Things I Read This Week And Liked
Friday reading roundup
The morning after the show I attended, they woke up together, ordered “four hundred thousand dollars’ ” worth of room service, and experienced a moment of gratitude over being in a hotel room. “We’re both deeply romantic about hotel rooms. We’re, like, ‘This linen!’ ”
Experienced as the exception, leaks promise a rare glimpse of unfiltered, unauthorized truth. As the rule, uncertainty will prevail. Politics documented by leaks and politics enacted through leaks are two very different things — and from the outside, the second is indistinguishable from the first.
When the real world is a nightmare and the former theoretical utopia of the internet is another one, it’s necessary to imagine what other kinds of utopias might look and sound like.
(I was allowed inside swiftly, of course, with the mere mention of my name and my outlet and the spelling of my last name and the spelling of my last name again — I don’t mean to brag.)
Whitney was the first pop star who I knew was a pop star, because I heard my mother singing her music in the house when I was a child. This was my sole marker for what a popular musician was: any musician who made my mother happy enough to lend her voice to a brief opportunity for harmony.