Fleabag and books like Miranda July’s All Fours ignite healthy conversation about the female experience. But I’m increasingly concerned about the ways that social media flattens these discussions, often misinterpreting or misrepresenting science in order to secure views and sell us products that will “fix” us.

We see this not just on the obsession with female hormones, but the resurgence of extremely thin bodies as the beauty standard and the normalization of surgically altered faces at younger and younger ages. These trends fit into the current moment of feminist backlash in that they argue that womanhood is something that needs to be maintained and curtailed—big appetite? Stop eating. Unwieldy emotions? These are not just presented as unfeminine, but entirely antisocial. It’s why Claire Danes’ expressive 46-year-old face is seen as a hot button topic: Should a woman express so much? Or is the ideal affect one of peaceful compliance?

And then there is Carol, a female character who doesn’t care about being nice. She couldn’t care less about whether her feelings of rage are merited. In a sea of happy zombified faces, she takes her anger as a mark of individuality.

In true antihero fashion, Carol convictions are often marred by catastrophically bad choices. At times, she is sharp and assertive. At others, she simply comes across as short-sighted and petulant. Unlike the hive mind, which can only speak in cheerful and carefully crafted platitudes, Carol is only able to speak from her messy grief-stricken heart.

Just as in the time of Breaking Bad, our culture has an extremely low tolerance for imperfect female behavior and Carol’s messiness is too much for some viewers who express frustration as to why she doesn’t just drink the Kool Aid already. Isn’t her anger just making her lonelier and more isolated? Shouldn’t she be more curious about the hive mind and whether they are actually good? It doesn’t matter that Carol’s wife is dead and the entire planet is under threat of losing what makes us human. Even at the end of the world, some people think the most important task for a woman is to perform happiness.

In my peak years of following new music, I was sometimes so disappointed in a new release from a favorite artist that I would wonder if they had always been bad, and I was only now noticing. It took a nervous return to the catalog to find reassurance (or in some cases, confirmation). I get the same feeling when I see a new Simpsons episode. It doesn’t go away until I stream a good one.

Lately I’ve had this feeling about the internet.

It’s harder to look back on the “good” years of the web. I can browse the Internet Archive for saved sites. I can pick up the book of Suck.com essays that I spent months looking for from used booksellers (I see there’s also a book of posts from The Awl but international shipping is a little too much). These remind me of what was on the internet, but not of the experience of using it. Besides, the goal is imprecise. When were the “good” years? When Twitter wasn’t a sewer? Before everything was video? When Google Reader was still active? (My answers: no, yes, a hundred times yes).

There is no explaining that old experience—logging on and knowing there was bound to be something fun or interesting to look at. Maybe I’ve given it away with my phrasing. “Logging on.” Nobody logs on anymore. We are on. All the time. That, perhaps definitively, is when the web was best—when it was a place you went instead the place everyone lived, worked, shopped, and had nervous breakdowns, all at the same time.

This is the web I’m reminded of while reading the posts in Talking Points Memo’s 25^th anniversary collection. It’s a history of the century, told through media—a series of essays about the web, how it changed, and how it changed us.

It’s no nostalgia trip, though a few posts made me feel wistful. Jeet Heer writes about the blogs that shaped public opinion against the Iraq War, a media and technological convergence that happened just as I reached voting age, and an era that is burned into my mind the way anyone’s late teen years are. Elizabeth Spiers’s piece captures what was so exciting about that time, beyond politics. “Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication,” she writes. These two pieces give a good picture of the web in the first decade of the century. The technology was transforming the world, yet using it sort of felt like goofing off.

A few other posts in the collection document what happened to blogging. It wasn’t the advance of technology that destroyed a world that was imperfect at the time but seems utopian now…It was money. Social media took the traffic and destroyed the incentive to start a blog (while also siphoning off writers’ thoughts as soon as they formed, rather than giving writers space to sit and coalesce their thoughts into something more than a funny tweet). And the most interesting sites went away for the same reason local newspapers did—private equity bought them and treated them like “widgets, endlessly interchangeable in the service of maximizing shareholder value,” Megan Greenwell writes.

Where there weren’t buyouts, there was buy-in, specifically to the business model of big tech (which we called “big” at the time, though compared to its world-conquering size today, it was tiny). In his series-opening piece “The Original Sin of Digital Media Was the Belief That Digital Journalists Were Part of the Tech Business,” TPM founder Josh Marshall writes that news doesn’t work like tech or finance:

There just aren’t network effects and there’s no lock in. There’s no feature of news consumption by which one news source gets better or cheaper or more useful because everyone else is already using it. If anything, quite the opposite. There’s always a different way to cover the news, a different style, a higher or lower tone, a different ideological outlook. You’re never going to invest in the right news start up and it totally explodes and suddenly it owns news like Google owns search or Stripe owns credit card payments.

Out of the ashes of so much odd investment and reader distraction came the internet we’re in now. And there are two pieces in the TPM collection that lay out the equally unavoidable pros and cons of our current state. Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket argues that independent journalism online is like the alternative media of previous years, though it’s focused on individual writers instead or organizations. This creates “something of a petri dish for narcissism,” Kabas writes, but it also ensures accountability:

The thing about going it alone — on journalism as a personal brand — is that there is no one to hide behind: The buck starts and stops with you. If you screw up, it’s your reputation and your livelihood because the product you’re selling isn’t just words; you, for better or worse, are the product, as well. There are many who might find that prospect horrifying — and there are certainly days when I wish I lived in a cave with no Wi-Fi — but in the end I’d rather answer to the regular people paying for my work.

There is power in an individual. This was a lesson of the early blog years, too. But the biggest difference now is that writing online is necessary for anyone who wants to write, and asking for money for that writing is necessary for anyone who doesn’t have a day job and wants to eat (hello, it’s me.) Ana Marie Cox makes the case that the patron system isn’t enough. For one, it pushes individuals to pay a la carte for what they might’ve had in a bundle before. There’s just not enough subscriber money for every writer to live five-dollars-at-a-time, unsupported by editors, colleagues, and insurance plans. Second, it too easily pushes writers to do the same kind of click-chasing that made the years of the social web so annoying. A person isn’t a site, and the chase can lead a writer to become a caricature of themselves—a distorted personal brand streamlined for salability instead of trust, information, or any of the other reasons people read news (or used to read news, anyway). “In a system where your income depends on performing as yourself regularly, at scale and on schedule, the temptation to shape yourself to what’s rewarded is impossible to resist,” Cox writes.

For every journalist like Kabas who maintains their integrity, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who aren’t interested in being journalists and never had any integrity to begin with. They’re extremely popular. It’s still possible to find the good writers and reliable sources, follow them, and support them. You have to do this if you want to support writing that matters. It takes work.

Was it always this bad? No. There were bad things and people online, sure, but they were more easily avoided, and they had less power and were less essential to the business model of the platform. Not being confronted with the depraved depths of the human psyche every few minutes surely contributed to the sense of fun and hope of the old web. And regular encounters with people pursuing something other than money or power could restore your faith in other people.

The web gives us everything now, and doing so, it’s erased the sense that it was once possible this platform could give us anything.

That’s the feeling I’m still chasing.

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In this episode, Arielle and Gabe speak with Andrew Bertaina, the DC-based author and professor, whose most recent book, Ethan Hawke & Me, explores his love for the Richard Linklater trilogy and how his appreciation for the Before films has expanded with time and new life experiences. We talk about the unique power of the films we grew up with and why revisiting films can be just as impactful as watching them for the first time.

Links:

Buy the book

Andrew’s website

The Theory of Receptivity and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke’s Face by Michelle Orange

The first time I went to Las Vegas, I was twenty, on a trip to a convention for my college’s broadcast news club. The city’s famous sins were legally unavailable to me, but ubiquitously offered and indiscriminately targeted—slot machines at the airport gate, waitresses with trays of free cocktails, and sidewalks lined with discarded flyers for strip shows.

Because gambling was at a legal and geographic remove (and because Las Vegas tourism marketing was effective) it retained a reputation in my mind as the most elusive and therefore most indulgent of the vices. Bars and strip clubs are everywhere; gambling took a vacation.

The gambling that was available to me—the lottery—had an air of either desperation or hopeful frivolity. I knew of people spending paychecks on gas station scratchers and I knew of office Powerball pools where buyers-in dreamt of making enough to leave the office for good. Both were fantasies.

