Ann Friedman - Is an era ever really over?

It's been strange to read the many "end of an era" eulogies for a decade of media that has formed the bulk of my own career. These pieces are all designed to offer 20/20 hindsight and a clean narrative about What Went Wrong. (Spoiler: Media companies should not have climbed into bed with tech companies!)

But living it was messier and more rage-inducing and more exciting than all that. 

It felt like being on the low end of the masthead, the person who edits blog posts, and occasionally pausing to think, "Wait, what's the difference between a blog post and a web article and a print article we've posted online? They all get read the same way." It was thrilling when those categories started to collapse, when it all leveled out. When my thin little work history suddenly had more cachet.

It felt like a lava flow of righteous anger every time a new crop of white men were anointed as the future: As a young editors "changing the game," as bloggers who found institutional success, as tech-savvy founders of digital-native media, as email-newsletter pioneers.

It felt like repeatedly making the case to my biz bosses that clicks did not equal quality, that chasing virality was not a good long game... while at the same time feeling deflated when a two-year-old post about home-organization tips did better numbers than a fresh feature full of on-the-ground reporting. Data is depressing.

It felt like I was always too late, even when I was early. Joining Twitter in 2009. (First tweet: "I caved.") Starting a newsletter in 2013. Launching a podcast in 2014. Each time, I thought of myself as jumping on a bandwagon that was just about to roll over me. The "end of an era" op-eds rarely focus on this constant pressure to do more, to be more, because it hasn't ended. (How is a writer who loathes the front-facing camera supposed to "do" TikTok? Forget it —just keep lurking!)

It felt like being icked out by the personal-essay gold rush (more trauma = more clicks!), but also buying some picks and shovels. It felt like trying to figure out a way to be "me" on the page while still holding back, infusing each piece with a sense of myself to connect with the faceless reader, then disconnecting from the comments section and at-replies. A fun psychological game!

Reflecting on this moment decades from now, I don't know if it will look like a clean before-and-after. (Maybe it will, simply because all of these op-eds say it is.) From the inside, right now, it just seems messier than that to me. A moment, yes, but just one in a long twisting tale of ever-shifting expectations for how we make media, how we consume it, and how it all gets paid for.

Homicides of unhoused people are on the rise across the country—particularly "stranger danger" incidents in which the perpetrator is a person with a fixed address, Thacher Schmid reports.

Nic Anstett is begging for more trans girl trash: Media that is messy, mindless, and doesn't center cis people.

Makah artist Micah McCarty creates whale puppets that are part of his family's harpooning history. For McCarty, writes Josephine Woolington, there is no difference between art and history, art and lifestyle, art and language. 

A timeline and primer on Atlanta's Cop City by Micah Herskind. 

"What and who will influence her next? Who will she leave behind, pick up, come back to? Who and what will stay with her the rest of her life?" Susannah Felts on watching her daughter, a music lover, grow up.

🚨 Cusk on Ernaux!!! 🚨

I love these appliqués by Ayako Miwayaki. I like this take on Lagerfeld as a Met Gala theme. And I love Somebody Somewhere so fucking much. Thank god the new season is here. 

"I have recently gotten into ant keeping, which is... clearly not for everybody," writes reader Rose Eveleth.

"I'm taking an art class at a local community college (highly recommend everybody check out their local community college offerings!) and decided to create a sculpture of a head with a brain made out of thumbs — I wanted to fill that brain with some marker of non-human intelligence. Which led me to ants. Now I am deep in ant world. 

There's something about caring for a collective intelligence in my home that is very quietly incredible. I sometimes watch the ants doing their thing and think that this is probably what it feels like for aliens to watch earth." 

"That is possibly my favorite-ever pie chart. So counterintuitive yet so true!" - Maggie. To enjoy every single hand-drawn slice of pie, become a paying member! It's just $1.25/month (aka $15/year).