The Top Ten Hate Reads of 2019

An End of Year Rage Retrospective

Internet trends are a lot like butterflies: baffling, floaty, intentionally showy little creatures with fleeting lifespans, and if you try to pin one to paper, you instantly kill it. In a year where memes are cycling through on a near daily basis, it’s hard to pull back and gain some perspective. It’s even more difficult with my beloved hatereads (all one word) because their existence depends on brief fiery emotions.

Nevertheless, I managed to scrounge up ten stories from this year’s dustbin of meme history that fill me with such passion, such vitriol, that it can only go by one word: hateread.

I’ve only been doing this two years, I can’t predict trends just yet, but 2019 was an off year for the hateread. This was the year of Cliff Wife, the year that guy tweeted out his screenplay idea and accidentally made enemies with MS-13, and most recently those dang social interaction scripts. We didn’t have time to hateread articles, we just hateread tweets instead.

But some…..oh, some we made time for. So let’s dive in, shall we?

10. A Jewish Wedding for Two Non Jews

Honestly, it’s a tossup between this and the White People Speak Out About Getting Married at Plantations article, but that had the rare modicum of self awareness in it, so this took the edge. The worst part about reading this, to me, was how much I saw myself in this couple, who literally romanticized every religious ritual in a Jewish wedding, turning what would normally be a secular hotel ballroom wedding into the Stars Hollow Elementary production of Fiddler on the Roof. I am not an expert in Judaism, I don’t pretend to be, but you don’t have to be one to get a grasp of what’s wrong. And if you are familiar with the customs, then you get the full extent of the wrongness.

I think I lost it when the groom, who like me is a cradle Catholic, said the following:

“I’ve . . . been to a Catholic wedding, and they just seem boring. It’s just like church,”

My dude. If your rituals are boring to you, don’t co-opt a minority religion’s rituals instead. Make up your own. Pour some sand into a vase. Touch rings like the Wonder Twins. Have a rap battle. Traditions have this sort of mystical quality about them because it’s something that has been done so many times before, so if you are seeking them out because they are new, maybe look elsewhere.

There are religious events that can be secularized. Many are. But adopting Jewish marriage traditions is not a “beautiful way to celebrate a marriage,” it’s a couple’s costume.

9. Millennial Man Who Lives His Life in the Victorian Era Never Swears and Wants a Date who Wears a Bustle

Here we see the rare Victorian Guy, a new breed of man who we thought was limited to The Gabriel, but this year we were given Nice Victorian Tailor, who is very nice, and then this month…. Victorian Painter, who is a Gabriel through and through. He is very much not of the “I dress this way because I like it just like you wear jeans because you like them” variety, he is a “Why can’t we go BACK when men were KIND and society was MORE POLITE and women were QUIET” flavor.

Bonus points to Metro for putting the caption “Michael, 24, dresses only in Victorian clothing and refuses to watch TV” under a picture of him in white tie on a MacBook.

I am currently not in a relationship, but I can assure you I am not unwanted. I am one of the most eligible bachelors for miles around.

Aw yeah, only the most eligible bachelors use terms like “eligible bachelors.”

I hope this guy finds a woman who genuinely loves the Victorian Era because I’m scared if he doesn’t he will manipulate a woman into believing she does and they’ll have tiny unvaccinated children who will become chimney sweeps.

8. The LoveSync Kickstarter

So first off let me say: it’s a sex button. It’s a button you press when you want to have sex. And it’s a Kickstarter.

Now that that’s out of the way: Whyyyyyyyy.

It claims to increase romantic communication, but it looks to me like this is just a way for couples to find another thing to avoid talking about because it’s shameful. In my opinion, if you feel too guilty to openly talk about sex…. you should not be having sex with that person.

And if you’re too afraid of getting rejected by your partner, that’s something you should confront, not bandaid over with a fancy nightlight.

I know, I know, it’s a kickstarter, but the effect is the same:

This is a Black Mirror worldbuilding prompt, not a buzzy new startup.

7. Larry Ray and the Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence

Let this serve as an example of why “hateread” is not synonymous with “badly written article.” Sometimes, good writing can take a possible hateread and salvage it out of the hole it’s dug, like The Cut’s Lena Dunham profile last year. This time, The Cut took a chilling tale of brainwashing and spun it into a creeping, slow, longread that hits you like a thriller novel and fills you with equal amounts righteous anger and sympathetic compassion.

