Inside an online platform everything, even reality, is just content and content just begets more content. And in a world run by big platforms, a person’s post becomes discourse, discourse creates memes, memes inspire a fandom, and fandoms become social movements. And over the last decade, as platforms flattened everything into content, most news publishers, hiding behind antiquated ideas about objectivity and made desperate from vanishing ad revenue, allowed themselves to be flattened, as well. And now, even though they don’t think of themselves as a competing news fandoms, they absolutely are.

I don’t think the way people react to news stories in 2023 is all that different from how it’s ever been. Here are two great threads comparing funny mean-spirited reactions to the Titanic sinking to the similar memes everyone made this month about the imploded submarine billionaires. But now, if you don’t like what’s in the newspaper you can just write your own thing and get more readers than it did.

Can’t possibly comprehend that extreme levels of wealth created an environment of arrogance that led to a submarine vaporizing a bunch of guys in the middle of the ocean? Just tweet that that’s not actually what happened. The fact the Russian coup didn’t even last a full day and no one got arrested sounds suspicious to you? Easy. Just make up something else.

Eventually every platform wanted the same kind of content, but to fit specific algorithms and specific demographics, which no one would bother to do, so the same videos just got posted everywhere until none of the networks felt distinct from each other and every site just pivoted away from the whole idea.

When kids are growing up, their moral compass isn’t formed yet. So there’s a dark side to it where you’re not really allowed to make mistakes. You’re supposed to make mistakes growing up and then learn from them. It changes who you are and helps you become a better person. But now, through everything being recorded, your mistakes can be immortalized for people to see, and kids aren’t allowed to make mistakes because that stuff can be brought up to tear them down later. So it’s a strange world that we’re living in now, and we won’t really know the effects of it till down the line.

I’d be in front of camera, and Danny would be behind. Danny would do a rough cut, I’d do a final cut, and then I’d do sound effects and music. And Danny would focus on VFX and color. So, during the process, we were more involved with those departments. I did a lot more with the sound and the music, and Danny did a lot more with the color. But on set, Danny would be the main voice communicating. If I had something like a direction that differed from what he was saying, I’d speak with him first and then we’d do a take like that. It was good having two of us, especially with scenes that had a lot more people. Danny could focus on the main, and I could look at the peripheral stuff. I feel like having a co-director is a bit of a cheat code. I can’t imagine doing it all by myself.

“Woke” vs. “Anti-woke” is a horribly exhausted and pointless framework, one which suggests binary simplicity where there is only boundless complexity, but beyond that, there was never any chance that there was going to be some clear victory for one or the other. What will emerge will be some synthesis of the two impulses.

I think there's gathering dissatisfaction with a common set of tropes regarding personal agency and mental health. In particular, I think that the dominance of the therapeutic assumption in American life, and the role of affirmation within it, will be challenged. Currently, an inescapable American cultural mode, particularly among the educated, is one of mandatory therapeutic maximalism and an attendant tyranny of affirmation.

Of course I want us to present people with alternative ways to feel about themselves and their mental health, but it can’t become just another catechism, a different checklist. There’s got to be an understanding that the human tools for confronting life are limited and contextual, some of them come from art and not from therapy, and that ultimately we’re all left to blunder along on our own paths, trying to achieve stability and self-ownership - but we’re not guaranteed to get either. So I would hope that this counter-movement would remain a matter of skeptical inquiry and not just another set of gurus.

Not getting what you want is a default and healthy status, not a tragedy, though you are perfectly within your rights to be unhappy about it, and people who do not give you everything you want are not inherently “toxic,” though you’re perfectly within your rights to be unhappy with them

Sick people have as much responsibility to manage their disorders as society has to give them the tools to manage them; you cannot ask others to give you accommodation for your disability if you refuse to take accountability for it yourself

If you want to be good to yourself, I suggest that you stop expecting society to be your therapist and go see licensed medical professionals in private to address the issues in your life that are appropriately treated that way. And if you want to be good to your society, I suggest you help to defeat the medicalization of everything, the casualization of the concept of trauma, the celebration of mental disorders, the assumption that everything that makes us unhappy is an injustice, the insistence that all conflict is abuse, and the infantilization of the human animal

Sometimes you don’t have ADHD, you just hate your job. Sometimes your boss isn’t a sociopath, he’s just correctly identified you as unqualified for a leadership position. Sometimes you really do have schizophrenia, only there’s nothing glamorous or exciting or romantic about it, and now you’re fat from meds and trying to hold down a steady job and going to support group to drink grainy coffee and hear people tell the same stories over and over again. And sometimes you’re just in pain because the world didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to, and you’re trying to scratch out a life you can live with, and you get overwhelmed with your mundane unhappiness on the subway home from work, and you think to yourself that it must be true that your suffering is something grander, something that calls out for medical attention and reasonable accommodation, something more that makes it easier.

