like a pair of bottle rockets

My name is Sophie. I'm a writer. sophcw at gmail dot com twitter

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i'm actually jealous of the 16 year old girls who get to cry about their crushes and listen to this album

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kinda mad about boygenius because it's gonna be hella expensive to get julien baker tickets now

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is it still called GPOY

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might start using this again

[reminiscences]

this is my favorite scene in the whole first season

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sup y’all i’m back

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This Friday at @trans.pecos, come out & support North Brooklyn DSA! DJs @jeremydlarson, @lizpelly & more. Free afterparty at @fathersbk! SEE U SOON 🎉🌹❤️🌹🎉

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Whether you vote for Hillary or not, you are already compromised. You are already part of the problem.

Here's the deal: people are flawed. Every country (that currently exists) is a a collection of many millions of people with only a few people in charge, either through democratic processes, monarchy or another non-democratic form of governance (or, like us, a combination of the above). Those people will inevitably abuse their power. The flaws of any given person will be magnified in this role. Corruption will exist. None of this is to excuse the many awful things our country has done and continues to do. I'm interested in alternative forms of governance in the future, socialism, rule by consensus, anarcho-communism etc. etc. But right now, that stuff is far off.

I understand why many people feel that decisions we make in such a deeply flawed political system don't matter. There are some pretty good arguments for that. I understand not wanting to vote for the lesser of two evils. HOWEVER: If you supported Bernie Sanders (or especially Obama), you are already making these compromises. Believe it or not, Bernie is pretty mainstream. He supports capitalism as our basic economic system. He supports Israel. He supports the continued existence of the US military. He believes in reform of the justice system, but he certainly doesn't believe in prison abolition or police disarmament. His campaign often disregarded the needs of black people in America (if you think that's fine, then you aren't as progressive as you believe you are). So if you supported Bernie (again, not to mention Obama), vehemently decrying Hillary is a hypocritical. Yes, Bernie is less compromised than her, but he **like all of us** is still compromised. He **like all of us** is still human. He **like all of us** is part of the problem.

If you want to vote Green or not vote because of how messed up our system is, I get that. I don't agree with you necessarily, but I can appreciate where you're coming from. But if you want to vote Green or not vote or vote for Trump because of your support for Bernie, I honestly think you need to reexamine your values.

I have many reservations about Hillary (although again, I voted for Obama, who has VERY similar policies, twice). However, as a white, privileged, educated secular American Jewish cis woman, I can not stand by and let Donald Trump take control of this country. I can not call myself an ally to the causes of oppressed people and allow Donald Trump to take power in this country. I can not answer to the women who may have even less access to abortion and birth control, to the families who may be torn apart and deported, to the countries we may bomb and the millions who will be affected by his foreign policies, to the Muslims living in the States who will experience suspicion and terror, to those trying to escape their own terrible regimes who will not be able to find a home here. Yes, some of these things will happen under Hillary as well, as they have under Obama and every other person who has ever ruled this country. But we have very good reason to believe that MANY MORE of these things will happen under Trump.

If you are a Muslim, a poor non-male person in danger of living without access to abortion or birth control or a person living in a country that may be pushed into chaos by Donald Trump's presidency, and you still believe that it is better to abstain from the process or to fight against a Hillary presidency than to vote for her, I'M ALL EARS. Otherwise, I think it i wrong to put our ideological purity above lives that would be ruined or extinguished by his presidency. Yes, Hillary will ruin and extinguish lives as well (as Obama has). Voting for her may be a deep and painful moral compromise to make. But those compromises** are a necessity of being alive in this world today. This is one I am willing to make.

**Do you buy ANY consumer products (clothes, technology, medicine, furniture etc.)? Do you drive or pay someone to drive you in a car? Do you have an account on Facebook or with Google (if you're reading this the answer is yes)? Do you pay taxes? Do you take advantage of governmental systems that are paid for by taxes? Do you eat meat, animal products, or foods farmed by corporations and harvested by undocumented oppressed peoples here or elsewhere? Do you drink alcohol or do drugs that may support violent systems? Do you benefit from white or cis privilege? Have you ever called the police to help you with something? Do you use services that are inaccessible to people with disabilities? I'm guessing none of you can say no to all of these (actually, I know so). You are ALREADY making these compromises in your day to day life.

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Huh, Tumblr is still here. 

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What was most attractive about micro­lending was what it was not, what it made unnecessary: any sort of collective action by poor people coming together in governments or unions. The international development community now knew that such institutions had no real role in human prosperity. Instead, we were to understand poverty in the familiar terms of entrepreneurship and individual merit, as though the hard work of millions of single, unconnected people—plus cell phones, bank accounts, and a little capital—was what was required to remedy the Third World’s vast problems. Millions of people would sell one another baskets they had made, or coal they had dug out of the trash heap, and suddenly they were entrepreneurs, racing to the top. The key to development was not doing something to limit the grasp of Western banks, in other words; it was extending Western banking methods to encompass every last individual on earth.

Thomas Frank, “Nor a Lender Be”, Harper’s

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Top 10 tMG

A few weeks ago I thought I might be writing a piece about my 10 favorite Mountain Goats songs and I got really excited. Didn't end up doing the piece, but I still have the list. Here it is. And here’s a Spotify playlist. 

