Somewhat tangential but also maybe not: Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" is a fantastic newsletter. It's consistently hilarious while explaining a digestible number of very real events in finance and tech. He regularly muses about the absurdities and appreciating the bumbling creativity of humans. As you might expect, he spends a lot more time on the topics that fit into those interests (i.e. the recurring segment "blockchain blockchain blockchain" about companies being founded around/pivoting to blockchain with seemingly no reason to use it vs. a database except for hype.)
Anyway, great writer and I'd encourage folks to subscribe.
Also a great writer, and this _is_ almost entirely tangential, but also maybe not: Jia Tolentino. "Trick Mirror", her first book of essays, came out yesterday and the first is an accounting of the internet and our collective descent into hell, the subsumption of self through social media, the irreconcilable promise of the web vs. its business model, our magnified sense of the importance of our own opinions, feeling good about saying things vs. doing the work (e.g. tweeting about politics vs. organizing; changing our profile picture to add an overlay for a cause vs. working to solve that issue; etc.) All of this in <30 pages. Stunning work of prose, somewhat depressing, and tightly delivered with measured sobriety vs. the performative outrage we've grown accustomed to (she also covers that.)
Going along with the tangent, if you're into recent essay collections (as someone who has been very much looking forward to picking up Trick Mirror myself), you might like Impossible Owls by Brian Phillips which came out last year. I wouldn't call it as focused as it seems Trick Mirror is, but I get a similar kind of vibe from their writing sometimes.
Thank you for the recommendation! I love essay collections and will pick up a copy.
I can't say that Trick Mirror is entirely focused, unless you're responding to my description of her prose which very surely is. The opening essay is on the internet, another on drugs and losing faith and finding faith and megachurches and Houston hip-hop, another on our obsession with optimization, another on the complexity of campus sexual assault, etc. The collection is broad and each essay is deep. (I feel quite strongly that I would read Jia's writing on anything—sawdust, pecans, lice, dry cleaners—and that compounds itself when she writes about topics both so weighty, so broadly applicable, and yet so personal.)
What I love about the collection is it feels the way Joan Didion's or DFW's best narrative non-fiction feels. That kind of awe at the writing, that unfurling of confident and thought-through storytelling, that kind of blossoming of connections that form the richness of life and intellectual inquiry. The difference–and for me this is somewhat personal and so perhaps not universally relatable but feels like it could be–is that, at 30, she is writing about our time. She's writing about coming of age in and with the world we live in now.
Didion writing about the sixties and seventies and Wallace about the eighties and nineties and two thousands are both beautiful and timeless and a masterclass on what greatness feels like in your hands, but there's something special about reading someone cogently weave personal experiences about AngelFire and Twitter and political extremism and Anonymous and the crushing weight of forever being "seen" and performing on the internet. Something special because we are living it now.
I feel about Jia—as well as a few other living writers; Caity Weaver's profiles come to mind—the way I didn't know to feel about other living legends. That feeling of not appreciating what you have because you think it will last forever. I think about when Mac Miller was still alive (less than a year ago) or when Lil Wayne was on top of the world with Tha Carter III or when Chance the Rapper still made good music or when Obama was president or when Jon Stewart was on TV or when Jobs was leading Apple. I didn't consciously stop and appreciate not only the work but to be alive to live it, and now that those times are gone there's only nostalgia. I'm trying to be more mindful of witnessing generational talent in the moment and Jia's writing feels that way to me.
Ha, no worries, wasn't taking a through line in Trick Mirror from what you wrote, but from the excerpts and reviews I've read elsewhere. I feel similarly close to her writing, in a specific way that's a bit electrifying when you initially have the realization of, "Oh! they also wrote that other piece I felt!", something speaking to your brand of existential experience drifting through now.
As for Brian Phillips, if you wanted to read pieces directly adjacent to some in the book, a few of the essays were adapted from freely available longform pieces he had already written. Sea of Crises[0] is very close to the in-book essay if I remember correctly, while the piece related to Out in the Great Alone[1] in the book is more of a side story. I'm a bit envious if you haven't already happened upon those and get to read the duplicative passages for the first time in the course of the book.
Also, I couldn't help clicking through to your profile given this aside (the quality and content of which I don't expect here) and I wanted to say that I appreciate the work you're doing.
Anyway, great writer and I'd encourage folks to subscribe.
Also a great writer, and this _is_ almost entirely tangential, but also maybe not: Jia Tolentino. "Trick Mirror", her first book of essays, came out yesterday and the first is an accounting of the internet and our collective descent into hell, the subsumption of self through social media, the irreconcilable promise of the web vs. its business model, our magnified sense of the importance of our own opinions, feeling good about saying things vs. doing the work (e.g. tweeting about politics vs. organizing; changing our profile picture to add an overlay for a cause vs. working to solve that issue; etc.) All of this in <30 pages. Stunning work of prose, somewhat depressing, and tightly delivered with measured sobriety vs. the performative outrage we've grown accustomed to (she also covers that.)