It literally IS the damn phone, guys. We know this, right?
I think even as far back as middle school I have been crippled by intense anxiety that my natural creative energies (such as they are) were being routed in the wrong direction. This was a specific Tavi Gevinson-induced anxiety, as I’ve written about before, but it has since extended to cover, miasma-like, my entire existence.
Is it bad that my innate obsessive impulse, my “organ of veneration,” was long ago and irrevocably given a technologically enhanced route of expression? Maybe?????? I am increasingly filled with guilt about how much I compulsively use and genuinely enjoy social media; and still very much haunted by that old thought that I would be someone and something very different—and possibly better—if it wasn’t for my the internet, and specifically my phone.
The idea that I could simply go on a semi-permanent digital detox isn’t particularly helpful here because then the active absence of the phone would be the backdrop to my life instead of the presence of it. What I come back to is how I want is a kind of complete AU reset, a glimpse or quantum leap into a world in which I not only didn’t fall into the digital pit but never faced it as a danger at all. And of course it’s a fallacy that I would be in any way better or meaningfully different in that world, (or else not different in bad ways) but I want to see it all the same, JUST TO BE SURE!
This impossible desire has grown out of my ongoing interface with the historical archive, during which I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that a lot of these really really smart men (mostly men) with well-cited Wikipedia pages whose letters and diaries I’ve studied extensively would’ve merely been hentai addicts or McKinsey consultants or incels or gamers or golden retriever stay-at-home boyfriends or whatever, if they were born in 1987 instead of 1887.
Assorted “some guys” I have been researching, c. August 1910
There’s nothing inherently special about them except that they happened to be born at a time during which various inborn traits were able to combine with circumstance and luck to give them a chance at having an immense and exciting impact on their chosen field. They were literally just some guys.
But this knowledge is an infohazard: because once you comprehend that, you inevitably can’t stop imagining the flipside, which is that perhaps you, also just some guy, a boring anxious middle-class phone addict, might have easily become more important or successful or fulfilled or simply happier by this point had the technological circumstances of your life been different.
I think “different” is the keystone of this fantasy. Sure, probably some of those 1887 guys wished they were born in 1787 (nostalgia is universal), but there was nothing really equivalent to the phone to wish themselves free of. Whereas the simple absence of the phone would render my current life thrillingly unrecognizable.
The thought experiment completely falls apart when considering gender, but that’s one of the reasons it kind of intoxicates me. Like, am I so unhappy with the colonization of my consciousness and the dismantling of my attention span by my phone that I would consider trading my hard-won personal rights and independence for it? Obviously not (!!!!) But the fact that I’m even returning to it frequently as a daydream is a measure of my increasing dissatisfaction.
Anyway. Challenging myself to simply be bored more often is absurdly, embarrassingly difficult. I wish I was at a big WWII reenactment or LARP camp or even experiencing the stressful plot of Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog just so I’d have a reason to wear a cool outfit and not look at my phone for days.
If I wasn’t so locked into the Apple ecosystem I’d consider getting a Jelly Star or a Light Phone, but as it is I’ve been experimenting with screentime-control apps and taking my Ritalin. There is no solution here other than resistance, practice, and discipline.
Last night, like I do many nights, I dreamed about shopping.
I dreamed about a long broad foreign boulevard filled with shops selling clothing and jewelry; I dreamed of entering a shop filled with beautiful antique theatrical posters, being told by the proprietor that there was a basement level, where beautiful sparkling toys and strange objects were being sold, and past the shelves and the people quietly perusing wares was a hallway opening up into a huge subterranean mall, where the echoing sounds of people shopping drew me forward into the bright promise of more, more. Then I woke up.
Sometimes I return to the same retail landscapes over and over in my dreams. Bazaars, markets, pop-up shops, multi-story bookstores, enormous glossy malls taking up whole spaceships, whole cities. In my dreams there is block after block lined with fascinating shops, lying just around the corner from where I live, that I never go to for some reason but am always longing to. I worry in my dreams that I have gone so long between visits to these magical streets that the items, the books or dresses that would change my life if only I could own them, will have been sold.
