Year: 2013

Claire L Evans considers the social media fallout from ending a relationship, what she terms its “digital shadow”:

In your attempts to clear the debris [after a breakup], you discover that, like an ecosystem, your social network reacts holistically to change. For one, it doesn’t want you to sever ties with anyone: at every turn, it seems to ask you to reconsider. The architecture of the social web, like that of a Las Vegas casino, always leads the user back inside. The engine depends on connections: groups, rather than individuals, are the commodity being sold.

Her advice? Luddite love:

The temptation to tag, cite, post and discover others through their front-facing digital avatars is great, but the rewards of love under the radar are more profound. Love undocumented is love unadvertised and unexploited; it is love that will fade gently, like a photograph, instead of creeping up, algorithmically, like a Google image search result.

(Photo: From the series “Album” by Jon Uriarte)

Jill Filipovic savages a NYT trend piece claiming that “millennials — who are reaching an age where they are starting to think about settling down — are subverting the rules of courtship”:

Newsflash to olds: Yes, dating is different now than it was in your day. It was different in your day than it was in your parents’ day too. That is how things work. Communication is especially different, since now we have cellphones and social media — we do indeed use those things to communicate. And yes, changing gender roles mean that women don’t have to sit around waiting to be asked out, and that we get to pick what we order for ourselves off the menu. Certain aspects of dating are more casual, because people date for many more years before getting hitched. We tend to date many more people. We’re more mobile and often live away from our parents, which means we cultivate local “families” in our social circles. We don’t just want to see how well our partners get along with our biological families; we want to see how well they get along with our friends, and if we share the same values and social preferences.

It’s easy to look at that and conclude that because things are different, they’re worse. But I’m not convinced that’s the case. Are some things surely worse for some people? Definitely. Are other aspects of these changes really overwhelmingly positive? Yes. People who delay marriage until they’re in their 30s or later (and, one assumes, end up dating a wider variety of people) tend to have happier and more stable marriages once they do get married.

Tom Dibblee defends Bud Light Lime, the butt of all beer jokes:

Bud Light Lime does two things: it allows me to shed the burden of sophistication, and it restores beer to what it once was, when I was young — a tart nectar that makes me happy. To speak to the second point (I’ll get to the first later): With Bud Light Lime, I never find myself slumping over the bar, turning every 30 seconds to watch the door in the hope that some imagined friend will walk inside and pick me up and fix all my problems. With Bud Light Lime, that kind of attitude isn’t even possible. Because it’s hard to be morose while drinking a sweetened, lime-flavored beer, yes, but also because being morose requires a self-seriousness that Bud Light Lime completely forbids.

The beer is a fitting legacy for the Anheuser-Busch heir who came up with it – August Busch IV, a “drug-addled playboy” known as “the Fourth”:

Once in charge, the Fourth, billed as a leader in touch with the new era of adult contemporary beverage consumption, set out to modernize the company, and launched such products as Jekyll & Hyde (a type of double shot that came in two bottles that you were supposed to mix together on your own), Spykes (a mildly-alcohol flavored shot that came in a tube that looked like a lipstick container that you were supposed to “spyke” your beer with — flavors included melon and hot chocolate) and Bacardi Silver (which may very well have been good, but came too late into the flavored malt beverage market, and just plain missed the boat).

But the Fourth did not stop there. Next came Chelada Bud, Michelob Ultra Lime Cactus, and Michelob Ultra Tuscan Orange Grapefruit, and — yes — Bud Light Lime.

On a related note, Martyn Cornell assesses the 20 most influential beers of all time. (Spoiler alert: Bud Light Lime isn’t on it.)

Robert Moor recounts his harrowing and life-affirming experiences while hitchhiking:

My first ride was with a stoned Maori who drove me a hundred miles in the wrong direction and dropped me off in a valley full of gray mist, where ice crystals collected on my eyelashes as I shook and regretted everything. My next ride was with a trio of jolly, heavyset women who warmed me with hot chocolate and drove me directly to my door, with plenty of time to spare.