Twenty years later, the fantasy is everywhere. The Supreme Court threw out the federal ban on sports gambling in 2018, giving states a new taxable revenue stream and sports books a high-tech opportunity. Billboards for sports betting apps line highways the way strip club fliers covered Las Vegas sidewalks. Fast-talking hosts pitch apps on podcasts, running through lengthy legally required disclaimers about risk and addiction. Ads are especially prevalent on TV during sports. Essentially every ad break in a football game features at least one spot for a sports betting app, usually with a celebrity spokesperson. In what would otherwise be editorial, gambling is an area of coverage. Analysis shows have segments sponsored by DraftKings or their competitors and pundits frame games according to betting odds.

Gambling has become the default second-screen experience.

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Besides betting apps, the other major advertisers are pharmaceutical companies and insurance. Taken in constant, large doses, the message to millions of Americans delivered in every broadcast is plain: you’re sick, you’re in danger, you can get rich.

Betting isn’t just augmenting sports. The casino is everywhere. Prediction markets like Kalshi let users bet on political outcomes. Some pundits and politicians treat these bets as if they’re public opinion polls.

At first, the rise of gambling seems like a new level of fandom—if you like something, put your money into it. But I don’t think that’s the case. Few of the sports fans I know place bets—they avoid the temptation and ignore the ads. The political junkies I know despise the prediction markets. When I talked over the idea for this piece with Arielle, she mentioned how it seems like gambling has become the latest evolution of hustle culture. (Something we’ll discuss on an upcoming podcast.)

Gambling has become another way to use your phone to fill all your idle time chasing money. But the reality of the odds makes betting like a stationary version of working in the gig economy—the same low wages and climbing personal expense of driving rideshare or making deliveries. The fantasy also elides the fact that gambling on sports with any consistent success requires skill—one that takes a lot of study to hone, and even then is imperfect in the face of luck. I lived in Kentucky for years and developed an appreciation for horse race betting, which I was always terrible at and too impatient to learn to do. Everyone is able to gamble, few actually can. Our digital technology works against the careful contemplation required to do it right. People still do it, though. And they do it a lot. Reportedly, searches for gambling addiction help are on the rise.

Hustle culture, as it’s often described, doesn’t just imply that hard work will help you make a living. In its high-tech application, the idea is that constantly working will make you very rich, until you have the money to earn passive income and can stop hustling forever. Until then, if you’re not earning money, you’re wasting time. It’s not just sports shows—so much media thrives on this illusion. Streaming services let musicians upload their tracks with the implication that they may be the next great hitmaker. Social media sites suggest virality is one post away. Fan sites monetize your nudes. At first, all these seemed like democracy—ways of getting around the old guard gatekeepers. Now they seem like bosses. It takes millions of streams to make what a musician might’ve earned in a set at a local bar. Virality fades fast. Chasing money is chasing an algorithm’s favor. The outcome of a sporting even may be a little less random, but it’s no more controllable.

The advantage of betting is that at least it’s private. There’s no need to open yourself to the world to do it, no rude comments or down trend lines on the in-app analytics. There’s no bumping into an ex when you drop off a burrito bowl.

We all know the cliche of the middle-aged man at the sports bar saying he could’ve gone pro. Now he can sit at home and imagine he’s an expert analyst. No one can see the love handles, no one can doubt him. What happens on his phone stays there.

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When I first started teaching classes about the concept of empathy, I noticed something that surprised me. It was always the students who genuinely valued empathy who were the most emotionally equipped to navigate complex issues.

At first glance, this might fly in the face of the prevailing cultural narrative that empathy is for the soft. While it’s true that those who self-identified as empathetic were often tenderhearted, it quickly became clear to me that this propensity for deep feeling didn’t render them helpless. In fact, it was just the opposite. The most empathetic people were unafraid of putting themselves in someone else’s shoes. They not only saw understanding the full range of human experience as important, they were also completely unconcerned that it would shift their own moral compass. Their sense of self was not fragile. It was strong.

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I’ve been thinking about this observation as we continue to navigate a culture that is deeply ambivalent about empathy, with many criticizing empathy and others misunderstanding it. Series like Ted Lasso, Somebody, Somewhere, and The Pitt are often framed as powerhouses of empathy, when they are more rightly characterized as warm-hearted looks at good people striving to help each other. These shows make us feel warm fuzzies because they are digestible looks at kindness. But while comforting narratives can feel like an antidote for doomscrolling, they don’t always encourage viewers to practice their empathetic skills.

Back in 2018, I wrote that BoJack Horseman was the most empathetic show on television precisely because it illustrates the complexities of empathy through its multifaceted look at deeply flawed characters. Today, that empathetic legacy lives on in the smart, funny, and deeply strange world of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, the most provocative and compelling look at empathy on television today.

The show’s central claim is as simple as it is profound: empathy is hard. The premise is this: Nathan Fielder plays a version of himself who tries to help others navigate the uncertainty of life by helping them to rehearse scenarios ahead of time. The rehearsals are bizarre and hilarious. In one plot line, Nathan works with a woman who is deciding whether she wants a family and moves her to a house in upstate NY so that she can practice what the emotional experience of childrearing would feel like with a series of child actors and a robot baby. In another, Nathan asks pilots to act as judges for a fake music concert so that they can get more confident raising safety concerns during flights.

Like other cringe comedies, The Rehearsal revels in discomfort and part of the joy of watching the show is simply seeing what absolutely crazy scenario Fielder is going to come up with next. But the show’s true interest isn’t in pranks, but the human spirit, as we watch Nathan try and fail to achieve the kind of genuine human connection he desperately wants.

In one of the most moving scenes in Season 2, we listen as Nathan laments his inability to effectively perform sincerity in a way that makes a person more than a number, before watching him try to strike the right emotional cord with teenage girl who is auditioning for his fake music contest. He listens to her play guitar earnestly, before letting her know that she will not be moving forward in the competition. The young hopeful is on the cusp of tears despite Nathan giving a heartfelt affirmation of her potential. When she exits the room, she is invited to give feedback on Nathan’s feedback, rating its usefulness on a scale of 1-10. Nathan eagerly runs out to see how she has judged him. He nervously unveils the quickly scrawled result, revealing either a 6 or a 9, depending on how you hold the paper.

Later in the season, we watch as Nathan tries to follow in the footsteps of a pilot he admires, only to suddenly realize that no matter how closely he tries to replicate the life presented in his subject’s memoir, there are still things about his internal emotional world that remain opaque. To handle this murkiness, Nathan begins to insert his own interpretation, theorizing hilariously that the song “Bring Me To Life” by the band Evanescence, played a much bigger role in the story than the pilot himself ever suggested.

Both storylines are not only striking, tender, and funny, but they also ask probing questions about the nature of empathy and whether our attempts at human connection are really an elaborate performance. While The Rehearsal often pokes gentle fun at the people participating in Nathan’s elaborate schemes, the show isn’t interested in punching down. Nathan clearly loves the people he clumsily tries to help. It’s his own struggle for genuine human connection that is the quiet heartbeat of the show.

This gulf between what a person feels and how they can effectively convey it is a central theme in empathy studies. Do we need to literally feel what someone else feels to connect with them? Do the social niceties we use to navigate emotion convey sincerity or is simply an elaborate social performance that some people are naturally better at faking than others?

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I find these questions eternally fascinating, which is probably one of the reasons I think The Rehearsal is so captivating. But another reason I love the show is that I identify with Nathan’s empathy anxieties. I think a lot about what other people might be feeling. I ruminate on my social interactions, and I spend a lot of time wondering how other people feel. The longer I study empathy, the more I worry about whether I am getting empathy right.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so resistant to portraits of empathy that seem easy and why Fielder’s show strikes me important. In the world of The Rehearsal, every attempt at connection, no matter how surreal or quirky or cringe, matters. It’s a reminder that without some empathy failures, we might not be able to connect at all.

“Neil Postman is having a moment.”

I’ve heard this phrase in conversation at least four times in the last month. Postman’s most famous work, 1985’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, pops up in newspaper stories, books, and podcasts. The book’s argument that TV was dumbing down public discourse and turning all information into entertaining distraction has been proven correct so many times that the author now seems like a prophet. 

When I wrote my own book about the hazards of technology (due out next year!), one of the first pieces of research I reached for was my paperback of Amusing Ourselves to Death, the second or third copy of the book that I’ve owned in my life. 

We writers who reference Postman (WWRP) tend to apply Postman’s key points about television to our phones (and to the phones of other people…especially those phones). This is rich territory. The dominance of video online makes the comparisons easy. But Postman’s warnings were relevant to the web long before our current pivot to video. The dumbed-down discourse and desperate distraction that Postman saw in the TV news of the 1980s didn’t leap online with YouTube. It came in through news websites. 

