Emily Is Reading

For brides and grooms in their 30s, “Mr. Brightside” would have been a bop of their formative years — a time when late nights were spent chugging Four Loko, sweating through skintight American Apparel disco pants and making out with the wrong person (or knowing that, actually, you were the wrong person).

You gotta keep the process fun, keep your integrity in place about why this role was chosen at this moment, and make it about the experience, because you have no control over the outcome. Especially in this medium. It’s not like theater, where your talons are in the dirt and you can feel the audience and know if it’s working or not.

“Sometimes I think that the meaning of life is to not give up, to keep the resistance going even though the forces stacked against you are overwhelmingly strong.”

“As the time came closer, I began to apprehend an uncomfortable truth. The actual medical mystery wasn’t about anything inside me. It was whether the tests were going to point to some far side of this where I got my life back.”

I spend quite a few weeks fretting about this. Only after speaking with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a renowned bioethicist and disability scholar, do I understand exactly why this is so. The last thing I want to do is hurt Adele. So not writing about her would be consistent with this wish, in keeping with the benevolent spirit of the Hippocratic oath: I’d be doing no harm. Whereas I am trying to do good, a much riskier proposition. “The problem with trying to do good,” she tells me, “is you don’t know how it’s going to come out.”

Teenagers met in internet cafes to evade parental surveillance; students used them as study halls. Relationships, both digital and IRL, came to life inside internet cafes; scammers transformed them into the headquarters of international crime rings. Travelers and migrants logged on to reconnect with families and friends in distant time zones. Very few people ever bought coffee at internet cafes.

Listen to this and just tell me what you think. I have texted the man I’ve been seeing, “Good morning,” and sent a picture of myself half naked. That was more than an hour ago. Do you think he’s still asleep, or is he enjoying his advantage, making me wait? This “open” arrangement is supposed to liberate me, but I keep getting detained, wondering what he could possibly feel. One marries in part to renounce forever this particular kind of not knowing, this protracted misunderstanding.

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“I should be extremely polite,” can and often is tangled up with, “the world wants to hurt me.” “I don’t want to bother anyone,” can be entwined with, “I’m angry at everyone.”

Of all the plastic created, since mass production began, more than half of it has been produced since 2000. We can throw it away, we can fool ourselves into thinking we’re “recycling” it, but it will not absent itself. It will show up again, in the food we eat and the water we drink. 

The character of Dril is fluid, but taken as a whole, the blurry image starts to come into focus: It’s that of an easily agitated, overly confident, wildly crass, IBS-ridden middle-aged man thrashing away on a computer—probably a PC. He speaks in outlandish non sequiturs and engages with brands with unreasonable love and hate in equal measure. He is the dark, democratic promise of the internet—that anyone can use it to broadcast their opinions at any time—fulfilled.

Three people making TikToks pointing out offensive jokes on a show you made centuries ago and made over a billion dollars on should never have even reached your radar. Fire whoever sent it your way. Take your money and sip your Smart Water and stop inventing problems where there are none.

Oh, thank goodness, an easy one. You have no idea what I’ve been going through for the past 24 hours. I’m on my way to a vacation in Thailand fighting for my life on choppy wifi with nothing but the worst airport salad I’ve ever had in my stomach. It tasted like it was still frozen and was bullied by the other salads in the freezer. I desperately needed a “should I go back to my ex?” letter. Bless you.

"If falling in love doesn’t feel like a return to some tenderness that got kicked out of you in second grade, it isn’t the real thing – everyone just wants to be called “baby” by a person who means it."