The Real Meaning of Emmanuel Macron’s Victory - The fact is that, in difficult circumstances, Macron has managed to win the Presidency twice. - link
After a COVID Expert Struggled to Obtain New Treatments for His Parents, He Tweeted a Road Map - Older, disabled, and chronically ill Americans who could benefit from novel therapeutics are scrambling to find them easily. - link
The Ordinary Americans Resettling Migrants Fleeing War - After Trump eviscerated the refugee-resettlement system, the government was unprepared for Afghans displaced by their country’s collapse. A new program lets civilians step up to help. - link
The National Guard Soldiers Trying to Unionize - When Governor Greg Abbott took immigration policy into his own hands, sending ten thousand troops to the border, not everyone went along. - link
How China’s Response to COVID-19 Set the Stage for a Worldwide Wave of Censorship - Authoritarian governments in eighty nations have enacted restrictions on free speech and political expression that were falsely described as public-health measures. - link
From Vox
A day in the life of a professional Twitter flirt -
Rosie Nguyen
How Fanhouse founder Rosie Nguyen, better known as @jasminericegirl, spends her 24 hours online.
Welcome to 24 Hours Online, where we ask one extremely internetty person to document a day in their life looking at screens.
For Rosie Nguyen, flirting with her Twitter mutuals is all part of the job. Nguyen, better known by her online persona @JasmineRiceGirl, is the co-founder and CMO of Fanhouse, an OnlyFans-meets-Patreon platform for creators to monetize their followings. She’s also an influencer, which can involve anything from singing to her Twitch subscribers to posting about her bowel movements.
There are less-fun parts, too. As a woman who tweets about being horny and other topics that fall under the general umbrella of “hot girl culture,” Nguyen regularly receives creepy DMs, unsolicited dick pics, and even “hate raids,” which is apparently a thing when a bunch of people swarm your Twitch stream to say vile things about you. The 24-year-old is still figuring it all out. “There used to be a weird tension between my internet persona and my professional life,” she says over a recent Zoom call, “but I’m really starting to embrace those weird overlaps.” Here’s how Nguyen spent her April 20th online (sans weed), in her own words:
8:50 am
I try to wake up around 9 am. I’ll usually straight-up spend an hour on my phone before I move or do anything — I don’t know how people have the energy to get up right after waking up. I scroll through Twitter and see people clowning on the person who complained about the “emotional labor” of parenting children. I didn’t comment on it because it’s not my business, but I hope the kids are okay.
It’s one of those things that you’ll only know if you live on Twitter. My roommates don’t know anything about it, so then I have to give them the full context and what everyone is saying and I’m just like, “This is so interesting that I just have all this information in my brain, every day.”
10:30 am
After my hour of doomscrolling, I use the Headspace app and meditate for 10 minutes. I’m never as consistent with it as I wish I was, but one more meditation is better than none?
11 am
I have a meeting with my marketing team and take my ADHD medication, which I should have taken earlier when I woke up but I forgot. I feel like a lot of content creators tend to have ADHD, because being online is one of those things that really work with it — you have these constant notifications keeping your attention.
11:15 am
I go through my Slack notifications and reply to everything. It always feels like there are a hundred in the morning to get through.
One thing that we do at Fanhouse that’s really important to me is protect creators from harassment and leaks. When I used to be on OnlyFans, it happened a lot. There will be Reddit threads devoted to leaks from people’s accounts with disgusting comments, so we DCMA all of those. Everything on Fanhouse has a unique watermark so we know exactly who leaked it, and then we fine them. I feel like most platforms don’t care about creators unless it’s copyright infringement, but we really do care.
11:50 am
I take a “Fanhouse break,” which is technically work, but it’s not work. I’m the co-founder and CMO, but I’m also on Fanhouse as a creator. I post “sad sad sad sad sad” on my private feed. I’ve been feeling stressed and overwhelmed and tired and all I want to do is sleep and cry, which is kind of just what you feel sometimes. Fanhouse is the place where I put all of those shout-into-the-void feelings.
A fan comments on my post, writing “hey stinky pup” to make me feel better. I message her back and ask how she is, and then I get curious how she became a fan of mine because she’s been really supportive in the past few weeks. I have a lot of small supporters — the $5 Twitch sub, the $5 Fanhouse sub. This fan in particular has gifted, like, 120 subs in my Twitch channel (cost: about $600).
