The Wing: A women-only coworking space branded as a feminist wonderland, The Wing calls itself “a diverse community open to all.” How inclusive! Memberships start at $185 per month. —Abigail Weinberg
Malcolm Gladwell’s career: Let’s thinslice: Malcolm Gladwell needs to stop writing. Gladwell’s theories are wrong (stop and frisk) or obvious (1,000 10,000 hours) or dumb (talking to strangers is the problem with everything). He made his bones at a time when glib, crypto-conservative contrarianism was the reigning media ethos. Today, the shtick has been worn so smooth as to be transparent. Flip through his latest book and you’ll find an easy-pass treatment of the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State and a determinedly apolitical reading of the death of Sandra Bland—two cases of institutional pathologies that Gladwell turns into parables about a quirk in human nature. Powerful people thus get excused for their mistakes, under the guise of Gladwell’s interrogating some orthodoxy or another. You don’t need to be a bestselling author of pop-science airport books to come up with a word for this stuff: bullshit. —Jacob Rosenberg
The careers of all business pop-psychology writers, while we’re at it
Podcasts
Complaining about “cancel culture”
Cars
Saturday Night Live political sketches
The “Overton window”
Caring about the Conways
Daylight savings time
“Neoliberal”
Slack: Hating on Slack isn’t an original idea, but let me add my name to the chorus of voices asking office decision-makers everywhere (including where I work) to spare us and get rid of it once and for all. If your office doesn’t use Slack, consider yourself lucky. It’s as if the annoying co-worker who never shuts up suddenly had a direct portal into your computer and you can’t turn it off. Suddenly you’re part of dozens of separate conversations, some of which you need to see, but most of which you don’t. You can try to leave but you’ll inevitably be added back in against your will, and there’s always at least one colleague who abuses the dreaded “@here” to summon everybody at once. It can be performative in the worst ways, including being used by managers to dress down subordinates in front of large groups of coworkers—see, for instance, the Away scandal—and serves as an involuntary venue for mediocre takes and tweet workshopping. It’s an information security nightmare, full of loose conversation and casual shit-talking that would be awkward (at best) when reviewed in a deposition or in some hacker’s Pastebin dump, and you have to trust your workplace admins to not look through it (the name is an acronym for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge, after all). Let’s go back to email. —AJ Vicens
Fad diets
Newsletters
Craft cocktails
The CIA’s Instagram account
The New England Patriots (...)
30-under-30 lists: This might have something to do with my recently turning 30, but I can tell you from experience: 30 is no different from 29 or 31. Why do we treat youth as its own virtue? I wish I could unlearn the word “Wunderkind.” —Rebecca Leber
Ratios
“I have a daughter, so I…”: Perhaps the best thing to happen over the past decade was the #MeToo movement, but of course, as with any step forward, there came bad allies and clout chasers. After the first wave of women who stood up and said, “Me, too,” there came a tide of men who said, “I have a daughter, so I… .” Fellas, maybe try thinking of women as whole human beings on their own merit, rather than in relation to yourselves. Your mothers and daughters and nieces and coworkers deserve more, dammit. —Becca Andrews
The idea of a monolithic “left”
“Adulting”: This is a word that never needed to be a word. Grow up already and just handle your shit. —Becca Andrews
Gender reveals
Gratuitous semiannual “I love women” threads in which men praise women in media: Chris Cillizza once unhelpfully tweeted “Women > Men. Everyone knows this.” Most men are only slightly more subtle, tweeting performative threads of women they admire on occasion, only to ignore the same women’s work and gravitate toward elevating and praising men’s work the rest of the year. —Rebecca Leber
Lists
Rankings
“Doggos”
“Puppers”
Hero worship of billionaires
Brands on Twitter
The “absolutely no one: / me:” meme
Creepy attacks on Greta Thunberg
Respect
Saying “regardless of your politics”
Devil’s advocacy
Zoom
Brexit
Uber/Lyft: They’re clogging streets, polluting, and killing public transit by offering unsustainably low investor-subsidized prices while mistreating drivers just long enough to replace them with robots. —Aaron Wiener
Goop and other pseudo-wellness bullshit: Stop saying juice cleanses and a $50 rose quartz face roller will make me feel better. —Laura Thompson
Detox elixirs
BS CBD promo
Fake butts
Image: Mother Jones/Getty
[ed. Something that should live (but sadly lacking these days): barbed and subversive satire.]
