Never News: parry-riposte

A very autumnal hello to you and yours on this lovely Friday! C'est moi, Producer Georgia, here with your Never News delivery for the week. The leaves are just starting to change, the temperature is a balmy 65 degrees, and it's almost the time of the year when I turn this newsletter into a Gothic mutation of itself. But for now, let's just relish in that very Practical Magic-esque time of early fall where the darkness has not yet consumed us, and the days are bright and lovely.

Now, onto the news!

THE BOSTON GLOBE: What the hell is going on at the Greenfield, MA lesbian bar?

My feed has been flooded with conversations around this piece in the Globe ever since it was published. The gist is this: a Greenfield, MA lesbian bar called Last Ditch made an Instagram point announcing that it would no longer require k-95 masks on Saturdays in the hopes of drumming up more business (it had previously required masking 7 days a week). The resulting comments were a firestorm of accusations and at least one threat that the bar be firebombed for this decision. Further attempts to engage with community members about this decision also fell apart in disastrous fashion. Unfortunately, people like Ted Cruz are already (and unsurprisingly) making a field day of this, which could distract from the worthiness of examining this moment in a sincere way. But in this article and discourse around it is a very, very interesting conversation about accessibility and inclusivity and where those things can be weaponized by people who would rather see Last Ditch — one of the 37 lesbian bars currently operating in the United States — shut down than make masks optional for one day a week. To me, this is an extension of ongoing discussions online about cancelation and the abuse of therapy terminology or situationally useful terms like "emotional labor" in order to allow the person wielding those terms to have carte blanche in their own behavior toward others with little to no possibility of accountability or expectation of nuance. I think this is a crucial conversation to have on the Left, especially online where the moralization of all decisions can reach such extremes that they become viciously punitive, more about vindication and shaming than actual community growth.

TUBEFILTER: Could fencing — or anything — be the new viral sport?

I've been thinking a lot about how social media can be used to popularize sports that wouldn't be all that interesting to people who didn't already know a lot about it pre-internet use. And this article mentions that after basketball and football reached unexpected audiences through the channels of the social internet, that fencing could be the next, far more unusual sport to try its hand (or its épée, as it were) with this playbook. It's pulling all the moves you'd expect – sending influencers to matches, and even bringing in Mandy Patinkin as a gesture to his role as Inigo Montoya. It's schticky...but hey, it might work. My only gripe with this piece is that frankly, I think basketball and football are hardly the best pre-fencing examples of this kind of practice. To me, there is no better example of how a niche sport could explode across an online audience than Formula 1 racing. I'll save the brunt of my thoughts on this for a potentially later date on the main feed, but there is absolutely some kind of powerful tool here, and one that stretches far, far beyond some of the most popular, ubiquitous sports in the country. And I think it has much less to do with the attendance of actors or broadly popular influencers, too. In fact, I think it has much more to do with the girlies. But like I said, more on that later.

THE NEW YORKER: is there a way out of the neutrality maze?

The central event of this article – Ed Sheeran's egregious fence-sitting nature when it comes to Palestine – has been discussed online ad nauseam. Still, I wanted to include this piece because it mentions a specific tweet that reads, “Just got back from the centrist rally. Amazing turnout. Thousands of people holding hands and chanting ‘Better things aren’t possible.'" It made me wonder about when this kind of glossy-eyed neutrality disguised as bravery in the face of adversity becomes something genuinely despicable to behold...and when it does the opposite. The promise of smoothness, the freedom from unpleasant ideas or decisions is extremely inviting, of course. It's the center of the "just let people enjoy things" way of thinking. Like, I was not surprised when a fan explains to the author of this article that they like Ed Sheeran because he looks like Ron Weasley from Harry Potter – a reference that tells me everything I need to know. Beyond the jokes and the memes, all of this feels like just another sunk cost fallacy where the soothing numbness of neutrality begets itself forever. Until...it doesn't? Maybe? God, I hope so.

And now, I bid you farewell. The next time you'll see me in your inbox, the vibe of this newsletter will be markedly different in celebration of October. But for now, I hope you get to enjoy the beginning of this brief, beautiful season. As for me, I've got a bunch of mini pumpkin ice cream cones in the freezer, and they're not gonna eat themselves!

I think this is one of the greatest albums to listen to in the early fall - here's a track from it!