Mina Tavakoli, Wish You Were Her. N+1.

Had anyone ever expected to see Marilyn Monroe? The fantasist born Norma Jeane Mortenson — born with a drive to make the switch from human to icon, to cross the magic portal we sometimes call “celebrity” — invented a character she called Marilyn. Immortality of a kind ensued. Could a Monroe impersonator spirit that sleight of hand back to us? Beam us even a particle of her star’s shine?

I wanna be kissed by you, just you . . .

William Davies: Easy to join, easy to leave. London Review of Books.

Crucially, however, while politicisation has continued to escalate, institutionalisation is at a low ebb. This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave. The chasm between politics and policy widens, as the former becomes a fruitless stream of outrage with little or no practical consequence.

Daniele Palmer: A Crisis of Belonging. Commonweal.

In place of swarm-like protest, Jäger wants to see not less politicization but more durable forms through which it can become consequential. Throughout the book, he returns to mass parties and trade unions: institutions that, in their heyday, aggregated grievances, trained activists, and translated diffuse discontent into strategic leverage. In the absence of such groups, today’s protests risk resembling not the organized politics of the 1930s but the recurrent peasant uprisings of the ancien régime. While they may register anger, they struggle to alter underlying inequalities.

Kaleb Horton was an American writer who died in September last year. He had an extraordinarily unique writer's voice, reviewing music, describing culture, and observing life in the 2020s. This paragraph, and particularly the last sentence, is one that keeps rattling in my head:

You can’t help anybody when you’re exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of “I would love to be dead right now” on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s wonderful because we’re not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.

THE PROFESSION OF HERITAGE conservation puts 'significance' at the centre of what we do. Places that, as people say, 'are heritage', aren't necessarily important or valuable or beautiful or good, they're significant, which is a key distinction. Something, like a historical event or a social meaning, makes them significant, and we have elaborate rubrics and sets of criteria to checklist-test the values. At bottom, though, it's a fundamentally human and subjective thing: if someone asks 'is it heritage', the question implied is 'heritage to who'. It is my firm view that there is such a thing as cat significance.

'The Disappearance of the Public Bench', Gabrielle Bruney, Places Journal

To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm.

'Occasional paper: Inconstant moon', Doug Muir, Crooked Timber

Now we have to take a step back and talk a little bit about the physics of moons.

'What happens when the short-form video bubble pops?' Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day

The takeaway for me from the Geese debacle is not that a bunch of huge fucking losers are getting money from record labels or whatever to astroturf fan campaigns for indie bands. It’s that the current state of short-form video is so unbelievably rancid that it has become inhospitable to anyone with an actual fanbase. There is a delicious irony here. That social platforms could be made irrelevant by their own pivot to video. Congrats, Silicon Valley, you built an infinite Jerry Springer machine and no one wants to use it anymore because it makes them look like Jerry Springer.

My Dinner With Andre: 45 Years Of Deep Listening by Ben Harris-Roxas:

This is what My Dinner with Andre is about, and it’s why I find myself drawn to it again and again. It is a subject of almost unbearable relevance in 2026 but almost unimaginably distant from how we live now, 45 years after it was made.

The film itself has no interest in being relevant to anything.

Sean at Defector:

In all of the important ways, this quote and the authors’ broader project sucks. But in one specific way, it’s nice to get such a tidy mission statement: I don’t know anything about this issue, and the consequences don’t impact me anyway, but here’s What It Means About Gender. It’s a studied ignorance; a principled lack of principles. Bigots don’t know ball, and they can’t be bothered to learn.

Ned Resnikoff, The Great Retcon:

But we should be clear: when they engage in this project, they are the ones who are rejecting our heritage as Americans. It is the modern-day Calhounists who are repelled by everything that truly makes American identity distinctive: its pluralism, its privileging of a shared creed over a shared gene pool, its history of hard-fought struggles for recognition, freedom, and equality. They might call themselves “heritage Americans” based on their bloodlines and supposed connection to the soil, but they reject the aspects of American identity that really count.

William Davies, N+1, Stupidology:

To many of us, the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies, as one of stupidity. This diagnosis has credibility across the political spectrum.

Fintan O'Toole, NYRB, The Lingering Delusion:

Harris’s book seems more a symptom of distress than a diagnosis of the disorders that have brought American democracy into mortal danger. It is a series of flashbacks to a bad trip, the replaying in her mind of an ultimately traumatic experience.

IN AUGUST THE LAST time I posted it was because I'd begun a Cert IV at TAFE in residential drafting. That's off: I've taken on a new and better job, so I sent my teachers as nice an email as I could to thank them, since I won't be continuing it.