Been fireworked up lately. (FYI Macy's still puts on the fireworks in NYC which is weird because, well, I didn't even realize Macy's still exists. T-minus 5 years and counting until they're the Amazon Fireworks. Big finale will be a union leader exploding probably.) Anyway, let’s keep things simple this week and give you a chance to catch up. Here’s a look back at my favorite Rubesletters so far this year.

10 best Rubesletters of 2022 so far

1. Apps turned dating into a video game. On West Elm Caleb and the age of minimal viable romance.

2. I love therapy. I hate therapy. I started seeing a therapist 10 years ago. Let's get into it.

3. Wabi Sabi is rock 'n roll. The mistakes are the interesting parts.

4. 15 lessons in comedy creativity from George Carlin. In the words of Carlin, Bill Burr, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Maher, Roseanne Barr, etc.

5. When my mom told me about her abortion. On secrets, shame, and abortion.

6. Something's off with how we talk about psychedelics. It doesn't have to be all microdosing, mental health, and big business. There's also room for a bit of wild.

7. Of course you should separate the art from the artist. You can blame the messenger while still enjoying the message.

8. His and Hers. Every weird thing I can remember about growing up with my parents.

9. The magic of "I appreciate you." People are desperately craving something you can give them for free.

10. "Time spent on app" is not a metric of success. What screenlife is doing to our brains.

Quickies

🎯 Modern Wellness™️ has created a flavor of glorified spiritualized narcissism in which the "cure" is worse than the disease

🎯 Shoutout to the skateboard guy who’s always filming the other skateboard guy but never gets any recognition. Don’t worry, you’ll be way more successful in life.

🎯 The business model of Broadway is kind of insane. It’s just constantly asking this question: What can young gay men make that old women visiting from Iowa will love?

🎯 I'm polyschizo (i.e. I’m in an open relationship with myself).

🎯 Sick and tired of nosebreathers insulting us mouthbreathers. Sorry, but mouths are made for breathing. It's 50% of the places you can use for breathing – and my body wants to do that.

🎯 Y'know how when you cross into Pennsylvania there are fireworks stores everywhere cuz they're illegal across the border? That's what it's gonna be like in Illinois but with abortion clinics.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Please don't talk to me about the difference between techno and house unless you are offering me ketamine.

June 30th 2022

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🎯 Whoa, just learned MASH stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Who knew? And then I found out CHEERS stands for Community Habitat Erected for Egregious Ribaldry and Suds.

🎯 The worst part about Republicans is they keep proving ultrahysterical Dems were actually kinda right all along which means soon the most insane people around will be in control of BOTH parties.

🎯 Take a typing class and a knife skills class and you’ll save yourself thousands of hours over the course of your lifetime.

🎯 Used to be 120+ pages in a newspaper and 2 pages had op-eds/editorials on them. Now, the entire news is opinion.

🎯 The more comfortable we get, the more any hint of discomfort starts to feel like an act of violence.

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Standup

5-spotted

🗯 How ADHD has been “captured by nerds.” 

Alongside useful advice on how to manage symptoms, the online discussion around ADHD is often more concerned with endless taxonomies of traits and behaviors. In this sense, it more closely resembles astrology than psychology, and functions largely as fodder for mild observational humor and relatable memes. While these are often defended on the basis that they’re raising awareness among the undiagnosed, they mostly seem aimed at people who already have both too much awareness and a diagnosis, and instead seem to be catering to a widespread desire to inhabit a fully-fledged identity. These taxonomies are mostly based on vibes and personal anecdotes, and are rarely supported by anything approaching evidence…Once you get a diagnosis, you are encouraged to identify with it to the point where every facet of your personality can be explained through this one lens, usually to the exclusion of all other factors. This strikes me as a boring and reductive way of thinking about your life, because everyone is more complex than a single condition. I’d like to think that I am an annoying f*ck-up due to a more expansive range of factors, and that ADHD doesn’t explain everything bad thing I’ve ever done or else everything about me that’s likable.

🗯 Alix Gucovsky: Protests don’t work, but money does.  

So we are going to have to be surgical and precise. We should start with Texas first-Austin City Limits and South by Southwest should pull out. Sponsors of these events should be boycotted until they agree to pull sponsorship and participation in any events taking place in Texas. All those Teslas-every woman should stop driving a Tesla and cancel any orders until Musk relocates and moves corporate offices from Texas. Sports-same thing. Stadiums in Texas include AT&T, Minute Maid, Dr Pepper Ballpark-you get the drift I am sure that there are more-demand they pull out. Current sponsors of ACL include Honda, Uber, Hulu, Tito’s Vodka, Miller Lite, Bulleit. Pressure them to pull out.  When we, the 80% of the people who believe that a woman’s right to choose is a guaranteed right, show the state of Texas that there will be financial impact from its actions they will recalibrate. And it will be a warning to the other states. Let’s go-state by state. There are 25 states that are harming women. Time to get active. Money talks and is likely our own leverage and pressure point. This is war.

🗯 Neil Postman, who in 1985 published Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued we were evolving technologically faster than our bodies were equipped to handle.

[Postman] thought violent imagery was less the problem than the way it was conveyed. He thought the accelerated speed and rapid mixing of disparate images and subjects was goosing people’s nervous systems, making them incrementally more hyper regardless of the content of the images/subjects.

He spoke about how in the early years of television, there were two commercial breaks during an hour showing a limited number of commercials each one running a sedate sixty seconds; by the early 90s the situation had metastasized to something like four breaks jammed with maybe five commercials at fifteen to thirty seconds apiece. The pace of the actual shows followed the suit, so that the eye never rests, nor do the emotions, and the mind takes in more than it can fully process. He thought that when you put violent subject matter on top of that, yes, it could influence people psychically (my language, not his). He talked about things other than television that were feeding the trend, for example increasingly high-speed travel, opining that we were evolving technologically faster than our bodies were equipped to handle.

🗯 A poor person with a spouse, a close friend, a relationship with a neighbor, and who attends a religious service is actually worth a lot.

-In terms of the effect on happiness, having a friend you see regularly is worth $100,000 a year
 
-Being married is also worth $100,000
 
-Seeing your neighbor regularly is worth $60,000

🗯 Charlie Jane Anders: Escapism is resistance.

People sometimes talk about escapist storytelling as a kind of dereliction of duty, as if we’re just running away from the fight. That’s some bullshit right there. In her 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin paraphrases Tolkien thusly: “If a soldier is captured by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? …. If we v the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape and to take as many people with us as we can.”

So yeah, escapist fiction is about liberation, and imagining a happier, more just world is a direct assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart. As Le Guin says, the most powerful thing you can do is imagine what if things could be different…

What if?

Thanks for reading. Dig the Rubesletter? Please share with friends and/or consider becoming a paid subscriber – it totally helps support the cause.

-Matt