Status Updates From The Deadline: Essays

On temping at dying tech companies in the late 1980’s: they “left one another sly messages on pink sticky notes” While You Were Out swapped paperback novels (Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, that sort of thing).”

Haha, ow.

Never having spent much time on Buzzfeed, I never realized how trashy it was.

These essays are good, but they’re meaty. I need at least a small break after each one to think and digest, so it doesn’t work to try and listen for a longer stretch. If one of my audio holds comes up I will probably put this on the back burner, to give each essay the space it deserves.

“No We Cannot”, about dystopias, particularly the recent trend, is good. Prescient, too, from 2017.

“Dystopias follow utopias the way thunder follows lightning. Lately, the thunder is roaring.”

I love Jill Lepore’s mind and style but I don’t enjoy the pop culture she writes about in this section: Ripley’s Believe It or Not, cryonics, Bratz dolls, Dr. Who. At least the Bratz essay, about how Mattel sued their creator for ripping off Barbie, gets into the history of copyright and brings in #MeToo by way of the sketchy judge, Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who heard the case.