At Tokyo Disneyland, for example, you can create elaborate in-reach prop displays that will never, ever be disturbed or broken by guests — rules are rules. (By the same token, I once got politely yelled at there for ducking under a chain to shortcut a completely, 100% empty line. I absolutely had to walk through the entire, empty switchback. And that’s fair, I was breaking the rules!) Whereas here in America, if your prop is not literally bolted down, it’s likely to show up on eBay / Van Eaton within the week.

honestly, a lot of it, I think, is just that some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe. That beautiful thing you’re working on, it lives in a window on your monitor tucked under a title bar, and that’s as tricky as it gets. What if you can’t imagine your thing in its final context? What if you aren’t great at predicting human behaviors other than your own?

good design isn’t just beautiful and incredible and boundary-pushing, it also remembers what it means to be human.

“The media” (or “mainstream media”): a meaningless phrase because there are countless very different media, which don’t act in concert.

“Gets it”: a social media phrase that is used to mean “agrees with me”.

Usually, though, people who claim to have been “cancelled” mean “criticised”, “convicted of sexual assault”, “replaced by somebody who isn’t an overt bigot” or simply “ignored”.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (the complete guide on how to write in just 13 pages). He lists other “worn-out and useless” words and phrases that were disappearing in his day: jackboot, Achilles heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno. The same fate later befell words overused in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: “heroes” (a euphemism for victims) and “greatest country on earth” (meaning largest military and GDP).

The philosopher Jane Bennett noted that matter is vibrant—everyday detritus, even trash in the gutter, can emit its own vibe that capitalist consumerism encourages us to ignore. The year’s most poignant piece of trash was a wrinkled face mask, paper or cloth, left strewn on the ground, its strings tangled, its symbolic hygiene demolished. There’s an abjectness to the mask; it’s the kind of detail a future movie would pan past in order to evoke the time period’s general despair.

“Liminal Spaces” VibesOffice-building hallway. Dead-end street. Loading dock. Nighttime hotel atrium. @SpaceLiminalBot is a Twitter account with more than four hundred and eighty thousand followers that tweets photos of “liminal spaces”: disused, off-hours, haunted. The mood is spooky but also calm; in these spaces, nothing happens. By definition, “liminal” means “transitional,” a threshold. (What qualifies, exactly, is hotly debated on the r/LiminalSpace subreddit.) But it became a meme in 2021, the year of liminality, its meaning expanded to describe pretty much anything empty and weird. Examples of liminal vibes include the Twitter account @gameauras, which collects “video game images with elegiac auras” and tweets screenshots of virtual liminal spaces, and the TikTok account @pineacre, which films montages of mundane institutions (laundromats, grocery stores) in the Arkansas Ozarks.

There is no better reminder of the combination of convenience and ennui of working from home than a mug of coffee going cold. You get up to microwave it, then repeat the process thirty minutes later. Even the mug seems exhausted.

There’s a fatal near-sightedness to the script: It may be possible to puzzle out the characters’ motivations in any given scene, but there’s no guarantee those motives will continue into the next one, and in fact they probably won’t. This lends the show an overall incoherence. There are sharp, funny, and even poignant moments, and it’s certainly beautifully shot, but it’s so impressed with the sheer abundance of its own ideas that it fails to commit to a genuine artistic perspective. Instead, it’s pure provocation. The show wants to shock viewers with its violent imagery and moral ambiguity, but provocation without perspective is just spectacle.

we have And Just Like That, a show whose first failure is its name. While the second season is currently dropping week by week without too much fanfare, the first season garnered almost as much attention as The Idol. Everyone was wondering how HBO could possibly reanimate the glittering albeit “problematic“ New York of Sex and the City in 2021, and they were right to wonder. The overly self-conscious reboot has been ridiculed mercilessly for trying to right the wrongs of the original series with a heavy hand—and at huge narrative costs: jammed-in “diversity” in the style of high-school science textbook covers, story lines that seem constructed solely to demonstrate the characters’ awareness of social issues. A friend recently described it to me as “Sesame Street for adults,” which made me laugh. (Of course I continue to watch.)

