Gawker - Send in the clowns (derogatory)

Time to pick a side

It is an incredible time to be a fan of drama, both theatrical and interpersonal. Beanie Feldstein is out at Funny Girl, Lea Michele is in, but only after Julie Benko stars in the show for a month. What do any of those words mean? And who is screaming? Never fear, I am here to break down all of the latest reports and gossip from the complete mess that is Funny Girl on Broadway.

I assume you know that yesterday it was officially announced that Lea Michele would be coming into the role in September. And that on Sunday Feldstein took matters into her own hands and announced that she would be leaving earlier than we all expected. If you didn’t know, now you do.

Yesterday, Page Six reported that producers from the show felt “blindsided” by Feldstein releasing her own statement. The tabloid’s source said that there was an announcement planned for the following day, but the Booksmart star went off script and released her own. In her notes app missive, Feldstein said that her decision came after “the production decided to take the show in a different direction.”

“She clearly doesn’t give a shit,” said the source. And you know what? She shouldn’t! She was horribly miscast to begin with, and the production team has done nothing to help her beat the “Beanie Flopstein” charges. Continue reading

Democrats ask voters to avert catastrophe by embracing despair

How wonderful must it feel to be a Republican in 2022? Sure, your guy lost the last election, but since then Democratic president and possible replicant Joe Biden has dropped to an approval rating of 33 percent, perhaps due to the total collapse of his legislative agenda, which has been stymied by two rogue senators so obviously self-interested that his failure to bribe them has become an indictment of the whole party. If Democrats cannot find the lever that moves Joe Manchin, what could they possibly do about public healthcare, or student loan forgiveness, or a climate-friendly economy, or any of the other promises from 2020 that now seem as empty as a child’s pledge to dunk a basketball? If you are a talk-radio type of guy, or one of the swing voters who apparently believe the school is trying to change your kid’s gender, I imagine the present political moment feels incredibly great.

I wouldn’t know, since I’ve been voting Democrat. I admit that only for the purpose of strict reportorial accuracy, since it feels like admitting I have been taken in some kind of scam. For the last two decades, I have dutifully supported the Democratic presidential candidate in every election, even when casting my ballot felt like digging a splinter out of my thumb with a pin: an irritating process that did nothing to advance my own goals but theoretically prevented something worse. The apogee experience of this approach to democracy came in 2020, when I supported Joe Biden.

I didn’t vote for the oldest U.S. presidential candidate in history because I thought he would make change. I voted to keep other, worse change from happening. This purely negative form of hope was unpleasant enough, since it required me to vote for inaction during an ongoing national crisis, but I accepted the proposition that I was preventing a more awful crisis from taking shape. And then Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization happened, rolling back the constitutional right to abortion, and suddenly my pyrrhic victory against a hypothetical second Trump administration had led to Republicans achieving their No. 1 social policy goal of the last 50 years. Continue reading

I've watched a lot of television and have pretended to read most books

Things have not been going so great for me in the realm of long-form speculative blogging, which is what I like to call fiction writing, since I graduated from an MFA program in 2019. I spend most of my days writing about a British grandmother’s strained relationship with a baby, and I am on the seventh draft of a manuscript I’ve been working on for five years. But luckily, as the lit world rejects me, my friends inside the TV will always embrace me. And that’s why I’m applying right now to be a villain contestant on a new reality show called America’s Next Great Author, hosted by writer Kwame Alexander.

The show, whose pilot is set to film in September, will have contestants pitching their book ideas to a “panel of renowned judges, a roaring bookish audience, and rolling cameras.” Here’s how it works:

First, nationwide tryouts in iconic American cities show off amateur writers as they get one minute to pitch their book ideas to a panel of publishing experts. Six charismatic finalists from vastly different places and backgrounds enter the Writer’s Retreat together for a month of live-wire challenges and spectacular storytelling. These talented amateurs have to start their books from scratch on day one of the Retreat and finish by the end of the thirty days. The climactic finale will reveal who made it to the finish line to become AMERICA’S NEXT GREAT AUTHOR.

Continue reading

"Hugs and giggles out loud"

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

No place on the internet stays good. Every meme page, every Facebook group, every novelty Twitter account — they all eventually become too self-aware and motivated by clout building and monetization to maintain their purity. I get it: The more popular a meme account becomes, the more work it takes to maintain the insatiable scrolling of its fans, and sooner or later, at the lowest point, the owners of the account become characters themselves. Sadly, this is just how the internet works.

But there’s one place on Instagram that has not and will never be marred by the sick online fame cycle of my peers. It is Grandmas Follies, a meme account and community made by grandmas, and — as stated on their finicky official website — it’s a place where you’re always welcome.

Grandmas Follies found me a few months ago the same way that everything I now consume does: through my Instagram algorithm. I still remember the exact post; it was a cartoon of a beautiful black woman that said, “Good Morning Every one.” Did my algorithm serve me this because the cartoon was black? That’s not for me to ever find out. All I know is that I was immediately taken in by the apparent sincerity of the post and its many comments. Including one person whose username began with “gramgram,” who replied: “Wish I looked that good in the morning! Or any other time of the day!😂” Same, Gram-Gram. Continue reading

In the expansion of her 2019 viral essay, CJ Hauser writes herself into a corner

There’s a certain essay form that tends to garner extensive praise in MFA workshops for its use of white space and its cleverly calibrated epiphanies: the braided essay. The braided essay seems at first to be about one thing, but then, after a couple of paragraphs following that thread, there’s an asterisk denoting a section break, and suddenly, the essay is about something else. The reader understands that these topics must be related, but the writer withholds the connection at first, careful not to show their hand on the page. The asterisks do the heavy lifting of creating tension that drives the piece forward. Sometimes, a third thread joins the braid after another asterisk; if the essayist is really ambitious, they might introduce a fourth seemingly unrelated topic. If the essay works — and often, braided essays don’t cohere—then, section by section, unexpected connections accrue, and the threads weave together tightly.

Reading a good braided essay can feel like watching a magic trick — in its synthesis, it subverts your expectations and brings you to a moment of revelation that feels like that mind-blown GIF. Oh, you thought this essay was just about a trip to study whooping cranes on the Gulf Coast that coincidentally took place 10 days after its narrator called off her engagement with a cold, cheating man? It’s actually about the narrator realizing she contorted herself in order to fit the form her fiancé wanted, and that’s a thing that women are always doing, and that even cranes do when they pretend to be women in Japanese folklore (and also The Decemberists albums).

I’m talking, of course, about fiction writer and creative writing professor CJ Hauser’s personal essay “The Crane Wife,” which was published on the Paris Review’s website in July 2019 and instantly tore through Twitter. For a braided essay to go viral outside of creative nonfiction circles, it needs to hit a nerve, and not too subtly. “The Crane Wife” hit readers, particularly women, like a reflex hammer, culminating in an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers and breathless praise. In the essay — presumably meant as a promotional hit for the author’s sophomore novel Family of Origin, which was published on the same day but garnered much less attention — Hauser isn’t subtle about the connections she wants us to see between how she diminished herself in her bad engagement to avoid coming off as “needy” and how she learned about why it’s not shameful to have needs via a field study on endangered birds. Continue reading