Out on the water, paddling across the straits between two small rocky islands, the dusk fades and the stars appear. Jennie has done her best to coach me in local geography before darkness, showing me the map with its patchwork of islands and bays, and describing the shape of each landmark. All to no avail. I’m more than happy to be lost at sea, leaning back in my kayak to gaze at the constellations, occasionally checking that the red light on the stern of her kayak is still visible ahead. We stop in the sheltered lee of an island and hear a hoot. “Eurasian eagle owl,” says Jennie. “They nest here.” Then she switches off all the lights. “Let’s paddle slowly close to shore. Watch what happens.”

As soon as we move, the sea flickers into life, every paddle stroke triggering thrilling trails of cold, blue sparkles. When we stop, I slap my hand on the surface and the sea is momentarily electrified into a nebulous neural network of light, like some great salty brain figuring out this alien intrusion. Below that, squadrons of jellyfish pulse their own spectral contribution.

“When I was a child,” Jennie whispers (we are both whispering), “there was no light pollution. We would throw stones from the shore to see what we called ‘sea fire’.” I spend a pointless few minutes attempting to photograph this elusive bioluminescence, then relax and simply enjoy it. Travel should broaden the mind, not the iCloud.

We are in the maze of deserted islands off Hälsö (population: 569), one of 10 inhabited islands in Sweden’s northern Gothenburg archipelago. To get here, all it took was a short bus ride out of Sweden’s second city, a brief ferry ride, then a leisurely hike along the new coastal trail that snakes round these islands, using bridges, causeways and ferries to connect. It does not feel like a lot, not for the sensation of being on the far side of the Milky Way in a kayak-shaped flying saucer.

The city of Shenzhen is one of the most striking examples of China’s super-rapid development in recent decades. As recently as 1955, it was just a collection of fishing villages in the Pearl River Delta between Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton), with an estimated 5,000 residents. The name “Shenzhen” meant “deep drainage ditch.” It was nowheresville, a patch of emptiness only distinguished by proximity to better-known cities. In American terms, a patch of Long Island that was mostly empty lots.

In 1980, as part of the “Reform and Opening Up” policy building a market economy to help develop China after Mao’s depredations, Deng Xiaoping established this strategically located patch of coastline as China’s first “Special Economic Zone,” allowing foreign companies to invest and build there on preferential terms. The then-governor of Guangdong, Xi Zhongxun (a political ally of Deng’s who had previously been purged and jailed under Mao) was an early advocate for Shenzhen’s SEZ status as well. His son, Xi Jinping, is of course the current ruler of China.

Shenzhen’s first skyscraper was built (unprecedentedly fast) in 1982, becoming the tallest building in China. Migrant laborers flocked from across the impoverished Chinese mainland to the new hard but relatively high-paying jobs in rapidly-multiplying Shenzhen factories, and Shenzhen had 175,000 residents by 1985. “Shenzhen speed” became common slang for rapid construction.

As a new development on the coast, Shenzhen has also invested heavily in becoming a “sponge city” to build resilience to climate disasters and sea level rise. An integrated development plan, heavily based on the pioneering work of Chinese urban water management expert Kongjian Yu, has made Shenzhen a “garden city,” with extensive green spaces and protected wetlands on large stretches of the coastline helping to absorb excess water during floods.

Today, Shenzhen’s combination of being a world-leader in electrotech and a pioneer of city-scale nature based solutions for climate adaptation has led to the “Shenzhen model” being a buzzword in international development.

AI tools like Sudowrite, Novelcrafter, and Squibler promise full-length books in minutes—or seconds. AI-produced books have begun to flood Amazon, and range from kids and coloring books to derivative novels and faux biographies repurposed from Wikipedia pages. It’s a mess, and it is only going to get worse.

One AI service claims users “can streamline the book creation process, from conception to publication, making it easier to bring your ideas to life and share them with the world.” Such rhetoric is gentle, inclusive, and misleading. Great art isn’t supposed to be easy. While it’s easy to fetishize the trope of the struggling artist, art results from failure overcome by determination. The artistic ego, in asserting itself, is a human action. When we cede creation to the machine, we are not making art.

Reddit posts abound in which people turn to AI to ease their writer’s block, as if it is a temporary inconvenience. The struggle, in fact, feeds the art. Joy Williams once wrote of Jane Bowles: “Each word is built, each step painful, each transition a rope bridge thrown over a chasm. She makes it look as hard as it is.” Williams could feel Bowles’s struggle, but it was a furnace of her creation. Reading Bowles, Williams concluded, “I am always enchanted and unnerved, a little sick, actually, with love for her gloomy waterfalls, her morbid gazebos, her ghastly picnics, her serious ladies and frail whores—her tortured, awkward, groping, uncompleted souls.”

