Hello, I’m Edith, formerly of The Cut and The Hairpin, and this is a newsletter with links, personal writing, illustration, and comics. It’s a work in progress — please let me know what you think! (Feel free to hit reply to this email.)
...[T]hose of us who are least likely to get “strategy drunk” are also the least likely to create anything new. It takes a little intoxication to do anything bold! … Although it’s easy to make fun of people who are obviously strategy drunk, we should also be thankful for them.
Divinations, by Nathan Baschez. This is from a new newsletter about business theory, which is not something I am normally drawn to, but I liked this bit, in part because it reminded me of a theory I have about art and creation, which I will now share.
Several years ago, I saw a bad tweet from a writer I admired, and I felt a rush of pleasure. I thought something like, Oh, great, even amazing people say stupid things. I then wrote my own tweet and felt grateful that her bad tweet had lit the path, in my mind, toward what would be good.
As I realized that the bad tweet had been necessary for the creation of the good tweet (my tweet), I also realized that our roles were basically interchangeable, or that we were each necessary and always exchanging one role for the other. Anyway, this is the theory: Sometimes we all have to create the bad tweet. We all have to take our turns at the wheel. Someone has to create the bad thing so that another person can notice it and make a good thing. It’s obviously more fun to be the person who creates the good thing, but it’s also important to create the bad thing.
This helps me when I’m worrying about whether something I’m making is stupid. It’s like, Well, maybe it is, but maybe it’ll help someone else make a good thing. And then it will be my turn again another time.
My last bachelor fling was semi-scandalous, in the art world, and volcanically erotic. I like to say that it burned the carbon out of my cylinders. She broke up with me on a street corner, denouncing me and storming off. I stood there for a spell grinning from ear to ear. I figured that I had mastered swinging singledom. Then I met Brooke.
TNY. Peter Schejeldahl. (Also: “Meeting Brooke, having Ada, and getting sober are my life’s top three red-letter days.”)
Esther Perel is so chaotic good she told a divorced couple that the husband should have another baby with his ex wife, who he cheated on, as a way of making it up to her. Balance the score! And somehow the way she tells it, it seems reasonable
Twitter/MeaghanO. This made me laugh. Also, here is the episode in question.
I made some stupid decisions, like turning down a couple of full scholarships to law school to go to the "best" one I could. Just saying that makes me want to vomit.
BuzzFeed. Twelve interviews about student debt.
Once your sauna is up and running, there’s nothing left to do but crank it up, invite some friends over, and sweat it out.
Outside. Do I have any friends with a sauna?
Ask Olive/Spiralbound. The cartoonist Jessica Olien writes (and draws) an illustrated advice column for the comics site Spiralbound (which I also run!). If you have a question, and if you are interested in seeing what an imaginary version of yourself might look like when she draws you (it’s all anonymous), definitely send her an email. Olive is especially good with love and existential problems. This has been a nice excuse to copy one of my favorite panels from an earlier installment of her column (get married, look younger, make more money). That was almost going to be the tagline for this newsletter!
The video game industry generates more revenue than movies and music.
Combined.
David Perell. This fact about video games blows my mind, but I’m also linking to it because I like this writer’s whole online presence. Getting his newsletter feels like peeking into the corner of a new internet, one that’s different from the version I used to be part of (back in 2013 or so). I got curious about him after coming across a long thing he wrote about Peter Thiel. The video games factoid appeared on his recent “Coolest Things I Learned in 2019” post, and his newsletter typically contains short personal writing, bullet points, photos, and charts about tech, money, life, and art. It’s hard to summarize, but his writing has a gentle, cheerful, thoughtful vibe.
A sad somersault. You almost never see it.
Twitter/MichaelFHurley. I’ve watched this like 15 times.
Boris Johnson was hot? Based on these photos of him from his youth??