Everything Melts

Thousands marched through London, Paris, and Tel Aviv that weekend against Israel’s ground assault on Gaza. In the same twenty-four hours I watched a time-lapse of popsicles dissolving in slow motion, spent a non-trivial amount of time on an Instagram photo of a German TV presenter’s breasts, and got very close to ordering a gold fixed-gear bicycle I have absolutely no use for.

The internet holds the serious and the stupid at exactly the same temperature, with exactly the same lighting. Javier Laspiur photographed vintage game controllers like museum relics—close, reverent, as if documenting a lost civilization—while four tabs away there was live conflict footage. Emily Stein shot teenagers losing themselves completely in mosh pits, which is to say, having the time of their lives. A BuzzFeed piece established, fairly conclusively, that cats are moral nihilists with no investment in gender politics whatsoever.

Merlin Bronques shoots parties the way certain war photographers shoot war: like the people in frame are the only people alive, like they know the night is finite. Rafael Varona builds entire miniature worlds inside glass bottles, which I find either deeply calming or vaguely unsettling depending on the hour. Deer have colonized a town in Japan and seem to feel fine about it.

The Walking Dead season five trailer dropped. There’s a ghost train in Kyoto that will tighten your skin without requiring you to leave the house. A photo of Alyssa Milano is currently doing the rounds that confirms, without any ambiguity, that fourteen-year-old me had his priorities exactly right.

Summer. The ice cream melts. The feed refreshes.