10 homeschooled children threaten to play the viola for Harlem residents

TikTok's de la Motte family has packed up their ten children and is headed to NYC

Beware: A TikTok family of ten homeschooled string-virtuoso children and their parents are driving their airstream trailer from a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco right onto your itty bitty iPhone screen, all the while misappropriating viral song clips about sex for their wholesome Trapp Family Singers-style family band content.

It’s the Happy Caravan, AKA the de la Motte family, and they’re on their way to a new two-bedroom apartment in New York so three of their children can attend Juilliard.

And while they’re physically going to be in Harlem (they saw their new home over FaceTime, as explained in the above TikTok), spiritually, these people are everywhere. Why?

Who the hell are these people?

Amber de la Motte — a bedimpled mix of Joanna Newsom, Jennifer Garner, and Liz Bruenig — went viral in March for the TikTok tour of the family’s um, cozy, apartment (Amber’s got the documents to prove it’s legal for 12 people to live in it). Continue reading

Welcome to the Fallon Files, a weekly-ish series chronicling only the lowest lows of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

What can’t Jimmy do? Fresh from vacation with a new lease on life, our boy has announced that he is adding something else to his long list of jobs. In addition to TV star (host, late night), TV star (host, primetime), author (children’s books), entrepreneur (pacifiers), Jimmy is adding sneakerhead to his resumé.

Partnering with creative agency MSCHF — of Lil Nas X Satan shoes fame — Jimmy has created his very own sneaker, called the Gobstomper, and he promises that there is “no blood” involved. Instead, it’s inspired by the Willy Wonka candy Gobsmackers, because apparently it changes color the more you wear it? More accurately, the shoe slowly disintegrates over time to reveal a swirl of primary colors. I’ll just show you. Continue reading

Apparently, author Jamil Jan Kochai did not know enough about second lieutenants

Author Jamil Jan Kochai put out his second book on Tuesday: a short story collection called The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. The dozen stories, many of which were previously published in outlets like the New Yorker and Ploughshares, echo some aspects of his debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar: deploying frame narrative, revisiting several characters, and occasionally dipping into fantasy, as in a video game in which the player interacts with his father in 1980s Afghanistan.

Like in his novel, many of the protagonists in Kochai’s new release are Afghan or Afghan American; he bills the book as a “living history that moves between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora.” Kochai, who was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan amid the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, is also of Afghan descent himself. Presumably aware of this fact, the New York Times books section’s natural choice of reviewer was someone with intimate knowledge of Afghanistan and conflict: a former member of the U.S. Armed Forces and Forever Wars veteran. Continue reading

The adaptation is charmless, stupid, and treats the viewer with contempt

“Everybody moved on. I, I stayed there. Dust collected on my pinned-up hair. They expected me to find, somewhere, some perspective, but I sat and stared.”

That is not a line from Netflix’s new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It is a Taylor Swift lyric. But it should be. An adaptation in which every line of dialogue and exposition Austen wrote were methodically replaced with a line from the Swift corpus would be infinitely better than what director Carrie Cracknell has done.

For their smugly updated version of Austen’s 1817 novel of prudence and romance, loss and longing, resignation and second chances, screenwriters opted not to transpose Austen’s themes to a contemporary setting where well-chosen modern analogues would underscore what is timeless in Austen’s observations. Nor did they guide and frame their actors’ performances to highlight the potential analogues latent in Austen’s original words. Continue reading

Few contemporary authors embody feminine swagger like the author of After Birth and Human Blues

My favorite compliment to give a novel is to say it has swagger. What I mean, in part, is that it has charisma, balls, a seductively bad attitude — but the craft of literary swagger is, by its nature, not an easy thing to pin down. In fact, one of swagger’s major characteristics is that it changes unstoppably. Writing with swagger breaks rules, morphs nonstop, and defies both itself and all efforts to contain it. As a result, it’s impossible to fake or imitate. Resemblance is the enemy of swagger.

Swagger, as a contemporary phenomenon, is very much associated with hip-hop. The best explanation I’ve found of the anti-resemblance rule comes from the artist and hip-hop pioneer Fab Five Freddy. In sociologist Tricia Rose’s 1994 book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Freddy says that inventing new styles is “what makes [making art] feel so good — that pressure on you to be the best. Or to try to be the best. To develop a new style nobody can deal with.” Swagger is precisely such a style. It earns attention not only by being good, but by being good in a startling and exhilarating way.

Part of what makes swagger thrilling is that it is both transgressive and defiant. Swagger-y books delight in breaking both literary and social rules, which means that writers blessed with swagger are often unusually able to attract attention against steep social odds. Continue reading