đ¶ Lostwave, Disney adults, and the globalization of ants
âHave you ever heard of Led Zeppelin?â
Hello, hello! Did you know that the Devil only has one nostril? At least according to some necromancers this medieval monk talked to:
(Iâm reading The Cloud of Unknowing as part of a Catherine Project tutorial. This chapter really isnât representative! The book is mostly a manual for Catholic contemplation.)
This transition is going to be a little rough, sorry.
The audacity of hopelessness
âAaron Bushnellâs Act of Political Despairâ | Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
This short essay on self-immolation and political desperation is very good.
Maybe Bushnell watched or read about the proceedings of South Africaâs case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. Perhaps he listened to the litany of atrocities that grew familiar as fast as it became outdated: the exact thousands of women and children killed, the precise majority of Gazans who are experiencing extreme hunger. That court ordered Israel to take immediate measures to protect Palestinian civilians. Israel has ignored the ruling, and the United States has vetoed resolutions calling for a ceasefire and argued, in another I.C.J. case, that the court should not order Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This was a government that Bushnell had sworn to protect with his life, subverting mechanisms created to enforce international law, including lawâsuch as the Genocide Conventionâthat the United States had played a key role in drafting.
We know that Bushnell planned his self-immolation carefully. He made final arrangements. He contacted the media. On the day of the action, he carried himself with purpose. His movements appeared rehearsed. Perhaps he dreamed that his protest would awaken a country that had descended into a moral stupor. Like Jan Palach, who ran down a street, and Ryszard Siwiec, who set himself aflame at a dance, Bushnell wanted us to see him burn.
Protect trans kids
âHow Libs of TikTok became a powerful presence in Oklahoma schoolsâ | Taylor Lorenz, The Washington Post
I would really rather not give this person attention in my newsletter (or my brain, for that matter), but the fact is that she is already getting attention from her base, and that attention is contributing to a hostile environment for queer kids in Oklahoma and across the U.S.
As Libs of TikTok, [far-right activist Chaya] Raichik has been blamed for sparking bomb threats, property damage, shooting threats, written and verbal harassment and other forms of violence against individuals, hospitals and schools across the country â including in Oklahoma, according to GLAAD, a nonprofit LGBTQ+ advocacy group. In her profile picture on X, she is holding a newspaper that reads: âwhen Libs of TikTok posts, threats increasingly follow.â
In a podcast interview this week about the violence that follows her posts, Raichik smiled and said sheâs proud of being called a stochastic terrorist â someone who inspires supporters to commit violence by demonizing a person or group.
âHonestly, like, that makes me feel really important,â Raichik said.
On Thursday, in an hour-long interview with a Washington Post reporter at a coffee shop in Los Angeles, Raichik said that âbomb threats are badâ and that she believes âpeople who call in bomb threats should be arrested.â But she said: âI just donât know â what does it have to do with me?â
A bugâs life
âThe strange and turbulent global world of ant geopoliticsâ | John Whitfield, Aeon
One thing about me is that I will always click on an article about ants. Is this due to the specific childhood trauma of reading Animorphs No. 5, The Predator (IYKYK)? Or simply that ants are endlessly fascinating? Because they are.
It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive.
In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known.
This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war â some even stowed away on the 16th-century Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. During the past four centuries, these animals have globalised their societies alongside our own.
No one knows that
âEveryone Knows That: how the internet became obsessed with lostwaveâ | Laura Holliday, Dazed
I really enjoyed this article about âthe most mysterious 17 seconds on the internet.â
Itâs late at night and youâre searching. For what exactly, youâre not sure, but perhaps something ASMR-infused â a video equal parts soothing and strange thatâll lull you gently to sleep, while reminding you of the vast expanse of the internet. As you navigate YouTubeâs complex warrens of âdarkâ and âunsettlingâ video essays, you see a familiar thumbnail crop up, sandwiched between playlists of unsolved true crime cases and Tumblr lore icebergs. An image of a hot pink boombox, set against furry cushions of the same colour, that wouldnât look out of place on a Depop Y2K listing. You click on one of these videos, and then you hear it for the first time: a low-quality recording of an upbeat, 80s pop song performed by a singer with an accent you canât quite place. The most mysterious 17 seconds on the internet.Â
The weirdest thing about the most mysterious 17 seconds on the internet is that you feel like youâve heard them before. Open up any of the thousands of videos about the unidentified audio clip dubbed âEveryone Knows Thatâ or âUlterior Motivesâ, and the comments are flooded with users claiming to recognise it. Itâs someone my dad went to school with. A band my sister used to listen to. My mum swore she heard this on the radio in Canada in the 90s. Ever since the snippet was first uploaded by user carl92 on Watzatsong in 2021, its eerily familiar melody has echoed across the internet, first finding its place in YouTubeâs library of lost media, before going viral more recently over on TikTok. There, videos dissecting its lyrics and describing it as a âparallel universeâ version of anthemic 80s hits like Madonnaâs âMaterial Girlâ, have amassed over 500,000 views.