To describe the plot of And Just Like That would be impossible, because there are anywhere between six and 10 subplots happening at any given time. This is an almost poetic consequence of the creators trying to say too much—and please too many people—at once. A peek: Carrie’s husband has died (trauma plot), she’s navigating the world of podcasts (age plot) and pronouns (pride plot), grappling with her willingness to say vagina on air (sex plot), developing a friendship with Seema, her girlboss Indian real estate agent (new friend-of-color plot—each original cast member gets one), whose Birkin was just stolen (tough-on-crime plot?). This covers about 1% of it and leaves me with no time to introduce the other eight main characters. Whatever sense of curiosity and spirit propelled the original series is revived here only in rare glimpses. The rest is reheated Twitter discourse.

Both The Idol and And Just Like That are fueled by internet-sourced neuroticism. Each is overly focused on audience reception as it manifests online, only with different aims: one hopes to shock, the other to appease. These goals aren’t surprising—they merely demonstrate the inevitable result of mistaking a marketing strategy for an artistic one.

I think hardcore Twitter users have rose-colored glasses about the site’s coolness. The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture.

The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were.

I subscribe to the belief that internet trends are defined by a ratio of laziness to social reward. Users will always do the laziest possible thing to achieve the maximum amount clout. So, if every platform becomes either a Twitter alternative or a short-form video feed, but all with their own unique requirements for virality, users won’t make individual posts for each. They will instead shotgun blast all of them with the same posts and bet on the odds that something will breakthrough eventually. Which means everything eventually just becomes a reuploaded video or a screenshot from somewhere else.

While trying to track down the actual hyperlink to a post I found a screenshot of on a closed social network I was struck by how on an internet full of closed platforms, broken embeds, and crumbling indexes, the last reliable way to share anything is a screenshot.

the camera roll is, at this point, the real content management system of the social web. This is something that TikTok realized faster than other platforms, with their downloadable watermarked videos that have now become ubiquitous on every platform that allows video.

My theory as to why New Yorkers were so allergic to independent content creators is because for all the tedious guffawing about being a city of hustlers, most of the people who live there crave, on some level, institutional legitimacy and influencers, by definition, don’t get it or really need it. It could also just be that New Yorkers hate tourists and content creators are, in some form, permanent tourists of their own lives.

I actually think the post-COVID New York TikTok boom is already cresting. I think once these trends become calcified enough to report on, they’re already on their way out. I also don’t think Gen Z TikTokers are driving rents up, but rather documenting its rise due to other factors, like landlords being able to blame TikTok hype to jack up their rents.

Users rely on drug dealers for ecstasy and most other psychedelics, or in elite cases, they employ chemists. One prolific drug dealer in San Francisco who serves a slice of the tech world is known as “Costco” because users can buy bulk at a discount, according to people familiar with the business. “Cuddle puddles,” which feature groups of people embracing and showing platonic affection, have become standard fare.

I think there are a million things to be discouraged about in the world, but I do think that the progress being made on "what it means to be a man" is moving in the right direction. It's clear men can be terrible, and the last decade in particular has had several movements root out some of the worst offenders, but I truly think all of us no matter our gender are more alike than we've historically thought, and the more we recognize that the better off we'll be.

What better way to show how good your taste is in movies than to talk about how much you didn't like that popular movie that everyone seems to be like? What better way to show that you have good taste in music than ripping on top 40 hits?The more toxic version of this is finding people who like something you think is lame and telling them why what they like is actually bad. "Oh, you liked this thing? Here's why it's actually bad. You're welcome." The goal, I guess, is to make that person actually go, "you're right, I thought I got joy out of this, but maybe I shouldn't have."As I've gotten older, the more I've recognized that when it comes to art especially, there's upside to enjoying something, and very little upside to disliking something. My "credibility" doesn't hang on me liking the right things. What I really want is to enjoy as many things as possible because that means I'll spend more of my time being happy.That's not to say that I think everything is good. I go into everything wanting to enjoy myself, but sometimes I just don't, and that's okay. My movie review thread is full of films that I just didn't enjoy. Sure, it's more fun to write negative reviews, but I'm still bummed that I didn't have a good experience, and I'm jealous of people who did enjoy their time.

Efficiency initiatives are all about doing the same (or more) with less.  And while sometimes that can be done purely through technology, humans often bear the brunt of efficiency initiatives.