12:40 pm
My most recent tweet was a more formal, professional one, which means that my next tweet should be a fun one. I try to keep my fun-to-work ratio on Twitter something like 9:1. I’ve had a tweet in my drafts I’ve been meaning to post, so I send it. It says, “this account is a safe space for horny women. You are loved and seen.”
this account is a safe space for horny women. you are loved and seen
I get a notification that my friend @akanemsko, a beautiful chess streamer, has replied to my tweet saying “I LOVE YOU JASMINE,” which makes me smile. I reply, “i love you too (i have very dexterous fingers btw).” Often when I interact with my friends on Twitter what we really do is aggressively flirt with each other. Flirting with everyone is maybe my toxic trait but it’s my favorite thing to do and it’s how I show love. I cannot tell you how much life it gives me. To my friend @chrissycostanza I comment, “my room is also a safe space for horny women btw if you would like to come over sometime.”
1:00 pm
My computer crashes and I lose all my tabs so I’m stressed. I’m one of those people who keep tabs open for all the things I need to do and I just hope I’ll get to all of them again. Knowing me, I’ll definitely forget something unless it pops up in front of my face. ADHD life.
1:50 pm
I use my phone when I poop. That’s the only way to poop. It was my third poop of the day, so I post on my Fanhouse asking if that’s normal. Someone responds that it’s impressive. Someone else responds, “women don’t poop, nice try.”
4:00 pm
I read through more Twitter replies. A bot on Twitter informs me that my tweet was a haiku. I count the syllables to myself and confirm they are right. I think, “Wow, I am a poet and a genius.”
A lot of “thank yous” from weird dudes. I do get told gross things on Twitter sometimes. My coping mechanism as a creator is to just block anyone who makes me feel weird in any negative way.
There’s always the component of people wanting sexual things from you. I get unsolicited dick pics all the time because my account is very sex-positive and I love talking about sex. Then men will comment, “I have a boner for you” or will ask me to do sexual things with them, and that is not at all what I’m inviting. I just block and ban them.
5:30 pm
I have to go to an event hosted by one of our investors for founders and other people in tech. I don’t love network-y tech events, and there’s no hour of the day where I go a full 60 minutes without picking up my phone, so at some point I sit down and scroll on my phone — Twitter, Instagram Stories, Fanhouse.
10 pm
Finally done with events and dinner. I make the mistake of looking at my DMs and the latest is a disgustingly horny message, so I block the sender.
I usually stream on Twitch at night after dinner — I’ve been trying to become a partner on Twitch, which is sort of the Twitch version of being verified. I do “Just Chatting” streams where I talk about my day and answer questions. I’ve also been learning how to play piano since the beginning of the year, so sometimes I’ll sing. People can request songs for $3.
I wish Twitch were better at blocking people. You can ban an account, but they can still watch your streams or make new accounts, so the harassment sometimes feels endless. Hate raids are a big thing, too: A ton of people at once will call you slurs, and the only way to get away from it is to end the stream. But tonight, my friend messages me on Discord because they need another player on Valorant, so I do that instead.
12:00 am
I try to have a rule where I get off my PC by 11 pm, but I don’t follow it. I usually scroll my phone while brushing my teeth — I can’t remember a day where I brush my teeth without using my phone. It’s like when you take a dump without your phone and you feel bored and empty.
At midnight I play the new Wordle and then spend another hour on my phone and check more replies to my tweet. It got about 7,000 likes, which is pretty good engagement for my account. These silly tweets are my content, my art, in a sense, so it’s sort of like if I did this painting that I was kind of proud of and my friends being like, “This is a beautiful painting!” Except it’s a horny tweet.
Total screen time: 6 hours, 47 minutes
This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.
The author of Station Eleven wrote a new pandemic novel -
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. | Knopf
In Emily St. John Mandel’s new book Sea of Tranquility, the apocalypse is ongoing. So is life.
In 2014, Emily St. John Mandel published Station Eleven, her bestselling novel about a pandemic. Which meant that in 2020, she acquired a peculiar sort of status as one of the ones who saw it coming, somehow; what Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson called one of the plague prophets.
Station Eleven wasn’t really about its pandemic, though; that was just the plot engine that got Mandel to her artsy post-apocalyptic world of traveling Shakespeare companies, beautifully rendered in the recent HBO Max TV adaptation. Mandel’s latest book, Sea of Tranquility, is a true pandemic novel. It exists to try to grapple with the world the Covid-19 pandemic made and what the pandemic taught us about reality. The results are lovely, life-affirming, and occasionally but unmistakably clumsy.