People always surprise me with the strangeness of their interior lives and the depth of their generosity. They are forever handing me things: food, cans of beer, cigarettes, joints. One guy in a Cadillac even pressed twenty dollars into my palm, saying I needed it more than he did—perfectly inverting the presumed ass-grass-or-cash economics of hitching. Economics which, by the way, I have found wholly false. Every single time I have offered to pay for a driver’s gas, I have been refused. Perhaps it would have cheapened the driver’s charity, sullied our real (if ephemeral) moment of humanity.

Aaron Gilbreath shines a light on the King Eddy Saloon in downtown LA:

Located on the ground floor of the historic King Edward Hotel, The King Eddy is the last original Skid Row bar still in operation, or what some call an authentic dive. LA’s Skid Row contains one of the largest permament populations of homeless people in the US, with estimates reaching as high as 5,000 residents. During the Prohibition, the saloon was a hub of alcohol bootlegging, and part of an enormous network of underground tunnels in downtown Los Angeles. After alcohol sales became legal again, novelist John Fante drank there, and poet Charles Bukowski drank and wrote there, too.

The new owners closed the bar last month for renovations that will “preserve the bar’s ‘mythical status'” – which raises questions:

As a dive—before it closed for renovations—the King Eddy served some of the cheapest booze downtown. It was the last place you could order a whole pitcher of beer for $12, a shot for $3.50 and a bottle of Bud for $4. They also sold $4 microwaved cheeseburgers. (Prices had been lower, but rent went up.) A banner above the entrance advertised “The Best Dive Bar In Los Angeles.” The website listed their motto: “Where nobody gives a shit about your name.”

To adapt, the King Eddy was starting to market its authenticity, a process which inevitably diminishes authenticity. In this age of heavy-duty lifestyle marketing and urban renewal, when does a dive cease to be a dive?

John Fleury and Benjamin R. Freed argue that dive bars in DC died long ago:

We’re not looking for a true dive. We’re looking for the invented nostalgia of the idea a dive conveys but watered down for the masses. You don’t want your beer to taste like the Toxic Avenger washed his feet in it (even if it costs $2), but you want a place that looks like that is the case while drinking your Dogfish Head IPA or Ketel One and in-house tonic. The idea of a disgusting bathroom that looks and smells more like a slaughterhouse is incredibly amusing and useful when writing on your OKCupid profile that you “love dive bars,” but it is a very different story when you have to use it multiple times after that “seal has broken.”

We are not a city that loves grime. We are a city that wants to give off the impression that we want grime, when in fact we crave sushi and cupcakes. We even go so far as to drink in places that go to a lot of effort to have dive aesthetics but price points and atmospheres that would keep any true dive regular out of the establishment. This may be the way the city is moving to as a whole: give the appearance of an all-American city while fewer and fewer can actually afford to pay their tabs.

(Photo by Marc Hughes)

Emily Temple rounds up eminent writers’ thoughts on the importance of revision. Here’s Vladimir Nabokov:

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

Raymond Chandler:

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

In 1938, Alfred Butts assigned numerical values to Scrabble tiles based on how often each letter appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Joshua Lewis believes it’s an inaccurate system:

“The dictionary of legal words in Scrabble has changed,” says Joshua Lewis, researcher and creator of a software program which allocates new, up-to-date values to Scrabble tiles. “Among the notable additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X, so even though Q and Z are the highest value letters in Scrabble, they are now much easier to play.” … According to Lewis’s system, X (worth eight points in the current game) is worth only five points and Z (worth 10 points now) is worth six points.

Nick Carr warns that changing the game “would make it more difficult for novices to occasionally beat veteran players”:

The scoring system’s lack of statistical rigor, it turns out, has the unintended but entirely welcome effect of adding a little extra dash of luck to the game. The apparent weakness is a hidden strength. Let the statistically impure thoughts of Alfred Butts serve as a lesson to us all about the dangers of our current fixation on the analysis of large data sets. Armed with a fast computer, a wonky algorithm, and whole lot of Big Data, a geek will begin to see problems everywhere in our messy human world. And by correcting every statistical anomaly or inefficiency, he’ll not only clean up the messiness, he’ll remove the fun. To a statistician, a blank tile has no value. The rest of us know better.