The Men Who Still Order Chicken Fingers
There are grown men who have arranged their entire food lives around the menu preferences of a seven-year-old, subsisting on McDonald’s and Capri Sun, approaching vegetables with the suspicion of someone who suspects a trap. Brian Smith wrote about them for MEL Magazine and somehow made it feel both absurd and completely comprehensible—and reading it, I recognized something. Not the extreme version, but the underlying impulse: the meals that exist outside of time, the foods you eat when you don’t want to think about eating. Comfort in a very specific flavor of not-growing-up. The piece doesn’t deliver a verdict on whether it’s sad or fine, which is the right call.
From there I fell into Amanda Montell’s essay for Marie Claire on young people with terminal illnesses who document their deaths on YouTube—not for pity, or not only for that, but for community, for record, for the strange intimacy of talking to people you’ll never meet who understand exactly what you’re going through. I don’t know what to do with the fact that dying now comes with a subscriber count. Reading about the people who do it, it doesn’t feel exploitative. It feels like the most human response imaginable to an inhuman situation.
Matthew Shaer spent time in Indianapolis for the California Sunday Magazine, following companies that decamped from Silicon Valley and found that software can apparently be written outside a fifteen-mile radius of San Francisco. This shouldn’t read as a surprise, and the fact that it does tells you everything about how thoroughly the Valley colonized everyone’s imagination of what tech looks like and where it’s allowed to exist.
Peter Brannen’s piece in The Atlantic pulls back the furthest—tracing the sheer improbability of human existence, the extinction-level events the planet absorbed before we arrived, all the forks in geological time that could have ended the experiment before it started. You come out of it feeling briefly awestruck and then immediately less significant. The universe isn’t rooting for us specifically. We just haven’t been eliminated yet.
And then a piece in ZEIT Campus—a German student magazine—on young Russians going through the motions of an election whose result was never in question. Putin at 70 percent in the polls, heading into his fourth term. An entire generation that has never known a Russia without him. Some had believed in Alexei Navalny; others had checked out entirely. The answers to how you vote when the vote doesn’t matter were less defeated than I expected. Which might be the saddest part.