Gawker - Another update about a 2,000-lb pumpkin

By Kelly Conaboy

Cheers

Flavored coffee creamers get a bad rap because they are gross. People think that just because they’re bad, they can’t be good. This is incorrect.

The novelty creamer is the iced coffee of cold-weather months: a seasonally appropriate abomination for the unsettled. The one discrepancy between iced coffee and coffee with a novelty creamer is that coffee with a novelty creamer actually tastes good. “Pumpkin spice” gets a lot of attention for being a flavor disliked by puritanical whiners during this time, yes, but the world of flavored coffee creamer is much larger than that. Cinnamon roll and candy cane-like flavors invite us to get out of bed in the cold darkness; they envelop our hearts in their caloric creaminess and say, It will be okay (artificially).

It’s not my job to convert the coffee drinkers who have shut their minds to cognitive dissonance of the delightfully disgusting flavored coffee creamer. They are religious in their devotion to the bitter grounds their father drank, and that’s for them to sort out. It is instead my job to survey the fall and winter 2022 market of unusually flavored coffee creamers and report my findings.

My first stop was of course International Delight, a stand-out in the world of coffee creamers that make you think, “Why would anyone want that.” Alas, they did not respond to any of my requests for free International Delights. And upon searching for the more creative International Delight flavors (Cocoa Pebbles, Willy Wonka, French Toast Swirl, Cinnabon, Coldstone Creamery, Almond Joy) at my local grocery store and then also the far-away grocery store, I was left empty-handed. Do they even actually make these flavors? It seems like no. A scam. To rebel against them, and because I prefer the more ethical oat milk anyway, I narrowed my scope to fancifully flavored nut milks (from companies that would send me milks for free). Let’s see how they fared. Continue reading

By Alex Pabán Freed

Perhaps it's time to have some unreasonable expectations

Is it good to go to war with contemporary literature? It’s at least a genre. A fun place to start is Elif Batuman’s eminently spicy “Get a Real Degree,” but there are many other places you could look: from Becca Rothfeld we learn that contemporary fiction has a problem with social media-born, anxiously-enacted, moral scrupulousness; from Parul Sehgal we learn that contemporary fiction has a problem with simplified trauma plots; Jackson Arn tells us the contemporary essay has, among other things, a problem with routine ambivalence; and the editors at n+1 tell us the contemporary review has a problem with grouping works by their thematic problems. Dip a bit into the archives, and you’ll find Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus going head-to-head in a thrilling, literary scrap, the “boys in the alley” as Cynthia Ozick would have it, same alley where, various years before, other boys David Foster Wallace, Gore Vidal, and John Barth all entered the fray — I’ve missed a few, but you get the idea: people like to go big.

Let’s try it out. The world’s structural problems require structural solutions: the novel’s pretty good at revealing the former and not really a part of the latter. We could do a bit of what the journal Chuang calls Scooby-Doo Marxism — where we take the mask off of whatever problems we have with contemporary literature and find capitalism lurking behind — but you probably live under capitalism, so unless you’re engaging in near-Olympic levels of denial, you already know it’s bad — if not for you, then certainly for other people. Follow these thoughts to their logical conclusion, of course, and you’re probably wondering: what can the novel possibly do to help bring about the end of all exploitation? What can the novel do at all? These are good questions to think about, so let’s think about them, starting with some of the claims made about the novel in Timothy Bewes’s recent book Free Indirect; I’m a civilian, but I have some friends in academia, and they tell me this is the new thing in the theory of the novel. Continue reading

By Tarpley Hitt

A new book on the consulting behemoth is deeply reported, but scarce on juicy details

The story of McKinsey could make for a ruthless and biting book; the ingredients are all there. The oldest, largest, and smuggest of the “Big Three” management consulting firms siphons 20-something graduates from elite colleges with the promise of astronomical pay, future job prospects with even higher pay, and values-driven impact that mostly translates into legitimizing mass layoffs for multimillion-dollar fees. The company’s century-long insistence on secrecy has allowed it to maintain both a conflict-ridden client list and a veneer of professional decency, yielding alumni both famous (Pete Buttigieg, Sheryl Sandberg, Bobby Jindal, Tom Cotton) and infamous (the ones who went to prison). And its historical trajectory, kicked off by an accounting professor on the eve of the Great Depression, has directly accelerated the metastasis of corporate power in nearly every industry subjected to its exorbitantly priced PowerPoints. That book was written by Duff McDonald in 2013. It’s called The Firm.

