What to Read When the Nostalgia Won't Stop
Hello! Today we're talking about nostalgia, butter, dark web drug markets, Breaking Bad, and more. 5+ articles and a book.
New here? Welcome! Consult my first post to see what amateur bibliotherapy means. If I link to a paywalled article that you can’t access, reply to this email and let me know.
Hello, friends.
Nostalgia feels like a trap right now. I’ve fallen into the intoxicating camera roll scroll hole on many sleepless nights. I feel best watching Perfect Afternoon Cable Movies that I’ve already seen 90 times (my definition-compliant picks include Double Jeopardy, Something’s Gotta Give and The Thomas Crown Affair). I keep re-reading my favorite passages from books instead of cracking open new ones. I am perpetually re-living my favorite things, and yet I am perpetually a bit bored.
Sometimes I catch myself in these cycles of nostalgia and just have to let them play out, because facing anything new feels too raw, too unknown. But in the back of my mind, I’m always thinking about a memorable quote from Severance by Ling Ma (a book I wrote about in my very first newsletter):
It is too depressing, too soul-crushingly sad, to reminisce. The past is a black hole, cut into the present like a wound, and if you get too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.
Today’s reads attempt to negotiate a balance between my need for normalcy with my overwhelming desire to forge a path forward. I hope you find something here that, like a good tequila cocktail, will warm your cheeks and remind you of when you were younger; I hope you find something here that, like a nitro cold brew, will wake you up and give you some fuel for the future.
The Articles
Quarantines Gave Us the Freedom to Embrace Our Inner Weirdos, GQ (~5 min). I’ve always been a weirdo, so I’m just thrilled to have y’all here with me at last! While this is a slight diversion from my usual philosophy of escapism-as-bibliotherapy, it’s soothing to read about everyone finally unleashing their inner oddball. For instance, Oprah Magazine published an article compiling the best Harry Potter fan fictions this week. Fucking OPRAH!
Just a thought here: wouldn’t it be fun if we could just be contentedly weird all the time? Would it be so bad to let our fandoms and hobbies and interests be part of us on a regular basis?
Stuck in 2020, Pretending it’s 2014, Vox (~10 min). I got choked up reading part of this article—which chronicles the indie-pop Tumblr-fueled internet version of 2014—so I will let it speak while I cannot:
I was not a Tumblr teen; I was not listening to Arctic Monkeys or wearing chokers and tennis skirts like a goth Lolita in high school, and odds are neither were you. But this is the beauty of a collective nostalgia for a subculture that existed mostly via shared images and downloaded songs: It’s all still there. You don’t have to have been part of it to understand the longing for what the music and images and styles evoked, or what it felt like to experience them when they were new.
The Rise & Fall of Silk Road (Part 1), Wired (~43 min). I first learned about the dark web’s most infamous black market from the excellent Casefile podcast and have read almost every article about it that I’ve found since. It is a truly unhinged and dark corner of the universe that also displays the ramifications of running an extremely lucrative empire behind a computer screen. I was so captivated by this story that I remember loitering in a Duane Reade to finish reading it, and was profoundly late meeting up with friends at the bar as a result.
As The World Churns, The Baffler (~7 min). This is the Land O’Lakes “clarified butter-maiden backstory” that you didn’t know you needed. Who is the woman on the front of the butter box, and how did she get there? What does it mean for American culture to finally lay this image to rest?
I Think About the Breaking Bad Bath Tub Scene a Lot, The Cut (~5 min). Hey, remember back when we were all watching Breaking Bad and nothing could hurt us? This installment of The Cut’s “I Think About This A Lot” column reminds me of the precariousness of reality through the lens of one of my fallback favorite TV shows.
If this beckons you down the path of Breaking Bad think pieces, let me just point out that there’s obviously an oral history of the show for you to read that’s likely more interesting.
The Books
Have you ever found yourself raptly reading a Facebook argument between two strangers? Have you ever felt the specific joy that only comes from spending an hour looking for a song you heard once, eight years ago, that had almost no online footprint, and actually finding it? Have you ever asked yourself what you do online all the time? LURKING: HOW A PERSON BECAME A USER by Joanne McNeill chronicles a “people’s history” of the internet and addresses many thoughts like these. It feels like reading a deeply personal and intelligent gem of a blog that parses the emotions and etiquettes that inform online behavior.
What to know before going in: LURKING is an incredible historical document about the internet, but it is also specifically “told from the hearts and minds of users rather than the profit and loss statements of tech conglomerates” (via Esquire). While there’s plenty in there that condemns big-tech giants like Google and Facebook, LURKING is a book that interrogates what it feels like to participate in online life within and beyond Silicon Valley’s borders. The book deftly recounts contemporary and historical nuances of digital existence in the hopes that we can one day reclaim the internet from what it is now: “a hell that is fun, ruled by idiots and thieves, providing users with slingshots for self-expression but no shield from the bile that rebounds.”
If you’d like something else, the New York Times has a piece on detective fiction audiobooks you might like; LitHub has a list of the 50 best contemporary books under 200 pages; and Bluestockings radical bookstore recommends some seminal texts about labor history.
This week, I’m still working on Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser and hope to start Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas. Tune in next time to see how far I get.
I hope you see something particularly enticing on a walk you take this week. Until then, please enjoy the correction at the end of this article reporting Stephenie Meyer’s upcoming Midnight Sun book release.