Anne Helen Petersen puts into words what we’re all thinking in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting (“It’s not enough to live in a blue state. It’s not enough to try and send your kids to private school. It’s not enough to donate to an abortion fund. It’s not even enough to have money, or a home, or an education. Privilege can insulate you from the hostility of American society but it cannot ultimately save you from it. Collective and individual action feel impotent. The idea of representative democracy comes to feel like a farce.”)
…and just 10 months after writing this thoughtful essay on gun violence in America, David Frum writes about America’s shame in the Atlantic, asking if the country can ever break the pattern of empty thoughts and meaningless prayers
Here’s an excellent explanation of why the teal Independents won so many seats away from the major parties in the Australian federal election
A tear-jerking essay for Shondaland explores how becoming the family translator led to the role reversal of parent and child for one Korean American writer (“From the moment I started to translate for my parents at the age of 9 years old, I was filling in the gaps where their English was lacking. My umma and appa gave me a window into their being, even if it was a byproduct of an unfortunate burden of immigration.”)
Wise advice for anyone wanting to tell their partner to pick up their share of the domestic load
In tech news: You can (finally) bulk edit Google docs, Meta’s new recurring notifications allows businesses to send ‘proactive, automated messages to people who have opted in to receiving them’, TikTok has launched a new ad product that lets brands turn top-performing creator content into ads as well as paid subscriptions for live content, Instagram’s ‘squircle’ inspired custom typeface is… interesting, Meta shared its plans to improve transparency around how political groups target their messages to voters in the lead up to the 2022 US midterms, Instagram is releasing Reel templates (hallelujah) so now you’ll only need to drag and drop your content in BUT it’s also testing a new stories preview that will hide your stories after a certain number of frames, and in slightly creepier news they’ve created a new AI platform to build realistic simulations of the muscles, bones and joints to create more realistic avatars in the virtual world
We love love love this interactive piece in the NY Times that peels back the layers of a still life painting The agony and ecstasy of an open relationship (when a piece of writing starts with “My mother will kill me for writing this article”, you know it’ll be worth your time to read)
This video of Cody Simpson making the Australian swim team and this one of MP Sam Lim talking about dolphins will warm your heart. We still can’t decide which is more wholesome
This week Taylor Swift was awarded an honorary fine arts degree from NYU and while her speech contained a few nuggets of wisdom (cringe, anyone?), the graduates in the crowd were justifiably pissed off that they were forced to listen to Swift talk about what she had learnt as an 11-time Grammy-winning millionaire
We devoured this short story about a hotel love affair on our morning commutes this week and we reckon you’ll do the same
People have a lot to say about Amber Heard right now, but some are asking whether this is just garden variety online hate, or signalling the end of the #MeToo era
One writer asks if you can have too much therapy, another sheepishly explains why she thought having a single therapy session would fix things immediately, and another searches for a Very Online Therapist (“It’d be great if I could find someone who knew everything about Twitter and promised to never read anything I said.”)
Anndddd… we regret to inform you that the skirt-pant is making a comeback, if the next Met Gala theme was 2010-2013 fashion trends, when you wake up from surgery and offer your nurse a raise, these cats are very calm about being trapped, five lesser-known personality tests to try, Instagram might have finally admitted it has a problem with TikTok, Louis Theroux makes his musical debut official, someone was probably (definitely) fired for letting the intern write the BBC news ticker, last week we learnt that the Kardashians can’t cook so of course this week were discovering they don’t know how to eat, all the best reactions to outgoing Prime Minister losing his job, eating lunch in England vs France, trying this olive oil hangover hack immediately, the words you hear most often in politics that mean the least, inside Anna Delvey’s chaotic art show, every Sally Rooney character, the overly familiar regular, and Anthony Albanese’s dog Toto has its own Twitter now because of course it does and the whole thing is cringe and not in a cute way