A new release, from New York Times reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, attempts to pick up where McDonald left off. When McKinsey Comes to Town, which came out Oct. 4 from Doubleday, is a deeply reported dive into the consulting firm’s expansive industrial reach, which draws from the accounts of nearly 100 current and former McKinsey employees, few of whom have much love for their old or current bosses. Most notably, the authors got a hold of McKinsey’s tightly guarded client list, which they use to highlight the firm’s fingerprints on everything from the opioid epidemic and the vaping crisis, to bloated CEO pay and the 2008 financial collapse, to ICE’s detention regime and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The reporting pair has been responsible for much of the Times’s McKinsey coverage, and anyone who has been following along will find the book somewhat familiar. Sure enough, the text reads more like an article compilation than a cohesive account of how McKinsey’s emphasis on efficiency perverted the global economy. Continue reading

By Olivia Craighead

The ring is off, the energy healer has been called, and she has the divorce lawyer on speed dial

If this were a movie, we’d be at the part just before Gisele Bündchen gets her groove back. She and current husband Tom Brady have both hired divorce lawyers, which means that it’s time for her to reinvent herself and learn who she is when she’s no longer tethered to a man whose brain and body is rapidly disintegrating. For Gisele, that means meeting with a spiritual healer and taking off her wedding ring, and the paps are all over it.

The Daily Mail reported that just days before the supermodel hired a lawyer, she met with someone named Dr. Ewa, a “a dedicated Doctor of Ayurvedic Medicine,” who blessed Bündchen’s SUV. The healer burned Palo Santo in and around the vehicle, hopefully removing whatever dark energy Brady had left behind.

Dr. Ewa — Is that her first name? Last? — is exactly the kind of woman you want cleansing your space. She appears to be an old white lady who wears harem pants and fuzzy UGG slides, and when Bündchen was leaving her office she threw up the prayer hands. We know Bündchen was feeling good because the Daily Mail also reported that she spent 40 minutes in a CVS afterward. What is better than languidly moving through the aisles of a drug store?

More evidence that Bündchen is winning came from Page Six, who got photos of the model out with the kids on Tuesday sans wedding ring. Continue reading

By Allie Jones

Depends on the tabloid

Can you believe Ben Affleck and Mrs. Jennifer Lynn Affleck have been legally married for three months? After their first wedding in Vegas, first honeymoon in Paris, second fake plantation wedding in Georgia, and second honeymoon in Italy, this rockstar couple is finally settling down in Los Angeles. Affleck just sold his Pacific Palisades bachelor pad for $28.5 million, which suggests he is living with his new bride at her place while they shop for a forever home with the right number of toilets. How’s all that going? Depends on whom you ask.

Us Weekly proclaimed this morning that Ben and J.Lo are “still in their honeymoon phase.” A source insisted that “they are very head over heels for each other” and “becoming husband and wife hasn’t changed their relationship much, except for the fact that it solidified what they had.” Continue reading

By Kelly Conaboy

The 2,656-lb pumpkin is Britain's largest ever

It’s a terrible time to be a pumpkin. People are carving things into you. People are buying you not to fulfill your life’s purpose (to be made into a pumpkin food) (or alternatively to be happy living out your days as a pumpkin in a field) but to decorate their homes. Farmers all over the world are carting your pumpkin body to fairs to weigh you publicly and then take credit for your heft. What’s a pumpkin to do? Well, Britain’s award-winningly large pumpkin had an idea, but beware — it’s not for the faint of heart.

“Britain's biggest pumpkin caused traffic chaos when it fell off its trailer and into a busy road,” reports the Daily Mail. The 2,656-lb pumpkin, even larger than the one that earned the U.S. record earlier this week, had just been officially weighed and deemed the U.K.’s largest pumpkin ever, before being strapped to a trailer for transport to a Southampton pumpkin festival. While en route, the trailer tipped over, causing the pumpkin to tumble out and block traffic. Continue reading