Edition #6
Grid Zero, George magazine, Boomer Stuff Avalanche, Tina brown's diary, card games, you don't have adrenal fatigue, placenta donation, Dirty Dancing, WTF, House in Habit, Alex Cooper's splurges
Like most things, the Grid Zero trend—a Stories-only Instagram presence—
seems to have started with teenagers, but it’s appearing more and more, and every time I come across it I’m delighted by the mysteriousness and wish I didn’t rely on Instagram as a career promo tool and could do it myself. Bobby Allyn, a tech correspondent for NPR wrote about it for the One Thing Newsletter.
The motivations are fairly obvious. Taking a stand for some modicum of privacy by depriving lurkers of any digital breadcrumbs, a sort of shield from a rando’s prying eyes. A separation from one’s not-so-distant-but-forever-ago-feeling past. (Probably not much more than a decade ago.) A minor act of resistance in our struggle against data-guzzling social media companies that have compiled personal dossiers on us.
It represents opting out of the Instagram slot machine where being at the right party, or notching some incremental career success can ring three cherries, drive a bunch of likes, and spur a dopamine rush. It’s a way of throwing your hands up and leaving the casino. The reaction to maximalist posting is cutting back entirely. “We’re living in a moment of extremely exhausting oversharing, over-preening self-presentation. It’s like, everyone is in your face at all times every day direct to camera,” Cassandra Marketos, a Los Angeles-based digital strategist, told me. “It seems like all the hot brands and hot people these days are taking the tack of withholding.”
Another friend explained his empty grid more nonchalantly: “No enthusiasm to post I guess.” Someone else said she took all her grid photos down because “I got weird about privacy.” Another friend who has noticed the trend explained it this way: “Caring about an ‘aesthetic’ feed is ‘cheugy’? The less you care, the cooler you are.” (Is pruning your life back to a few or zero posts letting go of aestheticization, or the ultimate form of it?) Someone else told me that Gen Z in particular does not want to “deal with the humiliation of appearing in the feeds.”
Not to mention the joy of never having to write a caption ever again. Can you imagine the free time?
This is awful.
The trademark to JKF Jr’s short-lived political magazine George expired (it closed in 1999) and a conservative lawyer and QAnon conspiracy theorist called Thomas D. Foster has revived it with the same masthead and tagline (“Not just politics as usual”). In case we’d all blissfully chosen to forget the QAnon-ers since the last US election, the NYT reminds us, and attempts to explain the connection with a truly bizarre conspiracy theory that I had never heard of:
At its core, the QAnon movement embraces the baseless conspiracy theory that a global cabal of Satanist pedophiles controls the news media and politics. An offshoot theory — one that has helped fuel interest in the new George — holds that Mr. Kennedy is still alive, and is waiting to join forces with Mr. Trump to vanquish the cabal.
The idea has sent some conspiracy theorists to online auction sites to buy hard copies of the original George, which they apparently believe may contain portentous hidden signs.
In a brief phone interview, Mr. Foster, who is based in San Diego and is listed on the magazine’s masthead as legal adviser, was asked if he thought Mr. Kennedy still walked among us.
“I really don’t know,” he replied.
Alumni of the original George are, predictably, horrified by its reincarnation. “It’s like taking a Chanel logo and slapping it on, I don’t know, toilet paper or something,” said Matt Berman, the magazine’s founding creative director.
I mentioned the upcoming Great Wealth Transfer from Boomers to younger generations last week (the week before? who knows)
but Business Insider is reporting on a less exciting side effect, which they’re calling the ‘Boomer Stuff Avalanche’, predicting that ‘Millennials are about to be crushed by all the junk their parents accumulated’. Which is fine if you’re talking about, you know, a couple of Rolexes and a Birkin or a Louis XIV armchair or two, but if we’re talking about a three bedroom home in the suburbs filled with Temu, it may be time to start encouraging a gradual Kondo before it becomes your inheritance.
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Along with Jane Pratt and, um, me, Tina Brown is the latest former mag editor to launch a substack.
The reason I try hard to keep this newsletter kind of impersonal, despite my editor’s letters often being quite the opposite, is because there is a lot of talk of white women publishing their diaries on Substack and I’m very self-conscious of being one of them (even if I’m only white-ish). Tina Brown has no such fears, probably because she’s the goat of white women diarists and could never be just another anything. She’s the latest legacy magazine editor (Vanity Fair, The New Yorker) to join the Substack platform with her new newsletter Fresh Hell and her words and thoughts are always, always a joy to read. (Aside: if you’re looking for a beach read this summer and haven’t read her Vanity Fair Diaries yet, aren’t you lucky.) (Also, she calls it her ‘Substack diary’, but it’s columns, not like ‘Dear Diary, today I had a salad for lunch’. Thank god.)
