Bits #33
kidfluencing, bad texting, 'serious' leisure + another nail in the coffin for magazine journalism
Hey! Happy Friday.
Above the paywall today: a shocking doc about kidfluencing; an excellent profile of Sayaka Murata; and a podcast on teenagers with tons of useful takeaways.
Below the paywall today: on taking ‘leisure’ time seriously (TV and drinking doesn’t count); why originality is overrated (free yourself from the meat hook of expectation!); and what one glossy magazine’s whack paid partnership says about the state of media today…
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This episode of Teenagers Untangled is a great companion piece to my conversation with Lucy Foulkes. Host Rachel Richards talks to social scientist Matilda Gosling about her evidence-based book on teens. Takeaways:
❋ Don’t use the ‘storm and stress model’ to understand adolescence—“there are huge amounts of positive weather patterns and creativity and ideas and brilliance which you miss if you just see the storm and stress”
❋ Keeping yourself healthy/sane has massively beneficial outcomes for your kids—“one of the best predictors of how teenagers are doing is how adults are doing”
❋ Gosling advises teens, “Don’t put anything on screen that you wouldn’t want to be screenshotted”. This is very sound advice which I will also take!
Nostalgia strings plucked by Lauren Bravo’s piece on the timeless style of mums in Shirley Hughes books. Reminded me of this gorgeous note I re-shared last month (from The Twits):
I really enjoyed Elif Batuman’s profile of author Sayaka Murata for The New Yorker which broadens Murata’s themes beyond contemporary Japan, relating it to the ideas of Viktor Shklovsky, Shulamith Firestone and Michel Foucault amongst others. (If you’re new to Murata, I’d suggest starting with her wildly successful/ least cannibalistic work, Convenience Store Woman—Book Chat on that, here—before moving on to the queasier Earthlings and Life Ceremony.) I was also intrigued by the rooms at Murata’s Japanese publisher which contain just a bed, desk and shower, that writers can book in order to isolate themselves from distractions (it even has a name: kanzume, or “canning.”) London publishing would never!
After 140 years, The Lady has gone into liquidation. Honestly, I’m amazed the admirably esoteric “journal for gentlewomen” which The Daily Mail called “Tinder for Toffs” (think that’s more Tatler, tbh) lasted this long
Beyond the mega-success of Ryan’s World, I knew very little about the kidfluencing industry. Until I watched Bad Influence, a horrifying and compelling documentary about Piper Rockelle and her ‘squad’ of 11 tweens, who lived together in a creator house managed by Piper’s mother, Tiffany. Proving that Ruby Franke is absolutely not the exception, Tiffany verbally, sexually and financially abused the kids—most of whom, along with their mothers and Piper’s sister, bravely appear on this documentary—netting herself $600,000 a month. Working 20 hour days and being forced to snog your friend on camera was all justified in the name of “exposure”—which is what they all accepted unquestionably as the best thing you could have. (Bizarrely, the house also contained 70 cats.) Taylor Lorenz, an excellent contributor, notes that unlike the highly regulated adult influencing industry, kidfluencing is “treated as a joke”. Until we start seeing “influencing as labour, these kids are screwed”
I’m currently reading (amongst many other books) former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s memoir and I am so titillated by his description of Anna Wintour as someone who “tends to greet me either like her long lost friend or like the car attendant”. He also adds the waspish detail that Wintour gets the bill as soon as she has finished eating—even if no-one else has. It’s giving Miranda Priestly, always and forever amen
The White Lotus finale was the best episode of the series (“I’m a people pleaser in a family of narcissists”), but I was most intrigued by the niche length: 1 hr 43 mins. Are rogue episode lengths more common now? And with less scheduling involved in streaming (although ironically The White Lotus was scheduled in the UK) does anyone care?
You know that statistic known as “the confidence gap”—that men will apply for a job they are 60% suitable for, but women will only apply if they are 100% qualified? This is so much better. 1 in 50 men believe they could beat a horse in a 100-metre sprint. For context: horses run up to 40mph and Usain Bolt’s record is 27mph. For Christmas, I would like the confidence of 2% of men
