On Pornography, Speedruns, and Other People’s Obsessions
Some weeks produce reading worth keeping. This was one of them.
Anita Blasberg and Lisa McMinn wrote for Zeit Online about what happens when Bushido—Germany’s most notorious gangster rapper, a man whose public image runs entirely on controlled menace—invites his suburban neighbors over for a polite chat. He lives in Kleinmachnow, a comfortable commuter settlement outside Berlin, surrounded by people who presumably did not budget for a famous hardcore rapper next door. The resulting portrait—Bushido as neighbor, host, man whose reputation enters any room roughly forty seconds before he does—is some of the more interesting German celebrity journalism I’ve read. The gap between the image and the person is, as usual, where everything interesting lives.
Maggie Jones’s investigation in the New York Times covers what teenagers are actually learning from online pornography—which is to say everything, and not in the way anyone would design if they were thinking about it. The sex education that once arrived haltingly from school or from magazines now comes via Pornhub and its equivalents, where the library is enormous and the pedagogy is completely unhinged. Jones looks at how young people process these images and what they do to their understanding of bodies, consent, and what any of this is supposed to feel like. It’s a better piece than its subject usually produces.
Scott Galloway’s piece in Esquire about Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon says plainly what most tech coverage won’t: these companies have colonized daily life and daily thinking, they pay minimal taxes, they’ve systematically gutted entire employment sectors, and they do all of this while performing the aesthetics of the scrappy, lovable startup. Galloway wants them broken up. The piece is brisk and genuinely angry and doesn’t pretend the situation is complicated, which is its chief virtue.
Patrick Klepek wrote at Waypoint, the now-defunct Vice gaming vertical, about the speedrunning community’s three-decade pursuit of a theoretically perfect run through Super Mario Bros.—not just fast, but optimal, every frame accounted for. The subculture has spread to most games by now, from Secret of Mana to Tomb Raider to Final Fantasy, communities competing against the physics engine rather than any human opponent. But Super Mario Bros. sits at the center of all of it. The original. The benchmark. The thing nobody has quite perfected. Klepek is good on why: the game is old enough that its mechanics are completely known, which means the remaining question is pure execution, which means the only enemy is yourself.
Allison P. Davis wrote for The Cut about Poppy, the singer born in 1995 who built a massive YouTube following by making videos in which almost nothing happens, and the something that does happen is unsettling in ways that resist description. She repeats a single word for five minutes and people love her for it. Her identity blurs between performance and person in the way Warhol spent a career manufacturing, except she seems to have arrived there essentially by refusing to be legible. Davis tries to describe her and is honest about how difficult that is. That turns out to be the piece’s best quality.