I remember these places as if I have really been there, even if I haven’t dreamed about them for years. The labyrinthine urban indoor mall, with whitewashed walls under fluorescent lights, where inside I found racks of cheap and beautiful frilly Japanese fashion that fit me perfectly. The enormous used bookstore, with worn nubby carpeting, where in the lower level I found huge, towering shelves of beautiful antique travel volumes and polar books.
A lot of people dream about malls—so many that there’s a subreddit, /r/TheMallWorld, for people to discuss this “shared astral space” they all go to when they sleep. They may be influenced by the “liminal space” meme, connected to the Backrooms metafranchise as popularly represented by the work of filmmaker Kane Pixels. But not a lot of these dreamers seem to dream about actually shopping in the malls—which, for me, is the best part.
I remember the first time I dreamed about shopping. There was no Hot Topic at my hometown mall, only at the slightly more downscale mall the town over, and I had been promised an excursion there with some middle school friends. The date was set, some weeks in advanced; I browsed images on Myspace and Polyvore of the kind of clothes and accessories I was yearning to acquire; and at night I dreamed of the mall as it existed in my mind, a marble-floored wonderland of studded belts and graphic tees and skinny jeans that would actually fit my shrimpy tween legs.
The Columbus Circle mall looking particularly dreamlike.
Naturally the Lincolnwood Mall did not live up to dream expectations, although I spent an awful lot of time there over the next few years. I do wish I could really visit those spectral dream shops; yet I can get just as much pleasure out of real ones. Left to my own devices I can shop for hours, days at a time: like on my solo trip to Japan, a 21st birthday present from my aunt, which was 10 days long: 4 of which I spent sick as a dog in a hostel bunk, and a full 3 of which I spent, joyfully, shopping. Not necessarily buying but shopping: an active verb, one full of potential. A feast for the senses, or at least touch and sight. Combing through racks — trying on clothes, shoes — holding things up to yourself in the mirror, imagining the kind of life you could lead if you took them home.
For me, shopping is fun as an activity in and of itself, but it all too often inevitably leads to buying. Money burns a hole in my pocket in a way that I’ve been assured I inherited directly from my father (although my mother is also a proponent of retail therapy, as needed). Once I received $300 from a class-action suit I had forgotten I’d registered for, and immediately went out and spent it on a pair of full-price Fluevogs—which, I might add, I get complimented on every time I wear them out, including just today.
My dad would often facetiously call a mall or shopping street “The Museum of Now.” My guilty secret is that I perhaps enjoy shopping just a little bit more than going to actual museums. You can take what you find home, when you’re shopping. And the ecstasy of ownership is long-lasting—just long enough to make you miss it when it’s gone, begin jonesing for the next hit.
The “hit” of really good shopping is tripartite. There’s the jolt of aesthetic pleasure you get when you come across The Item, when you first encounter it on the rack or on the shelf. Sometimes this alone can be enough to sustain me: I only need to find it to feel good, perhaps take a picture to remember it by. But I do very much love proceeding to the second part, which stretches out luxuriously across a few minutes: the moment you decide to take The Item home, when you twirl in it in front of the mirror and say to yourself, yes, you’re mine now. And the third part comes when you are home and it is yours: when you wear it out for the first time, or crack its spine to begin reading, or hang it up on your wall.
After that the cycle begins anew. Standing in front of my closet, trying on outfits for an hour, thinking, how the hell do I havenothing to wear? Social media exacerbates this, obviously, but it is certainly not the source of the problem. I dreamed of shopping long before I had a smartphone. These days, when I’m dosing myself with my fully allotted 35 minutes of TikTok a day I’m certainly more likely to want to spend on trendy clothes, shoes, and makeup; but at the times when I’ve locked myself out completely, my irrepressible covetous nature turns to equally (or even more) expensive markets: vintage furniture and home goods; antique gold jewelry; 19th and early-20th century manuscripts and ephemera.