When Zuckerberg says the organization is getting “flatter,” he means that more non-management workers will have to take on types of work—coordinating, synthesizing, communicating, and affective tasks—that managers used to do. For many, that means a significant intensification of a style of work that is not for everyone.

becoming more efficient and productive seems to hold positive moral value. It goes into the plus column on the balance sheet of your character. But this moral quality of efficiency acts to turn us each into a certain kind of person. Not just a certain kind of worker, but a certain kind of voter, parent, partner, mentor, and citizen.

Social theorist Kathi Weeks argues that the responsibilities we feel toward work—and I’ll add our responsibility specifically to efficiency and productivity—have “more to do with the socially mediating role of work than its strictly productive function.” In other words, the stories we tell about work and our relationships to it are actively creating our “social, political, and familial” stories and relationships, too.

A Year of Efficiency is bound to make shareholders happy. But what does it do to the humans who create the value those shareholders add to their portfolios? A Year of Efficiency might mean you can fit in more social media posts, more podcast episodes, more emails, or even more products or services. But how do you feel at the end? How has your relationship with yourself changed? How has your relationship with others changed?  Who do you become when efficiency is your guiding principle?

It’s worth questioning the moral quality we assign to efficiency and productivity in our society is healthy, or even useful. And it’s worth asking whether efficiency and productivity are really the modes through which we want to relate to our partners, children, friends, and communities.

While I certainly won’t deny the satisfaction of learning how to do a task faster, I do think it’s worth interrogating the way efficiency comes to shape our lives.

So you just go through the whole range of policy issues, and there's nothing so essential to the right wing tribe today that it wasn't at some point considered part of the left-wing tribe, and vice versa. Since what the left and right mean are always changing, you can't move towards something that's constantly evolving in its meaning.

Adolf Hitler was a socialist and he's considered extreme right-wing. George W. Bush was the most radical expansion government president in my lifetime, and he's considered right-wing.

There is certainly a tribe that calls itself right-wing, there's no question about that. And there's a tribe that calls itself left-wing, no question about that. But what these tribes stand for is constantly evolving. So why don't we just throw out the terms right-wing and left-wing, and say Republican and Democrat. That would clarify so much, and get rid of the illusion that there's some kind of philosophical core behind what each party believes because that's simply not true.

People say, "well, the one issue is change versus permanence. Liberals and progressives and the left, they like change. And conservatives like to preserve.” It's just simply not true. Who was it that wanted to change the Roe v Wade decision? Who is it that wants to change tax rates to make them lower? Who was it that wanted to change Europe to create a thousand-year German Reich?

a few years back, [social scientist] John Bargh at Yale said, I've got it. I figured out what it is that divides liberals and conservatives. All conservative positions are about fear. If you're afraid, you're a conservative. See, that's why conservatives went to the war in Iraq, they were so scared of terrorists. That's why they created the Department of Homeland Security, they were scared, they were afraid. And they would say, giving up a little bit of our freedom is a small price to pay for security because we're scared. Ha! Got it, says John Bargh, I figured it out. That's what a conservative is. A fraidy cat. Scared.

It's as if we went to the grocery store and they were sitting out in the front with two carts of groceries for us and said, what do you want, Cart A or Cart B? Now, you'd probably pick the cart that had more of the products you like, naturally. We all would. That's how it is when I go into the voting booth. I pick Republicans sometimes, pick Democrats other times. Sometimes I'm just trying to balance power between the two. But what I try not to do is to pick the cart of groceries, and then after the fact delude myself that all of these groceries are related, they all share an essential characteristic, and make up a fairy tale about how they all are essentially, philosophically bound. That's what our ideologues and pundits in America today are doing. They're inventing fairy tales after the fact to try to explain why all these unrelated positions are related when in fact they are not.

So let's say you are strongly in favor of tax cuts. I would seek out the strongest possible argument for tax increases and what those might be. Maybe that will persuade you, maybe it won't, but at the very least you'll open your mind up a little bit more.

What if we had someone who said, I believe in the minimum wage, but in order to make my research more careful, and to find my blind spots, I'm going to bring in somebody to help me design the study to set out the falsification parameters, and so forth, who is against the minimum wage. And then we're going to work together and we're going to establish ahead of time what it will look like and then we're going to conduct the research.

a global pandemic struck, markets crashed, and the possibility of a democratic socialist presidency in America started to fade. Much of our work with clients has been about how to address new audiences in a time of massive fragmentation and the collapse of consensus reality.