A few key points from Amusing Ourselves to Death:

1. Beginning with the telegraph, the fast transmission of information across long distances created “the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity.” This is inherent to mass media. In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin quotes the founder of French newspaper Le Figaro saying that to his readers, “an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid.”

2. Postman writes: “Entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure.”

3. Postman spends a chapter on the phrase “Now…this.” Newscasters repeat it to mark the end of one report and the start of the next. “There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, ‘Now…this.’”

My path to being a WWRP began when I studied Postman in college. This was mostly limited to broadcast journalism classes. We watched a lot of local TV newscasts that proved Postman’s point. There were stations reporting on freak accidents from cities hundreds of miles away—irrelevant to the station’s audience except for the chance to show gruesome pictures that would be forgotten by the time the late show started. There were stunts that tried to make a dry story fun. Usually these involved visual aides and were done by either the station’s stock “wacky” reporter or the station’s “troubleshooter”—a name for a reporter who did faux-investigative stories that often solved one person’s problem but left an institutional issue unaddressed (because institutional issues are too complicated and thus never mentioned). And there were the constant stories built on fear, usually about something that would kill you—hot dogs, an ingredient in your household detergent, etc.

If other schools taught journalism this way, then a lot of students weren’t paying attention. When Michael Jackson died in 2009, I was covering a city council meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. As word spread, one of the TV reporters left the meeting before an important budget vote because he had to get video of kids moonwalking outside of a Q’doba across town. 

Not long after, I noticed this same style of reporting online. Local TV news websites translated the broadcast to the web. They had shocking footage and terrifying tales of new deadly threats pulled from distant stations owned by the same corporate monolith.

Local sites that weren’t affiliated with TV stations did the same sort of thing—they ran stories that weren’t local and weren’t particularly enlightening, but were entertaining. Many local newspapers at that time had already been bought up by larger media groups, so they had a well of wild and entertaining stories from around the country to share. 

Startup news sites soon copied this style. They ran blaring curiosity gap headlines that read like teasers from the local TV news. They shaped stories into easy-to-parse listicles. The economics of the web fueled an insistence on a national focus for every story, with reporters only visiting a community if it was the center of a controversy, the site of a disaster, or if there were some really great pictures. Sites embedded strangers’ tweets the way TV news would talk to a few onlookers and cut their comments into the final report. 

This style owes some of its trashiness to print tabloids, too, but the point of a tabloid was to sell you a paper. The point of the website was to get you to click, and click again and again and stay in an ad-filled funhouse for as long as possible. This could be done by publishing stories about relevant topics that are written to be read in their entirety, but that’s costly and difficult. Instead, sites cluttered their columns with links to related stories, often inviting a reader to go look at something else instead of finishing an article. It’s the modern-age “Now…this.” No time to contemplate, no time to think. Just click and scroll.

It’s not surprising that the same techniques that got ratings on television would get clicks online. And I see why so many publishers went along with this strategy. The numbers are enticing. I worked in newsrooms in the early years of the social web, and it was easy to imagine that we were doing a public service. I know that as an editor I approved a few stories that made me silence my inner WWRP. When our ever-present Chartbeat dashboards showed a story was getting a lot of clicks, it felt like we had figured out some kind of secret code; we knew the formula to get attention. If we had to run a few silly stories in order to get traffic to our serious news website, so be it. If we had to make serious stories seem frivolous, then that was what it took to get attention. Over time, the distinction between the serious and the frivolous was impossible to see, let alone convey to the audience. 

Times have changed. The clicky text and listy articles of the last decade is now Millennial Cringe. Everything is video…again. And it’s worse than it was before. 

When TV news was dumbing down the discourse, there were alternatives. There were still people who read newspapers and magazines or had other ways to get information. There were still newspapers and magazines in existence. The fact that TV was popular and getting more popular was bleak, but there was hope. 

The number of people who get their news from social media keeps growing. According to a Pew study, the platforms that are growing the most are the video-centric ones: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. WWRP tend to focus on this fact. We’re so distracted by this scrolling that we’re ignoring everything else. But what I find more bleak is the fact that any other way of getting information is vanishing. 

Publishers who pivoted to podcasts five years ago are now making those podcasts into videos. News websites are full of videos of interviews and story summaries. GQ’s feature on David Letterman is a “video cover story,” essentially a long interview. This is fine if you want to listen to a conversation, but what if you want the analysis? What if you want to read words written by people who write professionally, instead of watching writers try to perform for cameras. Because video inherently requires performance. 

When asked on The Press Box podcast about journalists having to hold their own against people who are camera-ready and media trained, Zach Baron, the celebrity profiler who interviewed Letterman for GQ’s video, essentially said journalists need to level up and learn to do something interesting. It’s valid advice. It’s also the same advice journalists get every time their industry changes. Weren’t the wacky TV reporter and the overserious, faux-empathetic “troubleshooter” both adapting to the medium? Adaptation seems like the only logical choice, until we’re presented with an adaptation that’s too perfect—too smooth, too camera-ready, too lacking in the qualities that made the old style strong. By the time that happens, the entire industry has already shifted. What happens when these news outlets that are sacrificing text for video get the clicks and ad revenue they’re chasing? Words, articles, analysis, and ideas will fall away into a sea of videos that play in a tab we’re not even looking at. Market forces will have made us all trade incisiveness for talkativeness. 

And what happens if these videos don’t work? What if the numbers show that viewers drop out halfway through? Will there be any appetite to return to text, or will the videos just get shorter, more full of distractions, with new ways to keep someone entertained until the ads play? 

Whatever happens, a new generation will find another way to say that Neil Postman was right. 

Two things happen when a new Wes Anderson movie arrives in theaters, as The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson’s twelfth film, did last month.

First, I get excited. I like Anderson’s movies.

Second, I get frustrated. In reviews and in conversations about the movie, I come across the descriptor that will surely forever follow the director: Quirky.

Quirky is, perhaps, the adjective I despise the most. Even when it’s meant as a compliment, it reads as dismissive. It’s a sign of a surface-level interpretation, of disengagement in the face of deeper understanding; an allergic reaction to style.

I understand why Anderson’s movies are described this way. They have a distinctive look and feel—precise framing, Brechtian line delivery, meticulous costuming, precious-looking props. The movies tend to be comedies, or at least they have jokes and funny dialogue. Quirky seems like an appropriate word to describe the films’ erratic peculiarity. But “quirky” implies that peculiarity is all there is. With Anderson’s movies, beneath the squared shots and the precisely written lines delivered with flat affect, are ideas and performances that demand deeper attention. 

Take The Phoenician Scheme. One of the lead characters is grappling with visions of his death and the other is an aspiring nun whose descriptions of her beliefs come in short lines that emphasize the beauty of faith, even in the face of doubt or uncertainty toward organized religion. Global power moves between schemers, syndicates, criminals, and governments. No organization is to be trusted. Every person is more than they seem. 

Or Rushmore, a movie about an adolescent whose discomfort with his social station and profound loneliness lead him to fill his need for adult role models by play-acting as an adult himself. 

In “Asteroid City” a nesting-doll structure (the movie is presented as a television show about the production of a play) underlines the value of artifice in grappling with complicated emotions. 

But the style becomes the legacy. The Life Aquatic is an achingly sad movie that’s now largely remembered for the reddish-orange watch caps the characters wear. 

It was with The Life Aquatic, released in 2004, that the reputation for quirk took hold. It was Anderson’s fourth movie. The prior three (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) were certainly stylish, but the largely negative reviews of The Life Aquatic argued that style had overtaken substance as the motivating force in Anderson’s work. Roger Ebert used the phrase “terminal whimsy” to describe it. Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker that “we have grown accustomed to the unassailable claims of deadpan, although Anderson’s detractors might argue that underreaction, having begun as a show of hipness, has now frozen into a mannerism. What chance remains, they would ask, for the venting of genuine feeling? What would it take to harry these controlled characters into grief, or the silliness of bliss, or unconsidered rage?” Even the action scenes of that movie, Lane writes, were “lightly held within quotation marks.” 

2004 was perhaps the worst year the movie could’ve come out. It was the year of Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite, two movies awash in quirk that were immediately tied to the idea of Millennial Hipsterdom—the twee side of what would retroactively (and inaccurately) be called “indie sleaze.” Their aesthetic was a fad to grow out of. In Garden State, Natalie Portman’s character says that when she feels down, she makes a sound or does a motion no one has done before, just to feel unique. Meaningless noise is quirky. Portman’s character—an archetypical “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”—says she does this to feel original, “even if it’s only for a second.” That’s how long quirk lasts. 