Happy MLK Day!

Several years ago, near Chester, Pa., Jason Ipock’s aunt was looking to downsize now that she had retired. In her possession was a collection of old family home videos that took up too much room.

Some of the films were in worn-out film canisters, and Ipock worried they’d soon be unplayable. “I decided that I should have the family films digitized, so that we’ll always have a copy in the event of a catastrophe,” he said.

One had a label that stood out from the others: “Martin Luther King.” Ipock had heard stories about this film for years from his aunt and grandmother, Mary Ipock, and decided to digitize it first by going to a film store in Philadelphia.

The result was an MP4 file, a 13-minute film – in color.

There’s a certain serendipity that happens at a potluck. Foods that have never mingled together find themselves side by side: jambalaya in a crockpot, a cardboard pizza box, a plastic tub of Trader Joe’s hummus, a platter of gluten-free brownies. None of it really makes sense when scooped together onto a plate, but all of the flavors blend like fast friends—and if you’re lucky, oftentimes, the people do, too.

It’s another Monday night, which for me, means another neighborhood potluck. Every week, a group of us meets in the same grassy area by the bay in our neighborhood outside of Providence, Rhode Island. This week, I brought a pesto pasta salad with random veggies I found in our fridge; last week, it was leftover ribs my husband made over the weekend; the week before, a bag of chips and salsa. As we set up shop on a foldout table, I can see the curious faces of people driving and biking by, wondering what the heck is going on. But for us, it’s just another Monday night. People start trickling in around 5:30pm and stay until the sun goes down. We catch up on each other’s lives, and watch the kids run around while helping ourselves to a second plate. Then, we pack up our things and say our goodbyes, knowing we’ll see each other again next week.

While these gatherings now feel like a staple in my life, I first learned the magic of weekly potlucks a few years ago, in my old neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was 2022, and we were still feeling a bit socially raw, fresh out of our Covid bubbles. A neighbor friend started a group text, inviting us to gather every Monday at the playground for a whatever-you-have-lying-around potluck dinner and a good hang.

At first, the weekly cadence sounded like… a lot. Weekly? Really? Could my social battery handle it?

Yet after the first few months, it started feeling like an important ritual, and after the first year, it felt like a sacred space. The regular cadence was key. It allowed us to check in on each other and get to know our week-to-week rhythms. I could ask how Jen’s doctor’s appointment went last week, or if Joel had recipe-tested the chicken and dumplings he was planning for his upcoming popup restaurant. When I wanted someone to be my accountability-buddy to do that yoga class I kept swearing I’d do, I could ask if anyone else had been looking for an accountability-buddy, too. And with the standing weekly gatherings, all of this could happen in an intentional way, our commitment to a weekly meal slowly blossoming into something more.

In the last 15 years, a linked series of unprecedented technologies have changed the experience of personhood across most of the world. It is estimated that nearly 70% of the human population of the Earth currently possesses a smartphone, and these devices constitute about 95% of internet access-points on the planet. Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.

History teaches that new technologies always make possible new forms of exploitation, and this basic fact has been spectacularly exemplified by the rise of society-scale digital platforms. It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”. Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market.

Understanding the significance of our own lives requires some understanding of scale. “Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences,” Marcia Bjornerud, a geologist, writes. The Anthropocene, she suggests, is a fine time to “adopt a geologic respect for time and its capacity to transfigure, destroy, renew, amplify, erode, propagate, entwine, innovate, and exterminate.” We need to know how to navigate our epoch: to recognize our profusion of scales and strive to understand, amidst their collisions, not just how to care for the world beyond us but how a person can be, what it means to stand as a morally vested individual.

And yet we humans are still not particularly good at seeing ourselves in time or space. I’m certainly not. So here we are. Not only has our age come face to face with an emergency of scalar challenges—brashly called a global climate crisis—but we have produced a daunting sense of distance from addressing it. The problems are physically too far away, too large, too vast; the psychological distance we feel from addressing them is too great. It’s a double-distancing. Hopelessness comes from the scalar mismatch between we individuals, who are wee individuals, and the problems of an 8,000-mile-diameter earth.

All of this was on my mind when I first met Robert Socolow, an 88-year-old physicist who, over the course of his life, turned to environmental science and technology to help humanity respond to our most complex challenges of scale. One of those efforts has been with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where Socolow helps with their Doomsday Clock. That’s the device that, since 1947, tracks humanity’s proximity to self-destruction. The clock is a metaphor, presuming to measure Blake’s hours of folly by minute and second hand; the hands are set by “nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies, and biosecurity,” among other concerns. They’ve changed positions 26 times in the decades since they began metaphorically ticking. Since 2010, the clock’s hands have only moved closer to midnight.

