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Now, the links you’re here for:
The not-so-secret life of a TikTok-famous teen (Rebecca Jennings, Vox)
“TikTok-famous teens, the envy of their generation, are all too aware that their fame could go away at any moment. What goes unspoken is that there is always someone funnier or prettier or more likable or who works harder, and that soon their own face may show up less and less on strangers’ screens. That so many people will become TikTok-famous or Instagram-famous or Twitter-famous that it will cease to mean quite so much; that someday there will be simply too many influencers and not enough eyeballs and money. That if everyone is a little bit famous, no one is.”
‘Everything that you’re feeling is ok’ (Ann Givens, The Trace)
“Coroners and medical examiners often call themselves “the last of the first responders,” the people who arrive after the emergency is over — the lives have already been lost, and anyone with a prayer of surviving has been whisked away. They do work that most of us would find unbearable: examining and collecting dead bodies, notifying families of the newly deceased, assisting with autopsies. Coroners are often depicted as frumpy gray-haired men, antisocial and drawn to the dead because of some reluctance to connect to the living. But the field is now overwhelmingly female — in Clark County, well over 85 percent of the employees are women. The death examiners I’ve met are charming, sociable, and motivated by a deep sense of empathy. With salaries starting at $15 an hour for a coroner investigator in Las Vegas — the same as an Amazon delivery person — they aren’t exactly in it for the money. They recognize in themselves a rare ability to guide people through the murky waters between life and death, and they are pulled to their work with a force as strong as gravity.”
The Secret Tapes of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder (Jane Corbin, BBC)
“He talks about how when he’s doing autopsies. You can hear them laughing,” Kennedy says.
“He says, ‘I often play music when I’m cutting cadavers. And sometimes I have a coffee and a cigar at hand.'”
Then the tapes reveal the doctor knows what he is expected to do, according to Kennedy.
“It’s the first time in my life, I will have to cut (up) pieces on the ground,” she recalls him saying. “Even if you are a butcher you hang the animal up to do so.”
An upstairs office in the consulate had been made ready. The floor was covered in plastic sheeting. Local Turkish staff had all been given the day off.
“They speak about… when is Khashoggi to arrive, and they say, ‘Has the sacrificial animal arrived?’ That’s how they refer to him,” says Kennedy.
She is reading to me from her notebook, horror in her voice.
The (loud) soundtrack to my struggle with faith (Anna Gazmarian, Longreads)
“As we grew up, the musicians stopped attending church and spent their weekends at house parties. Rumors had them chugging beer, smoking pot, and going into rehab. I kept track of photos of them social media sites and watched them drift apart, not unlike the way I’d distanced myself from friends in youth group. Over the years, many of the mainstream Christian bands also renounced their faith. The lead singer of the band As I Lay Dying came out as an atheist after being convicted for attempted murder. Allegedly he hired an undercover police officer to murder his wife. The vocalist in The Order of Elijah renounced his faith after reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Watching their loss of faith led me to throw out their CDs from my window as I passed the Waffle House on Jonestown Road. Watching them walk away from Christianity confirmed my belief at the time that struggling with doubt is a prelude to abandoning belief in God.”
Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair (Jessica Hopper, Sasha Geffen and Jenn Pelly, Vanity Fair)
“In 1996, singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan was tipping from alternative icon into something more like traditional pop success. At 26 she had garnered serious momentum—and 2.8 million albums sold in the United States—after her 1993 crossover Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. But as she ascended through the music industry, she kept hearing “no.” No, we can’t play your song—we already have another woman artist in rotation. No, you can’t put two women on the same concert bill—it’s box office poison. Sexism was passed off as age-old industry logic—logic that forced her into competition with other women artists to be the sole exceptional woman allowed opportunity.
“McLachlan was not alone.
“So she presented a challenge to her team—let’s prove them wrong—and in 1997, they assembled a bill of women to play massive outdoor venues across the States. McLachlan headlined, and they stacked the show with superstars like Tracy Chapman, Aimee Mann, Suzanne Vega, Emmylou Harris, Paula Cole, Patti Smith, and Lisa Loeb. The backlash to what would come to be called Lilith Fair was swift. From the beginning, Lilith frequently encountered skepticism from the industry and withering hostility from the media (“It is, in short, a total crock of shit,” wrote critic Gina Arnold), and was attacked by the Christian right. The Los Angeles Times reported music-industry insiders deriding it as “Lesbopalooza.””
Image credit: Ian Sane