Do other people want this much stuff, this badly? Why can’t I be happy with what I have?
Does anyone want to buy any of this for me?
My problem is that my wanting is always shifting up a gear, taking new forms. My tastes change and suddenly I hate everything I have; suddenly I see a new gulf stretching from who I am to who I want to be, crossable only by filling my apartment and wardrobe with better, different things, things I didn’t want a day ago. In college I liked Urban Outfitters; I still like Urban Outfitters, but now I also like Anthropologie and Sezane and Eliza Faulkner and Batsheva and Helmstedt and Camper, to say nothing of leatherbound antiquarian books and William Morris wallpaper and Matilda Goad cookware—I could go on.
Couldn’t the energy and creativity I spend on making wishlists and Pinterest boards and filling online shopping carts be better spent another way—like on making something new? Maybe. I mean, I do knit and sew… sometimes!
But I try to see the bright side. This inability to be content with what I have is, perhaps, another way to describe ambition. I may never be satisfied; but on the flipside, I’ll never be stagnant, either. I will always be looking for the next best thing and reaching for it. I will allow myself the pleasure and pain of evolution, of changing taste, of dreaming new selves into existence day by day. One day I will be rich and beautiful and beloved and have a house full of every thing I have ever wanted… but until then, I will just keep shopping.
Recently:
I appeared on The Study Hall Podcast to chat about the experience of reporting my Atavist piece about Pennell and Atkinson.
For Atlas Obscura, I wrote about the last days of the beloved Antarctic vehicle Ivan the Terrabus.
Two years ago, I discovered a love story hidden within Scott’s last Antarctic expedition—between two of his officers, Pennell and Atkinson. They survived the tragedy which took Scott’s life and shocked the world, but further dangers lay ahead for them.
If you happened to read my early blog posts about these guys, you know the basics of this story, but I hope you’ll take the time to read the longer piece. It’s about 12,500 words long, so might take you between 30-45 minutes to read. Early reviews: “I cried.” “This is one of my favorite articles of the year.” “But did they have sex though?”
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who helped me get this story across the finish line: the original Discord transcription teams; Sarah Airriess, Anne Strathie, and Bizzie White (Pennell’s great-niece) who all accompanied me on my research trip to Oddington last year and supplied an immense amount of helpful information and references; Naomi Boneham at the Scott Polar Research Institute; Adele Jackson at the Canterbury Museum; and last but certainly not least my editor Jonah Ogles who had the superheroic task of helping me cut down my original draft of over 20,000 words (lmao) and managed to accomplish it without making me completely lose my mind.
If you enjoy the piece and want to help get the word out about it, I’d love you forever if you reposted on X or Bluesky, or shared it yourself on Instagram or Facebook. My goal is to get this in front of some big-time Hollywood honchos who, after they have finished weeping, call me up and offer me the big bucks to make it into an Oscar-bait movie starring Josh O’Connor. (He could play either one of them, I’m not picky.)
To accompany the story, I’ve teamed up with my good friend Gen to do a Pennell/Atkinson themed guest playlist for her music newsletter, Fidelity. You can check out the songs and listen here.
I’ve never been big on year-end lists and roundups as it is — I’m always too busy hibernating or sewing or completely checked out of social media, as is my holiday-season tendency — but this year, the idea of looking back on purpose is more or less nauseating, given the staggering personal loss casting a shadow over literally everything else that happened to me.
However. One of my 2025 resolutions is to lose some of my shame about self-promotion. One important element of my father’s life and legacy is that he was, surprisingly for such a brilliant showman, selfless verging on shy when it came to his own work. He vastly preferred to facilitate and guide the performances, recordings, and celebrations of others rather than release work under his own name for his own personal benefit. An exception may have been the popular WBEZ radio shows that made his name in Chicago, but even then he went on the air in service of sharing brilliant and often obscure music from around the world, and cultivating a community of appreciators of that music, rather than furthering his career. Despite the wishes of his friends and fans, during the decades after his show’s untimely end he never went back on the air, never started a blog or wrote a book, and never released an album of his own original music. He was strongly principled, and believed that a life of making music every day for himself and his community was far preferable to any other kind of life, even a highly lucrative one. These principles are certainly why he was so beloved in that community, but also why he sometimes struggled—missing out on opportunities, and perhaps never getting the recognition he deserved. With his radio prowess and conversational brilliance he could have been an Ira Glass or a Studs Terkel (both of whom he knew and worked with); with his musical and studio talent he could have been a nationally famous songwriter and producer.