All the while, people have been eager to launch new products more focused on impressions than materiality, and “spending on experiences” has become the standard of premium consumption.

it’s time to reassess the consumer experience that came along with the neoliberal fantasy of “unlimited” movement of people, goods and ideas around the globe.

Umami, as both a quality and effect of an experience, popped up primarily in settings that were on the verge of disintegration, and hinged on physical pilgrimages to evanescent meccas. We also believe that the experience economy is dying, its key commodity (umami) has changed status, and nobody knows what’s coming next.

Umami was the quality of the media mix or the moodboard that granted it cohesion-despite-heterogeneity. Umami was also the proximity of people on Emily’s museum panel, all women who are mostly not old, mostly not straight, and mostly doing something interesting in the arts, but we didn’t know exactly what. It was the conversation-dance experience and the poet’s play and the alt-electronica-diva’s first foray into another discipline. It was the X-factor that made a certain MA-1 worth 100x as much as its identical twin.

“Advanced consumers” became obsessed with umami and then ran around trying to collect ever-more-intensifying experiences of it. Things were getting more and more delicious, more and more expensive, and all the while, more and more immaterial. Umami is what you got when you didn’t get anything.

What was actually happening was the enrichment of financial assets over the creation of any ‘real wealth’ along with corresponding illusions of progress. As very little of this newly minted money has been invested into building new productive capacity, infrastructure, or actually new things, money has just been sloshing around in a frothy cesspool – from WeWork to Juicero to ill-advised real estate Ponzi to DTC insanity, creating a global everything-bubble.

Value, in an economic sense, is theoretically created by new things based on new ideas. But when the material basis for these new things is missing or actively deteriorating and profits must be made, what is there to be done? Retreat to the immaterial and work with what already exists: meaning. Meaning is always readily available to be repeated, remixed, and/or cannibalized in service of creating the sensation of the new.

The essential mechanics are simple: it’s stating there’s a there-there when there isn’t one. And directing attention to a new “there” before anyone notices they were staring at a void. It’s the logic of gentrification, not only of the city, but also the self, culture and civilization itself. What’s made us so gullible, and this whole process possible, was an inexhaustible appetite for umami.

eyond its synergistic effect, umami has a few other sensory effects that are relevant to our theory. For one, it creates the sense of thickness and body in food. (“Umami adds body…If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it’s thicker – it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food.”) For another, it’s released when foods break down into parts. (“When organic matter breaks down, the glutamate molecule breaks apart. This can happen on a stove when you cook meat, over time when you age a parmesan cheese, by fermentation as in soy sauce or under the sun as a tomato ripens. When glutamate becomes L-glutamate, that’s when things get “delicious.””) These three qualities: SYNERGY, IMPRESSION OF THICKNESS, and PARTS > WHOLE, are common to cultural umami, as well.

Umami hunting was a way for the West to consume an exotic, ethnic, global “taste” that was also invisible and up to their decoding / articulation.

when something is correctly salted, Chang argues, it tastes both over and undersalted at once. As a strange loop, this saltiness makes you stand back and regard your food; you start thinking about “the system it represents and your response to it”. He argues that this meta-regard keeps you in the moment and connected to the deliciousness of your food. We counter that it intensifies a moment in a flow, temporarily thickening your experience without keeping you anywhere for long.

strong flavors, namely umami, mark a surge of intensity in the flow of experience. It also becomes clear that paradox itself is at the heart of contemporary consumption. For example: “This shouldn’t be good but it is” “This doesn’t seem like what it’s supposed to be” “This is both too much and not enough” “I shouldn’t be here but i am” “This could be anywhere but it’s here”

Parts > Whole is just another way of saying a combination of things has emergent properties. In itself this doesn’t mean much, as almost any combination of things has emergent properties, especially in the domains of taste and culture. Coffee + vinegar is worse than its constitutive parts. A suit + sneakers is a greater kind of corny than either worn separately. Most emergence is trivial. The Umami Theory of Value centers on losing your sense of what’s trivial and what’s valuable.

If you tried to unpack your intuition, the absence of the there-there would quickly become evident. Yet in practice this didn’t matter, because few people were able to reach this kind of deep self-interrogation. The cycle was simply too fast. There was never time for these concoctions to congeal into actual new things (e.g. create the general category of K-Pop patrons for Central European arts institutions). We can’t be sure if they ever meant anything beyond seeming yummy at the time.