Seen now, after eight more films from Anderson, The Life Aquatic does indeed mark a shift in the director’s career. It moved the action away from the roadside motel of Bottle Rocket, the private school of Rushmore, and the ‘70s-movie inspired New York of The Royal Tenenbaums and into a fictitious Mediterranean filled with elaborate boat sets, pirates, and abandoned island hotels. At the time, this is what read as a retreat into comfortable style—a decision to separate from reality and set every movie (with the exception of The Darjeeling Limited) in a snow globe. From the seascapes of The Life Aquatic, Anderson moved to the imagined island of New Penzance in Moonrise Kingdom, the fake European countries of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the 1950s southwest of “Asteroid City”, and the imagined Phoenicia of this year’s release. This is the world seen in the myriad parodies, the tributes on social media, and in the pandemic-era meme. It’s behind both the loving homages and the sneering dismissals. 

Anderson’s style is not purely for aesthetics, and his alternate worlds aren’t built only to escape the intrusions of technology like cell phones. Anderson’s worlds are fun-house mirrors more than snow globes. They are precious because they depict ideas that are fragile—childhood, beauty, wonder. The world is constantly at risk of being smashed. Like the actors in “Asteroid City” or the writers in The French Dispatch, the work of creation (a play, a performance, an article) is simultaneously a way of understanding the world and a defense against the inevitability of its destruction. 

When asked about the memes his work has inspired, Anderson told Mashable, “if it's somebody who's imitating me [and my work], but making the people just stoic, dead expression…I don't feel that's what I do. I wouldn't print [that] take, right?" His confusion is the difference between thinking about a work and simply looking at it. 

The pitfall of developing a signature voice is that people will recognize it. Once they do, they stop looking for anything else. They watch, read, or listen in hopes of finding a way to feel smarter than the work—even if they ostensibly enjoy it. This is how recognizable themes become “obvious,” how a logical plot becomes “formulaic,” how a style becomes a copyable meme. It’s how difference becomes “quirk.” 

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There is no winning with this audience. The way to stop their self-confidence is to make something beyond their understanding, which then becomes inscrutable, dense, or “weird.” 

As a description of art, “weird” is a bizarro cousin to “quirky.” Both are dismissive. Weird describes what the viewer determines is unexplainable. To say something is weird is to say it has a strangeness that’s beyond understanding. To call something quirky is to say you understand it all too well. Weird says “I don’t want to engage with this.” Quirky says “I don’t have to.” 

When faced with artifice, with a recognizable style, with a distinctive voice, or even with a charlatan’s pose…instead of dismissing it, ask why. Why is it like this? What appears to be quirk is, often, a style that makes it possible to deliver a message. It’s the language an artist develops to say something they have to say but may not want to say it in a straightforward way. 

Some artists are raw. Rawness has power. Elliot Smith (whose song “Needle in the Hay” is used to great effect in The Royal Tenenbaums) made raw and sad music. Iggy and Stooges—whose song “Search and Destroy” scores the major action sequence of The Life Aquatic—made raw and powerful music. Art can be a vent. But a person can’t live life in the nude. 

In the 2002 documentary Gigantic, John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants says he’s never wanted to “publicly cry” with his music. The band’s lyrics are dark, paranoid, and depressive—my favorite is a breakup song that includes the line “I’m going to die if you touch me one more time, but I guess that I’m going to die no matter what”—but the music is upbeat new-wave pop. Played any other way, the songs would be dirges. They would wallow. Wallowing has it’s place, but some feelings are too heavy to wallow in, they’re too dark to look directly at. They need a more inviting approach. 

I should say here that this grudge against “quirky” is partially personal. My own writing has been described that way. Pieces I’ve written on hillbilly-themed television shows or the history of eating squirrel have been called “quirky” as a compliment. Though I wonder if the complimenters read them. These stories were, respectively, about a conservative takeover of television as a backlash to the civil rights movement and about stereotypes of poverty in midcentury America. Should I have underlined the point more? If I had, would anyone have read them? 

What’s the alternative to artifice? Avoiding whimsy, detachment, or stylization isn’t just publicly crying, it’s limiting. There are a lot of tools an artist can use. There’s no one definitive way to deliver a message or to make a movie, just as there’s no definitive way to live your life or feel your own emotions. 

To critique Anderson for his style is to suggest that he should make movies that look different. Which is to say he should make movies that look more like a conventional filmmaker’s view of movies. In truth, Anderson’s films are no more stylized than Quentin Tarantino’s, but because Tarantino works in a different palate (call it realist, call it violent, call it knock-off exploitation, call it traditionally masculine, or choose any other descriptor/compliment/detraction to fit your taste) he’s less often subject to the same critique. 

To argue that Anderson, or any artist, is nothing more than a replicable style raises the question of why everybody else isn’t replicating it. If it’s so easy, so simply reduced to something anyone with a smartphone and some software filters can do, why is Anderson’s style still distinctively his? Attempts to do something similar—like Napoleon Dynamite or The Brothers Bloom—went the way of 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, and the other talky, violent pictures that followed in Pulp Fiction’s wake. There is something that makes the original into a classic (cult or otherwise) and the copies into also-rans. It’s something that can’t be dismissed. It’s a difference between the viewer who is attempting to outsmart the work and a work that doesn’t exist to be outsmarted.

Sometimes the work may not exist fully to be understood. This is one message I took away from “Asteroid City.” An actor in the play-within-a-play can’t understand why his character burns his hand. The writer who wrote the script doesn’t know either. He stops to question, then he goes on. We won’t always understand why we do what we do. Our own emotions confuse us. But we have to accept that this is part of being alive. And sometimes we have to pretend to do something else. 

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A few days before Sabrina Carpenter shared her original album cover for Man’s Best Friend, I went to the National Museum of Women in the Arts to explore their “Uncanny” exhibit, which featured an array of creepy and surreal works by female artists. There were wax figures of women who at first glance looked real, as well as a series of uncanny masks with real human eyes. One particular memorable installation was a large slab that looked like it had been stretched from skin. Up close it looked waxy and strange: two disembodied mouths slightly open, a faint trail connecting them that reminded me of an umbilical cord. The mouths looked feminine, vaginal even. A sign near the art shouted “DO NOT TOUCH.”

The pieces unsettled me, as they were meant to. I didn’t use my phone to search for what others were saying about them. I walked through the museum taking in all the art and letting my feelings marinate, even if that meant I didn’t have all the answers right away.

I thought about this experience a few days later when I first saw Carpenter’s now famous album cover. In the image, we see Carpenter on all fours next to a man in a suit whose face is hidden from view. She reaches for his leg with one crisply manicured hand as he holds a tangle of her hair in his fist. Carpenter is not looking up at him. She is looking at the camera. It’s a grittier image than her last cover, where Carpenter gazes lovingly at the viewer, a bright red kiss on her bare shoulder. Man’s Best Friend feels more vulnerable. Carpenter is known for her playfully sensual style, but the cover here feels less sultry than pornographic, less about sexuality per se and more about submissiveness.

I hated it upon my first glance. I’d been reading Sophie Gilbert’s riveting book Girl on Girl and found it impossible to place the Carpenter’s image in a context that didn’t raise my hackles. Gilbert clearly maps how much of the early aughts were defined by sexism that took away women’s power while claiming to offer women more freedom. I’ve written before about how much I enjoyed the humor and joy in Short N’ Sweet and resented moving from an image of femininity I found fun to an image I found concerning. I’d seen versions of this picture dozens of times, in ads, fashion spreads, even other music videos. Neither the images themselves nor the discourse surrounding them ever seemed to push things in a better direction.

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I found myself increasingly frustrated by the digital discourse too, even the takes I agreed with. Short form content, whether written or video, tends to focus on immediate emotional reactions and surface-level examinations of feminist concepts. There are no reliable forms of citation in digital discourse, which leads to a lot of takes from individual influencers, rather than generative conversations between and among experts. This creates a cultural climate where even the most discussed issues fade into mere background noise and the most interesting ideas get buried.

I’ve started to wonder if that’s the point—we can’t move forward if we’re constantly stuck in the same discourse cycles. So much pop culture analysis today is ill-defined, more interested in creating gotcha moments than having genuine conversations. This happened recently when some social media users complained that a 2024 image of Carpenter lying in the grass near a sprinkler, with some arguing that she was glamorizing pedophilia since the scene looked reminiscent of a scene from the 1997 film version of Lolita. Never mind that Carpenter is a 26-year-old woman and there is nothing in the image itself that suggests she is younger than her age. The way the picture might echo the 1997 film’s aesthetic is interesting, but the focus is on accusing rather than engaging in genuine analysis.

