You Have Forty-Five Years to Get Rich and You’re Spending Them Like This
Charli XCX covered Shake It Off on British radio this week and it’s better than it has any right to be. I know that sentence might cause some people physical distress, but I stand by it. She took something already great and made it stranger and a bit more brittle, and I’ve had it lodged in my head for two days running.
Meanwhile adidas released the Yeezy 750 Boost, Kanye West’s contribution to the history of footwear, and I need to register my objection formally. Not to Kanye in principle—he’s a self-aggrandizing egomaniac with the self-awareness of a parking cone, but occasionally he does something worth paying attention to. This shoe is not that. This shoe looks exactly like the orthopedic correction shoe a kid in my primary school had to wear because one of his legs was shorter than the other. That kid was embarrassed about it. Kanye is charging eight hundred dollars for his version. Genius is a word people use too freely.
Elsewhere on the internet: a game called Riot Simulator, in which you are the people and everything in front of you is an obstacle representing the state. The satire is thin but the catharsis is genuine. And an app called Fap Fapp that apparently exists to teach you how to masturbate, on the assumption that the internet, your older sibling, and basic human instinct have all somehow failed you. I have questions about the target audience. I have more questions about what a one-star review looks like.
A piece on Slate about whether anyone can still get rich after forty-five landed this week with the specific energy of someone handing you a countdown clock you didn’t ask for. The underlying research is real: economic mobility narrows significantly past a certain age, the window most people imagine is open is much shorter than advertised. I read it, acknowledged it was probably correct, and went back to doing exactly what I was doing. The clock is moving. It has always been moving.
The Season 2 trailer for Silicon Valley dropped, and I’m not exaggerating when I say there were weeks during the first season where I looked forward to a new episode more than I did to Game of Thrones. The Pied Piper story is constructed so carefully that watching Erlich Bachman say something horrible becomes a source of genuine comfort. I need to know what happens next.
Two final thoughts, because this week has apparently broken me completely. Stop shaving so much—the cumulative hours you spend removing hair from your own body add up, over a lifetime, to months. Months you could spend sleeping, reading, growing something instead. And finally: I’ve spent the better part of this Friday thinking about the logistics of eating only blue food for a weekend. Blueberries, obviously. Blue sports drinks. A döner dipped in food coloring. Harder than it sounds. While working all this out I’ve also been scrolling through a Tumblr called 35-24-35—which is exactly what the numbers suggest, a gallery of women built like runway models in various states of near-undress. I’m sitting here with a Burger King sandwich dripping onto my stomach doing this. Productive Friday.