Let’s start with some…

Quickies

🎯 "Breaking news" worked: It broke us.

🎯 "Felt cute might delete later" is a great euphemism for "I’m bragging but may stop bragging later. We’ll see!"

🎯 Dating apps create the illusion of infinite choice, like a buffet that never ends. Why settle for egg rolls with student loan debt if there might be a shrimp cocktail with a 401K in your future?

🎯 I’ll really believe gender is just a construct when a bar offers a Fellas’ Night and a bunch of ladies show up because “it’s a good ratio.”

🎯 Dry January? I’d be more impressed if people did No Social Media September. Can you imagine? Of course not. So tell me: Which one of those is more addictive?

🎯 One day we will treat screen addiction the way we treat tobacco addiction. Tobacco companies blackened our lungs, tech companies blackened our brains.

🎯 People who hate stuff reply in the comments. People who love it email, text, or DM. It’s the opposite of what Dale Carnegie preached (i.e. praise people in public and criticize them in private).

🎯 Idea: Reboot "What We Do in the Shadows" but instead of vampires, it's Elon, Thiel, and Ackman at 900 years old and they're still just constantly enraged by Gawker, Kara Swisher, and Business Insider.

🎯 A good way to gauge anti-semitism is to note how clearly a person enunciates Jewish last names. You can tell when someone’s really leaning into the -stein, -berg, -witz, etc. The ultimate example is how Jack Nicholson’s character sneers “Lieutenant WEIN-berg” in his “you can’t handle the truth” monologue in A Few Good Men.

🎯 Years ago I went to a hood barbershop and the barber asked me if I wanted a “shape up” and I didn't know what that meant so I left looking like a reggaeton DJ.

🎯 A tricky thing about dating women over 30 is how frequently it feels like they're extremely mad at you for something someone else did to 'em in the past.

🎯 Poly people talk so much these days. It’s annoying. Just pretend you're French, have an affair, and shut up about it.

🎯 Why does almond milk have an expiration date on it? It’s almonds and water. What exactly is going to go bad here? Feels like the Apple model of making you think perfectly fine products must be relentlessly upgraded.

🎯 A fun thing about studying Buddhism is seeing how much of what passes for "wisdom" is just reconstituted advice Buddhists have been following for centuries. The Denial of Death, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F–, MBSR, the resurgence of Stoicism, etc. We keep remixing the infinite.

🎯 Always blown away by the hubris of “I’ve experienced trauma” folks. As if everyone else is going around living a trauma-free life. We’re all in the weeds, baby.

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Comedy

🃏 I post clips of my standup (and more) at Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube.

🎟️ TOUR (HEADLINING)
2/10 Comedy Dojo (Morris Plains, NJ)
2/23-24 Steamboat Comedy (CO)
3/2 Priam Vineyard (Colchester, CT)
4/19 Comedy House NOLA (New Orleans)
4/26 Cheshire Craft Brewery (Cheshire, CT)
6/14-15 Denver Comedy Lounge (CO)
6/16 Boulder Comedy Show (CO)

🎟️ NYC SHOWS
EVERY TUESDAY | Hot Soup @ Comedy Cellar (FBP)
EVERY WEDNESDAY | Good Eggs @ NY Comedy Club (EV) – discount code SCRAMBLED

MOOD BOARD
Gospel (NYC)
THU 1/18/24
TICKETS (discount code JOY20)

The best paragaphs of the year [Part 2]

I use Instapaper to read long pieces and occasionally highlight “aha” passages. Here are some of my faves from 2023…

The Tyranny of ‘the Best’ [NY Times] by Rachel Connolly:

It’s true that searching long enough for something can make the fantasy version — the version with which you’d be happy — seem more and more perfect in the abstract, in such a way that it drifts farther and farther away. It’s human nature to want more, and better. Indulging this instinct can push us toward better options, to a point, and from then on hopelessly feed a sense of want. I see this most vividly in online dating, where optimizing everyone’s power to search for a partner seems to have caused more disappointment and loneliness than anything else.

It’s a sentiment that has the folksy feel of a Sunday school teaching, but still, part of having a good life is learning to be happy with what you have. As Dr. [Barry] Schwartz put it: “We mistakenly think it is a treasure hunt. And it’s not a treasure hunt. It’s more like treasure creation.”

Leonard Cohen on Creativity, Work Ethic, and Why You Should Never Quit Before You Know What It Is You’re Quitting [The Marginalian] by Maria Popova:

[Hard work] has a certain nourishment. The mental physique is muscular. That gives you a certain stride as you walk along the dismal landscape of your inner thoughts. You have a certain kind of tone to your activity. But most of the time it doesn’t help. It’s just hard work.