I read this article the same day I watched the Battle of Winterfell episode of Game of Thrones, and I spent way more time thinking about this. There’s a reason why it’s one of their most read articles of 2019.

It starts as a profile of a terrible man, which we were not short of this year, and that transforms into a microcosm of cult mentalities, hypnosis, lies, the sheer power of abuse, and how PTSD completely overthrows your life.

What do you do when your trauma resembles therapy, so normal healing procedures trigger you? It’s so tragic and I want to yell about it forever.

I thought a long time about whether or not this counts as a hateread, but I had such a visceral emotional response to it I couldn’t ignore it. Sometimes, a hateread needs to make you angry at the world for a few moments.

6. The Topanga Tea Ceremony

Of course, what would a Hateread list be without a pretentious NYT article. It’s got everything: Supermodels, fake names that SUPPOSEDLY mean “Heavenly Dance,” Amanda Chantal Bacon, just a greatest hits of Hashtag Wellness.

It strikes me as a combination of the first two stories on this list: It’s making what would normally be just a conversation into A Thing, like the Sex Button, and that Thing is a ritual appropriated from another culture, like the non-Jewish wedding. If you want to meditate with your female friends you can just….do that.

There are some ALL TIME pull quotes though.

Before we’d ever met, my first email to her bounced back with the most enviable and otherworldly out-of-office reply I’d ever seen: “Thank you so much for taking the time to connect,” it began. “I may be serving tea, on retreat, off in the forest, or on the other side of the world. Due to this flow of life and my continued desire to remain present unto it, it may take some time to receive a response. I will only be responding to those emails that required my direct attention so as to minimize my time exchanged with technology.”

Due to this flow of life and my continued desire to remain present in it, I regret to inform you I will be unable to attend your party, my life’s journey is leading me towards lying in bed and watching Lost for eight hours.

I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while: the way the retreat leader gets confused about the concept of space, the implied presence of “moon” and “cacao” ceremonies, and especially the phrase “no intentionality around being together aside from what’s come to be called ‘fun’.” To each their own, but this isn’t All the News Thats Fit to Print in my twenty two year old opinion.

5. A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions

The best part of a hateread is the satisfaction: the satisfaction that you aren’t that person, the satisfaction that you can rail against an enemy, whatever it may be.

This article has both of those, plus the satisfaction of knowing it’s a mystery solved by AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SUCCESSOR. Whatever the opposite of irony is, that’s it.

The last semester of undergrad (I graduated! yay!) I took a class on editing and publishing. I was interested in online media, and lord knows I had read quite a bit of it doing this last year, but the class was mainly on book publishing. It was a lot of fun, and it made me excited to start a writing career, whatever that looked like. Maybe I’d even get a book deal someday!

And then this article came out and I lost all faith in publishing. Knowing that at the age I was slaving over my screenplay drafts, Dan Mallory — the grandson of a president of RKO — was “whiling away” his summer interning at New Line Cinema, and while I was rediscovering a love for writing, Mallory was a film critic at Duke. I was not accepted into Duke. When Mallory was denied acceptance to Princeton, he wrote a letter to the dean calling him a “latter-day Stalin.”

While the comparisons hit me hard as a college student, the rest of the article I’m sure hit just as hard to those in the publishing business. The quantity and pure creativity of the lies he created: he had a PhD from Oxford, he worked with Tina Fey on her book, he was on the cover of Russian Vogue… it honestly would bode well for a fiction writer if he didn’t pass them off as fact completely.

I’m not even going to touch on the cancer things, that cannot be summarized, just read that.

Then….there are The Pee Cups. Supposedly, while waiting for a promotion at Ballantine, he left cups full of urine outside of his boss’s office door. This man wrote the #1 best selling book of 2018, and it’s getting made into a movie.

But man, I should’ve watched Talented Mr. Ripley before reading that article. Completely spoiled it.

4. The Time I Went On A Lesbian Cruise and It Blew Up My Entire Life

…Have you ever imagined what reading a episode of The L Word would be like? It’s this.

