Gawker - Today's newsletter written by Joe Alwyn

And how does reading another hybrid essay/memoir about mental illness make you feel?

You may, at some point in the past few years, have encountered a nonfiction book arranged along the following lines: an author recounts a series of facts about a particular mental or physical ailment, alongside the story of their own struggles with it; this is interspersed with nuggets of cultural history or literary criticism pertaining to said ailment. The erudition will be lightly worn but nonetheless insistent. The prose will be parceled out in relatively short, non-sequential paragraphs, of which a percentage will comprise just a single sentence; some of these will be gnomic, others merely elliptical. There will be comma splices, and a quote, somewhere, from the personal correspondence of Virginia Woolf. The word “liminal” will feature at least once. Publicists and reviewers alike will call it a “meditation,” because that’s what it is.

Graham Caveney’s new memoir, On Agoraphobia, is the latest addition to this hybrid genre. Caveney, who has suffered for decades with a crippling fear of open spaces, writes candidly about this little understood condition. “Panic,” he writes, “is a pitbull with a rag doll”: “A rollercoast lurch in the stomach, the tightening twirl of the solar plexus, an offbeat disco of the heart.” The day-to-day anxiety is “anticipatory” in nature: “Panic attacks do not lead to agoraphobia. The fear of them recurring does. Agoraphobia is a meta-fear, a pre-emptive strike against the fear yet to come.” Various treatments proved ineffective: he tried Cognitive Behavioral Therapy but was irritated by its jargon (“They say things like toxic and challenges and use evidence as a verb”); the behaviorist technique known as “flooding” — whereby the sufferer is made to confront their fears in the hope of reprogramming their nervous system — didn’t work; benzodiazepines and antidepressants did little more than “instil a perplexed nonchalance, an unenlightened Zen.” Continue reading

"William Bowery," more like "will" you stop lying to me

“William Bowery” is credited as a co-writer on several songs across Taylor Swift’s upstate New York-themed albums folklore and evermore. The nom de Swift was the subject of immediate speculation from the singer’s fanbase, which theorized the person behind it was Swift’s boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn. During her Disney+ special Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions, Swift confirmed it: William Bowery was indeed Joe Alwyn, and he allegedly wrote major chunks of a bunch of songs, most notably folklore’s “exile” and “betty.” He even nabbed a Grammy for folklore’s Best Album win last year.

Now, listen. I’m happy for Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn. I really am. It brings me peace to think of them relaxing in Taylor Swift’s Rhode Island estate, not a financial worry in their minds, their staff quietly tending to a roaring fire, their privately owned waves crashing just outside. I hope to one day house-sit there, for a stretch of several months. But I do not like being lied to.

Joe Alwyn did not write those goddamn songs.

(In my opinion.) Continue reading

A humble and largely baseless theory

Via his Substack, the writer Daniel Stone does the occasional deep dive into very particular media trends, which he investigates with extensive number-crunching, footnotes, and charts. He has previously looked into the financial trajectory of neocon rag Commentary (plunging); the delivery times and lengths of Matt Levine’s Bloomberg newsletter “Money Stuff” (growing longer and later); and how frequently the New York Review of Books’ book reviews are reviewing the books of other New York Review of Books contributors (very often).

Earlier this week, Stone sent out an edition about the length of byline credits at The New York Times. He had noticed that stories appeared to have an increasing number of authors. The data seemed to bear that out:

Looking at thirty years of the Times index I found that today about 18% of all New York Times news articles (and 20% of those appearing in print) are multi-bylined—hardly “every” article, but still a decent chunk. But it is very much a new thing. The proportion of multi-bylined articles has sharply increased in recent years, doubling since 2016, quadrupling since 2009, and octupling since 2001.

It was a timely moment to make this observation. Just a day earlier, 106th Pulitzer Prizes were announced, and the Times did very well. Eight of the Gray Lady’s entries won or were named finalists, to which we say: Good for them. The reporters worked hard and deserve the credit.

But which reporters, exactly? Continue reading

Did Ellen just commit fraud?

In honor of Ellen Degeneres’s show, The Ellen Degeneres Show, coming to an end after 19 years on May 26, we are chronicling its farewell season each week. These are the Last Days of Ellen.

This column is mostly devoted to talking about the various A-list celebrities who are bidding their best friend Ellen adieu during her show’s final season. That is well and good, but it does completely ignore a huge aspect of the Ellen Experience: fan interaction. How silly I have been to ignore the true lifeblood of this entire franchise.

If our girl loves one thing, it’s pretending to like her fans. After assuring the audience that she will “have another chapter” and “see [them] in another chapter” (sounds like a threat to me), Ellen explained that she was inspired by an auction of Tiger Woods’s golf clubs to have an auction of her own. Specifically, she would be auctioning off a giant purse that she used as a prop in an episode from the second season of Ellen, “I’ll even sign it,” she promised.

To sweeten the pot, Ellen threw a couple of tie-dye shirts, a onesie, and a wine tumbler into the purse. So all in all, this is an auction lot worth, in Ellen’s words, “somewhere between $32 and four million.” That is funny when you hear it the first time, and becomes a dark bit of foreshadowing when you know what’s going to happen next. Continue reading

The Queen is s l o w m o t i o n abdicating

Yesterday, Prince Charles sat in for Mum on a throne made of gold at the House of Lords to open this season of Parliament. He wore a diamond chain and pronounced the word “Covid” like an ancient Briton whose mandible was perfectly preserved in a peat bog. But the papermen of Fleet Street are saying this wasn’t just Charles filling in for Mum as she recovered from a brief, mild case of being dead — this was a soft launch of a new sovereign.

Ever since Edward VIII gave up the throne for Wallis Simpson, the American mynx purported to be a Nancy Reagan-style BJ queen, the concept of “abdication” remains firm’s worst nightmare.. The prevailing sentiment at the Firm is that a monarch only retires when they die, even if there is no constitutional rule that says this.

So Lil remains the Queen until her corgis meet her at the gates of heaven, but in the meantime she’s going to have Charles do her bidding via the Regency Act. In a piece for the Guardian, Windsor expert Ed Owens writes, “The Queen’s withdrawal from public life has been hastened by medical problems, and the Prince of Wales finds himself regent in all but name.” Continue reading