In 2025, Socolow himself revealed the face of the clock at a press conference in Washington, DC. It was January and he was at the US Institute of Peace in Foggy Bottom. With a crowd of reporters looking on, cameras flashing and shutters digitally clicking, Socolow stood by a modernist wooden stand and spun a turntable to reveal the clock hands at a small, acute angle against midnight. A world of scalar challenges fell into an urgent sort of order. The end was 89 seconds away.

Most of us are daunted, every day, by the vastness of planetary activity and the proximity of our personal choices. We look at the clock, unsure how to balance clashing scopes of time and space. But if I’m unsettled, I want proximity to settle me. I want to be close, I want to feel part of the world I inhabit and see and feel, I want to hold those I love near to me. So what should we do? When I met Socolow, I wanted to close the physical and psychological distances in my own life before time ran out.

There aren’t many escapes from the grim onslaught of terrible news these days. You can stare at a blank wall, obsessively count the hairs on your arm, or, in a true moment of desperation, ponder the state of global fashion. I prefer the last one. I love being on the cutting edge of style, peacocking out in the decaying slopfest that is our planet. A crisp, well-made suit is a cure for all manner of emotionally trying times. I relish being hyper-aware of the goings-on of fashion, so I was one of the first sorry souls to learn of the current global obsession with flimsy canvas Trader Joe’s shopping bags.

For those unaware, Trader Joe’s is an American grocery store chain known primarily for its affordable prices, whimsical tropical branding, and heart-attack-inducing parking lots – apparently designed to be small because the stores themselves are so tiny that they can’t justify more spaces. I don’t naturally see the use in swanning about with a tote bag promoting a demolition derby disguised as a market, but I’m not most people.

All across the world, eager consumers are seeing price tags of up to $50,000 for a bag I can buy today for $3 that I will then shove into the remaining empty space in my closet and completely forget about every time I go shopping. Such is the fate of most tote bags. It’s a lonely existence, filled with neglect rather than groceries. So, why all the fuss over something so trivial? How did a store for budget-conscious Americans become a status symbol everywhere else?

In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.

It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.

A new year is upon us. Traditionally, we use this time to look forward, imagine and plan.

But instead, I have noticed that most of my friends have been struggling to think beyond the next few days or weeks. I, too, have been having difficulty conjuring up visions of a better future – either for myself or in general.

I posted this insight on social media in the final throes of 2025, and received many responses. A lot of respondents agreed – they felt like they were just existing, encased in a bubble of the present tense, the road ahead foggy with uncertainty. But unlike the comforting Buddhist principle of living in the present, the feeling of being trapped in the now was paralyzing us.

I mentioned this to my therapist, Dr Steve Himmelstein, a clinical psychologist based in New York City who has been practicing for nearly 50 years. He assured me I was not alone. Most of his clients, he said, have “lost the future”.

People are feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated, bombarded with bad news each day – global economic and political instability, the rising cost of living, job insecurity, severe weather events. This not only heightens anxiety but also makes it more difficult to keep going.

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

Philosopher C Thi Nguyen’s new book tackles precisely this kind of perverse behaviour. He argues that mistaking points for the point is a pervasive error that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we don’t want. “Value capture”, as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress, begin to blur. You internalise the metric – in some sense it supplants your original goal – until it has “redefined your core sense of what’s important”.

He gives the example of American law school league tables, introduced to offer an ostensibly objective yardstick for candidates who had previously relied on promotional material and insider gossip. The new, supposedly hard, data focused on a few, narrow metrics.

‘A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.’ VS Naipaul’s first rule for good writing is a popular one. From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter.

This has been a standard modern academic account of English prose, from Edwin H Lewis’s 1894 book The History of the English Paragraph to recent dataset analyses. Arjun Panickssery recently argued that English sentences got shorter over time and that ‘shorter sentences reflect better writing’.

The Elizabethans and Victorians wrote long tangled sentences that resembled the briars growing underneath Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Today we write like Hemingway. Short. Sharp. Readable. Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete.

I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modeled more closely on spoken English.

What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.

Two Palestinians are gathering donations to create a public library in Gaza, after Israel’s war and genocide destroyed nearly all existing libraries, schools, and universities. The two men, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim, are avid readers who have spent years trying to save books as they struggled to survive in Gaza.

