Friday Things

I know it’s not technically a long weekend (I, for one, have a calendar full of meetings today), but the mid-week stat holiday does make it feel like one… and honestly, I did not plan my time in a way that allows me to actually write a full newsletter. But! We definitely have to talk about North West, at least a little bit.

Nicknamed Lumumba Vea (Lumumba Lives), his real name is Michel Kuka Mboladinga and he was there to cheer on his country’s national team, the Leopards, in its ill-fated match against Colombia. If he looks familiar, it’s because he’s gone viral before, most recently during the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) in January, but he’s actually been posing as Lumumba during the Leopards’ games for a long time—since 2013.

Image: instagram.com/spencerpratt Remember Spencer Pratt? Youknow, one half of The Hills’ Heidi-and-Spencer, who was everyone’s favourite reality TV villain for a minute there and experienced a late 2010s resurgence in popularity because of his charming but also kind of random obsession with crystals? And who, alongside Heidi, went on to blow $1 million on said crystals—not to mention another $9 mil on shopping sprees and bodyguards and wine? Yes, that Spencer Pratt.

Image: Commonwealth Foundation If you’re not Caribbean, you may not have heard of indentured servitude. This was a system of labour where workers signed contracts, called ‘indentures,’ to work for free for a set period of time, usually five years, to repay a loan or pay off a debt. While people did choose to enter into indentureship—nominally, at least—this system was definitely exploitative and abusive, especially for women.

And honestly, it probably was. It contains lines like, “They called her Zoongie. Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men” and “coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all,” sentences that make the reader stop and think, what does that even mean?

If there’s one thing I’m going to do, it’s make sure we are sufficiently entertained for a long weekend (even if I am also a little stunned that it’s already Victoria Day…). So, this week’s newsletter is an extra-long list of And Did You Hear About recommendations.

Your new book, Dekonstructing the Kardashians, explores the frameworks that supported the family's rise to fame, and demonstrates how their cultural influence can help us understand how media works now. What are the most important things to understand about the Kardashians’ impact on culture and media? First, they industrialized intimacy.

Content warning: this newsletter contains references to and descriptions of sexual violence, intimate partner violence and other forms of gendered abuse. The biggest discourse across my feeds this week is centred on an article published on CNN.com on March 26. It starts with a parallax scrolling effect, where the introduction to the story appears line by line. With each click, a horrific new detail emerges: “This is Piotr. He lives in Poland with his wife who’s in her 40s.

In fact, these attacks are entirely predictable tbh! And I mean that so literally: In an interview with Fortune, Aleksandar Tomic, an economist and the associate dean for strategy, innovation, and technology at Boston College, pointed to the Industrial Revolution as a precursor to today’s A.I. anxiety.

I'm curious about what it means for you to be public about using tarot in your creative process. Because as you said, it's been internal this whole time—maybe it’s a source of inspiration, or offering some guideposts, but you're not necessarily publicizing this connection. But now with the Dreadlings, it is external. How does that feel? Or does it feel like anything? It felt vulnerable. That's the first word that kind of popped into my head.