Gawker - Attachment weary

Are you anxious, avoidant, or hoodwinked by shaky science?

It requires no special insight to conclude that they fuck you up, your mom and dad. Still, attachment theory is having a new moment, laundering the observation through its Duplo-sized conceptual vocabulary. The 2010 hit Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment, by Amir Levin and Rachel Heller, has climbed back on the best-seller list, accompanied by a slew of related articles. A recent piece in the New York Times noted a “hockey-stick-like surge in sales” of the book during the last year, which the author attributed to a Tik-Tok trend cycle, and that people in lockdown had more time on their hands to consider their emotional lives. Attachment theory now seems to be the framework through which the millennial women and men who mention their therapist in their Tinder bio apprehend their romantic lives.

Attachment theory was first formulated by the British psychologist John Bowlby in 1958. As multiple critics within the discipline have noted, the theory is less a single system than an archipelago of categories built on his original work. Bowlby was interested in how an infant’s relationship with its mother shaped its subsequent approach to the world, and his breakout study of 40 delinquent boys in a juvenile prison attributed their dysfunction not to social factors like class, but to a deficient attachment with their mothers during infancy. Bowlby, in collaboration with American-Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth, observed dozens of mother-infant pairs — many of which were unreplicated studies — and elaborated the three major types of attachment: anxious, avoidant, and secure. The psychologists’ followers continued to add categories, including “anxious avoidant” and “disorganized,” with each subsequent generation of attachment theory psychologists adding new hybrid categories.

The new book from Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen is self-help for managers

In 1946, the pioneering sociologist Charles Wright Mills lamented the tragically unheroic life of the salaryman. Unlike entrepreneurs, captains of industry, and other all-American heroes of the competitive market, even the fully-realized salaryman — the corporate executive — “has never been a popular middle-class idol; he is too cold and high with impersonal power.” Living a toadying life of quiet misery, the white-collar employee clambers their way up a business bureaucracy. The office was no place for heroics.

In later decades, bathed in the twin bright lights of technology and finance capital, the office itself became, in its own way, heroic, or at least exciting. From there emerged technologies that would change everything. Money could be pulled from thin air. Lean teams of dynamic individuals strode into a future far from the petty indignities of the office hierarchy and its pen-pushing, ladder-climbing denizens. ​​The modern office could be cool even if most of the people who went there were not. Of course, filling a sunlit loft with ping pong tables does little to address existing workplace hierarchies except superficially. Even after the cool office became passé and Silicon dreams faded like so many lines of recalled Teslas, modern managers — Mills’s salarymen and salary-women — remained marginal figures in the cultural imagination.

A new book by journalists Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen attempts to fill this gap, casting office workers as champions who can change their workplaces and even society as a whole. Former BuzzFeed reporter Anne Helen Petersen is probably most well known for her viral article about “Millennial Burnout” and a book on the same topic that followed. Charlie Warzel, her partner and also a former reporter at BuzzFeed, writes a newsletter for The Atlantic. Out Of Office (OOO) is drawn from the authors’ experiences of working from home both before and during the pandemic as well as from interviews with employers and employees about remote work.

‘Summer House’ should be fun.

It was only two weeks ago that we declared Seth Marks the “new worst househusband” in the Bravo Real Housewives universe. We were correct; he had just motorboated a cake shaped like his wife’s friend’s boobs, and then he asked that friend’s husband for the number of her plastic surgeon to imply that he’d like to buy his wife the same boobs. But the world moves fast, and it seems we already have a new “new worst househusband” to anoint. Evolve or die. The new worst househusband is Kyle from Summer House.

Kyle from Summer House is not a househusband in the traditional sense. He isn’t on a Housewives franchise, and in the timeline of Summer House’s current season he is not yet married. But Summer House is a Bravo reality franchise with “house” in the title, and in actual reality he is indeed unfortunately married to fellow castmember Amanda. I’ve checked with the judges and he qualifies. Congratulations to the entire Summer House family.

Kyle from Summer House has always been not great. His most infamous on-air moment is drunkenly screaming at his now-wife for being “not fun” when “summer should be fun.” He was in his mid-30s at the time; he is now 39.

It can be as easy as eating a whole head of raw lettuce a day

Most adults in the U.S. are not consuming enough fruits and vegetables, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote in a recent report. With this study, the CDC once again confirms what all of us in the U.S. — as well as everyone who has ever had the slightest inkling of an opinion on Americans — has known all along, in our heart of hearts, probably since the moment we were first capable of independent thought.

Per the CDC, only 12 percent of U.S. adults consume the recommended 1.5 to 2 cups of fruit every day, and just 10 percent reach the recommended daily intake of 2 to 3 cups of vegetables. When I think about how small a cup is, those recommended servings sound easily attainable, but when forced to review everything I’ve eaten so far today — an egg-and-cheese sandwich on a roll, a bowl of oatmeal, a few potato chips, like 30 ounces of water — I must concede that there’s no fucking way I eat enough fresh produce to satisfy the draconian demands of our snitch-ass public health bodies.

There are many reasons why the majority of people in this country may not ingest the minimum recommended amount of fruits and vegetables each day — food deserts, lack of time or money to cook, the calculated convenience of processed foods, inflation, capitalism, so on and so forth — but let me put all that aside for a moment to address just the people who are not eating enough produce for the same reason as me (a profound lack of desire to do anything at all times, mixed with a dash of laziness): I know it’s hard, but we can probably do better.

Here are some friendly suggestions for how to attain the recommended daily servings of fruits and veggies (remember, 1.5–2 cups and 2–3 cups, respectively):

He says the COVID-19 vaccine is mind control or something, IDK.

As you know, Eric Clapton is obsessed with getting the SARS-CoV-2 virus inserted directly into his gaping mouth and flared nostrils by any means necessary. Is it the taste he loves, the smell, or the feeling? He can’t tell, and he thinks it might just be the vibe in general. Regardless, he loves the virus in an almost sexual way; he can’t think about anything else, and sometimes his thoughts of SARS-CoV-2 interrupt his sleep. If he could achieve an erection he would, and I fear his obsession is only getting worse.

Clapton recently appeared on some YouTube channel called Real Music Observer to talk about how the vaccine that protects against COVID-19 is, like … a mind control device from the government? I don’t know. He said people who get vaccinated and wear masks are victims of “mass formation hypnosis,” which is a term being thrown around now in anti-vax spaces primarily because of a misinformation-spreading scientist named Dr. Robert Malone, who recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. (His appearance sparked an open letter to Spotify from medical and scientific experts who called the misinformation spread using Rogan’s podcast "a sociological issue of devastating proportions.")

“Once I kind of started to look for it, I saw it everywhere,” Clapton said, about the effects of “mass formation hypnosis.” I bet. He says he even saw “little things on YouTube which were like subliminal advertising.” Gosh, imagine that. Anyway: