Vox Sentences - Well this is awkward

You know that famous optical illusion where some people see a young woman and others see an old lady? That’s sort of the trick of this week’s newsletter, except instead of the relative age of maidens and crones, you can choose to see or not see the political content of these stories.

If you’re looking to escape the charged atmosphere, I got you, babe! You can read on for Vox stories about cinema, sex, hands, awkwardness, and that big fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park without necessarily succumbing to questions like “Who is personally at fault for Kamala Harris’s loss, and is it someone I already didn’t like?” There’s a big world to think about outside the immediate realm of the US presidential election. Just skip the next couple of paragraphs.

For the rest of us, let’s face it: There are political stories everywhere for those with eyes to see. You can’t really talk about cinema, sex, hands, awkwardness, or that big fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park without some political dimension. You might have a motive for wanting to focus on grounded, accessible, human stories at the movies this week. Sexual contraception is certainly a loaded question. Some may have recently been inspired to consider concepts of “left” and “right.” As host Sean Illing points out right at the top of this week’s The Gray Area episode about awkwardness, there’s a very salient reason why this coming Thanksgiving might be socially (and politically) uncomfortable. And when it comes to that fire, there are concerns to be acknowledged about the future of climate action. 

We’re on the precipice of a new era, one that may or may not look a lot like a semi-recent era. Soon enough, our reality will necessarily be about a little more than just your perspective, but for now, enjoy these stories, however they look to you. 

—Meredith Haggerty, senior culture editor

It’s not normal for the East Coast to be on fire

Prospect Park went up in flames! The fire raged for hours, and I could smell burnt leaves all the way to the East River a few miles away. It’s been unseasonably warm in the city, but it was actually the long period of no rain that the East Coast has recently experienced that’s to blame for the blaze. (Although the higher temperatures didn’t help, making the area’s vegetation extra thirsty.) 

Drought is a regular weather concern for some parts of the US, but it’s frankly very freaking weird for NYC. It’s a change, if you will.

As climate scientist Aradhna Tripati told my colleague Paige Vega, climate change “is no longer theoretical or a distant threat, an abstract one. It is not something that happens in the future here. It is not something only happening in places far away from where we live. All weather is now being affected.”

🎧 Well this is awkward

Moral philosopher Alexandra Plakias has a theory that is going to absolutely destroy the personality of about half the millennials I know: People aren’t awkward, only situations are. 

As Plakias explains to host Sean Illing on the latest episode of The Gray Area, philosophers don’t think much about these daily moments of social discomfort that we deal with. But there’s a lot to unpack because when we label a person — rather than circumstances — as awkward, we’re putting that responsibility on them, instead of looking at the world around us and accepting natural social ambiguities. Plakias and Illing’s conversation touches on the fear, uncertainty, shame, and even cowardice that plagues us when it comes to not already knowing how to behave.

Safe sex doesn’t just mean condoms anymore

Shots! Pills! At-home tests and treatments! Condoms remain an old steady for one-size-fits-all safe sex (even if the condoms themselves aren’t one-size-fits-all, and can’t always prevent skin-to-skin STIs like herpes and HPV), but there have been innovations in the space that are worth learning about.

Ultimately, what this all points to is a more self-directed future for those who bone. As Keren Landman explains, with advances like home testing for chlamydia and gonorrhea and PrEP pills or injectables for HIV prevention, individuals now have a greater sense of control over their own sexual health — a boon as health care worker shortages loom and sexual health care becomes more and more fraught. 

🎧 Why are there lefties and righties?

As a 39-year-old woman who still has to make “Ls” with her thumbs to know which direction is which, I felt profoundly seen by this week’s game show episode of Unexplainable. It turns out, I am not alone! 

In the episode, host Noam Hassenfeld and producers Meradith Hoddinott and Byrd Pinkerton quiz their guest, Explain It to Me host Jonquilyn Hill, on a series of directionality mysteries — specifically if they’ve been solved or not. So does science know why some people struggle with left and right? I won’t spoil the answer, but this episode got me thinking plenty about chirality, mirror images, how weird it is that we even have these pairs of symmetrical limbs, and other big questions of life on earth that can get shunted aside when we’re trying to go about our stressful little days and our stressful little jobs in this stressful little world.

As JQ asks the Unexplainable team, “Wow, do you ever stop and think, being a person is so wild?” After listening to this: Yes!!

Why Conclave and Juror #2 are the movies we need right now

“Middlebrow” is often lobbed as an insult, especially in the world of cine-mah, but that is just such a misunderstanding of what the word really means. We need something between the highbrow (read: holding pretensions to scholarly, rarefied taste — not necessarily “good”) and the lowbrow (by which I mean definitely unintellectual — although not necessarily bad). There’s nothing wrong with a movie that’s trying to do something with a little bit of balance.

In the last 20 years, movies pitched straight down the middle for adults have been a dying breed. Between the Oscar bait and superhero movies, we should celebrate the Conclaves, the Airs, the Challengerses, the Juror #2s. Listen to Kyndall Cunningham, and then settle down with some fun, thoughtful, new movies for grown-ups. (Conclave is still playing in theaters; Juror #2, which I saw in a theater and enjoyed very, very much — brag — is coming to Max over the Christmas holidays.)

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