Gawker - Cool new way to poison yourself

An hours-long quest for a disturbing new food

There are no Sonics in my immediate vicinity. The closest outpost of the fast food chain is about an hour’s drive away. Yet for weeks I have been subjected to ads for Sonic’s new Sour Patch Kids® Slush Float — an advertising technique that, as you may know, is Sonic’s dirty trick. “Here's why you see Sonic ads even when there isn't a location anywhere near where you live,” explained Insider in 2017, and I do not care what the answer is; I only care that I need the Sour Patch Kids® Slush Float. And I will have it.

In its ads, the slush float looks like a child’s illicit dream. It is bright pink with multicolored sour candy flecks, topped with a generous coil of vanilla ice cream that extends from the upper quarter of the cup to several inches past its lip, itself topped with larger multicolored chunks of massacred sour candy.

In a press release for the new slushie, a Sonic representative calls it “refreshing” and “craveable”; a drink that “provides an exciting new twist” by “incorporating the iconic Sour Patch Kids candy.” Upon viewing the slushie, each of us might instead describe it as “horrifying” and “of an unnatural shade,” one which may “provide an exciting new twist” by “unleashing heightened ADHD symptoms and severe migraines.” But as a sour candy fan who once received from Santa a shoebox filled to the brim with loose Sour Patch Kids, I will reserve all judgment until the slushie is mine. Continue reading

Gone but not forgotten

Welcome to Net Positive, a series about nice places and things on the world wide web.

Many features of American democracy are disappearing before our eyes: the right to decide what to do with your own body; the right to be safe from concealed firearms; the right to be free from group prayer at public school; the right to inhale clean air. I am so furious I can hardly breathe the shitty air we already have. But deadlines do not evaporate during societal collapse, so I am here to tell you some good news. There is at least one widely hated facet of civilization that will soon go blessedly extinct: the CAPTCHA (aka the “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”).

For the unfamiliar, CAPTCHAs are those little boxes that ask users to promise “I am not a robot,” and then prove it by identifying grainy pictures of bicycles or typing out visually distorted gibberish. The unfamiliar are likely a minority here, as CAPTCHAs are an omnipresent feature of the modern internet. But those inhuman humanity verifiers, like our basic civil rights, may be mortal after all. Continue reading

Her role-defining bullet points have been taken away

Over the American holiday weekend, I was on the beach at Princess Margaret’s estate in Mustique with one or two of my many younger lovers, slathered in baby oil and engrossed in a beach read: The Sovereign Grant and Sovereign Grant Reserve Annual Report and Accounts 2021-22. It’s a flirty little bit of chick lit about the Queen and her official expenditures and the roles of the (throbbing) members of the senior royal family. But this year’s report was decidedly less sensual than its prequels, as it seemed to hint that the Queen’s summertime tryst with the living realm may be short-lived. Continue reading

The Radiohead album still defies both its critics and admirers

In Grant Gee’s 1998 documentary Meeting People is Easy, which follows Radiohead’s OK Computer tour, every band member, particularly frontman Thom Yorke and guitarist Jonny Greenwood, field questions both condescending and unoriginal. A journalist asks Yorke if the presence of celebrities at their concerts means anything to the band. Yorke, who looks off to the side, bemused, quips that he had a good conversation with Calvin Klein about underwear. This is one of the more straightforward sequences in the documentary, which is largely impressionistic, a collage of sounds and video captured in dark hallways, stuffy hotel rooms, and pre-show concert rehearsals. At one point, another journalist, whose face we don’t see, wonders, “What is the stupidest question you’ve been asked?” The answer isn’t shown. Instead, Gee cuts together interview segments illustrating the band’s attempts to give thoughtful answers to people who want cut-and-dried quotes. Audio filters in, a shot of a highway, their head of PR listing off the schedule of radio spots and magazine appointments they have. Grant Gee, speaking to Rolling Stone, said, “From the start it was quite clear that they were quiet and articulate people being put through this industrial process of sort of being vacuumed for image and information and quotes and thoughts.”

OK Computer marked several turning points for Radiohead: a more experimental sound, an abstraction and more distant viewpoint in Thom Yorke’s lyrics, a stark, harsh visual direction in the artwork of collaborator Stanley Donwood, and the earnest genesis of the band’s working relationship with producer Nigel Godrich. These elements would come to define the rest of Radiohead’s discography, the promise of artistic trial-and-error leading to bold, genre-breaking work, all created with the same roster. OK Computer also marked the beginning of a pedantic, sometimes antagonistic parsing and interrogation of meaning by the press that has swarmed each subsequent Radiohead album.

25 years after its release, and we are still arguing about what OK Computer means. Frankly, we’re still arguing about what it is. For example, the idea that OK Computer is a concept album, a notion denied by the band since its release but still perpetuated to this day. Continue reading

Cooper Raiff's latest indie trifle has nothing to say

Every good coming-of-age story centers a sense of loss: of innocence, of control, of self-assurance. Being 22 is confusing not just because the answers don't seem to be clear, but because the questions aren't always apparent. We all go through this, and it sucks for everyone. Except Andrew, the protagonist of Cooper Raiff's Cha Cha Real Smooth, out in theaters and streaming on AppleTV+. Andrew, played by Raiff, finds himself beguiled by Domino (Dakota Johnson), a woman some ten years his senior whose daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt) attends the same school as his own little brother David (Evan Assante). Domino, Lola, and Andrew first meet at a bat mitzvah where the dance floor is a little sad and empty. Andrew takes it upon himself to pump up the party, betting Domino $300 that he can get Lola, who is autistic and a bit older than the kids in her grade, to dance with him, thus encouraging everyone else. Wielding his charm and wit, Andrew succeeds at securing Domino's attention and saving the party from the unforgiving wrath of preteen boredom. Soon enough, every Jewish mother in Livingston, NJ wants Andrew to be the party starter at her kid's bat or bar mitzvah, Andrew is in love with Domino (even though she's engaged), and Lola is attached to him. Continue reading