With their new library in Gaza, the two are hoping to preserve as many books as they can, but also build a space for rebuilding collective memory and fostering expression, creativity, and play. Their tenacious defense of books amidst brutality and genocide is not only an attempt to preserve objects, or institutions, or even a culture under assault:

“With your support, you are not rebuilding a place —

you are rebuilding a life that can continue.”

Today's random YouTube find. It's an interesting exploration of the development of America's housing market over the past century.

We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot actually be gotten, that we can't define, from a source that has no interest in providing it.

The distinction between thick and thin desires isn't original to me.

Philosophers have been circling this territory for decades, from Charles Taylor's work on frameworks of meaning to Agnes Callard's more recent writing on aspiration.

But the version I find most useful is simple:

A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.

A thin desire is one that doesn't.

Every Tuesday at dawn, Raildon Suplício Maia goes to the market in Macururé, in Brazil’s Bahia state, to sell goats. He haggles with buyers to get a good price for the animals, which are reared in the open and roam freely.

Goats are the main – and sometimes only – source of income for the people of Macururé, a small town in the Brazilian sertão. This rural hinterland in the country’s north-east is known for its dry climate and harsh conditions.

But earning a living from goat rearing is becoming more difficult as the dry season extends and the native vegetation withers in the Caatinga, a shrubland and thorn forest biome that spans much of the sertão, leaving even these hardy animals starved for food.

“It used to rain earlier,” says Maia, 54, a short, wiry man with the weathered face of someone who has spent a life outdoors. “Now, there are no cacti, there’s no grass, there’s not enough water. We have to spend what we earn from selling the animals on buying feed.”

There was a time when fat liberation seemed inevitable: Body positivity, a movement to dismantle systems that map stigma onto fat bodies, was having a cultural moment. Plus-size model Ashley Graham received a Barbie molded in her image. Per her request, Mattel made the doll’s thighs touch, an ode to the realness of Graham’s body and that of the 67 percent of women in the United States who are above a size 14. She also appeared on the cover of Vogue UK and American Vogue, designed a swimsuit line with Swimsuits For All, and became the first plus-size model to grace the cover of Sport Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. At the time, Graham’s ascendancy and success were treated as the collective win of a movement that had pushed for fashion, in particular, to become more inclusive of larger bodies.

Women of size were purchasing fatkinis in droves, unapologetically flaunting their curves on coveted magazine covers, selling out fashion collections, and generally pushing for and investing in representation that had long eluded us. Whether it was calling out fat-shamers in gyms, getting a line of Barbies that were more representative of actual bodies, or finally having stock photos that purposefully included plus-size women, women of size were declaring our right to exist without persecution. It felt like inhaling a breath of fresh air after being inside for too long. Though the average American woman wears between a size 16 and a size 18, we represented less than 2 percent of media images. Having access to cute clothes, two-piece swimsuits, and Photoshop-free advertisements was critical for a population that has long been starved, a punishment for daring to be large in a culture that idolizes thinness.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, body positivity had become a mantra for those who are learning to reject diet culture and love their bodies, flaws and all. Graham and her peers—including Tess Holliday, Iskra Lawrence, Gabi Gregg, Nicolette Mason, and Danielle Brooks—championed the movement through their social-media platforms, their work with clothing brands and advertising partners, and their features on magazine covers. The ascension of body positivity gave us fat-girl memoirs that deliberately focused and centered the narratives of fat women, such as Kelsey Miller’s Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life, Gabourey Sidibe’s This Is Just My Face: Try Not To Stare, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Jes Baker’s Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living, and Tess Holliday’s The Not So Subtle Art of Being a Fat Girl: Loving the Skin You’re In. And multiple fashion companies, including Aerie and Target, even pledged to use minimal or no retouching in their advertising campaigns for a time.

The body-positivity movement used rhetoric rooted in empowerment to affirm women of size and encourage us to accept ourselves as we are, regardless of our dress size. Even now, a Google image search for “body positivity” offers an array of simple illustrations framed around the idea of empowerment. All bodies are good bodies. There’s no wrong way to have a body. All bodies are beautiful. Beauty comes in every shape and size. Honor my curves. Plus is equal. It’s time for us to reclaim our bodies. These catch phrases, and dozens of others, are powerful hashtags on Instagram. Tagging a photo with one of these popular hashtags lets other body-positive people know you’re a member of the community: Like them, you reject Photoshop, jiggle without shame, and paint your stretch marks with glittery, rainbow colors.

But as fashion became more body positive, the push to make other institutions—including media, law, schools, and housing—more inclusive of people whose bodies have been marginalized was sidelined. Legislators have ramped up their attacks on trans and gender-expansive people, airlines still make it difficult for plus-size people to travel, and the Department of Education is dismantling protections for people with disabilities. Yet, body positivity morphed to almost exclusively focus on fashion, empowerment, and selling products. It was a complete departure from the radical politics of fat acceptance, the movement that birthed body positivity. As we reflect on the (bygone) age of #bodypositivity, we should ask: What were the aims of the movement, who got centered and celebrated, and what bodies were considered “good bodies?”

