This month on Together, Alone found us feeling scared, celebratory, and ready to revel in awkwardness. So, a pretty good February. Here are our essays and conversations from this month, in case you missed them.
We started with Gabe’s look at the decline of criticism, and what it says about the future of culture. “Ultimately, less criticism means less conversation about art. And when we limit how we talk about art, we limit what art is made. When we limit what art is made, we limit what we as a culture are willing to confront in our society and in ourselves. We limit our ability to think,” Gabe writes.
On Valentine’s Day, Arielle celebrated the “weird female characters” of fiction. The most recent example is perhaps Weird Barbie from the movie Barbie, but the character type has a long and glorious history. “The lady weirdo is not generally portrayed as malicious. Instead, her antics are often positioned as endearing, especially when her character is a child or young adult. Take Hey Arnold’s Helga G. Pataki, who bullies Arnold, but who has such an ardent crush that she literally keeps a shrine to him in her closet, the ‘football headed’ monument forged from Arnold’s already chewed gum,” Arielle writes.
And to wrap up the month, we talked about one of the weirder corners of recent television: the work of Nathan Fielder. Fielder has gone from parodying reality television to exploring its ethics and its role in society, all while making some of the funniest shows in recent memories.
We’ll be back in March with a new set of essays and conversations. If you have any pieces of culture you’d like us to discuss, please let us know. And if you know of anyone who might enjoy our work, please consider sharing it with them.