Good day, Rangelife readers. Well, you voted, and you like your coffee burnt and your newsletters long, so that’s what we’ll keep doing.
I run into this warning literally every time I sit down to type out a newsletter, and I end up slashing many paragraphs. So thank you, Substack editor.
I’m winding down my time on Twitter / X. The timeline has grown less useful as many former tweeters have migrated elsewhere, and the replies to any tweet are full of woman-hating men and CPAC rejects.
My family went to see Barbie on Sunday night, and we all loved it. It’s the emotionally touching deconstruction of patriarchy and modern society we all needed. It also has a brief scene where a wayward Ken mansplains Lou Reed’s influence on Stephen Malkmus to a poor Barbie, and my family stared and laughed at me when it happened. I’m still recovering.
Anyway, go see it; the worst people don’t want you to.
Let’s just rethink this whole “summer break” thing
What used to be everyone’s favorite season is now the Bad Months. Nova Scotia just got a summer’s worth of rainfall in one day. Georgia has no peaches. Summer camps have moved indoors. And if you’re cooking out, then you’re really cooking out, as the entire Sun Belt has become the Uninhabitability Belt. Heat deaths are skyrocketing.
I visited Consumer Reports last night, and their top six featured articles are all adaptation guides for the newly dystopian North American summer:
Most Reliable Central Air Conditioning Systems
Best Air Purifiers for Wildfire Smoke
Best Whole-House Generators
Ultimate Heat Survival Guide
Best Medical Alert Systems
Storm & Emergency Guide
Now that we know how to get a good deal on apocalypse survival, here’s another climate adaptation to consider: Maybe let’s reform our school calendars around our newly deteriorating climate. Let’s think about replacing summer break.
To start, we need to acknowledge that summer break is an anachronism. It exists because, before anyone had air conditioning, urban families were pulling their kids from school to escape to cooler countrysides. (Contrary to popular belief, summer break as we know it started in cities, not for farm kids to help with the planting.)
In recent decades, educational research has proved that a long summer break is actually a terrible model for childhood education, requiring each school year to start with a month of remediation for learning loss, and impacting low income kids far worse than rich kids. (“Previously on high school Algebra…”)
We cling to summer break as a holy American shibboleth, even though for much of the USA, the weather is actually its least tolerable of the year and always has been. When I was growing up in Miami, 35 years and 10 degrees Fahrenheit ago, it seemed cruel to make us spend the best months locked up in classrooms, only to be released for mosquito- and thunderstorm-season.
Air conditioning is no longer a luxury in most of the USA. It’s literally life support. For many, schools provide this more effectively than people’s homes. And spring and fall are now more pleasant times to be outdoors and travel in much of the world.
Maybe it’s time for our calendars to adapt to the climate, too. Let’s break up summer break, and migrate it to other parts of the year, depending on the local seasonal climate. Imagine spring vacation. Fall sleepaway camp. (The actual, warmer 2020s versions of spring and fall, not the childhood ideals.) Fewer families traveling all at once. Less brain rot. Better use of our new weather.
(Caveat: none of the above applies to where my family lives lol.)
Less money, less modern anguish
The Wall Street Journal is a 60-year-old man with two vacation homes and an outrageous stock portfolio who thinks everyone could be rich if they just made better choices, but the world is better off that they don’t because who’d clean up the lunch buffet at the country club?
Case in point: Last week, the WSJ printed a feature headlined: “Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’” Indeed, economic growth in the EU has been stagnant while North America and Asia continue to grow. USA!
So what does this new, poorer economic reality look like for Europeans?
People are working fewer hours, sometimes even choosing shorter work schedules to spend more time on leisure and health
Germans are eating fewer sausages and more vegetables. French are consuming less wine and foie gras
People are buying groceries from new companies that recover good food that was about to go to landfill
People are sharing cars and wearing clothes for longer before throwing them away
Wait a second. These read like my New Years resolutions!