One thing I’m asked about by a stranger in my DMs at least once a fortnight,
which is astoundingly often given the subject matter, are the card games I play with my family. Everyone’s looking for ways to connect! PLacing the answer here for posterity: we play Speed, Stress and Shithead, and I recently heard good things about Spite-and-Malice (I really can’t explain why such a lovely pastime is made up of so many angry S words) but haven’t played it yet to be able to give it a solid rec.
Adrenal fatigue is apparently not a thing,
so I guess we have to go back to explaining our tiredness by the fact that we don’t sleep because we work too hard and have too much on and carry a little box with all the distractions in the world in our pockets. This is not a new video but my god, it is so true for me.
When we talk about placentas it’s usually because a Kardashian or Gwneth Paltrow or your second cousin in Byron has eaten theirs,
but the medical community has actually understood the incredible healing powers of the organ for decades.
From The Skimm:
Among the examples of what the female body is capable of, Marcella Townsend’s story stands out. After surviving a propane explosion at her mother’s house in 2021, Townsend’s face became unrecognizable. That is until surgeons used a graft made out of a human placenta — yes, the organ that forms in the womb during pregnancy — to heal the 47-year-old’s burnt skin. Research has found that, even after it exits the body, the placenta is packed with stem cells and important proteins. The organ can help promote speedy skin and tissue regrowth, heal chronic wounds (like diabetic ulcers), and even restore vision.
About 20 women in Australia choose to donate their placentas after a scheduled c-section, which make up about a third of all births in Australia (there were a total of 286 998 babies born last year). That’s a lot of magic feminine healing tissue discarded as medical waste. If you want to donate yours and your hospital doesn’t have an existing program, visit Placental Tissue Donation | Australian Tissue Donation Network
Dirty Dancing is becoming a Broadway musical in 2025.
(We saw Back to the Future in the West End a couple of years ago - now on Broadway too - and while it could have been terrible, it was actually really fun. The songs are no Andrew Lloyd Webbers but a Delorean literally flies over the heads of the audience and it’s truly gasp-inducing.)
The Atlantic taught me this week
that the military version of WTF is, of course now that I think about it, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which I think is so much nicer than the imbecilic-sounding ‘what the-‘ at a time where so often no other expression will do when reading the news.
I only ever engaged in the House in Habit world
when I became temporarily obsessed with the murder of Gabby Petito and she seemed to be the ultimate source of all intel on the case, but a surprising number of people who I know and think are otherwise smart follow her (I’m hoping in a can’t-look-away way but you never know and best not to ask these days). Mother Jones wrote a story exploring how she went from mummy blogger to Trump handmaiden and I’m hoping if I put it here they’ll read it and realise she’s kind of… nutty.
Back in August Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper signed a three year podcasting deal with Sirius for US$125 million
but apparently she’s keeping it very real, telling the Hollywood Reporter: My friends make fun of me because of how reserved I am with money… That said, when I signed my Sirius deal, I ordered a bunch of new hoodies and sweatpants. I love to be comfortable.” That’s great, but also, I would love to introduce her to a nice Loewe handbag.
A man convicted of killing his two-year-old child in a 'shaken baby' case back in 2002 just had his execution blocked by the Texas Supreme Court.
'Shaken baby syndrome,' now mostly known as abusive head trauma, is a diagnosis that’s increasingly questioned here and around the world. It’s an issue that hits close to home because of something that happened when my five year old Odie was just a couple of months old; I’ve never written about it before. (So much for not making this another white woman’s diary on Substack. Feel free to just skip this catharsis, I promise it won’t happen often.)
I had to go back to work pretty quickly after Odie was born and the decision of who would take care of him was, unsurprisingly, a huge one. We had a daycare recommendation from a friend—someone who couldn’t praise the caregiver enough; she was practically family to them. She only took on three kids under two at a time in a cute little cottage across the road from her house, purpose-built for babies. I met her and loved her on sight. After the first day, I picked Odie up, and he promptly vomited all over me. Still, he seemed fine afterward, and he was his usual self the next morning. I was loathe to miss my second day back at work, so I called the daycare, we put it down to a change in routine, and she reassured me he was okay to return.
The second evening, though, it happened again. This time, he seemed properly unwell, so we took him to the hospital. We were there for a few days while doctors tried to figure out what was wrong, but in the end, we were sent home without answers and told to come back if he got worse.
