Closing My Tabs: Part One
A weekly list of some of the tabs I have open in my browser and my quest to finally close them all.
On any given day I have 500 — or damn near 500 — tabs opened on my phone’s Google Chrome browser. On my computer as we speak, I have three different windows opened with so many tabs that the tabs have been reduced to mere icons suggesting what they are. I swear I always mean to read and/or watch what I’ve opened in a timely manner (who doesn’t want to see a nearly hour-long house tour of a chef I’ve never heard of before YouTube suggested to video to me?) Anyways, this is my inaugural installment of Closing My Tabs where I’ll venture to a place where no person has gone before: The New Yorker article that has been collecting dust for six-months now.
What is it like to have every single childhood milestone documented for the entire internet to see? A group of former child influencers can tell you. They’re also ready to tell lawmakers as well in hopes of getting proper protections put in place to defend the next generations of online child stars. “Children’s advocates said it’s important for parents to respect their kids’ autonomy and allow them control of their own digital footprint,” CNN writes. “They said their biggest concerns are not parents who post occasional photos of their kids but family vloggers and other influencers who seek followers and revenue on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.”
Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch? - Esquire
Esquire does a lot of excellent reporting on the state of the publishing industry in recent years. In a newer piece, writer Kate Dwyer writes about the difficulty first time novelists are having with launching successful debut novels. There are several reasons listed in the article including the bloated media landscape that makes reaching a concentrated audience of literary fans difficult. The most interesting part of the article was the part about the impact of influencer/social media culture now on making or breaking a book. “Connecting an artist’s biography to their art—or, by another name, creating a parasocial relationship between readers and authors—has long been an effective marketing strategy,” Dwyer writes. “But for debut authors, it now goes beyond writing personal essays and includes becoming a bona fide social-media influencer.”
Why Are Divorce Memoirs Still Stuck in the 1960s? - The New York Times
Something that I’ve been thinking about for a while and even more so while reading Sarah Menkedick’s review of the genre known as the divorce memoir is how limited the options are even when we think we’re dreaming big. Women only options are labor, be it in the home or in the workforce. Much like the authors featured in Menkedick’s piece, they romanticize work, thinking of it as a more autonomous liberated space than a life of being a wife and a mother. But for millions of women across the world, the choice between being a worker or a domesticant is a choice between a rock and a hard place. “Herein lies the ultimate paradigm, the space no woman wants to explore: What if the modern woman didn’t actually care about book sales? About making partner? About building a successful brand? That would be unthinkable,” Menkedick writes. “Embarrassing. Mealy, mushy, female.”
Six Attempts To Find Noah Kahan Interesting — UPROXX
I stumbled upon this article a few months ago and the title alone voiced something I had been thinking about for a while now. I only know the singer Noah Kahan through TikTok videos where his music periodically will appear. His music seems harmless enough, the kind of stuff I would’ve heard on an episode of One Tree Hill growing up, but not the kind of music you expect someone to build a lasting career out of. Writer Steven Hyden is similarly perplexed by Kahan’s fame. “This kind of music seems particularly prone to this sort of phenom — twee/boring folk singers who are secretly huge,” Hyden writes. “The kind of shit nobody likes to write about and tons of people like to put on in the background.” I’m not immune to the kind of music that Hyden is describing. I grew up on the Christian adjacent, acoustic guitar, laidback stylings of artists like Phillip Phillips, Brandon Heath, and Mat Kearney. But just how many songs meant only to be used in an Instagram reel of your last road trip can a person make a career out of?
The Dark Side of Courtship — The Intelligencer
Shannon Harris became the face of purity culture thanks to her husband Joshua’s book I Kissed Dating Goodbye which dominated Christian conservative circles for years. A few decades after the book’s success, however, Shannon and Joshua’s picturesque marriage ended in divorce. Joshua has since denounced purity culture, but conversations have largely left out the impact that his teachings had on his ex-wife. That changed when last year Shannon came out with her book The Woman They Wanted, her memoirs about surviving purity culture and the surveilling eyes of the church. My favorite part of the profile she did with Intelligencer is when she talks about the only authority the church allowed her to have were over other women. “I was given a small group of women to lead in my new role,” she wrote. The first task she was given was to tell a new pastor’s wife that her new position meant she could not pursue her dream career in veterinary medicine. The idea made her sick. “But I did it,” she wrote. “This time I was the cruel one, forcing obedience and conformity on a person I was supposed to love and care for.”
