Roundup: Fan life.

By which I mean I'm not moving from sitting in front of my fan.

this oughta do it

At Spike, Natasha Stagg writes about post-COVID trend predictions. “It isn’t fun to be told,” she remarks

what my peers and I are feeling and doing based on the assumption that no one changes and that, when given an opportunity, we throw valuable lessons away in favor of emotional excess. All of this is validating a sneaking suspicion I’ve had for some time: that trend forecasting, or trend evaluating, is inherently cynical. People are predictable, it declares. A pendulum always has a backswing; it never makes a full rotation.

One of the things I like about Stagg’s writing is that she describes a world, and particularly a “New York,” that is recognizable to me and also completely unrecognizable to me at the same time. Normally I bristle at statements that seem to make big universal claims about experience but in her case they always seem grounded in the particulars of her experiences, a kind of leaning into a provincial view to see what you can get out of it, which is m…