Sea of Tranquility also exists to play, metatextually, with what it was like to be Emily St. John Mandel in 2020. One of the central characters is Olive Llewellyn, an author in the 23rd century who lives on the moon and has found herself abruptly famous after her book about a fictional pandemic is a big hit. She’s on book tour — this section cheekily titled “The Last Book Tour on Earth” — when she finds herself caught up in another pandemic, this one real.
Abruptly, Olive’s universe narrows itself: long days indoors, trying to work while simultaneously educating her child from home, her book tour gone virtual. She finds herself delivering holographic lectures on the great uptick of interest in postapocalyptic literature over the past decade.
“So I’m guessing I’m not the first to ask you what it’s like to be the author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic,” one journalist remarks.
As Olive shuts herself indoors, Mandel spirals her narrative focus outward and across time. In 1912, we meet Edwin St. John St. Andrew, 18 years old and “double-sainted,” who finds himself exiled out of England and into Canada after sharing his lightly anti-colonialist views at his viscount father’s dinner table. Edwin will shortly find himself in the trenches of World War I, and shortly after that staring down a flu epidemic. In January 2020 we touch base with Mirella, the victim of a Madoff-like Ponzi scheme. (Mirella appears in Mandel’s 2020 novel Glass Hotel, but you don’t need to have read Glass Hotel for Sea of Tranquility to work.) In all those timelines, we encounter the mysterious Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, and in 2401, we enter into his head to find out his side of the story.
Gaspery and the looming threat of disease and destruction bring Sea of Tranquility together. All of Mandel’s characters find themselves living through a version of the apocalypse, a moment in time that seems as though it might plausibly be the end of days. (Gaspery’s plotline, which revolves around the simulation hypothesis, involves a threat to the fabric of reality itself.) “We might reasonably think about the end of the world,” Olive says during one of her lectures, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”
The project of Sea of Tranquility is about finding meaning and beauty within a world that is constantly dying, about relishing a life that seems always on the cusp of awful and irrevocable change. In this it mirrors the appeal of Station Eleven, which imagined that even after the apocalypse, art and beauty and pleasure would matter. Here, Mandel’s prose is shot through with moments of unexpected lyricism that seem to mirror this project, that take you by surprise with their limpid sweetness.
Olive on her book tour walks through “the Sheep Meadow at twilight: silvery light, wet leaves on the grass.” During a spaceflight off of Earth, “the atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then — it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble — there was black space.” Gaspery, who lives under the artificial atmosphere of a moon colony, walks home through the rain with pleasure. “I’ve always loved rain,” he says, “and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.”
The loveliness of Mandel’s sentences, though, stands in jarring contrast to the clumsiness of her plotting. The different sections of this novel are linked by a time travel mystery, and the mystery’s resolution, which forms the emotional fulcrum of this novel, is so pat and clichéd that if I were to describe even just the setup in this review, you would know immediately how it all worked out.
Still, it’s also true that Mandel really is extremely good at writing prose. And the larger project of Sea of Tranquility feels, in the long and fraught ebb of the pandemic, both nourishing and needed. The world is always ending, this book says, and there is always beauty to be found in it.
One Good Thing: The Two Fat Ladies proved pleasure was for every body -
What I loved most about it was the message it sent me about the kind of adult life I could still choose to live. | Photo by PA Images via Getty Images
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The late-’90s cooking show was a revolution before we knew much about body positivity.
In the first scene of the Two Fat Ladies’ season three opener, set in western Ireland, a wrong turn down a dirt road leads the show’s stars, Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson, to schmooze with a cattle-wrangling Benedictine nun in a paddock outside Kylemore Abbey.
When the sister bemoans the waning interest in taking the veil, Dickson Wright declares herself and Paterson “a bit worldly” to qualify. The nun, wearing what appears to be an acid-washed denim habit, leans over the fence and squints.
“You’ve got to have been out in the world a bit to know what you’re missing,” she says.
Paterson nods, her eyes widening behind her bottle-thick lenses: “Otherwise, you might get yearnings later on,” she says.