Donald Trump wants us to believe that the “war on Christianity” is spreading across the globe. The US president recently sounded the alarm on the “mass slaughter” of Christians in Nigeria while threatening a US invasion of the African nation. We shouldn’t be surprised. This falls right in line with Trump’s ongoing attempts to project Maga Christianity on to the global stage and crack down on religious freedom.

Maga Christianity represents a self-serving, commercialized version of the Christian faith – putting power over service and empathy – and it is everywhere in our federal government. In February, Trump announced a taskforce led by Pam Bondi with the goal of rooting out “anti-Christian” bias. In September, Trump announced his plans to protect prayer in schools. Later that month, he issued a memorandum identifying anti-Christianity as a potential driver of terrorism. These are not just one-off incidents. This is a national effort to push the Maga Christianity agenda on Americans, and we’re already seeing the consequences.

Despite the Bible’s clear call to “love thy neighbor”, the Maga movement has used its version of the Christian faith to oppress immigrants, oppose the rights of women and condemn the LGBTQ+ community. At the same time, we’ve seen shootings at places of worship and arrests of faith leaders at peaceful protests.

Emilie Nasseh, a 30-year-old living in Manhattan, has made up to US$2,000 a month through an unconventional side hustle: renting her clothes and accessories.

Nasseh uses Pickle, a peer-to-peer clothing rental app where users share their wardrobes for profit. Some lenders may also list their clothes for sale. Among Nasseh’s most popular rentals were handbags, including a Chanel mini wallet that has been rented out nearly every week over the past year.

“I’m very happy to allow others to use items in my closet who haven’t had availability to that luxury. I’m not using (the item), so it’s kind of a win-win scenario for everyone,” she said, noting that she may make $500 during a slow month.

archive.is link

As I apply for yet another job, I look at the company’s website for context. I’ve now read their “what we do” section four or five times, and I have a problem – I can’t figure out what they do. There are two possibilities here. One: they don’t know what they do. Two: what they do is so pointless and embarrassing that they dare not spell it out in plain English. “We forge marketing systems at the forefront of the online wellness space” translates to something like “we use ChatGPT to sell dodgy supplements”.

But understanding what so many businesses actually do is the least of my worries. I’m currently among the 5% of Brits who are unemployed. In my six months of job hunting, my total lack of success has begun to make me question my own existence. Just like when you repeat a word over and over until it loses all meaning, when you apply repeatedly for jobs in a similar field, the semantics of the entire situation begin to fall apart like a snotty tissue. About one in five of my job applications elicit a rejection email, usually bemoaning the sheer number of “quality applicants” for the position. For the most part, though – nothing. It’s almost like the job never existed in the first place, and it’s possible that it didn’t.

In 2024, 40% of companies posted listings for “ghost jobs”, nonexistent positions advertised to create the illusion that the company is doing well enough to take on new employees. And this seems like an all-too-easy way to lie about your success. Regulation of job ads is mostly the remit of the Advertising Standards Authority, which – in all its might – has the power to … have a misleading job ad taken down. So with no particularly harsh consequences for employers, why not go on a pretend hiring spree? Ethics in the job market seem to have gone out the window, and the idea of wasting the time of thousands of hapless jobseekers doesn’t seem to matter much.

Stories like this make me feel far less special.

Inexorably, nostalgia grinds on, ingesting and crushing everything in its path into an unrecognizable, homogeneous slurry. The ironclad law stating everyone in their 30s must get obsessed with resurrecting childhood media assures no decade can escape. But as said threshold creeps through the 80s and 90s and draws unavoidably closer to the 2000s, remembering the era fondly is requiring more and more ludicrous amounts of cognitive dissonance. Rife with war, fearmongering, and recession, and the 2000s were not a fun decade to live through, especially as a teenager.

Nostalgia culture’s defenders assert that we can just jettison the bad stuff. Forget the politics, wars, recession, and so on and just enjoy the Nu-Metal and clear plastic electronics. But is that really possible? Can you simply excise popular culture from the context in which it was created? I submit that you cannot, and while that’s true for every era, the politics of the post-9/11 era invaded our everyday lives so pervasively as to make it a particularly futile exercise in sophistry when you’re talking about the 2000s.

I know that a lot of us here already know this, but this explanation is unusual on its clarity and so I think it's good for sharing to friends and family that don't see what's happening.