Irony is dead but Joe Manchin remains alive. Interesting.

Used to be you could tell what people were like by what they liked. Not anymore.

At the beginning of spring, a friend told me a story. She’d recently had a long lunch with a friend who kept ordering the group espresso martinis. They were delicious, yes, another round. When she awoke in her bed with heart palpitations and saw nine on the clock, she was unsure which nine it was. Espresso martinis, of all drinks — isn’t that funny? It was. Who would have thought?

As it turns out, everyone. From the notorious haunts of Chinatown east to unbearable West Village brunch spots, people were sitting outside with conspicuously brown drinks. I went to a gallerist’s wedding that served them after the cake was cut. At dinner with my girlfriend and her parents in Boston’s touristy Seaport District, I saw them at the kind of restaurant to which a girlfriend’s parents take you. They could be ordered at Lucien or Pastis or TGIFridays, or made at home with a recipe from the Starbucks website. The espresso martini wellspring was unclear to me — I heard it may have had something to do with a reality TV show — but the beguiling potion was suddenly everywhere. The definitive espresso martini piece has already been written, but the drinks themselves aren’t really what concern me. More unusual is the way they were embraced by the chic and the normal and the embarrassingly uncool all at once, with equal enthusiasm, totally eschewing the standard cool-common-passé sequence. Everyone seemed to realize that drinking them is sort of funny, but to also genuinely like them. I started to think of the phenomenon as the apotheosis of a decade-long shift in how trends unfold: an irony-level collapse.

It’s hard to live in the modern world without feeling like you should start committing some felonies.

Sometimes, in idle moments, I get a vision of my teenage son’s son — my imaginary unborn grandson — manually pollinating soybeans for 12 hours a day in exchange for a ration of drinkable water. I prefer not to linger on this image. Once I have forced my mind away from it, though, to picture said grandson coming home and feeding me my mush, I end up wondering how I will explain to him why it was so vitally important, in the year 2021, that we preserve the normal function of the Senate and respect the personal autonomy of a man named Joe Manchin III.

As the senior senator from West Virginia, Manchin is one of 50 people who must vote unanimously if Democrats are to pass any significant legislation during this two-year window in which they control the presidency and both houses of Congress. He opposes the climate change provisions in President Joe Biden’s budget bill — provisions that would incentivize electricity providers to replace coal- and gas-fired power plants with solar, nuclear, and wind, as well as impose taxes on emissions of methane and other pollutants that cause global warming.

We're here for you.

We turned the clocks back on Sunday. This means that going forward we’ll have a bit more light in the morning. It also means that, for the foreseeable future, night will begin about halfway through the workday. Now everyone will want to go beddy-bye around lunch. Of course, going beddy-bye won’t be allowed until the clock says it’s actual nighttime, so to compensate, everyone will complain about the darkness every day until spring. Wah, wah, wah — it’s dark. Wah, wah, wah — remember when it was bright out now, before? I need to be frank with you. This compounds an already undesirable situation. Collectively, we need to suck it up.

(Please do not get defensive.)

My friend, you need to deal with the fact that it’s going to be dark outside early, just like you have every year before this one. I just … don’t want to fucking hear about it anymore, not to be rude. To help, I have put together a quick guide to processing different feelings you might have. Please proceed with an open mind and an open heart.

Of course the former president of my alma mater is involved in the University of Austin

It has come to my attention that my alma mater, St John’s College, is in the news because its former president, Pano Kanelos, quit his post to start the University of Austin, an unaccredited school co-founded by Bari Weiss and her various loud yet silenced-identifying friends, which will forever appear beneath The University of Texas at Austin on Google.

Because I don’t think one should dwell on college for the rest of their life, I don’t. I have not used Facebook since 2011, but I have heard, against my will, that Kanelos has been a contentious figure in the college community since joining as president. It’s also possible that he left the liberal arts college in more financial turmoil than when he joined it, as if you needed more evidence that someone joining arms with the likes of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan to found an educational institution with less legitimacy than the University of Phoenix is an intellectual grifter.

If you went to St. John’s, please do not contact me. I do not care. I’m still waiting for a refund to be honest. The only reason I am writing this blog is because my editor saw me tweet “Was St. John's College not white supremacist enough???” in response to the news and asked me to. The thought that I could make someone’s life better by convincing them not to attend St. John’s College is what made me say yes.

Business Insider reported several allegations of disturbing behavior with much younger women

An investigation published in Insider found that Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, a middle-aged multimillionaire who has built his entire empire on being a public asshole, is also a private asshole — specifically to much younger women, some of whom claimed he subjected them to “frightening and humiliating experiences,” including nonconsensually choking and filming them during sex. Some of them were teens at the time. From Insider:

Insider spoke with more than two dozen people with direct experience with Portnoy and Barstool, including eight current or former employees. Some women, as young as 19 who had no professional connection to Portnoy, recounted having sexually explicit online exchanges with him. Three of these women said they had sex with Portnoy, now 44, and that the encounters turned into frightening and humiliating experiences that have taken a toll on their mental health. Two, including Madison, said Portnoy both choked and filmed them without advance permission; another, who has had depression, said she was suicidal after the two had sex. And all three were afraid to speak out, fearing retaliation from the media mogul and his rabid fan base.

The article details an encounter with a 20-year-old college student, who met Portnoy on Instagram after messaging him about his videos reviewing different slices of pizza. Portnoy sent her footage of his past hook-ups and asked about her sexual fantasies, then bought her “a first-class plane ticket to visit him at his $2.2 million Nantucket home.” Two days after they had sex, the woman texted her friend that the interaction “was so rough I felt like I was being raped.” The texts detailed how he allegedly videotaped her, spit in her mouth, and choked her so hard she couldn’t breathe. She wrote: “It hurt and I was literally screaming in pain.”