Gawker - What doesn’t kill you makes you ugly

By Steven Phillips-Horst and Eric Schwartau

Two gay guys discuss monkeypox, pickleball, and Gawker's one-year anniversary.

WELCOME TO TALK HOLE, A MONTHLY TOPICAL CONVERSATION BETWEEN COMEDIANS ERIC SCHWARTAU AND STEVEN PHILLIPS-HORST.

ERIC: I haven’t seen or read or done anything besides play tennis and go on vacation.

STEVEN: Out-of-office vibes. Did you see the Zelensky Vogue photoshoot?

ERIC: I did. I guess I have seen things.

STEVEN: I loved it. It was very Talk Hole. Very, “let’s take a topic, center ourselves in the narrative, and do it for a magazine that’s actually just a website.”

ERIC: In the age of video, of the reel, of the constant live Twitch, there’s something inherently funny about choosing the medium of photography. It’s such a museum artifact.

STEVEN: Photography is kitsch now by definition.

ERIC: It’s very deliberate. Slow media.

STEVEN: I mean, it used to take forever to take a photo. With all the gunpowder! This is a return to form.

ERIC: But now you can’t bring gunpowder on set.

STEVEN: Thank you, Alec Baldwin.

ERIC: Apparently Instagram changed something but I haven’t noticed. People are up in arms. Kylie and Kim posted some sort of sad, chain-letter saying they “just want to see photos of their friends.”

STEVEN: My understanding is that Kylie is upset that there’s so many reels. It makes her nauseous on her short flights.

ERIC: Maybe she shouldn’t sit in the front row.

STEVEN: I think the front of the plane is actually less nauseous — because you’re farther from the bathrooms.

ERIC: I think that’s only on a bus…

STEVEN: Oh my god. I just realized the rationale behind the name Airbus. Continue reading

By Claire Carusillo

Cometeer's frozen coffee capsules taste just like coffee

Welcome to Consumerism Reports, a recurring series about all my devices and products. I’d like to clarify that it is NOT a tech column, a food column, or a wellness column — it’s about spending money to speed up self-transformation, and then buying more stuff when that doesn’t work. And so I have acquired an endless array of gadgets, tools, powders, and liquids: from products that promise to make my face look more triangular to tonics that make the skin around my eyes less purple. Do any of them work?

Ah, coffee coffee coffee, that dirt brown and enlivening stuff. Do not talk to me before I’ve had it, because my brain no worky without it. And don’t talk to me after I’ve had it, because I won’t be able to hear you when my head is in the cupboard looking for a fresh bottle of Dave’s coffee syrup, that hyper-viscous Rhode Island-inspired treat that once briefly made me a high-IQ genius. I want coffee all the time!

Luckily, my new friends at Cometeer sent me an innovative new at-home coffee pod treatment after I begged for it with a lot of exclamation marks in the Twitter DMs. Cometeer, according to their promotional materials, is a “world class cup of coffee that is ready in seconds.” Cometeer partners with roasters you’ve probably heard of like Go Get Em Tiger and Counter Culture and flash-freezes a super-strong liquid coffee into a little aluminum pod, reminiscent of a Nespresso. Continue reading

By Olivia Craighead

It's the secret hero of the streaming wars

Welcome to I Was Wrong About, a series of reconsiderations and mea culpas.

I am, first and foremost, an HBO Max girl. If you told me I could only consume one streamer’s library for the rest of my life, I would say bye-bye to Hulu and Netflix and the Paramount Plus account I got just to watch the Tonys. But while HBO Max may be the gold standard of streaming, every perfect child needs a weird sibling lurking in the corner who is actually kind of cool if you get them talking. That’s where Peacock comes in.

I cannot think of Peacock without thinking of this exchange from an episode of 30 Rock, referencing an ill-fated promo campaign for NBC:

Kenneth: This is bigger than both of us. It’s NBC. We comedy.

Jack: Kenneth, it’s we peacock comedy. You say the peacock.

Kenneth: What? That’s insane.

Calling Peacock “Peacock” is insane. Originally advertised as the home of all things NBC, the name was inspired by the NBC logo and met with similar bewilderment. How are they still trying to make “peacock” happen? Continue reading

By Tom Whyman

The leader of the UK Labour Party sucks in ways both general and specific

I hate Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the UK Labour Party. I hate him in a way that's hard to describe, because there are so many aspects to my hatred of him: I hate all of him, but I hate each aspect of him individually, in its own precise way.

I hate him aesthetically. I hate his fussy little too-perfect just-shy-of-Nazi-officer haircut; hate his “Prime Minister from central casting” face, which initially seemed designed by committee, but increasingly suffers from having an expression slapped on it like he's desperately trying to explain away his role in a sex scandal at the dog pound he runs; hate his pedantic voice, which makes everything he says sound like an HR meeting you don't really need to be at. Starmer is a small man — physically short, yes, but that’s not really notable, except as a symbol of the immense spiritual shortness that it signifies. He is aesthetically petty and dull, a piece of hotel art made man. The journalist Moya Lothian McLean once described him as a “wet wipe,” and that seems pretty much right: Keir Starmer is a piece of damp, semi-plastic disposable cloth, that might clog up your drain after getting covered in shit. Continue reading

By Jack Hanson

‘Mother Joan of the Angels’ offers one of the richest portraits of religious imagination

Roman Catholicism, like poetry, seems to be news that stays news, at least in the United States. It might seem strange, at first glance, that the country’s largest religious institution should be an enduring source of curiosity, but with a thoroughly Protestant cultural and political patrimony, an aversion to all things European, a willful ignorance of the Global South, not to mention a civil religion that demands total devotion, the American fascination with and suspicion of Mother Church seems (forgive me) preordained.

That said, as with any American phenomenon, it is a particularly American Catholicism that dominates discussion. As historian Piotr H. Kosicki recently argued, the Catholicism that enjoys outsized representation in the halls of power is in fact a nativist authoritarianism that is more properly aligned with ascendent Rightist movements across the globe (some Catholic, others not) than with the Vatican or, more to the point, than with past generations of immigrants and workers who suffered from the anti-Catholicism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This provincialism posing as historical representation dovetails nicely with the other hot topic in the ongoing discussion of what, exactly, is up with the whole Catholic thing, namely, the largely online merging of trad and transgressive — or trad as transgressive — aesthetics. Neither preoccupation with tradition nor loathing of bourgeois religion is anything new in the history of Catholic cultural revivals (though this time around is looking a little thin: a century ago in France they got JK Huysmans, Charles Péguy, and Raissa Maritain — who do we get?); it is nevertheless remarkable to read claims about the ultimate superiority of the Tridentine Mass put forward in the half-frenetic, half-lethargic idiom of shitposting. Continue reading