But I think unemployment is the great affliction of man. Even people with jobs are unemployed. In fact, most people with jobs are unemployed. I can say, happily and gratefully, that I am fully employed. Maybe all hard work means is fully employed.

The ‘World’s Happiest Man’ Shares His Three Rules for Life [NY Times] by David Marchese:

Matthieu Ricard, ordained Buddhist monk: Compassion is to remedy suffering wherever it is, whatever form it takes and whoever causes it. So what is the object of compassion here? It is the hatred and the person under its power. If someone beats you with a stick, you don’t get angry with the stick — you get angry with the person. These people we are talking about are like sticks in the hands of ignorance and hatred. We can judge the acts of a person at a particular time, but compassion is wishing that the present aspect of suffering and the causes of suffering may be remedied.

Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas [The Atlantic] by Charlie Warzel:

People don’t sing as loudly at shows as they used to, [Willie Williams, U2’s creative director,] argued, because they’re distracted filming. For Bono’s recent one-man show in New York, the pair had decided to ban cellphone recording to achieve an intimate effect, but, working on the Sphere, Williams told me he came to embrace the phones-up experience. “The vast repository of the record of my work is shot by people I don’t know,” he said. “And so not only do they become participants but also collaborators and curators of my work.” He described the Sphere residency as perhaps an extreme version of what live music has evolved toward: A “gigantic group project to archive these shows, one where we are collaborating with the audience and building a body of evidence.”

Related:

U2 at Sphere is the nightmare future of music

Matt Ruby · October 3, 2023

We have finally reached peak "I go to the concert to watch a screen and not the band." That’s what I thought when my timeline filled up with shots from Sphere, the huge IMAX theater/eyeball launched by an evil billionaire in Vegas that opened with some Irish band in the pit playing the soundtrack to a post-modern Fantasia flick that scrolled by on a scr…

Read full story

This Is Not a Taylor Swift Profile [NY Times] by Taffy Brodesser-Akner:

Her music had changed by then. Suddenly, her slow creep from country sped into pure pop, leaving country behind, wishing it well and taking only its tradition of sinuous storytelling with her. Her voice changed, too. Gone was the yodelly vocal flip of the country singer. By then, we had endured a long moment of female artists whose voices seemed outsize for the body of a regular human: melismatic, with 10 notes to a syllable of a word, or a gravelly voice, where a woman sounds as if she is digging down, grinding something out. Consider Taylor’s approach: a voice so pure and pretty that it makes you wonder why so many of her musical peers and predecessors work so hard. It’s not an otherworldly voice, but a specifically worldly one. She sings how you would sing if you were talking and became so overcome with emotion that your voice was lifted and carried by it. It’s how I would sing if I could.

For Jewish Comedian Gary Gulman, Comedy Is Tikkun Olam [Kveller] by Lior Zaltzman:

Gulman: There are a lot of people in the psychiatry, psychology and social work profession who are Jewish people…That also points to this ethos of Jewish people which is under-appreciated and under-reported: that we want to save the world. This idea of tikkun olam — heal the world. So we go into these selfless professions Yes, we also go into show business and corporate law. But we also go into these professions of helping people and charity. It’s such an under-appreciated aspect or stereotype of Jewish people that I wish would be given more more ink and and hot air rather than the insane conspiracy theories and harmful stereotypes.

Julia Fox Gets Dirty to Come Clean [NY Times] by Jessica Testa:

Fox: I understand the privilege of having nice things, but I also understand the burden that comes with it. Because now you’re constantly guarding your things. You’re paranoid about your things, you’re getting insurance on your things. Things get stolen or they get damaged, and it’s totally out of your control. I don’t put my self-worth in my things anymore. I’d rather wear some young up-and-coming designer that nobody knows than a full Dior outfit.

The Pathologization Pandemic [gurwinder.substack.com] by Gurwinder:

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their troubles are not their own fault, but the product of various problems beyond their control. These problems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly they are medical. A common example is “trauma,” a psychiatric term that’s become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused even clinicians fear it’s lost its meaning.

Most people, however, are happy to have their personal failings blamed on medical issues, because it absolves them of responsibility. It’s not your fault you violently lashed out, you have trauma. It’s not your fault you lack energy, you have long Covid. It’s not your fault you hate the way you look, you have gender dysphoria…

Ahead: Gurwinder on therapy and sharp paragraphs from Milan Kundera, a virtuoso violinist, and more…...