Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Category What I'm reading

  • Knicks In Four

    Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day: 'The Clear Channel Internet'.

    All of digital video — and by extension, all of social media — is poisoned. There’s been so much written about the Dead Internet theory lately, but that’s not what this is. It’s closer to the Clear Channel internet, where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not when it comes to the truly viral content. It’s either being directly bankrolled by a company like Kalshi or downstream of some weird payola agreement a bunch of influencers made with random clippers on Discord. But unlike TV or the radio, our social media feeds continue to look like — and market themselves as if — they’re still powered by real people.

    Broderick's newsletter is sometimes incomprehensible and extremely online, and it makes me feel ancient, but it is essential to understand what the internet now is.

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  • What I'm reading: Gulliver

    Fintan O'Toole, Gulliver's Warning, New York Review of Books

    But self-pity is not dependent on any objective reality of oppression or injustice. It is proportionate only to one’s sense of having “deserved much.” The sense of injustice it feeds off is entirely about one’s sense of one’s own proper status. To put it simply, if you always travel first class but one day, for some reason, you get relegated to economy class, you will spend the trip feeling terribly sorry for yourself. If you always sit in economy class, it just is what it is.

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  • What I'm reading: Consider the Phone

    Ryan Avent, Consider the Phone.

    We are all implicated. It’s remarkable to me how very clever people — research-driven wonky sorts and respected academics and savvy businesspeople — will engage in conversations about the rottenness of the information environment around us, completely certain that only other people are driven mad by it. That’s not how the information environment works!

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  • What I'm Reading: Impersonators

    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 . . .

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  • Hyperpolitics

    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.

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  • What I'm reading: public benches and Phobos

    '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.

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  • What I'm Reading: Jerry Springer Machine

    '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.

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  • What I'm Reading: My Dinner With Andre, The Review

    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.

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  • What I'm reading: Heritage Americans and Bigots Don't Know Ball

    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.

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  • What I'm reading: Stupidology

    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.

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