But he didn’t want to be, and more to the point he didn’t really have to be. He came of age in a different time, when it was far more possible to make a living as a jobbing artist in a local scene. But these days, for my generation, the cycle of endless self-promotion for creatives is virtually unavoidable. Rebecca Jennings, in one of my favorite articles of the year, pointed out that if you’re an aspiring artist, musician or writer today, you’ve “got to offer your content to the hellish, overstuffed, harassment-laden, uber-competitive attention economy because otherwise no one will know who you are.”
Maybe if he wasn’t gone I would be finding it a little easier to figure out what I want to do next with my life. It has never been this hard before. As the first draft of my book manuscript nears completion, and a year of (uncompensated, natch) revisions and rewrites rises up before me, I can’t avoid the fact that I need to double down on building a critical mass of people who will preorder the damn thing when it’s done. Hopefully I can trust all 600-something of YOU to do that, but that won’t be nearly enough! I have to push past my inherited shyness, my love of being a modest facilitator behind the scenes, and be willing to do the laborious but necessary work of tuning up my personal brand, no matter how much it goes against my sensitive, principled grain.
What will that mean? I’m not really sure yet.
I’ve been spending a lot of time knitting lately, and as consequence I’ve been scrolling on social media less (good) and watching more longform content, mainly Star Trek and UK quiz shows, but also increasingly, YouTube vloggers, crafters, and video essayists. Some of my favorites include Rajiv Surendra, edgyalbert, and Simone Giertz.
I’ve never been much for video essays (or podcasts), but as a big-time yapper I wonder if it might be a good format for me. I haven’t done much in the way of YouTubing since my high school ukulele career, but it seems a little more my speed than TikTok (which I deleted months ago) and I could always edit longform stuff down into reels — it’s harder to go the other way.
The important thing is that people watch YouTube videos and they don’t really read articles—as way too much discourse this year has agonized over. With all of my heart I adore writing articles and ideally would just do that and nothing else forever, but because I’m not a great writer or a controversial one, merely a competent one with some very specific interests, I don’t really stand a chance in the NYC media rat race as it currently is played.
Social media, the great democratizer. I’ve done it before (see also, ukulele) and surely I could do it again. Aforementioned specific interests (polar, fandom, fashion, music, tech) have decent-sized audiences. All it would take is time and effort… although I would really rather spend that on knitting. If there’s something specific content-wise you want to see from me, or you have a cunning plan as to how to amp up my public profile with the least effort and most reward ahead of my book’s release, I am ALL EARS. Also please have me on your podcast this year! Also I started a public Instagram where I want to start posting more about my research!
Bangers of the year
My 50 favorite songs of the year (not necessarily all released in 2024) were packaged into playlists for the breaks of Terror Camp, the virtual conference I’ve run since 2021.
“I think that’s one of the cool things about Terror Camp, is that there are various structures in academia and traditional academic conferences that can be gatekeeping mechanisms,” Pickman tells me. “This one is just like, if you’re interested, just show up. [...] You don’t have to wait to try to break down the doors, to be part of a more traditional academic conversation.”
That sentiment is echoed by Goz. “This year, there were a number of sessions that highlighted marginalized voices in particular, like presentations on Inuit and female perspectives in polar exploration, on queerness in the context of the historical era or transness in the context of present-day fandom,” she says. “It shows that you don’t have to be an armchair dad obsessed with naval warfare to enjoy The Terror and its related subjects. You can be into fashion or food or gender, or just really curious about a single working-class historical figure who might otherwise have been remembered mostly as just another name on a muster roll.”