The next night, he did. He was feverish, listless and vomited more. This time, instead of heading back to our local hospital, we went straight to Sydney Children’s. There, with nothing to do but watch my sweet, sad little baby, I thought I noticed something—a subtle gesture, like he was touching his head. I asked the doctors to check it out. Tests showed some fluid between his skull and brain. The neurologists believed he was likely born with it ("He has a big head—well, you both do," one doctor said, motioning to me and my husband, as we touched our enormous skulls self-consciously. "So it makes sense.") They were confident it would go down in time.
But since it could also mean a potential head injury, Family and Community Services (FACS) got involved. It goes without saying that we cooperated. But it was awful. We were asked about how we handled the baby, whether our older children were ever left alone with him, and we underwent multi-hour video interviews with the police—all while 13 days and counting into a hospital stay with our newborn. They were trying to rule out shaken baby syndrome, and the process was intense, but we respected the need for thoroughness if it meant protecting any children who might truly be in danger.
With nothing to do except struggle to sleep in the hospital room armchair for the long hours of every night, I started researching. To diagnose shaken baby syndrome, three key factors (the ‘triad’ of symptoms) need to be present: subdural haemorrhage, brain swelling and retinal haemorrhage. Odie only had the first. The neurologists were being definitely dismissive of the idea of shaken baby syndrome, saying they believed it was nothing to be alarmed about and that we should go home. (Odie by this stage was acting perfectly fine, despite being subjected to invasive testing, including a lumbar puncture.) Still, FACS were allowed to keep us in the hospital until the single woman looking after our case, the only opinion that apparently mattered, ruled out any ‘reasonable suspicion’. And she wasn’t letting go. When I showed her the research I’d found - all in respected medical journals - she just asked me scornfully what level of education I had. I’ve never wanted to stab a person in the eye like I did in that moment, but I thought that probably wouldn’t help our case.
It became clear over time that she was zeroing in on our daycare provider—the same woman who had been in business for decades and was beloved in the local area. Odie had only been with her for two days. He was a placid baby, hardly ever cried, and definitely not enough to frustrate someone whose entire life revolved around taking care of babies. It didn’t make sense to me. Yet, the FACS worker insisted that continuing to send him there would be irresponsible of us, which had me in a panic. How could I ever know for sure? How could I take that risk? We decided that we couldn’t. Even if there was the slightest chance, we needed to change carers (like good daycare for a baby under one would be easy to find at short notice). But ultimately I could never bring myself to make the call; the idea of making false accusation, or even the idea of causing an unproven suspicion to spread in what is essentially a small town just didn’t sit well with me. My gut was sure nothing had happened.
We were finally allowed to leave the hospital, but only under the condition of multiple further interviews and a home visit. A different FACS worker arrived one day not long after, and after a cup of tea and a few compliments about our furniture, we were cleared. It made me sick to think that, had she been less impressed by our sofa, things could have turned out very differently. I couldn’t help but reflect on how easy it would be for someone in a different socioeconomic or racial group to lose their children to this ride that, once set in motion, felt almost impossible to get off.
In the end I followed my gut—and the neurologists’ opinions—and sent Odie back to the daycare. He spent four wonderful years with that same woman, who became like a second mother to me and another grandmother to Odie and our whole family. To this day, he still asks to visit her nearly every morning. I can’t believe how close we came to making a decision that probably would have destroyed this wonderful woman’s life.
A year later, we had a follow-up with the neurosurgeon. He glanced at our file and said, “Oh wow, you’re that family that got stuck on that crazy FACS woman’s train.” Odie’s head was by then completely normal-sized. (I don’t know if I can say the same for me and Haydo.) As for the original sickness? A new paediatrician reviewed the files. Turns out Odie had a UTI when we first took him to the hospital—a diagnosis that had been treated but somehow overlooked in the ensuing chaos. The symptoms of a UTI in a baby? Vomiting, fever, lethargy. The big noggin was just an unfortunate coincidence.
In a world where we mostly worry (rightly) about under-resourced social workers and children falling through the cracks, there’s another danger too: over-zealousness. (Related: This story isn’t about shaken baby but is one of the most horrific examples of a similar misdiagnosis imaginable. Be warned: it’s long and heartbreaking.)
Was that a downer of a way to end the newsletter? Let’s try this instead:
Amelia Dimoldenberg’s long-awaited Chicken Shop Date with Andrew Garfield
came out and it is a masterclass in flirting. I can’t wait for the inevitable Netflix rom-com.
See you next week xxx
Taking another woman down and alluding that anyone one that follows her isn’t as smart as you thought they were. Justine, really?
Also the above comment, “extremist” or even “conspiracy theorist” is a very boring and lazy description that gets attached to anyone who dare question, think differently or dare look through another lens to others.
Women taking down women. Got it.
I started reading HI in 2021 but then it become worryingly… extremist. Also have contacted the Placental Tissue Donation organisation!