As always, the epicentre of the mystery is located on Reddit. Redditor u/twinseylohan moderates the r/everyoneknowsthat subreddit â a rapidly expanding community of 29,000 sleuths who spend their free time searching for the origin of the lost song, suspected to be anything from an obscure Italo disco demo to a Japanese car commercial. Like many of the subâs other moderators, he believes that the appeal of âEveryone Knows Thatâ comes down to a sense of frustration around not being able to find something in a world where everything is accessible at our fingertips. âWith the internet, especially younger generations who have grown up with it, you have this notion that you can find anything easily,â he tells Dazed. âThen when you canât, thatâs a really interesting thing. Why can't we find it?â
The big cheese
âThe âDisney adultâ industrial complexâ | Amelia Tait, The New Statesman
Why mock âDisney adultsâ when you could realize that Disney has been in the business of creating lifelong consumers for decades?
Whether Disney adults are embarrassing or enchanting is largely a matter of opinion. What is missing from endless comment sections is the fact that they are a creation of the Walt Disney Company â a character constructed just as carefully as Elsa or Donald Duck. Disney does not hide its desire to create lifelong consumers. In 2011, Disney representatives visited new mothers in 580 maternity wards across the US, gifting them bodysuits and asking them to sign up for DisneyBaby.com. In 2022, the company announced plans to build residential âStorylivingâ communities across America, with special neighbourhoods for those aged 55 and up.
[Sarah] Rachul grew up in the 1990s, during the so-called âDisney Renaissanceâ, when Disney debuted a string of critically successful films and re-released its earlier classics on VHS. Merchandising reached new heights: 7,000 products were released to promote 1997âs Hercules alone. It was, Rachul says, âalmost like you couldnât avoid having [Disney] as part of your childhoodâ. She wept when she saw Goofy in the parks because the anthropomorphic dog was her late grandfatherâs favourite character, and her grandfather was her best friend. For Rachul, hugging Goofy was like having âthis little piece of my grandpa backâ.
Over the past 100 years, the Walt Disney Company has entwined itself with our families, memories and personal histories. In many ways, Disney is a religion that one is born into, the same way a 15th-century English baby was predestined to be baptised Catholic. Choice doesnât necessarily come into it â we see Mickey Mouse around us like our ancestors saw the cross; a symbol that both 18-month-olds and 80-year-olds recognise. But if we accept that Disney adults were created, rather than spontaneously generated, then why are we scrutinising the congregation instead of the church?
good idea right?
ââMom, Youâre Not Grunge Enoughâ: Olivia Rodrigo Fans Thrash in the Desertâ | Callie Holtermann, The New York Times
The NYTâs style section talks to Olivia Rodrigo fans about what they wore to her concert. Thereâs some interesting stuff in there about how a tour audienceâs aesthetic is created and reinforced. But mostly itâs just very cute.
For fans of Ms. Rodrigo, the current poet laureate of adolescent vulnerability, what was the look going to be? They arrived at the first stop on her worldwide Guts Tour already dressed in startling unison.
In the parking lot before the concert, fans waited in long lines in every direction â for the merchandise truck, for V.I.P. tickets, for porta-potties â each one a slow-moving runway show. Purple was everywhere. Butterflies, too. Many followed the singerâs lead in drawing from riot grrrl and grunge fashion from the â90s, like Lucy Elfelt, 14, who had some pointers for her mother on dressing to emulate a decade that only one of them had actually lived through.
âShe was like, âMom, youâre not grunge enough,ââ Alicia Elfelt, 49, said. âIâm like, my hairâs purple.â
Donât miss Olivia Rodrigoâs Saturday Night Live performance of âall-american bitch.â (And you know I mean it: Iâm a huge SNL apologist, but their musical guest recordings are usually ⊠not great. This oneâs electrifying.)
Until next week, hereâs Arthur.