I first started watching Two Fat Ladies not long after graduating from college. Living alone for the first time, in a sweaty little studio apartment on the ground floor of a Dupont Circle brownstone in Washington, DC, I developed a routine: On Saturday mornings, I walked my granny cart to the farmers market at the top of the Metro escalators, bought whatever I could get for $20, hauled it home, and turned it into food while watching the hours of cooking shows the local PBS channel would broadcast on weekend afternoons.
Two Fat Ladies aired as part of that block of programming, and technically, it was a cooking show. Each week, its stars traveled to a different peculiarly British institution to prepare different peculiarly British dishes for the people who kept those institutions running. They roasted a Christmas goose for the Winchester Cathedral boys’ choir and deviled kidneys for North Yorkshire brewers, soused herrings for lock keepers at the Welsh-English border and made Queen Alexandra’s favorite sandwiches for Oxfordshire cricketers. They fed teams of workers and hobbyists laboring in the region’s most prominent historic establishments with food that was rich and messy, aimed at providing comfort rather than novelty.
But the show’s real draw was its hosts’ prodigious patter: They squabbled over directions while trundling down country roads in a Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle with a sidecar, stopping occasionally to coquet fishermen out of the best seafood or haggle over local produce. In the ancient kitchens where they heaved seething crocks into and out of countless Aga ovens, they offered something less like an educational demonstration and more like a cottagecore cabaret act, roaring at bawdy songs and recollections of their own newsworthyexploits.
I learned a lot from the show — how to make mayonnaise with a whisk (drizzle the oil in drop by drop), how to peel peaches (dunk them briefly in boiling water), how to ensure meat’s maximal unctuousness (bard and lard). But what I loved most about it was the message it sent me about the kind of adult life I could choose to live.
When I started watching Two Fat Ladies in the late 1990s, I was not thin, not quiet, and not particularly interested in a life of routine. However, the icons of femininity available to me were overwhelmingly slender and acquiescent: Supermodel culture was at its peak, threatened only by Kate Moss’s even skinnier aesthetic, and “body positivity’’ was years away from becoming part of the vernacular — Americans hadn’t even collectively agreed to celebrate Jennifer Lopez’s butt. Sex and the City’s 1998 debut felt revolutionary because, at that time, women who grounded their power in the pursuit of pleasure and adventure were more often reviled than revered.
Before I even knew what the male gaze was, I sensed that the Two Fat Ladies couldn’t care any less about it. Female characters whose size and exuberance did not prevent them from taking delight in food, sex, and travel felt revolutionary to me.
In 1999, the show came to an abrupt end when Paterson died months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. For years, scenes and snippets of its dialogue floated into my mind during nostalgic moments. Unable to find it on cable or any of the streaming services, I bought the box set in 2014, and was relieved to find its message still lands; there is no bad time to be reminded we’re all entitled to live a life that makes for good stories later on.
The show is now syndicated on the Food Network, although people without cable TV can watch somewhat haphazardly edited episodes on YouTube. A little less than 30 minutes into each episode is one of my favorite parts: the moment just before the credits roll, when the stars finally come off their feet to enjoy a cool drink and a chat while others eat their food. They never sat at the table with those lucky ones for whom they cooked; for the Two Fat Ladies, there was perhaps more freedom — and more pleasure — in being just a little bit on the outside, sprinkling fairy dust over one magical meal before disappearing in a puff of smoke.
Two Fat Ladies is available to watch on YouTube. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.
From The Hindu: Sports
IPL 2022 | Battle of pace aces: It's Ferguson vs Umran as Titans face stern Sunrisers test - Gujarat Titans are currently in the midst of a dream inception year with six wins from seven games at the halfway stag
‘Jealous gang’ wanted me to fail, says former India coach Ravi Shastri - He says how the ex-England opener Robert Key should go out about his job as ECB's ‘Director of Cricket’.
IPL 2022 | Sunrisers’ pace attack is fast, furious and lethal - Umran, Bhuvneshwar, Jansen and Natarajan’s performances have lifted the team
IPL 2022 | Royals stand in RCB’s course-correction path - Kohli’s form remains a concern; Buttler firing on all cylinders
Shikhar Dhawan sets up Punjab Kings’ narrow win over Super Kings - His 110-run partnership off 71 deliveries with Rajapaksa flattens the CSK attack; Rayudu’s brilliant 39-ball 78 goes in vain as Arshdeep stifles the chase
From The Hindu: National News
Booking begins for Kollam-Wagamon-Munnar budget tourism package -
New York-inspired central park, ‘Olympic City’ to surround Noida International Airport, proposes Master Plan-2041 - The region around the Noida International Airport is also estimated to inhabit 41.7 lakh people by 2041
On the path of progress, in chilli business - FPO in Khammam makes a profit of ₹96 lakh
Jignesh Mevani sent to five days in police custody in assault case - Mevani was arrested in this case on Monday soon after he was released on bail in another case in Kokrajhar district
People react against forcible removal of K-Rail stones: Kodiyeri - ‘Cong., BJP protesting for political reasons’
From BBC: Europe
Nato expansion: No set date for Finland application - minister - Comments come as local media reported that Sweden and Finland could bid for membership next month.
