It was more experimental, more political, and far less popular than
“Dancing on my own,” or for that matter any of her other singles, but my
favorite track from Robyn’s album Body Talk is still “Don’t fucking tell me what to do.”
Not many artists can do something so thoughtful with such a minimal beat and repetitive lyrics, but the epistrophe builds and builds over the course of the song:
My drinking’s killing me
My smoking’s killing me
My diet’s killing me
My heels are killing me
My email’s killing me
My manager’s killing me
My ego’s killing me
Can’t sleep it’s killing me
Ease up you’re killing me
Let go you’re killing me
And so we come to the basis for the pop music reference:
Your boss is killing you.
Our jobs are making us sick, to the tune of 120,000 excess deaths per year in the U.S. alone — making workplace-related illness the fifth highest cause of death.
The gig economy is killing you.
At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system.
The Superclap is killing you.
Your clutter is killing you.
Wilmington, Delaware is killing you.
A bucket of rocks won’t stop anyone from killing you.
Worst-case scenario
The ad-supported business model for the internet is terrible. What if it infects the self-driving car business?
It used to be boasted of every new innovation that it would make some old legacy system “more like the internet.” That boast carries a somewhat more ominous tone these days. Maybe there are some features of the internet we don’t want to export.
Apparent inevitability of the worst-case scenario
In 1962, the city of Artesia, NM completed its state-of-the-art elementary school, built entirely underground, so that students would be prepared for the inevitability of atomic holocaust. Ed Burmila makes the connection to today’s delirium of active shooter drills, armed schoolteachers, and bulletproof backpacks. (There are 58 of you– how many of you have done active shooter drills at your workplace or school?)
Campus political correctness is out of hand
Texas teacher suspended after telling her students she’s married to a woman.
The Atlantic, in its search for “provocative” and “challenging” ideas, has hired Kevin Williamson, formerly of the National Review. Williamson, perhaps best known for advocating the hanging of women who have abortions and caricaturing black children as “primates,” joins Ross Douthat and David Brooks in the pantheon of living insults to every unemployed writer who actually has talent or an opinion worth considering.
You can still post an apartment rental ad on Facebook and make sure that black people and families with children don’t see it.
Cultivating LOLs
I’m not sure that word means what you think it means.
Ned Flanders x Tupac.
Cultivating joy
Blep. (Yes, this is my dog. No, I’m not sorry.)
Black dogs are hard to photograph. This shot took a lot of practice.
Box-O-Huskies.
Salt water may cause your dog to malfunction.
Secretly Ironic 