Before September Makes Everything Serious
The last weekend of August always feels borrowed—like summer is still technically happening but everyone has emotionally moved on, and that gap between what the calendar says and what you feel is where all the best bad decisions live.
So go dancing. Grab eight friends, dress everyone in the cheapest clothes available, find a track with a stupid beat, and just be genuinely idiotic about it. There’s a video going around of exactly this premise—eight people in discount outfits losing their minds—and I’ve watched it four times. The joy in it isn’t ironic. It’s the real thing.
Clint Eastwood spent twelve minutes at the Republican National Convention this week addressing an empty chair as if Barack Obama were sitting in it. The chair said nothing, which was the best possible response. Eastwooding is now the verb: pointing at empty furniture and delivering your grievances. I’ve been doing it to the chairs in my apartment. They’re holding up well under cross-examination.
A study came out this week suggesting that heavy cannabis use in your teens can permanently lower your IQ. I read it while—I’m going to let you fill in the blank.
The cast of The Newsroom spends roughly eighty percent of each episode screaming at each other about the state of American journalism. Aaron Sorkin wrote everyone to be smarter and faster and more righteous than any real person in any real newsroom has ever been, and the result is both insufferable and weirdly compelling. Watch one episode, if only to calibrate how much workplace screaming feels proportionate.
Someone has also compiled a top-ten list of memorable screen breasts. Miley Cyrus. Rosario Dawson. Mädchen Amick. No notes. I support this work entirely.
On the more serious end of the ledger: Pussy Riot were sentenced this month to two years in a Russian penal colony for staging a protest in a Moscow cathedral. Two minutes of performance art, two years of prison. The sentence is obscene. The world is paying attention, which means something, even if it doesn’t mean enough.
And somewhere out there exists a gold-plated Game Boy. One person has it. That person is not thinking about Eastwood or Putin or the end of August. They’re just playing their golden Game Boy. Good for them.