Terror Camp has expanded its focus in the four years it’s been running, but the TV show remains at the heart of many of the panels — and demonstrates why it’s such a powerful entry point into polar obsession.
Well, I’m really mad about something online again so it’s time to crack open the old newsletter and kvetch.
This TikTok (from a now-private account) was reposted on X two days ago by @sexiestbadg1rl with the caption “wow we never really changed.” It depicts a lovingly-crafted Hollywood fangirl scrapbook from the 1930s:
If I had seen this in its original context I would’ve been absolutely overjoyed — I’m an ephemera enthusiast in general, and I especially love vintage fan objects like this one.
But, having deleted TikTok a few months ago, the way it came across my timeline was through the quote-retweet of @transeurydice:
This interaction currently has 150k likes and 4.1k RTs, an order of magnitude more than the quoted post. A huge number of people seem incredibly eager to agree with the idea that there was NO POSSIBLE WAY this scrapbook could be authentic.
One of the top replies? “Some of those are 1,000% cut out pieces of printer paper u can tell the distinction between them and the real news paper clippings”
Another: “Lol the paper is wrinkled but the images are somehow flawless (they also show no signs of wear they’re printed relatively recently), the ink is DEFINITELY not bearing any signs of being old”
The original post has hundreds of quotes asserting things like: “If this was real, the person would be wearing a mask and gloves because glue back in like the 1930s was basically acidic like everything else”; “If I had to use one video to describe anachronism, it'd be this.”
Singled out for criticism and “proof” that the book is a modern forgery: the handwriting (nobody apparently wrote in printed letters back then), the signatures (the book would be worth thousands if the signatures were actually real), the quality of the photography (“yes ofc because you could print pictures in 1935”) and, again, the paper:
The original QRT followed up their “debunking” mic-drop with a quote from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, arguing that believing the scrapbook is real means playing into the “constant posturing of a universal woman myth.” ….? This made me want to tear my hair out, but we’ll get back into that in a second.
First of all, let’s take a brief look at the history of fannish scrapbooking. The practice of keeping a personal commonplace book was popularized by male scholars, notably John Locke, but by the 19th century (I’m vastly simplifying here) had become a distinctly feminized practice, and middle-class women in America and Britain would collect poetry, imagery, and original writings from friends and family in their personal albums. (For a fantastic examination of how the writings of Byron were collected and transformed by his 19th-century female readers and fans, see Corin Throsby’s 2009 book chapter “Byron, commonplacing and early fan culture”.)
By the turn of the 20th century, mass culture was gaining momentum, and fan culture with it. You could amass large collections of celebrity cartes de visite and other ephemera; you could join a fan club for a matinee idol on the London or New York stage; and soon enough you could visit a nickelodeon and pay to see your favorite silent picture over and over.
Early cinema producers and distributors took advantage of the existing enthusiasm for celebrities and performers in order to stoke interest in their products. “Screen-struck girls” even before the Great War were buying cinema magazines like Photoplay and Motion Picture Story en masse, and many proceeded to transform them into artifacts that demonstrated the emotional attachment they had to the stars of the screen. Kathryn H. Fuller’s work on early film-going culture is a great look into this process. “Movie fan culture,” she writes in At The Picture Show (1996), “started with material provided by the film industry and then was re-created as scrapbooks, poems, fan letters to the magazines and the stars, and fan-written film scripts—all created by moviegoers for their own enjoyment.”
And mind you, this was in the 1910s! By the 1930s, film fan scrapbook culture was so ubiquitous that you can go on Ebay right now and buy an authenticvintageHollywoodscrapbook, much like the one in the original video, for less than the price of a nice meal out. In Diana W. Anselmo’s excellent book A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (2023), she describes how movie studios and magazines incentivized scrapbooking as a way to retain fans’ attention and “counteract the intrinsic ephemerality of filmgoing.”
