Could you disappear off the internet if you wanted to? (6.6.25)

Plus, why are we lying to young people about work? You notice things when you stop rushing, people who can read others' minds, the Kardashian's weird new transparency and more!

Hi Open in a New Tab readers! I’m excited to share this week’s list of things I’ve been reading, listening to, and thinking about.

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Enjoy this week’s list! I also recorded a video (below) reading through this, if that’s a better mode for you!

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from reading 📖

Why are we lying to young people about work? a great essay from my internet friend

Maalvika

. The lie, she writes, is that we say work should feel/be effortless, that when you *find your passion* it won’t feel burdensome or tiring or boring or stressful, ever. Instead, what if we talk about work as effort that can mean something?

I really like this piece. It reminds me that even though I have gone so firmly towards the anti-work camp (lol), it’s true that each of my jobs, while generally often frustrating, boring etc, have also been incredible tools for me. Tools for learning, growth, self-knowledge and discovery, connection, leadership, challenge. The older I get, the more important it is to define my life outside of work, and also, it’s so clear that that work really has been a crucial part of building that life I want to live. And for that, it’s been valuable. (you won’t catch me tooting work’s horn regularly so soak it in now hah!)

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How to Disappear- what a wildly interesting article from the Atlantic about what it takes to truly live a private life. The people they talk about in the article are not living on some deserted island; they’re living in DC, or other unnamed cities (unnamed, because well.. of course), they have kids, jobs, friends. And also— they use the UPS store as their listed home address to receive their mail, and have dozens of burner phones and digital credit cards with different names. It’s wild. And also— isn’t it equally wild how the vast majority of us (myself very included) just shrug as we throw our personal info around to every site that will give us a 15% off coupon? (again, I say this as someone who readily does that….)

Here’s a striking quote from the piece:

Even his family members don’t know his address, he told me; if they’re visiting, he’ll pick them up at another location and then bring them to his house. His neighbors know him by a different name, and he segregates his relationships, never socializing at the same time with people who know his real name and people who know him by an alias. “A big part of what I do is lying,” he told me, “and I think that that’s one thing that a lot of privacy advocates don’t really talk about: If you really want to be private, you have to get comfortable with lying. You have to think of it as a tool that you’re using to defend yourself.”

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Things i notice when i’m not rushing- this essay came up on my Substack homepage and immediately caught my eye. I’ve really been trying to notice when I’m in moments of transition (like waiting at a train station, or in a doctor’s office etc.), moments when I can’t just rush around, when I am pushed to slow down. I try in those instances to purposefully just sit/stand there, and not pick up my phone (or frankly, not pick up my book either). I’m trying to retrain my brain to exist in stillness and to find the monotony of life rich *enough* for my requiring-an-obscene-amount-of-stimuli brain. Loved the writing on this essay.

things i notice when i'm not rushing

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In praise of the difficult book from the Financial Times. I think this is such an interesting counterpoint to the rhetoric we mainly see about books these days, that books are escapism from our horrible world, that they should make us feel overt pleasure when we read them. This article says, what about the books that are hard to read? That don’t immediately feel all that good? Sometimes those books can stay with us. The success we feel as we start to piece together the meaning of the book, or as we have to keep stopping to look up definitions of words, the ways the book’s challenges linger with us long after we’ve finished. There is nothing like a difficult book.

What’s a book you remember reading that felt really hard to read?

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from listening 🎧

The Telepathy Tapes, Episode 1. WOW. What an absolutely fascinating podcast. This show explores the communication abilities of non-speaking people with autism, namely, the ways in which some can read minds. It’s an evidenced-based, narrative storytelling podcast. I haven’t heard anything like this. I cannot recommend this enough! I’ve just listened to the first few episodes so far; I suggest starting from this very first episode and working your way through the catalog.

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After the DC Shooting from On the Nose. On the Nose has been a really important podcast for me in my regular media consumption about Palestine. It’s by Jewish Currents, a leftist magazine committed to activism and thought. This episode is a conversation specifically around the shooting and killing of the two young Israeli embassy workers in DC a few weeks ago. The shooter screamed Free Palestine as he was shooting. In this conversation, the panel discuss whether this should be called a political act or a hate crime and why it ultimately hurts Jews, and continues to make Jews much less safe, when every Anti-Israeli action is labeled as Antisemitism by the media. I think this podcast is able to take an incredibly complex topic and distill it to its core, with nuance and care. I highly recommend this episode for Jews and non-Jews alike.

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How Groupthink Protected Biden and Re-elected Trump from the Ezra Klein show. I just realized this episode is a few weeks old so the NYTimes has put it behind a paywall (-_____-) and I don’t think there’s a way to gift someone a podcast episode ugh. So please listen if you’re curious and have an NYT subscription, otherwise I’ll just explain it here. The episode is a wildly interesting conversation with Jake Tapper who has just co-written a book on this subject. Basically, they discuss how there were a handful of people in the Biden administration (like six people…) who were controlling Biden’s decisionmaking re: running in the election. They wouldn’t let people critique him, they wouldn’t share honest information about his health, and they would essentially lie about how physically and mentally sound they knew Biden to be, saying things like, “his communication skills aren’t 100% these days, but when it comes to making decisions, he’s still so sharp.” Turns out that was all internal spin… It has since come out (of course post-election) that many many people in the Biden White House were deeply concerned about him running, that many wanted him to step down, but they were up against a concerted campaign amongst the few to silence dissent and ensure that didn’t happen (until of course.. it did. Too late…).

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Can pain and suffering sweeten our lives? from Life Examined. For something to be counted as meaningful, does it have to have some degree of difficulty? That’s the topic of this episode.

They define what they mean by ‘difficulty,’ saying they’re talking specifically about chosen suffering. Not something like your kid dying, or having a chronic illness, but CHOOSING challenging things, from simple things like eating spicy food or watching horror movies, to harder challenges like writing a book, or taking a job that’s a stretch etc. On the one hand, some people will say “a life well lived” is one that maximizes for daily pleasures. Simplifying life down to its more basic enjoyments. Others will say, it’s the totality of challenging experiences that make a life of pleasure ultimately.

In the episode, the guest says it’s increasingly important for parents today to teach their kids to seek out difficulty. Because we live a frictionless, easy existence with our phones and Internet, finding ways to, well…struggle is something we should practice doing, as this is a key to deriving meaning.

So I ask here, what’s a hard thing you’ve sought out recently?

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from anywhere else📱

This reel is from @Kardashian_Kolloquium on Instagram (

mj corey writes

on Substack):

kardashian_kolloquium

A post shared by @kardashian_kolloquium

She takes an academic lens to analyze the Kardashians, which is one of my favorite things to do (I genuinely think they are an important barometer of our sociological time). So anyway, in that IG video, MJ Corey is discussing how the Kardashians appear to be taking a new angle re their plastic surgery, one of transparency. Someone on TikTok this week asked Kylie Jenner for the details of her boob job and she very swiftly commented with exact specs, and name dropped the doctor:

Why the sudden ‘transparency’? For years they’ve denied the work they’ve had done. MJ mic drops when she says in her video that they’re trying to “credit the artists who are producing these faces,” positioning themselves as altruistic, generous, and grateful for the doctors who’ve changed their bodies. And also, that they’re being altruistic to *us* (the viewers) by revealing such private, vulnerable information. HOW INTERESTING. Because of course, nothing is done casually with the Kardashians; there always is a strategy and it’s interesting to speculate what that new strategy might be here, and more importantly, to what end?!

Here are a few comments from that IG video that are sticking with me:

Would love to hear any of your thoughts on this!

Thanks everyone for reading!

Miriam