Errands for a Wasted Weekend

Jay Z was once interviewed next to two women who were quietly going down on each other during the interview. I think about this sometimes—not the obvious thing, but the composure. The ability to give clean answers about music and empire while your peripheral vision is processing something else entirely. A specific professional skill, and arguably a talent.

Miley Cyrus was topless somewhere on the internet this week, and the internet handled it the way it always does—with the reliable conviction that this time it’s news. It never stops being the same moment.

There should be more collective shame in the air than there is about a petition circulating this week arguing against LGBT content in education. It collected enough signatures to become a story. File it under things you already know and try to hold onto the low-level disgust rather than letting it normalize.

Berlin Fashion Week was happening—Topshop threw a party, people wore coats—and the photos of Berlin from 1992 are more interesting than any of it. A city that hadn’t finished figuring out what it was going to be yet, every face in the images doing the same arithmetic. There’s more honesty in those pictures than in anything currently on a runway.

Sign the Tempelhofer Feld petition. The former airport is one of the last genuinely open, unmonetized spaces in a city that keeps selling itself to itself, and they’ll pave it if you let them. Sign it especially if you’ve never been there.

Buy a pony if you can. Have sex with someone who has your name—I’ve thought about this longer than I should and I still can’t tell if it would be narcissistic or the opposite, or whether that distinction matters at all. Tell your friends you find them terrible and then go find better ones outside, somewhere, before Sunday takes you back.