The problem isn’t limited to video content either. Today’s pop culture articles often offer the same breadcrumbs of analysis. In a recent article for The Guardian, a critic claims that Carpenter’s photo spread for Rolling Stone fits with trad wife zeitgeist of the current moment, “Carpenter in gingham lingerie, posing with a deer in the woods surrounded by flowers, makes the subtext literal: this is a male fantasy for men who do not like women’s independence, and she is owning it.”

Is a woman posing nude with flowers emblematic of the male gaze? Is it specifically “trad wife?” The constant reliance on pithy pop culture terms ends up flattening what could be a genuinely fascinating conversation about representations of femininity. It keeps us forever spinning our wheels, creating a climate where women’s rights are reduced to a fad.

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One way to tackle the “just vibes” echo chamber is to start to take our “bad” feelings more seriously. In Garth Greenwell’s fascinating essay, “Taking Offense: Reading Through Bad Feeling” he explores how having a negative response to a piece of art isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The key is that we must deeply engage it:

An initial, untutored response to offense is simply to shut down our perceptual apparatus, to refuse to see the thing that has offended us. Which means, if the art we’re responding to is interesting art, we may be shutting ourselves off from a value that, were we to engage with it, we might see as balancing out the pain of offendedness—or even, if it’s really interesting art, a value that is bound up with offendedness, a value we can only arrive at through offendedness, that lies on the other side of it.

For Greenwell, the opportunity to dwell in bad feeling is a gift that allows us to not just understand a piece of art more deeply, but to understand ourselves. This is what I think is the necessary next step for feminist pop culture discourse as well: to go beyond the outrage machine so that we can genuinely grapple with culture.

Since her Man’s Best Friend controversy, Carpenter has released a few alternative covers, one in which she is dancing in a room full of men who are turned away from the camera, and another where she is lounging alone in a room filled with flowers.

In the end, the original image does strike me as most impactful. The softer images of femininity that Carpenter draws on in her alternative covers don’t make me angry like the first one did. They also don’t have the same bite. Our digital discourse is intent on cycling through an endless array of hot takes. By confronting our own feelings about the cultural objects that haunt us, we better respect female artists who are navigating the same imperfect world we are.

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1. Time

I haven’t had a Diet Coke in over a decade, but if I ever look at the clock and see that it’s 11:30, I immediately think “Diet Coke break.” Then I hum the riff from Etta James’s version of “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” 

It’s the ad. I saw the ad dozens of times in its original run, when I was nine years old. Watching it on YouTube now, each frame is familiar. 

As a kid, I thought of the ad the way I thought of everything that was beyond my understanding—an image of adulthood to come. This is how adults look when they’re at work. This is what adults drink when they’re hot and thirsty. The subtler and muddier messages about sex and class went into my head even as they seemed to go over it. And like all the other media I gobbled up in my formative years, this ad surely shaped me in ways that are imperceptible but unavoidable today. But its most-obvious lasting legacy is an earworm that wakes up in midmorning.

I’m at the tail end of the generation that grew up with warnings about the idiot box warping impressionable minds. I was born the year Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death was published. By the time I was cognizant enough to operate the TV remote, the dire warnings of TV’s power had been proven so many times they were accepted as true, but the TV had become so dominant an instrument of information and entertainment that the suggestion we could do anything other than learn to live with it was absurd. Condemnations of TV had become something to make fun of, preferably on TV—a joke on Murphy Brown or the plot of a Simpsons episode. There was good TV and bad TV. The solution to the appliance’s mind-altering power was to have a sense of taste.

But knowing what to watch didn’t apply to the ads. They were always there, always fighting for attention. Before the days of the buy-now button, an ad had to stick in your head until you went to the store. Sometimes it stuck around longer, not just popping up in the soda aisle, but every time you saw a bead of sweat on an aluminum can, a construction worker on a break, or a woman with big glasses looking out of an office window.

2. Togetherness

You can’t choose what you’re nostalgic for. Nostalgia longs for a time and the feelings you had in that time. Any particular media or object is a trigger, not the target. Jingles are the sensory soundtrack. 

On a springtime walk with my wife, Linda, she said she often sees flowers and sings “fantastic flowers, made by me”—the jingle from a toy ad that was in rotation in our youth. When she said this, I immediately thought of the color scheme of the flowers—pinks, pastels, purples—and the grain of a CRT TV. I thought about being a kid. 

Every so often, I’ll come across a mention of the Pure Moods, a CD compilation of new age music that was aggressively marketed on TV, especially late at night on Comedy Central. The songs all blend together in my mind the way they do in the ad. 

But Pure Moods was art. Maybe it wasn’t my taste or your taste, but it was music meant to be enjoyed. What do we do with the jingles and the slogans that we never wanted to hear? The Big Red jingle is as tuneful as any pop song. I know I could walk into a room of my peers, sing “that Big Red freshness lasts right through it,” and get a rousing response of “your fresh breath goes on and on.” It would be like a retro karaoke night. The jingle wasn’t meant for this. A composer and musician worked hard on it, but they were selling chewing gum. There is no deeper message other than the longevity of Big Red’s cinnamony flavor. 

Is it art disguised as commerce or has commerce rendered art irrelevant? 

Does it matter? The song does exactly what it’s supposed to do, plus something more. It works in ways it was never intended to. 

It’s something to sing together to think about the old times. 

3. Trash

I knew the jingle and the dance, but I couldn’t have told you that Chicken Tonight was a line of sauces meant to be served over pan-cooked chicken. I always assumed it was an actual poultry product. 

But I could have told you that the dance was dorky. Even as a kid, I thought the documentary-style footage of the ad was suspect. Nobody likes groceries that much. My judgement was helped along by The Simpsons. In one episode, after a meal, the family’s grandparents remember Bart and Lisa doing a cute song and dance routine when they were younger, and push the kids to do it again. Turns out, it’s the jingle from a 1960s hot dog ad. After everyone joins in singing the big finale, Lisa asks “Doesn’t this family know any songs that aren’t commercials?” The family pauses, then does the Chicken Tonight dance.

A 2018 paper in The Royal Society Open Science journal suggested that chicken bones will be a marker of the Anthropocene age. Humans have bred chickens to a form that wouldn’t exist through evolution, and the ground around the world is full of discarded chicken bones. Would an alien archaeologist of the future think chickens ruled the earth?

YouTube is full of old commercials, usually ripped from VHS. The clips were caught on tape while someone was trying to record a show they wanted to see. Watching the old ads, seeing the wistful comments and the high view counts, it’s easy to feel like an archaeologist who stumbled into an ancient civilization’s long-buried trash heap. There’s value in what’s here, but there’s a reason these artifacts aren’t in a place of prominence or a tomb. We buried them, they weren’t buried with us. 

There aren’t that many jingles anymore. Ads are micro-targeted based on data mined over the last decade of device use. 

The space occupied by the jingle has been filled by the meme—another piece of catchy content meant for fast memorization. TikTok and Instagram are full of videos soundtracked by hooks from songs or clips of dialogue from an old movie or TV show, or that simply follow a familiar style and format. Users put their own semi-plagiarized spin on it, copying each other for clout and for fun. I have no doubt that in a few years, meme formats will be nostalgia fuel, infuriatingly and inexorably lodged in the memories of a new generation. 

This isn’t repeating commercials, but it is commodification. The person is the product, fitting into a market-ready package. There’s no point in complaining about it, though. Like TV, it’s already so widespread it just seems normal. 

Chickens rule the world. 

When we first meet Iris, we know little about her except the fact that she is a doting girlfriend eager to impress her boyfriend. But when another man at a gathering they attend tries to sexually assault her and she kills him in self-defense, we learn that she is not a human at all, but an advanced “emotional support” robot who is designed to love, support, and have sex with the man who purchased her.

Iris’s journey to self-actualization is about plotting a life away from being a mere toy for men, a common theme in films and TV shows that feature female robots. In films like Ex Machina and shows like Westworld, the female robot exists as a fetish-object to its creator. The hiccup that disrupts their “use” of these objects comes from the recognition that these man-made machines genuinely have the capacity to think and feel.

In these stories, the viewer is meant to emotionally connect with the machine woman rather than the person who owns her. Iris, played excellently by Sophie Thatcher, seems more human and multidimensional than her narcissistic boyfriend, who, in typical movie villain fashion, makes the odd, but narratively pleasing decision of tying Iris to a chair so that he can explain her backstory before destroying her.

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There are male robots in Companion, but it doesn’t surprise me that the film is explicitly focused on a female one. We have a cultural obsession with female robots, perhaps because, unlike the Boston Dynamics and TESLA humanoid bots, they are most often built with a human face. While the shadow of The Stepford Wives hangs over 21^stcentury female robot depictions, it’s clear to me that new robot “tradwives” unsettle us less because of the way they expose the patriarchy, than the fact they illustrate all the ways that modern technologies dehumanize even the most intimate of work.

