Leigh Alexander

Good morning! It’s me again. I had some solutions to the insomnia you tweeted about, and also some tips for you to get past where you said you’re stuck on your current project. Writer’s block, eh? Must be writer’s block. I’m not a writer, but I get that all the time.

Brooklyn is a cruel laboratory for the self.

It’s weird that we don’t have media where women are rewarded for developing the courage to walk out on disappointing, terminally-adolescent screw-ups.

People telling others to shut up about their political views on Facebook are legislating how others use the service, yeah. Abstain from the dialogue or hide it if you’re not interested, but handing out dictums through image macros or impassioned essays is weird, dude.

Let’s just combine it and call them Generation Why Me. It fits, right?

Drink when ambivalence haunts you.

Like, I feel like media criticism is to an extent an established discipline, but in what way are traditional ideas of ‘criticism’ relevant to what we’d call ‘new media’? Is the glut of 90s-nostalgia Tumblrs operated by ironic 20-year-olds a phenomenon worthy of a note in the cultural history books, or is it aberrant, unnoticed?

It is an extremely ‘fun time’ to be a woman. Catalyzed by the instantaneous access to information and social support provided by the modern internet, plus the fact women’s health issues have become a charged pivot point in the American political climate, people are more interested in revolutionizing defined gender roles than ever…

It should be noted that in the ‘weirdo’ context, individual is differentiated from “Facebook user who is merely interested in/ wishes to share in the culture in which the mutual friends of yours participate.”

If in a far-flung future when the Earth has died, leaving only minefields of shattered Gorilla glass and the vomited innards of machines, the corpses of wireframe creatures with wires spilt out on the blasted land like entrails, let’s say some foreign species arrives and combs our data ghosts in order to divine the purpose of Valentine’s Day.

Your body mass index is a little high. But that’s really fine so long as you still look good. Keeping your proportions in a regular state of expansion is a good way to ensure you have high clothing turnover, do you understand?

This article is intended as an explicatory primer on/ analysis of the Lana Del Rey phenomenon that you can send to your Facebook friends, your mother, your coworker who has just heard of her yesterday, or to someone who says to you next year, “oh yeah, what was the deal with that one singer last year again?”

No one is ‘shouting.’ No one is ‘being ironic,’ and those who comment on the tonal choices people make in the use of text just kind of seem really inhibited or legislative.

“w00t,” says the office ‘cool guy’, who likes to wear his plaid fedora on the group coffee outings while he explains joyfully to everyone about all the circa 2007 bands in which he is interested.

At some point, I learned something important: that being ill could dissolve the uncompromising infrastructure of your young life like so many bad dreams. Instantaneously, sympathy! Others to do for you what normally you were left alone to manage! And most importantly, liberty from obligation.

Already the air around me feels different. If you are a secular adult and you want to know limbo, stay in New York City for Christmas.

Your life becomes a constant progress of trying to sleep at night and work during the day — at least until you realize the utter impossibility of that endeavor, until you surrender to the fact that you’ll wake with full intention at 11 a.m. and instead spend four hours gazing at social media for some purpose you’ll justify to yourself somehow.

Sometimes I feel like wouldn’t Facebook be even better if you and I were the only ones on it, so that when it said I had seven notifications or nine or that I had two unread messages I could just be excited because it couldn’t be anyone but you.