She also notes the importance of these scrapbooks when it comes to studying the how and the why of early female movie-going practices, and the ways in which participation in commercial mass culture could be turned intimate, personal, and even queered:
[P]aper-based fan repositories bring into sharp relief the transformative labor performed by female audiences across history. In the creative hands of early moviegoing girls, teleological paper scraps and heteronormative narratives reemerge as refractive artifacts, cropped and decontextualized, turned polysemic with lust, willfulness, curiosity, possibility, and self-affirming verve, characteristics Sara Ahmed identifies as symptomatic of queerness’s “stubborn attachment to an unassimilable difference.”
oooh look the writing’s not in cursive so it MUST be fake !!!!
The array of errors made by the X commentators in assessing the authenticity of the scrapbook are distressing enough: nobody seems to have had any experience holding or touching or seeing a letter or album page from that era. Nobody seems to know what a glossy film magazine is, or understand that a careful cut-out from a high-quality film fan magazine from 1935, lightly adhered to a piece of acidic scrapbook paper and then held tightly between the pages since then, rarely exposed to the sun, would look pretty much exactly how the photos in the scrapbook look. The backing paper is probably of lesser quality than the magazine paper, hence the diverging appearances as they aged.
this is my thirteenth reason.
The complete brainrot of believing that photographs owned by an individual can only be produced by printing them from a personal printer, as opposed to being cut from a magazine or printed book, or developed at a photo lab, or reproduced at a copy shop (as Henry Darger did with his collage images around this time), is hard to take seriously, but if a young adult has had no lived experience of any kind of tactile print culture, I guess this is what can happen.
Anyway, 90 years ago was literally not that long ago.It’s not as if it’s a medieval manuscript! It’s not as if Old Hollywood stars all had their portraits taken on tintypes! I have an envelope of family pictures from the 1920s that are as clear and glossy as the day they were developed. It’s a fascinating phenomenon that analog artifacts can come off as fundamentally inauthentic to people who have little experience with them. It may seem counter-intuitive that gelatin silver photography from the 19th and 20th century can be vastly more high-definition than digital photography from the 2000s—but it’s true.
Consulting a well-preserved and extremely authentic fangirl scrapbook from 1913 last year, I was presented with beautiful pages that very much resembled the ones being debated here. It was a privilege to come into contact with the analog enthusiasm of someone I could empathize with so powerfully across the decades. Sheer ignorance of the realities of the life-cycles of paper and ink aside, it’s upsetting to me to see so many young people, women in particular, dismiss the very idea that a girl almost a hundred years ago could be as exuberantly devoted to the film stars of her day as girls are today to contemporary celebrities.
There is such seeming desperation, such active reaching for proof it isn’t real, because if it was, that would mean that they, today, with their home printers and merch and photocards, are… what? Less unique? I’m not really sure. I just know that the dedication to holding one’s era up as exceptional and alive, and the past as backwards, inaccessible, disintegrated into dust, puts one’s ability to properly consider one’s own context in a chokehold.
In fact, the actual Old Hollywood stans out there on X are agreed on the book’s authenticity, mainly because they have the contextual knowledge to understand who Franchot Tone even was, and that of course a girl back then would like him in ways nobody today would. The idea of going to the effort to fake something like this for Franchot Tone fan clout is laughable.
As frustrating as this discussion has been to watch unfold while I stand by, powerless to make people understand the existence of magazines, it has been really eye-opening—and motivating, in terms of understanding the urgency of my own work. Quite the inverse of being squeezed into a “universal woman myth,” as the OP of that first dismissive QRT put it, taking seriously the material culture of ordinary young women throughout history presents a perfect opportunity to attempt to situate our knowledge in the everyday, and indeed practice Donna Haraway’s own concept of “partial perspective” — which, she tells us, can allow us to “[construct] worlds less organized by axes of domination” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 1991).
I’m trying to look on the bright side here… amongst all the thousands of people unable or unwilling to perceive the authentic charm and beauty of the scrapbook, instead dismissing it as a hoax, I hope there are at least a few people who find themselves fascinated by what it says about the congruence between the present and the past, and newly motivated to begin exploring the kaleidoscopic and inspiring world of paper ephemera.