Unlike the male coded robot, whose job often involves merely bringing a box from one end of the room to the other, the female coded robot ruptures the family. In Subservience, the nanny bot threatens because she is a replacement for the mother, both in terms of domestic tasks as well as sexual and romantic ones. In M3GAN, the artificially intelligent doll shifts from being a little girl’s protector and emotional confidant to becoming a violent and controlling parent figure. Both films make it clear that the robots are mere imitations rather than actual girls and women. And in a fun and campy fashion, viewers understand that real human survival may necessitate fighting back against these deceptive machines.

In contrast, both Companion and Westworld invite us to see female robots as victims of the system that created them. One of the most unsettling aspects of the Westworld theme park is the way that Dolores and the other female robots are designed to endure sexual violence, which is commonplace precisely because some men who “play the game” are actively seeking it out. And while The Man in Black seeks to dehumanize Dolores through sexual violence, her expression of terror at these habitual attacks is also what renders her real to viewers who can clearly see her pain and suffering

Companion makes a similar emotional bid: when Iris kills her rapist after he attempts to attack her, the viewer is meant to sympathize with her fears, rather than view her act of killing as unjustifiable.

In one of the most intriguing moments in Companion, the sole human female character explains that she doesn’t feel compassion for Iris. Rather, she resents her, noting that Iris’s very existence is a reminder that women are replaceable. One of the reasons I’m fascinated by depictions of women who create and buy robots is that it offers a counterpoint to the narrative that women are simply wary bystanders genuinely at risk of being “replaced.”

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In Tove Lo’s music video “No One Dies from Love,” for example, we watch a female pop star purchase a female robot who charms and seduces her female owner, only to be replaced by a new model. Annie 3000 resists the clichés that dominate our look at female robots. She is more androgynous than curvaceous and her sexual and romantic awakening comes after they stand eye-to-eye to one another. When Annie 3000 is replaced with a newer model, we see the way she rips out her mechanical heart as a commentary on what it means to be human, not what it means to be female.

Similarly, Doja Cat’s playful video for “Cyber Sex” offers a funny and subversive spin by placing herself in the mad scientist role. It’s a move that renders Doja Cat the conductor of her own erotic fantasies rather than the object of someone else’s desires.

My favorite depiction that flips the gendered script on sexbots is the Black Mirror episode, “Be Right Back.” In it, we watch a woman grieving her dead boyfriend end up recreating him through his online footprint, putting together photographs, emails, and other remnants he has left to render a bizzarro version of the real man she loved. At first her recreated partner is merely a voice, but eventually he becomes a lifelike robot that she uses for both emotional and physical intimacy. If the story centered on a male character who lost his partner and replaced her with a machine lover, the premise would feel less original. But the “gender swap” shifts the focus away from our cultural fears about the female robot so that we can focus on a more original meditation on grief, one that is simultaneously creepy and moving.

In contrast, Companion is less interested in revolutionizing the genre than paying homage to it. The film is most successful when it is being playful, and one of the fun highlights of the movie is when we get to see the robotic perspective of what it’s like to undergo the process of being “love linked” to an owner. Each time, we see a cheesy pre-scripted “meet cute” that allows the robot falls in love with the person who purchased it. In one example, we watch a robot stumble upon her true love in a grocery store when he clumsily causes an entire orange display to fall to the ground. In another “love link” story, a different robot meets the love of his life at a costume party where he accidentally steps on his true love’s dinosaur tail before breaking into a dance sequence.

Despite these original moments, Iris’s story of forging her own freedom remains frustratingly hemmed in within the conventions of the genre. Unlike Ex Machina, which brilliantly plays with its viewers emotions by presenting a female robot who is decidedly not human, Companion wants viewers to see Iris as a woman. By the end, save for her exposed robotic hand from where her ex burned her, the fact that she is a machine is barely part of the emotional equation.

Before all this talk of second screen experiences and streamers telling showrunners to dumb down scripts, there was a category of writers who catered to a half-distracted audience. I was one of them. I worked in news.

In college classes on writing for broadcast, professors encouraged us not to take attention for granted. Our audience was cooking, commuting, or chasing kids around to get ready for school. They weren’t intently watching the screen or staring at the radio speaker. But this wasn’t art or entertainment, this was the delivery of information.

Multitasking is, if not the reason for mobile media, then the secret to its success. Radio couldn’t survive without people listening in their cars. The Walkman, the iPod, the AirPods with their volume settings that automatically adjust to the noise around you—these are replacements for silence or the noise of the outside world. They are, as Shuhei Hosokawa wrote in the excellent essay The Walkman Effect, tools for giving control over the environment. 

Most phones didn’t have radio tuners in them. None played cassettes. And moving MP3s took a cable. When Apple dropped a dedicated podcasts app onto every iPhone, it made talk the competitor to streaming music. Before 2012, podcasting had been not necessarily nascent, but niche—time-shifted public radio shows ruled the charts, with public radio-esque reported shows close behind, Slate gabfests gaining ground, and a few independent chat shows in the mix. After iOS updates and the Serial surge, the medium had more fans and followers. Independent shows, programs made by upstart studios, and new ventures from established media companies took off. 

This year, the hosts of the film podcast Blank Check have been cheekily dropping jokes about “a decade of dreams”—a Disney-esque way of marking their tenth anniversary. The show started as a production of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv company and was, at first, only about the Star Wars prequels. It was partially a parody of Serial where the hosts investigated whether the trilogy made any sense, and the overall idea was in line with the gimmicky shows of the time (for instance, The Worst Idea of All Time, from 2014, followed its hosts as they watched Grown Ups 2 every week). It’s been ten years since the debut of the late, great Another Round—one of Buzzfeed’s forays into podcasting, whose Hillary Clinton interview helped establish the idea that candidates should go on podcasts during the campaign. This summer is also the tenth anniversary of the You Must Remember This season on Charles Manson and Hollywood, and of the debut of the British comedy show My Dad Wrote a Porno. The year 2015 in podcasting was a little like the early years of Prestige TV. There were a lot of shows out there, but the good ones had everyone talking. Except unlike with TV, almost anyone could try to make a podcast, and some of the best shows came from people who hadn’t made one before.

Then the money swept in. Most of it went to a few players for whom passion and desire seemed like less of a motivation to make a show than profit or boredom. Longer chat shows, political extremism, outright commercials (why does Trader Joe’s have a show?), and various celebrity “brand extensions” have crowded the medium, putting a lot of gilded chaff on top of the wheat. 

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Now podcasters are trying to make TV. Well, I use the word “now” a little loosely. Video podcasts developed along with audio podcasts, but YouTube was the more natural home for such shows. In the early years of the COVID pandemic, as bored homebodies recorded their Zoom calls for public release, they cut short clips to promote episodes on social media. These clips might be the funniest joke, the most scandalous remark, or whatever pseudo-philosophical blather a host found the most likely to be enlightening. It was so popular, faking an appearance on a podcast became yet another online grift. In a media world dominated by TikTok and short video, the brief video clip was a clever way to grab a new audience. 

I get it. I worked in public radio and for years we made “Audiograms”—short videos of animated waveforms paired to a clip from a story or show, with subtitles. The goal was to give people a taste of what we were doing in hopes they would sign up for more. We used animated waveforms, crassly, because a little bit of motion might catch someone’s eye in an infinite scroll. Audiograms never really worked to do anything other than get a bunch of trolls yelling at us as they took an out-of-context clip even further out of context. Video clips give a little more context, which makes them better as promotions.

But then the clips expanded to the whole show. The line between podcaster and YouTuber faded. Podcast studios have become video-friendly, with neon lights in the background, monstera plants, and other hallmarks of late Millennial home decor (plus a sponsor message or two). The hosts could be recording in the waiting room of a subscription-based doctor’s office, a medical marijuana dispensary, or an AirBnB in Austin. Other shows seem aimed at people with Stockholm Syndrome for the Zoom years. They’re a splitscreen of the hosts talking in their respective homes. This isn’t limited to home productions or amateur startups. More then two million people follow the Kelce brothers’ show, and the video of it looks like two guys getting ready to talk quarterly reports. 

I know the reason shows do this. They need an audience. More people are on YouTube than podcasting apps. Plenty of YouTube users put the video on in the background and focus on other tabs. It’s like TV news. 