France election: Macron faces immediate challenges to power after victory - The re-elected French president has to focus on a new set of problems, beginning with a general election.
French election 2022: What happened on the night? - Jubilant supporters greet Macron at the Eiffel Tower, while there’s disappointment for those with Le Pen.
French election: I did not vote because nothing will change - Many French people were left disappointed by the options in the presidential run-off.
Osman Kavala: Turkish activist sentenced to life in prison - Osman Kavala is found guilty on coup plot charges in a case criticised as politically motivated.
From Ars Technica
Mysterious outbreak of hepatitis in children grows, first death reported - An adenovirus remains the top suspect, but that still has experts puzzled. - link
Apple will delist App Store apps that haven’t been updated recently - An effort to clean up search results has indie devs feeling dejected. - link
It’s happening: Elon Musk strikes deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion - Twitter sale to Musk needs shareholder approval, is expected to close in 2022. - link
The first “Meta Store” is opening in California in May - Retail attempt down the road from Meta’s VR labs primarily dedicated to VR headsets. - link
Pixel Watch prototype is left at a bar, gets photographed - It has “substantial” bezels, pogo pins in the band connector, and an ECG sensor. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A small church had a very attractive big-busted organist named Linda. -
Her breasts were so large that they bounced and jiggled while she played the organ. Unfortunately, this distracted the congregation considerably.
The very proper church ladies were appalled. They said something had to be done about this or they would have to get another organist.
So one of the ladies approached Linda very discreetly about the problem, and told her to mash up some green astringent persimmons and rub them on her nipples and over her breasts, which should cause them to shrink in size.
But she warned Linda not to taste any of the green persimmons because they are so sour they would make her mouth pucker up, and she wouldn’t be able to talk properly for a while.
The voluptuous organist reluctantly agreed to try it.
The following Sunday morning the priest climbed into the pulpit and said,
“Dew to thircumsthanthis bewond my contwol, we will not hab a thermon tewday”
said to his priest, ‘I almost had an affair with another woman.’
The priest said, ’What do you mean, almost? The man said, ’Well, we got undressed and rubbed together, but then I stopped! The priest said, Rubbing together is the same as putting it in. You’re not to see that woman again. For your penance, say five Hail Mary’s and put $50 in the poor box!
The man left the confessional, said his prayers, and then walked over to the poor box. He paused for a moment and then started to leave.
The priest, who was watching, quickly ran over to him saying, ’I saw that. You didn’t put any money in the poor box!
The man replied, Yeah, but I rubbed the $50 on the box, and according to you, that’s the same as putting it in!
There was once, in a small town, a man named Don. -
One day Don was walking on top of a fence, and he slipped. When he slipped, the fence split him in half, right up the middle, but miraculously, each half of Don survived! Each half got up, started hopping away, and essentially started living separate lives.
The left half, more prone to rational thought, spent most of its time in libraries, and got an accounting gig. The right half, more creative, picked up painting, and taught pottery at the local community college.
On top of the spectacle of a man split in half, the townsfolk could not believe how rarely they saw both halves of Don at the same place. Indeed, nobody could think of even one occurrence of this happening.
Now one day, half a man walks into a bar. The left half of Don, always punctual, walked into the local watering hole at precisely 8:00, and ordered a shot of whisky, which the bartender poured for him.
At 8:01, the right half of Don wandered in, sat down, asked for a beer, and nodded to his other half, which nodded back. As the bartender poured him the beer, the left half of Don took his shot, left just enough to cover the bill, and left at precisely 8:02.
The bartender was astounded– he was the first person to see the two halves interact since the accident. As it dawned on him how rare this was, the bartender exclaimed, a little louder than he wanted to, “Whole Don here for just one minute!”
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