~notes~ (Vol. 9)

Watch “The Roosevelts” & mourn the loss of Adulthood in America

Mad’s Music Mix:

This week’s Music Mix was interrupted by the following message. Mad’s Music Mix will resume next week with the musical gems you will soon know and love. And now a word from PBS…

Watch Ken Burns’s “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History” on PBS. Don’t have a TV? That’s ok! You can stream it online at pbs.org at your leisure. This is some low-cal, low-carb, fat-free binge watching right here.

Jeff’s Journo Jems

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture [The New York Times magazine] A.O. Scott might be the chief film critic at The New York Times, but he also moonlights as one of the best culture writers of our time. When he pens pieces about popular culture, he doesn’t just focus on movies — it’s often a synthesis of TV, and books, and more. Here Scott uses the impending end of “Mad Men” as a jumping off point to talk about the presumed lack of adulthood present in American TV shows and books (specifically the rise in popularity of young adult fiction). But then he turns the whole thesis on its head and asks: Is our national love affair with youth a new idea in popular culture? The short answer: no. But it’s really worth the long read for the full explanation.

How I Rebuilt Tinder and Discovered the Shameful Secret of Attraction [BuzzFeed] I’ve not been shy about my intellectual crush on Anne Helen Petersen, an academic turned feature writer for BuzzFeed. And let’s just say this long read that looks at the sociology of Tinder is right up my alley — and I’m not just saying this because I also wrote a story about dating apps last week (#selfpromotion). Through a quick pseudo-academic study, Petersen discovers that sharing the same race as a romantic partner might not be the “ultimate confounding factor” as OkCupid founder Christian Rudder asserts in his new book, Dataclysm. Instead, she suggests it might be more about class.

From the Porch to the Street [Frank Chimero] If there’s one person that always makes me think, it’s Frank Chimero. I’ve linked to him in the newsletter before (see here and here, for the newcomers out there). This time he takes on the changing nature of Twitter from a social platform for the few in the know (circa 2008) to the megaphone-like structure of today. The post can be extrapolated to any social situation (virtual or not), where the question becomes: What happens when to the early adopters when something becomes mainstream? What I think I love most about Chimero’s writing is how he introduces me to so many thought-provoking concepts, from Christopher Alexander’s spectrum of privacy to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s evaporative social cooling.

Sun, Sea and Silver Service: What’s It Like Crewing on a Superyacht? [The Guardian] For the most part, reading about the uber wealthy is something I loathe. But there’s something about this story about the crews aboard superyachts (boats longer than 30 meters) that kept me sticking around. Perhaps it’s the fact that they gossip enough about their bosses to make the story interesting, but still remain remarkably veiled — for job security, of course, but also out of a peculiar code of silence across the industry.

Throwback: Take Picture [The New Yorker] Anniversaries, especially of tragedies, are always thorny topics to discuss. I grabbed dinner with Madaline this Thursday, and as we walked to the train, we both noticed two beams illuminating the sky to our south. It was September 11 and neither of us had remembered. Remembered probably isn’t the right word to use here. I feel like I’ve been conditioned to remember that day — at least more so than any other day I’ve lived. But there’s something oddly reassuring about the fact that Madaline and I thought of dinner last Thursday as just another early fall evening with crisp air and too much good food. That kind of mundanity — and even monotony — is what I enjoyed about this piece in The New Yorker, a collection of photos taken in the months leading up to September 2001 by a window washer at Windows on the World, a restaurant atop the north tower. In tragedy, we often forget the banal everydayness that used to occupy these places.