But the difference with TV news is that, even though we wrote it assuming people were busy buttering their toast or figuring out what to wear, we wanted to find an arresting image—a reason to look at the screen, to pay attention to what we said and to use the full breadth of our platform. With radio, we tried to create “driveway moments”—stories that would keep a listener entranced enough that they would sit rapt in their parked cars, staring at the speaker. We looked for ways to more effectively deliver information. With video podcasts, the video exists just to exist. 

This fundamentally breaks what a podcast is. In this platform-centric era of media, moving to a new platform means adding a completely different audience, an audience with different expectations and different habits. The shows bend to appeal to people who aren’t tuned in. The fast food review podcast Doughboys (also now celebrating its tenth year) starts every episode with an invitation to go to YouTube. That is, the show opens by inviting the listener to stop listening. 

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The host of one of my favorite news podcasts recently posted to BlueSky, “ugh apparently we’re on YouTube now,” and attached a video clip of the show. This sums up the general approach a lot of podcasters seem to have taken with video. It’s just another thing they have to do. It’s a sign of the dire financial straits independent media are in that they need to try and compete on every possible platform, even those they don’t want to be on.

The reluctance reminds me of another trend I’ve picked up on. Early in podcasting, the host-read ad spot gained a new type of value. It was like the old-time radio and TV shows when a host took a little break to make a personal appeal for their favorite brand of cigarettes. For a long time in news, these were expressly forbidden. Having an arbiter of information selling a product was a betrayal of trust, an insult to the audience’s intelligence. I’ve never thought it was a good idea for podcasts to go down this road. Some boundaries should remain, no matter how good the money is. Lately, it sounds like a few hosts agree with me. In ad breaks, I hear snide comments and disinterested script reads. The hosts seem to want the audience to know they don’t really care about cookie-scented deodorant, vitamin supplements, or sports gambling (real sponsors for real shows). I hear hosts break the fourth wall and say “now here’s a call to action” or “the email says I should give you a personal testimonial.” 

Is any of this worth it? Is the money that good? Are the video numbers that big? Is it worth reading the YouTube comments and seeing the TikTok stitches? Is this why you want to make a show? On the one hand, there are endless celebrity and brand podcasts that sound like lazy cash grabs, and there are ideologues pushing bizarre and heinous conspiracies. On the other hand, there are good shows where the hosts seem bored, disconnected, and resentful of the demands of an audience they hope to attract. Who really wants to be making a show? Who wants to listen? 

Again, I get it. I get that this is what it seems like you need to do to be a podcast in the year 2025. But this is a situation that came about because everyone was doing more, chasing the same measures of success on the same platforms until everything took the same basic shape. I know the finances are tough on podcasts. It’s why so many are going to Patreon, where the pledge structure encourages shows to offer even more—another episode each week, longer edits, more work for hosts and producers. It’s tough competition and hard work. But in a time when everyone is doing more, one way to stand out is to do less.

In this episode, Arielle and Gabe discuss Derek Thompson’s article, “The Anti-Social Century” and what it means to watch TV in a time of increased loneliness. We discuss online discourse, fractured viewing patterns, doomscrolling, the joys of discussing the TV shows we love, the power of small talk, and strategies for how we can engage video content in more meaningful ways.

I feel like I should be more critical of the fact that The White Lotus has a ton of new merchandise, but the reality is I’ve been absolutely charmed and delighted by the array of items available for purchase.

I adore the Funko Pop figurines of Armond with a suitcase and Tanya on a scooter. I’m considering purchasing the official cocktail collection book, “designed to bring the elegant resort experience to your home.” I love the t-shirts and drinking glasses that feature the iconic White Lotus logo and am even considering the more modest purchase of themed Coffee Mate creamers based on this season’s setting in Thailand: Thai Iced Coffee or Pina Colada. My jaw dropped when I realized that some of the tie-ins are far more expensive. Banana Republic features a new White Lotus collection with tropical print maxi dresses, beaded bags, and a $50 bucket hat. Away’s White Lotus collection features limited-edition carry-on luggage in varying sizes. The tagline reads, “You handle the emotional baggage; we’ll handle the rest.”

As my friend and fellow Together, Alone commentator Gabe Bullard argues in his essay on why The Bear needs a cookbook tie-in, good merchandise can “work as a projection of taste.” I may love watching the occasional episode of Is It Cake? but I would never buy anything to advertise the fact. In contrast, a White Lotus purchase feels like an investment, one that not only showcases your prestige TV taste, but can also potentially help you forge connections with other fans.

As streaming has led to a more fractured viewing experience, I’ve come to appreciate how good merchandise can move conversations about TV away from our living rooms and into public view. And yet, marketing morally complex shows still feels complicated to me. When Mad Men was first airing, I worried that there was something insidious about the public’s obsession with the show’s sumptuous fashion. The magazine spreads that highlighted the gorgeous furniture and bold clothes of the time captured the glamour but also didn’t require that you grapple with the heavier topics embedded in the series. I was frustrated by how many viewers seemed willfully obtuse to the heart of a show about broken people adrift in a changing cultural landscape. The outfits and objects that were being sold often made the world feel lighthearted and nostalgic: didn’t the focus on fashion and party favors detract from the more pressing themes of the series?

These tensions are also illustrated in the recent discourse about the Anora Criterion Collection Box Set, which some view as salacious, and others view as precisely in line with the film’s frank story about sex work. The cover features Anora in a provocative pose with thigh high black boots and open legs. “Take her home” the Instagram ad purrs. I don’t dislike the Anora cover. I love how the film’s heroine is draped in her iconic red scarf, which functions as a central metaphor for the questions at the heart of the film: the same scarf that is used to gag her is also later used to keep her warm. But I was annoyed when I first read that tagline. It invites attention (sex sells!) without saying anything clever or interesting.

Perhaps this comes down to a bit of a defiant streak in me: I don’t want a company to tell me how to feel. It’s why fan art always feels richer and more inviting than anything a studio produces and why I’ve been especially captivated by the merchandise for Severance, which pokes fun at the dystopian world, eagerly offering up Lumon themed mugs and stationary, as well as novelty t-shirts and hoodies. The White Lotus merch is cheeky yet ultimately aspirational. Severance merch embraces irony in a way that not only fits the show’s ethos, but also ultimately feels more authentic.

So why do I still feel joy when I scroll through The White Lotus merch page? Perhaps it’s because I’ve become less of a cynic than I was when Mad Men was first airing. The White Lotus is a show that works precisely because the world it presents feels so seductive. I trust that viewers who adore the show are able think deeply about their reaction to that world and to also enjoy the simpler pleasures of a bucket hat or tote bag that proudly proclaims, “I love this show. Maybe you will too.”

Years ago, jet lagged and bound for home, I settled into my economy seat and put on the first movie that came up alphabetically on the in-flight options—2001: A Space Odyssey. I napped for the next hour or so and woke up when the drink service began. As the flight attendant handed me a coffee, he looked at my seat-back screen, smiled, and then with sarcasm that his French accent pushed to disdain said, “as it was meant to be seen.” 

I looked around the plane. Everyone else was watching something with either Captain America or Will Ferrell in it. 

I’ve heard plenty of friends and fellow critics talk about “airplane movies,” but nobody seems to have the same definition. Sometimes the term means a movie whose only cultural legacy is that it appears on in-flight menus waiting for someone to be bored or curious enough to watch it. These movies do not exist on the ground. If the term is used positively, then it’s a backhanded compliment; the movie is one a viewer wouldn’t watch unless they were stuck in a metal tube with nothing else to do for a few hours, but once they gave it a shot, they found it more enjoyable than sitting in silence. It’s cinema’s version of Stockholm Syndrome.

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The captive nature of a flight gives clearance to watch anything the airline offers, free of the need to keep up appearances. For almost a decade, this meant watching Marvel movies. After the 2001 incident, I noticed that, on every flight, most of my fellow passengers watched the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I joined them. I don’t know that I would ever have seen Tom Holland as Spider-Man if I didn’t have family overseas. The plane was a place to catch up on what had begun to feel like cultural homework. 

If a plane movie is homework, it can’t be a very challenging assignment. The cinematographical crimes of compressing Kubrick’s masterpiece to the size of a head rest aside, there’s something about a flight that pushes against the highbrow. The plane, like the airport, is a liminal space in society where typical rules don’t apply. Before every flight, I download a few titles on Mubi or The Criterion Channel to my laptop, but my aspirations remain in the overhead. The plane is a place where Fellini’s Satyricon is no match for a Shrek spinoff. Besides, I’m too nervous on a plane to watch something from my own device. Here I feel almost Victorian—what if there’s nudity, violence, or other visual strangeness that will make my seatmates call the steward? “Sir, Buñuel is for business class only.” 

