Fritinancy

September linkfest

This month I’ve been reading Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, published in August by Kurt Andersen. According to the publisher, it’s “the epic history of how America decided that big business gets whatever it wants, only the rich get richer, and nothing should ever change.” Andersen also pinpoints a when for the everything-going-to-shit: around 1980. (Perhaps you remember who was elected president that year.) Andersen is a deft writer who makes even dense economic theory fun to read—he is, after all, one of the founding editors of Spy, the satirical magazine of the 1980s and 1990s that dubbed DJ Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian.” For me, though, the book’s most interesting insights are about nostalgia and how everything became “retro” or a “reboot”—or, in movies, a sequel or remake. Andersen says we started retreating into nostalgia in the 1970s, as an exhausted response to the “disorienting” newness of the 1960s. But we’ve never really shaken off that nostalgia-fever. The entries under “Nostalgia” in the Evil Geniuses index fill more than a column, and include these headings: “of blue-collar workers for time when they were majority,” “default to, enabled building of reproduction-old-days political economy by economic right-wingers,” “as fuel for fantastical or irrecoverable post politics,” and “‘USA! USA!’ chant.” I quoted a particularly excellent sentence from Evil Geniuses in last month’s linkfest, which you can read here.

 

Word of the week: Cottagecore

Around the world, clothing sales have plummeted since mid-March, when shops closed their doors to slow the spread of COVID-19 and “slob-chic” became the order of the day. According to one estimate published in early August, US apparel sales could shrink by as much as 50 percent in 2020.

There was one odd, notable exception: a frilly, glittery, hyperfeminine, wholly impractical pink dress, printed all over with red strawberries, that became “a viral sensation,” according to Glamour reporter Adrienne Matei, with sales spiking 1,000 percent between late July and mid-August. Created by a 24-year-old designer from Kosovo with the lyrical name Lirika Matoshi, “the strawberry dress,” as it became known, costs $490 and has inspired TikTok tributes, anime fan art, and, inevitably, cheap knockoffs on Amazon and Etsy. The dress is “a bright spot in a dark year,” Matei writes: a perfect representation of “one of 2020’s most popular trends: the ‘cottagecore’ aesthetic, a sweetly pastoral paean to the countryside popularized by the internet’s young romantics.”

 

Strawberry-print midi dress by Lirika Matoshi.

On the Visual Thesaurus: Political campaign slogans then and now

My September column for the Visual Thesaurus, “A Slogan in Every Pot!”, looks at the history of political slogans—from “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” (1840) to “Build Back Better” (2020).

Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s an excerpt.

Campaign slogans are “miniature narratives,” says Philip Seargeant, a British linguist and author of The Art of Political Storytelling: Why Stories Win Votes in Post-truth Politics (2020). Successful slogans, he told me in an email, “place the desire for change at their heart, and foreground the need for action to accomplish that change.” Change through action is at the heart of slogans like "Make America Great Again” — Donald Trump's 2016 campaign motto, often compressed into a hashtagged acronym, #MAGA — and “Take Back Control,” a Brexit slogan. “Both use imperatives — ‘make’ ‘take’ — which urge a form of participation from the electorate, and suggest that together some sort of change can be effected in society,” Seargeant says.

“Make America Great Again” was an abbreviated version of the slogan originally used by Ronald Reagan. In 1984, Reagan ran for reelection with the hazy, sunny slogan “It's Morning in America.”

Context matters too, says Seargeant: “A successful slogan will be a mix of the words on the page themselves, plus outside factors which mean these words resonate with a particular mood in society, with the character of the candidate, and with the larger branding of the campaign or movement.”

Read the rest of “A Slogan in Every Pot!”

Popcorn

How bad is it out here? On Wednesday, smoke from wildfires throughout the American West turned Bay Area skies an otherworldly shade of dark orange. The COVID pandemic is still very much with us, and most businesses and schools are at least partially closed. Bob Woodward’s new book about the Trump presidency, Rage, is predictably enraging. (Read Jennifer Szalai’s sharply written review in the New York Times.)

Things may be even worse in Florida.

So let’s take a moment for distraction. Pass the popcorn.

Pass the Popcorn, a movie-guessing game

How MoveOn got its name

Among the many, many political emails and texts filling my phone during this final pre-election sprint are daily communiqués from MoveOn, the progressive public advocacy group. Yesterday’s email, from the director of analytics, bore the subject line “This is a long email, but I hope you read it,” and sure enough: 1,143 words.

I no longer remember when or why I signed up with MoveOn, but I do remember how the organization got started and how it got its name. In fact, I remember attending an event shortly after its founding at which co-founder Joan Blades was the featured speaker.

Here’s the story.