10. Source Decay, All Hail West Texas

9. The Sign, Songs for Peter Hughes

8. Twin Human Highway Flares, Full Force Galesburg

7. Palcorder Yajna, We Shall All Be Healed

6. Minnesota, Full Force Galesburg

5. No Children, Tallahassee

4. Pale Green Things, The Sunset Tree

3. The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton, All Hail West Texas

2. Going to Georgia, Zopilote Machine

1. This Year, The Sunset Tree

Runners up: Game Shows Touch Our Lives, Home Again Garden Grove, Alpha Incipiens, Commandante, Fault Lines, The Alphonse Mambo, Old College Try

[fuertecito]

Fiona Apple, who lived her own personal hell with Sony back in 2005, comes forward in support of Kesha.

#FreeKesha

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There is this pressure to make sense of everything in the moment, to accelerate the creation of the meaning we derive from an experience. I think – and I already told you I am 26 so maybe this is just an old lady talking, right – the overwhelming deluge of all this “Fuck! I’m in My Twenties!” stuff written and liked and reblogged by people who are actually in their twenties accelerates this unnecessarily, and creates these self-defined, self-fulfilling norms. So I wonder if, the way I could only separate the universal and particular shittyness of public transportation only after I left DC, I won’t know what it meant to be in my 20s until I they’re behind me. Maybe the stuff we’re saying “fuck!” about is just what it’s like to be a conscious adult in this moment of history; maybe this is just the way we live now.

Lindsay Zoladz wrote this in 2012, upon the occasion of her turning 26. The post has stuck with me. Today, it’s my turn--I’ll be 26 tomorrow, February 16th. 

What sticks out to me in this thoughtful and well-written post is Lindsay’s acknowledgement of the pressure we feel to memorialize our lives as we’re living them. As Jeremy mentions here, the atemporality of the internet means that the concept of “old” and “new” have become meaningless. Similarly, as we have gotten used to documenting every moment of our lives, we frame our experiences as future memories. I know I do, though I try to fight it. But whether I resist the urge to Instagram the concert I’m attending or not, I can’t escape that this is our reality. Time, at least in our imagination, no longer insistently moves forward, as anyone who encounters Facebook memories on a daily basis can attest. 

As I cross the invisible threshold into my no-longer-early-20′s, I think about the paradoxes of my personal story, and of our 21st-century existence. I was raised in the woods but live in the city, and I can’t decide which I love more. Human connection, what Julie Delpy’s character in Before Sunrise calls the “little space in between” people, seems to me to be where the important experiences of our lives occur. Yet I spend most of my time alone on my computer. I’ve twice gone on five-day silent meditation retreats and have a longer one planned for this year. Those experiences have proven to me humans’ ability to physically alter our own minds. I know that with hard work, I can make myself a better person, and make the experience of living more rewarding. But I’m unsure if I have the motivation to get there. 

In 2014, I wrote an essay for Pitchfork (which Lindsay edited) about the irony that young people feel nostalgia so strongly. Like everyone, we yearn to tell our little stories, and today it’s easier and more tempting than ever. The story of my own life seems muddled, but despite Didion’s protestations, I think that’s something I need to accept. Our time provides no narratives, but perhaps living in the chaos of timelessness is more honest than crafting some neat vision of our existence. I can choose to spend my time alive building a story that will slip through my fingers like sand. Or, I can find a nice seat, and observe the transformations as they come. As Joanna would say--In the river of time, stand brave: Time moves both ways.

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[mfortki]

What we did at Hopes and Fears

A few weeks ago, Hopes and Fears stopped publishing. I haven’t yet commemorated it. Here are some of our articles. (02/15-01/16, there were around 500 features and 2,000 total posts, so this is random and wide-sweeping.) As editor-in-chief, I was lucky to be part of a team of editors, writers, designers, illustrators and photographers who made something this good, different and ambitious. Follow the editors here: Rhett, Mike, Sophie, Anna, Gabriella. The designers: Serge, Leo. Director of photography: Eugene. Publisher: Vasily.

Is the world real, or is it just an illusion or hallucination?

The lucha libre fighters of the Bronx

What it’s like to be an art handler for real housewives, Wall Street weasels, and Jay Z

More:

The lingering effects of NYC’s racist city planning

Multiracial in America: Who gets to be “white”?

Inside the jihadi lifestyle magazine wars

An oral history of PM Entertainment, a low-budget high-octane American dream

A visual history of abortion and birth control

If you remember this playground, your childhood was awesome

A Freaks and Geeks geek on becoming the M'Lady meme

Meet the activist leading the lonely ‘smokers’ rights’ movement

Where a 1997 Lonely Planet tourist guide to NYC will take you in 2015

Internet slang meets American Sign Language

Meet the designers of NYC’s Latin club night posters

Smashing the competition: What it’s like to be a professional video game commentator

Clone ethics: What shouldn’t you do with your clone?

Prop masters explain the movie magic of fake cocaine

Why are so many Disney parents missing or dead?

I used a 56K modem for a week and it was Hell on Earth

Fuck, marry, kill: the legal age for doing adult things around the world

What’s the “best” form of capital punishment?

I tried to make a meme and lost my mind

Inside the misunderstood world of psychiatric service dogs

Feel something real: The Dogme 95-inspired battle for the heart of live action role-playing

The future according to anime

Hackers watch “Hackers” (the movie)

I played every game by the worst video game company ever

Is Google’s Deep Dream art?

The woman that can feel every earthquake in the world

Searching for the “grey market” foods of New York City

The messy business of NYC’s live poultry industry

Luca Locatelli: My Week At War Photography Camp

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