Frankly, as a genderfluid person, I don’t want to write too much about this “Can lesbians survive the gender revolution” diatribe, in which a woman breaks up with her partner who recently came out as nonbinary and then falls head over heels with a 53 year old British woman on an Olivia cruise to Bermuda. Is it problematic? yes. Would I watch a romcom about it? Also yes, because I’m so starved for queer content.

I hope her ex-partner is doing okay and is living in the house in Montana they put a deposit on together.

3. Bella Thorne’s All-Natural, DIY Nighttime Skincare Routine

I know, I know, it’s a video. But it’s for Harper’s Bazaar. For those hateread purists, I’ll transcribe the skincare routine.

1. Lounge in your bathtub on your phone. Make sure you are wearing at least three diamond necklaces, two diamond watches, and two diamond rings.
2. Explain why your skincare routine is one thing except when you’re feeling fun and funky.
3. Explain why we THINK “chemicals” work when in reality our skin gets reliant on them, and why you like to brush your teeth with coconut oil.
4. Tell the story of how you made your assistant try your lemon sugar olive oil scrub.
5. Put your hair up so you don’t get the mask on it. Do not take off any of your jewelry.
6. Scoop scrub with hands. Rub into face. Lick hands. Continue to rub into face with hands. (e.d — it was at this point I could hear Nicole Cliffe screaming “No!!! Physical Exfoliators!! Ever!!” á la Mommie Dearest)
7. Compare the scent of the scrub to the heated towels “you get on airplanes,” a totally universal experience.
8. Explain how slapping your face brings the cells back to life in a sense.
9. Talk at length about why you do microneedling.
10. Explain why you do your own makeup, which only consists of tinted moisturizer. Where have we heard that before? (#9 last year is where)
11. Put coconut oil, honey, and cherries in a bowl. Listen to the product.
12. Let everyone into the secret of your lip color: rubbing cherry skin on your mouth! “It’s kinda like a stain!”
13. Whisk them together with a “wispy guy.” Assure the viewers why you don’t need a wispy guy, you can use “a spoon or anything you can smash with”
14. Just kinda….smoosh it into your face.
15. Rinse. End of routine. No moisturizer.

2. I’m Not Jealous, I’m Territorial

Is this satire? Maybe. Is it written to be humorous? Probably. Is it a hateread? Definitely.

This was published the day after I started writing this, and I didn’t know how to handle it. It was outrageous, surely it wasn’t meant to be sincere, that it was meant to be satirical. But all signs pointed against that.

After copious conversation with my mother, a real life Southern woman who spends her days in the company of other real life Southern women, I’ve settled on the opinion that it’s HUMOROUS, but not SATIRE. This woman really doesn’t want her husband to talk to Alexa, but thinks this is a relatable, fun thing about her that makes her just sooooo quirky. It’s not quirky, it’s abuse.

Part of me now wants to buy her book, like reading it will help decipher the weird “blink” ending, an ending that nobody has successfully explained to me. But the larger part of me knows that idea poses a danger to everyone around me because I would definitely throw it across the room. But I’d love to overhear her talking to my mom at a neighborhood party.

1. Caroline Calloway Got Scammer Advice From Taylor Swift

I’ve never felt like a kid on Christmas Eve more than when we knew Natalie, Caroline Calloway’s ex-friend and former ghost writer, was going to write an essay for The Cut.

It felt like the natural conclusion to a long saga that encompasses years but hit its stride in 2019 and its peak when Caroline wrote an essay comparing herself to Taylor Swift. If you are unaware of Caroline’s history, don’t worry, she… tells you what to google? Basically she’s her own Instagram icon who occasionally bites off more than she can chew.

I would relate to her as a 20 something just trying to figure things out, but she has a tendency to lean into her hate, and thus she embraces the term “scammer” and equates herself to T.S. in the snake-emoji era.

I picked this article as #1 as it represents all of The Caroline Calloway story, from this article, Natalie’s article, Kayleigh Donaldson’s exhaustive work, and Caroline’s prolific daily Instagram stories, which have more parts than novels have chapters.

Even if she was a hateread, a hatefollow, 2019 was her year, and you almost have to respect her hustle: I couldn’t imagine anyone else in this spot. Hopefully next year she can go on another Taylor-inspired turn and get really into movie musicals and off my timeline.