This was not meant to be a nihilistic, Gen-X faceplant (“nothing means anything any more”), since we think that perspective can paper over the nuances of consumer experience, business realities, and cultural crisis. Instead, we wanted to link macroeconomic and macrotrend observations to everyday experience, especially in the context of burgeoning collapse.

"Questioned about the 2005 'Access Hollywood' tape, he actually defended his comments about grabbing women by their genitals without consent," Cevallos wrote. He said the rich and famous have been able "to get away with" that behavior, unfortunately or fortunately. "What part of that was fortunate, exactly?" Cevallos asked. Both moments "featured prominently" in Kaplan’s closing arguments, and both were evidence "that didn't exist before Trump offered them up on a platter."

Then I imagined if one of those women sued Clooney, took him to trial, and Clooney had to get deposed. During his deposition he reaffirmed that for "millions of years" rich and famous people have been able to grab women by their genitals and "unfortunately or fortunately" that is how it works. I imagined Clooney mistaking the woman accusing him of sexual assault for his ex-wife. I imagined him, during the deposition, being asked if he cheated on his first wife and saying, "I don't know." I imagined if there were two women willing to testify against Clooney in a trial, under oath, that he sexually assaulted them.

He has claimed on social media he and Carroll don't know each other and have never met, despite photographic evidence of the opposite — nevermind the corroborating fact Trump and Carroll were running in the same circles in New York City in the 1990s and 1980s.

Super Bowl ads are simply a different species in the advertising kingdom. Companies are not just paying for a large audience. They are paying for silent focus: Tens of millions of people quietly watch Super Bowl commercials and actually talk about their favorite moments of corporate branding. They are also paying for exposure: Super Bowl ads are watched and re-watched—on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, and on next-day rankings and analyses across the internet. On most days, readers click out of ads to read articles online. For one day, they read a lot of articles only to click on the ads.

Games—sports—are a form of mass entertainment. They differ from the other principal form of mass entertainment, scripted drama, in three ways that help to account for their appeal. They are spontaneous. Unlike in films and theatrical productions, the outcome is not known in advance: No one bets on the outcome of a play or movie. They are authentic: Unlike film stars, athletes really are doing what audiences see them doing. And games are coherent. Unlike so much of life they have a beginning, middle, and end, with a plot line and a conclusion that can be easily understood.

I don’t see myself ready to invest much in something I’m not even sure I want. Also, if it doesn’t work out, I’m scared of leaving a broken heart in another person.

I want to make myself accountable for taking these personal matters more seriously. As a friend told me recently, I should “whole-ass” it, not “half-ass” it, if I want to progress.

I’m not interested in a relationship for its own sake. I could never be with anyone I’m not genuinely interested in, only to have someone and not be alone. I don’t want to compromise or lower my standards to end singledom. I’ve written about perfectionism from a work-related perspective on this blog before. It apparently also applies to my personal life and partner choice.

The success of frozen pizza, in general, and Minnesota’s Totino’s company, in particular, caught his eye and he wanted to move quickly into that arena. He would, of course, develop his own frozen pizza, but Paulucci had another idea. Chun King churned out thousands of mini egg rolls per day and Jeno figured that an egg roll wrapper could be filled with just about anything. He told his vice president of research and development to turn this idea into reality. The VP, in turn, assigned the task to Beatrice (Luoma) Ojakangas, by coincidence, the older sister of the engineer who had developed the egg roll machine for Chun King.

If the general feeling toward pizza rolls in the 2020s is that they’re for busy kids or stoned adults (as is the consensus in those Reddit discussions explaining the food to non-Americans, which I think tracks with the broader cultural understanding of who eats them today), in the 1960s, they were something different: a new and nifty treat you could serve as a canapé.

In many ways, then, pizza rolls are the perfect American food: a slightly ridiculous and nontraditional dish that pulls from multiple cultural sources outside this country. Their very existence, and the way in which they’re sold, symbolizes the abundance of the USA—its richness of cultures, its excess of resources, its delight in just kinda making things up and seeing if they work.

American food, as a broad-brush concept, is defined not by a specific set of dishes or flavors but by its incredible variety. Obviously—obviously—you can find lots of tasty food in the USA and plenty of regional specialties. But many of those local delicacies have faded away over the years, and as a nation, our signature thing is that you can get, for example, dozens of kinds of orange juice at any time of the year and hundreds of yogurt flavors, and seemingly every grocery store and strip mall has foods that originated in various far-off corners of the world.

inveterate