Gawker - Stop the (French) presses

The former Times Book Review editor is a dull culture warrior

There’s a new worst columnist at the New York Times, and her name is Pamela Paul.

In 2014, I wrote for this website that technology writer Nick Bilton was the new worst columnist at the New York Times. Pamela Paul, however, makes me cry out in the night for Nick Bilton. She has me rereading his column on how he couldn’t find a pen and saying “damn, this guy is a genius.” She has me longing for the paradisal days of him waxing over whether to delete his Facebook account. She has me enthusiastically writing him a Guggenheim recommendation letter.

Paul was the editor of the Times’s book review section from 2013 until this year, and is also the author of a book of rejected Shouts & Murmurs called 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet. Usually it takes a columnist a few years to get to a certain level of asininity; Paul, who started at the opinion desk in April, has summited the highest peak on column five. Continue reading

Even a cheap electric coffee maker can do a better job

It’s natural to want to make coffee in a French press because they’re cute and cheap and seem fun, or at least easy, to use. For a while they were the fanciest normal-person brewing option, and quickly became a popular way to serve coffee in restaurants and hotels to show that the coffee was fancier than the average diner cup. It’s a romantic way to leisurely have your coffee with the newspaper. Unfortunately, the French press is an incredibly flawed brewer whose time has come and gone.

I admit it’s annoying to invoke “third-wave coffee,” but it’s worth remembering that for a really long time, coffee was not interesting. If a bean’s origin was stamped on a label, it almost didn’t matter because all coffee kind of tasted the same. It was roasted dark and wasn’t very fresh, or if it had been freshly roasted it was sold from open-top barrels so it was “fresh” but also going stale. But now there are tons of artful roasters making coffees that actually taste like the crazy flavors in the tasting notes.

And even if you love a toasty dark roast your options for making coffee have drastically improved in every direction, and I’m not just talking about Chemex and manual espresso makers. There are really good automatic drip machines, even ones that claim a pour-over like experience, and honestly, I think even a cheap electric coffee maker can do a better job than a French press as long as it’s clean and you don’t let it scorch on a heating plate. Continue reading

A horse race is never going to be a place for healing

Three mares have won in the Kentucky Derby’s history — Genuine Risk, Winning Colors, and Regret. Coincidentally, you can experience all three of these things in your first minute at Churchill Downs.

The Derby is the longest-running American sporting event ever, and there’s your first hint that it shouldn’t still exist. One hundred and forty-eight years of anything is ugly.

“The taxi line we usually use here is blocked by about, uh, 60 or 70 private jets,” the Spirit Airlines pilot laughs on the overhead microphone. I’m in the middle seat because I have not been chosen by God. Churchill Downs is a ten-minute drive in a city that’s only about four times the size of the crowd that shoves their way into the racetrack once a year to see short kings abuse animals that could and should kill them. Women on both sides of me scroll through push notifications about how the entire row’s reproductive rights will be nuked sometime in the next eight weeks.

Today I want to get very drunk. Today I want to see every societal ill hanging out of the side of an ugly cutout dress from a strip mall and every moral catastrophe spattered across the cuffs of a rich drunk on his way to a Trump fundraiser. Today I want to see Jack Harlow press himself against the side of a trolley as it lurches through a crowd of thousands of dirty cups and people. Today I am collecting every infinity stone of American ugliness and going to the Big American Horse Race. Continue reading

Ew!

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.

Friends, Ellenistas, countrymen, we have made it to the final week of Ellen. Those of us who have made it this far have high expectations for these last few shows. We want big guests in the flesh, huge surprises, and tearful goodbyes from Ellen herself. Today, instead of any of that, we got Jennifer Lawrence calling in while “sitting on the toilet.”

The set-up here is that before she was famous, the Don’t Look Up star used to let her mind wander while taking a shit and would imagine herself being interviewed by Ellen. (Who among us hasn’t?) For some reason, Ellen decided to use her last precious moments on her show to call up Lawrence — who, again, we are told is on the toilet — to talk about the nature of her being on the toilet. The whole thing is about as boring as it sounds. Continue reading

Recent childhood fascinations become fodder for clout and, eventually, corporate reboots

Nostalgia is generally understood to work in cycles: loops of 20, 30, sometimes 40 years, in which cultural artifacts and ideas undergo a process of antiquation and reclamation roughly in line with the tastes of the people who grew up with them (or occasionally as a kind of ironic appropriation on the part of people who grew up after them). This is a phenomenon born from a symbiotic relationship between artists and audiences, bolstered by a keen corporate eye on what is in and what has been out just long enough for people to miss it. It can be observed in music, fashion, and culture in general. Often, it is most visibly present on the screen, as a direct consequence of a generation reaching adulthood and claiming control of the mechanisms of media production. The stories that they loved as children return when they start calling the shots: think Back to the Future’s romantic reconstruction of the ‘50s in 1985, or the revival of ‘80s properties like Ghostbusters and Robocop in the 2010s.

It might be reasonable to assume that, by the time 2042 rolls around, we would be similarly nostalgic for the 2010s — that is, if the mechanisms of culture hadn’t been politely sledgehammered by the digital age. The cadence of the nostalgia cycle has been reduced from a few decades to maybe five minutes, at best. From Percy Jackson fans demanding that an actor in his 30s play a 12-year-old character because he had previously, to countless TikToks romanticizing the “Wandavision era” of the pandemic, the way that people talk about the recent cultural past has shifted significantly. Every week, a new reboot or spinoff of something that feels like it has barely gone anywhere is announced. For the most part, these projects are greeted with open arms by audiences reinscribing meaning to that which they had happily forgotten and are now dusting off again, as if the process of remembering creates value in and of itself. Through nostalgia-tinted lenses, conventional retreads of film and TV are offered as works of significant cultural artistic merit at the expense of new stories, the endless relitigation of the past dwarfing curiosity about the mediums’ possible futures. Continue reading