03.31 | hey, hey look over here

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
   – Rudyard Kipling

✉️ letter #39

Last week I finally finished another attempt at a vlog, pushed it out to Youtube, and then immediately felt embarrassed that I'd made it at all and chose not to tell anyone about it. Because apparently my brain is a teenage daughter, deeply mortified at any attempt for mom to put herself out there, hyper aware that someone in the wider world will be able to utilize this as ammunition for a social execution.

Which is dumb, because it's public already. And if there's any demographic that's more likely to be nice about my bullshit, it'd probably be the people who like me enough to be friends with me on various social channels anyway. I'm not famous enough to have actual haters. Or at least, I'm not anymore.

Quick storytime: At one time when I was editing Shanghaiist, I somehow earned the ire of some startup literary journal blog which hated me enough to spend a couple of weeks making fun of an article I wrote about my grandparents' old home in Shanghai getting razed for some luxury mansion development (the article is still here, with pictures, in the Wayback Machine). In some weird, misguided attempt at posturing indifference, my boss decided to write a nice feature about their website right after their first diatribe against me. It obviously didn't do anything except get them extra traffic to talking about how much I sucked. They enthusiastically got around to doing that more.

So, a little exasperated by my boss' inability to be in my corner, I asked these folks if they wanted to meet up and talk about it. They agreed - turns out they were two Shanghainese 海归, a woman and a man, who'd relocated back to the city a short while ago. We had a long conversation over coffee about why that article had triggered them so and what they felt I could do better. Their main complaint turned out to be "nobody should care about you." All I could say to that was "maybe? but who should I, the person doing all this free writing that you're totally free not to read, care about instead?"

Nothing really got resolved, perhaps. Except that over a decade later, I have a very satisfying story about how I confronted some trolls, flustered them by digging for actual constructive feedback, and now I can't even remember enough about their site to unearth it from the landfill of dead internet URLs.

Anyway, if I could be that brave about sharing and defending my personal stories when I was 25 and was actually trying to protect a reputation, it's silly to be such a baby about it now. Transcript and video below:

🌱 newsreel for a different world

Do I even want to talk about the IPCC assessment report, or are we all #doom-ed out on climate change issues already? Last year, I summarized COP26 and it feels like everything I wrote for that could be interchangeable with how to react to what we learned this month. Gen Dread had a good note on how to process the feeling that nothing's going to get us unscrewed at this point, and what we can all do despite that. It's important to remember that just because life probably won't get better, doesn't mean it's not worth trying to mitigate it getting worse.

• Well, even if we aren't caring fast enough to avert disaster, we are caring more. 76% of US workers now say it is important for businesses to “prioritize sustainability practices and values in today’s society.” Look, for a country with half its politicians denying climate change even exists, that finding's actually kind of heartening.
• Other gifts: The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News is looking juicy, and judges are intensely side-eyeing Rupert Murdochs' claims that he's too infirm to attend a trial considering he was just fit enough to get married and ping pong around his multi-city multi-country homes.
• Other gifts: I normally find the power and skill of Disney lawyers kind of creepy, but boy does it fill me with mirth watching Ron DeSantis flounder against them while trying to "un-Woke-ify" Orlando.
• Other gifts: Trump finally getting indicted for something, even if that something is probably the least consequential of his many crimes. My deepest hope is that he tries to flee the country but gets caught in the most embarassing situation possible - like he tries to crawl into an air vent at the airport and gets stuck, Winnie-the-Pooh-in-the-honeypot-style. My fingers are crossed.
• An actual climate win: The UN general assembly has adopted a resolution that would make it possible to "hold polluting countries legally accountable for failing to tackle the climate emergency."

🎵 song of my week

Every now and then a song comes along that makes me really regret not sticking harder to contemporary dance lessons. A lot of those songs are by FKA twigs.

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

Earlier last year, I was thrilled to go attend a book talk for When McKinsey Comes to Town after meeting one of its authors, Mike Forsythe, at a dinner for former China journalists. And this morning I was thrilled to see him and his consultancy shade being featured on TikTok by one of my favorite TikTokers. Knowing that McKinsey specifically searches for what they call "insecure overachievers" makes me smirk so hard my face might stay that way.

Also noting: Dan Toomey is my New York City crush and I keep on walking around midtown hoping one day to accidentally run into him for a journalistic meet cute. He: morning brew social media comedian. Me: former reporter turned marketer of probably one of the most depressing news topics in the current zeitgeist. Lots of drinking (hopefully paid for by a sponsor!) and romance ensues.

Hey, one can dream.

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