Gawker - Big lollipop

By Fran Hoepfner

I completed America's most disgusting treat

Preface

The giant lollipop is an icon. It is the epitome of candy. It has an emoji and everything (🍭). And yet, despite the infamy of its girth and rainbow swirls, I can’t recall ever seeing anyone actually eat one of these big pieces of candy. Not in my childhood. Not in my adulthood. Not recently in South Carolina, where I visited half a dozen old-time sweet shop(pes) filled with screaming, running, sticky children and their handlers. My parents had never let me buy one when I was young. “Those things taste horrible,” one of them must have said to me, and looking at the lollipops, I somehow knew in my heart that they tasted horrible, even without having taken a single lick.

Still, the question plagued me: What would it be like to consume one? What would it do to my body? My mind and my spirit? “I should eat a giant lollipop,” I thought, followed by: “I should eat a giant lollipop for work.” To my surprise and eventual dismay, this website said, “Okay.” It was time to put my insatiable sweet tooth to the test. Let the licks begin. Continue reading

By Elia Cugini

Why readers on TikTok love this sentimental slop

Last year, in a piece titled “How Crying on TikTok Sells Books,” the New York Times tracked how the social media app was ushering readers into the Age of the Ugly Cry: clusters of videos dedicated to “books that will make you sob” have reached millions of views and were having, according to publishing-industry insiders, a seismic effect on sales. Years-old novels about domestic violence (It Ends With Us), childhood sexual abuse (A Little Life), bisexual yearning in Old Hollywood (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo), and getting your favourite twink killed in the Trojan war (The Song of Achilles) have experienced massive, ongoing increases in sales, largely based on videos that promise they will make you “sob until you can’t breathe” or will leave you “heartbroken and shattered for days.” Your local bookshop probably has a TikTok table; at least half the books on it will be designed to make you weep into your breakfast muffin, if you’re a breakfast muffin person.

Because it involves both melodrama and young people online, it’s easy to set this phenomenon at odds with a more high-brow appreciation for quality fiction, but I don’t think that’s necessary. Everyone wants media to occasionally make them feel things. Aren’t even the most Cusk-pilled among us sometimes a little sick of spare, dysthymic, white-dustjacketed novels about watching your house plants die in your Brooklyn apartment? Don’t you just want to chuck it all in for a book that’ll kill off every other thought in your head? And sure, some of the novels beloved by sobbing TikTokers are very bad. Most novels are. If you managed to get through adolescence without writing a novel’s worth of bad hurt/comfort fanfiction, good for you, but we are different people. There exist valves in the human psyche that are best turned by fiction that is perhaps inept, but is emotional in a vulnerable, sincere, full-throated way.

However, there remains something a little unsightly, a little base, about books that set out to make you cry, and something a little unnerving about books that try to cloak the rawness of that motive with a high-minded style. This aesthetic clash is typified by A Little Life, a Booker-nominated 800-page tome about a ravaged, traumatized lawyer in New York, which started heavily featuring in teenagers’ sad-book recommendation videos years after its 2015 release, sitting snugly between various popular YA and romance picks. Why? Continue reading

By Kelly Conaboy

Thank you, but no thank you

Welcome to Miss Type, a column about etiquette in the digital age. This week: How do you quietly leave someone’s “Close Friends” list?

Vampires cannot enter a home without invitation. It’s nice that they have a rule. In the modern horror of our daily lives online, people can insert themselves into our personal digital space without so much as a request; showing up in our email, our DMs, our Venmo, our text messages, our Twitter mentions. You try to go about your daily life and suddenly a person is attempting to get your attention publicly, and who even are they? Go away!

This intrusion is never as unusual as it is with Instagram’s “Close Friends” list. Here, an Instagram user you have agreed to follow — a friend, a former coworker, a person you knew in high school, a person you’ve never met but have friends in common with — can add you to an exclusive list of followers who can see secret, not-for-everyone’s-eyes Instagram Stories. The secretive nature of these Stories is denoted by a green circle around the Story poster’s icon. Continue reading

By Olivia Craighead

Like a lot of hideous ink, it’s about astrology

You can tell so much about someone from their tattoos. For example, I have a switchblade on my ribcage because I was once a 22-year-old going through an identity crisis. Aaron Rodgers recently got a giant astrology-inspired design on his forearm because he is a 38-year-old with bad taste.

On an appearance on the NFL network, the Green Bay Packers quarterback finally answered some questions about why he got a tattoo that every high school’s requisite white rapper would call “sick.”

"If you're not a student of astrology, there's going to be some weird things to look at in there," Rodgers said. "There's three signs at the top: Aquarius to the right, Sagittarius in the middle and Scorpio on the far left." Continue reading

By Kelly Conaboy

He's as good a therapist as he was a fictional father

David Sutcliffe, the actor who played Rory Gilmore’s loser dad Christopher Hayden in the beloved CW series Gilmore Girls, did not storm the Capitol on January 6.

There were rumors he did, after he shared a video taken during the riot on Instagram, but he cleared them up by quote-tweeting a video of a man smoking a joint inside of the Capitol that day, adding, “There are rumors circulating that I ‘stormed the capital.’ Not true — though I would have been proud to share a smoke with this great Patriot!” In a follow-up tweet, he suggested that he was kidding. (Ha-ha.)

That David Sutcliffe seems to be MAGA-adjacent does not come as much of a surprise to Gilmore Girls fans. A deadbeat, absentee father and frequent monkey wrench in the Luke-Lorelai love story, Christopher Hayden is one of the series’ most hated characters, perhaps second only to Luke’s secret daughter April (also a monkey wrench in the Luke-Lorelai love story, but more importantly just so annoying, oh my god). That he is an apparent Trump supporter — who once shared the thought that after Trump dies, he will become “a symbol of rebellion, and [replace] Che Guevara on T-shirts” — gets the reaction less of “oh no!” and more of “ugh, of course.” Continue reading