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As Marvel’s fortunes (and quality) waned, I noticed more passengers watching Oscar-nominated movies on planes, especially around winter holidays. This, too, is a type of homework: The Academy Awards are still the one time when a large audience pays attention to movies, and a well-traveled viewer can have an opinion on the proceedings. 

On my last trip, I played catchup, too. I watched Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which I’d been meaning to see since it was new but couldn’t find on a streaming service I subscribed to, followed by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, because I have a longstanding obsession with the Turtles as a cultural phenomenon (evidence here, here, and here) and because I was visiting my niece and nephew, who had told me they liked it. I’d read good reviews of each movie, and was pleasantly surprised at both. I regretted not making more of an effort to see them in theaters.

Both Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret and Mutant Mayhem reminded me of another type of movie experience—the second-run theater. This is how I saw most movies in the first half of my life, at a steep discount a while after they left the big multiplex. In my experience, this was the best way to see a movie. The buzz had died down, the ticket was cheap, and the ambiance was purely about the movie. There were no bored teenagers, no awkward first dates, no one looking for the cachet of the new. It was low stakes.

There’s little that’s enjoyable about flying now. The airports are a mess, ticket prices are maddening, and it seems like the baseline level of rudeness is a little higher (shameless line cutting abounds). But the mutual understanding that we can pass the next few hours together in silence, enjoying a movie we could’ve seen months ago, makes even a crowded plane feel like a comfortable social space.

Just be careful reclining your seat.

When it opened in 1942, NBC’s Radio City building in San Francisco was a marvel. Visitors could enjoy air-conditioning and peer through lobby windows into the state-of-the-art control rooms. A mural on the art-deco facade “symbolizes the vast extent of radio and the unlimited service it gives to all the lands and all the peoples of the earth,” NBC said in a press release.

The building’s seventh studio, Studio G, followed an experimental design. Concerned that some guests might not be comfortable around all the broadcasting equipment, NBC decorated the space like a standard living room, with soft furniture, coffee tables, and even drapes. Talking on the radio would be like sitting in a salon, though one with more wires than in a standard home.

The need was short-lived. Within the decade, the age of TV arrived and soon, microphones were a regular sight. Filmmakers had long ago found ways to keep microphones out of shots—on booms above the frame, especially. This worked fine for TV dramas and sitcoms, too, but the nonfiction shows were on the street and in studios. There was no hiding the microphone, and there was no hiding from the microphone. Reporters held microphones in their hands in the field, late night hosts had one on their desk, game show hosts carted them across the stage to stick in contestants’ faces, and talk show guests wore them clipped to their lapels. The microphone was a symbol of authority—the person in control of the microphone was in control of the screen, the person on the other side of it was there to inform, entertain, or answer. 

Now we’re in another age. A new language is developing for a smaller screen. And the microphone has shrunk as well. A trend in social media videos is to use a microphone that’s comically small, barely holdable between two pinched fingers, or to clip a lapel microphone to anything other than a lapel. It’s a bizarre, confusing prop that betrays a deeper confusion built into the platform.

The modern TV mic took a while to develop. In his landmark 1960 documentary Harvest of Shame, Edward R. Murrow wore a microphone on a necklace (it kept his hand free to smoke one of his ever-present cigarettes—the smoke of which sneaks into interview subjects’ closeups at times). This is a lavalier microphone—its name comes from a type of French pendant. This gave way to the lapel microphone, clipped, as the name implies, to a jacket lapel.1 In other shots, reporters carried handheld microphones with boxy labels carrying the station logo. The industry name for the boxes is flags—they call attention to the microphone. 

In social media videos, the microphone evolved as well. At first, it wasn’t necessary. The mics on smartphones are generally good, and the lens is so wide that a person is bound to be close enough to get decent sound. Besides, external microphones for phones were wonky and largely limited to the media professionals who turned their phones into production tools (I tested various microphones and adapters in my time as a radio reporter). Amateurs making videos didn’t have a popular platform beyond the chaos of Vine or the already established world of YouTube. 

Then came TikTok and Instagram Reels, and the role of the Influencer was now to be in motion, making constant commentary. People who pivoted to video could often be seen holding the in-line microphone of their earbuds as if it were part of a TV reporter’s kit. This, I believe, is where the trend of a pinched-grip tiny microphone took hold. It was awkward to see—the speakers generally leaned in close into the mics, affecting an awkward and unnatural posture. Never mind that these microphones were made to detect a person’s voice when earbuds were worn naturally. And never mind that a default sign of discomfort in front of the camera in the TV language was a lean into the microphone—imagine the startled person-on-the-street on the local Action News, unsure of where to look and bending uncomfortably (and unnecessarily) toward a reporter’s outstretched mic. The effect was sound that was, most of the time, thin and clipped, worse than the phone’s built-in mic would’ve captured. But, occasionally, the closeness gave an ASMR quality to the speech. This must’ve been part of the appeal. 

 Soon, influencers found lapel microphones and clipped them to anything except a lapel, effectively making new shapes of microphones. A guitar teacher I follow clipped a mic to a small model guitar. A stereo reviewer clipped one to a vintage Snoopy toy. The effect is strange. It’s not clear why the host is holding something so close to their face. But this makeshift microphone brought confidence. As video apps took over social media, and as algorithms fed more content from strangers than from friends, the oddly-shaped microphone became as ever-present as the circular reflection of ring lights in the speaker’s eyes. 

It’s still a little jarring to see. The show Subway Takes pops up in my feeds a lot. I like it. The idea of a talk show set in a moving train has the anything-goes energy of the best of cable-access, and the conversations are typically funny. But the host and guests both speak into lapel microphones that are clipped to Metro Cards. In one video, a stranger asks what the host and guest are doing, because it looks like two people loudly talking into their transit passes. 

This style has now circled back to its inspiration. PBS and MTV accounts have shared videos featuring tiny microphones that are shaped to look like their larger old-school counterparts. In the PBS video, it’s strange—why, when a reporter is in a TV studio, is he effectively using a toy to talk to us? In the MTV video, the guest—Justin Hawkins from the band The Darkness—seems actively uncomfortable. The microphone is so small, the reporter’s hand has to be just inches from Hawkins’s face. One side-effect of the old, bulkier, TV microphone was that it allowed a reporter to stand close to someone without getting too close—think of Bob Barker’s wand mic on The Price is Right.

As a symbol of the new medium, the tiny microphone is oddly poignant. It’s small for a smaller screen, and the confidence and authority seem to be missing, too. It plays at imitating the media it’s replacing, but stops short. Sure, the days are gone when a television producer could command swaths of city real estate (the San Francisco NBC building is now a parking garage), but reach is power, and there are accounts who command more regular viewers than network news does today. That power, however, isn’t so much in the hands of the people making the videos as it is in the platform that serves them and the algorithm that controls it. It’s true that the networks could fire an anchor or a host any time they wanted, but the world of online video is far less stable and the algorithm is more demanding than any program director ever was. A single slip-up can lose an account its audience. No one needs to be fired to be erased from view. 

That uncertainty is clear in the amateurish effects and visual sameness that’s taken hold in social video. Tiny microphones, jump cuts, warped and pixelated graphics, inaccurate subtitles, haphazard background removal—these amount to some kind of style, I guess, but it’s not a style that communicates anything other than being in a hurry to follow a crowd. It’s not just that it abandons the basic elements of video production in favor of trend-chasing speed, it ignores the power (and if you’re civically inclined, responsibility) of having a platform in the first place. The new medium demands a new visual language. The one that’s being created is in constant retreat to corporate power.

Around the same time as the tiny mic trend began, another type of video filled my feeds. In these, the poster was talking into a substantial, professional microphone, looking out of the frame and an implied interviewer. These were fake podcast appearances—posters pretending to be on podcasts in order to give an air of authority. It’s another way of abandoning the inherent power of a platform to borrow credibility from another medium. 

The strongest social videos have their own type of confidence, and develop their own language. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie posts political analysis with a calm clear-headedness (while holding a wireless microphone at a comfortable distance). Jenny Nicholson’s four-hour review of Disney’s Star Wars hotel is, at first glance, the standard YouTube formula of direct address to the camera with cutaways and b-roll, but the clip is done with such preparation and research that it’s a joy to watch, even if you don’t really care about theme park hotels. 

The need for boldness is urgent. Style and approach shouldn’t be shaped only in pursuit of profits, however futile the fight may seem.  

In 1958, long after the living room radio studio was obsolete, and long after TV stopped being a novelty, Murrow gave a speech to a group of television executives. His focus was television’s role fighting "ignorance, intolerance and indifference.” It became an indictment of the medium’s direction. 

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire,” Murrow said. “But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.”