Two killer political ads you need to see
My perfect wife made a donation to the Biden 2024 campaign specifically so she could get me a Dark Brandon mug. The Biden campaign’s commitment to doing clever, weird shit is very encouraging.
And that includes this ad, which just uses an audio clip of a real speech by Congresswoman Jewish Space Laser as narration. Maybe the Lincoln Project won’t be the only people making effective online content next year.
Secondly, Ohio has a special election coming up in a few weeks to make their state Constitution more difficult to amend. Republicans specifically put this on the ballot now because they’ve recently passed punitive sex and abortion laws like Florida and Arkansas have, and they don’t want any pesky reactive voter initiatives to turn out young voters who still have sex.
An Ohio-based PAC came up with a really funny and super creepy ad against the initiative. (Maybe don’t watch it with the kids.)
Hello Nasty is 25
I’m old enough not to be shocked anymore by other things being old, too. It’s been truly gratifying and hilarious to watch Millennials and even the older Gen Zers discover that things they liked are now 10 or 20 years old, which means they’re old, too, and what exactly have they even done with their lives, and oh my god I’m going to die someday.
But this one snuck up on me.
Hello Nasty isn’t the Beastie Boys’ most beloved LP (it’s probably their third most-beloved?), but it was the most beloved cassette in my yellow Volkswagen GTI in the summer of 1998.
I recently re-listened to Hello Nasty end-to-end for the first time in probably a decade. Of all their albums, it’s aged the best. With Mixmaster Mike on the controls, the sounds were wildly ahead of their time. If not for the old-school MC styles of Mike, Adam, and Adam (RIP), you could easily believe this album came from a later decade. It’s sonically thrilling and lyrically hilarious, and it’s got the tightness of a trio that had been writing and perfoming since they were teenagers. And the music videos were the best things on MTV and they legitimately hold up.
Chuck D called the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J the only truly revolutionary rappers. I’m finally getting around to reading the B-Boys book, and if there’s ever an argument for forgiving the sins of youth, it’s what the Beasties became after they were no longer boys.
Thinks to make you link
AI is about to fuck up online media: “AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born.” AI has been with us for longer than most people know. I’m still surprised by how many people think that asking Chat-GPT to write an essay about the 1994 Dallas Cowboys in the style of James Joyce was their first interaction with AI, as if they’d never used Google Maps to navigate to the nearest Hooters, or asked Alexa to play Smashmouth. AI has been writing sports summaries and financial news for major publishers for years, and you may not have even known you were reading the output of bots.
But Chat-GPT and the like are accelerating the ability to spew content instantly, and so social networks are doomed to be flooded with bot-written content. In 2016, a few hundred Russians hand-typing Facebook posts actually swung an American election; imagine what AI can do, thousands of accounts at a time, interacting with people via adaptive DMs, and learning from every conversation.
Cheesesteak Mukbang: This ad for local chain The Cheesestake Shop aired for a few weeks during SF Giants games this season, but the backlash was immediate and visceral, and the company pulled it. You have to see (and hear) it; it’s disgusting, I love it.
Cheeseburger Disaster: Similarly, someone ordered and reviewed the no-meat, all-cheese Burger King “Real Cheeseburger,” and it was a disaster. Hilarious. Subcribed.
Why Twitter Changed to X: “Elon is bad at Twitter, and I am sure he was getting tired of hearing how bad he is at Twitter. Well, guess what? He’s bad at X now.” Elon Has One Final Bad Idea for Twitter.
(I recently migrated with my last Twitter DM chat to Slack, and so now I’m kind of done with Twitter/X, a week after my 15th anniversary there. 15 years? I’m so old, lol.)
What they thought of us: I recently found this clipping I cut from Weekly World News in 1994. Did all you entitled Gen Xers get what you were owed?
Cheers.
FWIW, Hello Nasty was the most beloved cassette in my navy blue Volvo 244 in the summer of 1998.