Hype is a dictator 🎉
> the persuaders | hype machine
How much hype in the air on any given day about any given thing is generated for the purposes of making money at the expense of your mind?
- next time "Want to touch the sky, kid?"
- listening Fontaines D.C. "Televised Mind"
"The world is still a weird place, despite my efforts to make clear and perfect sense of it."
—Hunter S. Thompson
> newsworthy | firestorm
It came as a surprise that just after dropping out of high school, I fell in love with books.
A friend handed me a book by the late renegade journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It was edgy and rebellious and idealistic.
- I thought journalism was all stuffy, white newscasters who looked and sounded like they were from everywhere and nowhere America.
I learned about a movement of narrative and longform journalists who were disrupting establishment journalism for good: Alex Kotlowitz, Lawrence Wright, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, David Simon, Jill Leovy, Michael Lewis, Anne Hull, Joan Didion, and others.
Eventually, I set out to become a journalist, too, and made it to the University of Kansas and its student newspaper. I learned how to report and tell stories.
I went to post-hardcore and post-metal and post-indie shows.
I went to late-night parties at the home of beat writer William S. Burroughs.
Around this time, I began to experience miserable social anxieties. They blended not-so nicely with a growing lack of confidence.
Together, they began to haunt me night and day.
The fastest and most thorough way to relieve them was a soothing whiskey and beer back – and then another, and then another – at the Replay Lounge or The Bottleneck or the Eighth St. Taproom in Lawrence, Kansas.
Relief from the anxieties and insecurities never lasted.
Even two years after I'd become a paid newspaper reporter in San Francisco, I still didn't think I'd earned the right to call myself a "journalist" to other people.
A fellow reporter was the daughter of one of the most influential journalists in America.
How could I share the same title with her?
George, that's irrational, you say.
Exactly. You're getting it now.
- next time "I proved myself by working late."
- listening Neurosis, Jarboe "Taker"
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