Even metaphorically, clowns are more sad than funny.

With his usual flair for brutal honesty and cutting language, Matt Taibbi writes about following the Republican clown car of primary campaigns over in Iowa to see what’s really going on. Though he may not have uncovered much we didn’t already know, he is able to distill the things that are driving us toward doomsday like few others can. See these few paragraphs near the piece’s conclusion:

Politics used to be a simple, predictable con. Every four years, the money men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they’ve always bought.

…

There’s no hidden platform behind the shallow facade. With Trump, the facade is the whole deal. If old-school policy hucksters like Christie can’t find a way to beat a media master like Trump at the ratings game, they will soon die out.

In a perverse way, Trump has restored a more pure democracy to this process. He’s taken the Beltway thinkfluencers out of the game and turned the presidency into a pure high-school-style popularity contest conducted entirely in the media. Everything we do is a consumer choice now, from picking our shoes to an online streaming platform to a presidential nominee.

He may be right; our obsession with outsized characters over policies and substance could still possibly lead to the most embarrassing candidate ever fielded by a major party. And what if he somehow won?

If we elected a truly unqualified, dangerously confrontational president (whether Trump 2016 or a theoretical, even worse candidate), what’s the worst that could happen?

Would it really be the end of America, or would checks and balances keep us from disaster?

Would he make it through a full term or would the public stop the charade?

Do heavy Tinder users have the least, or the most, need for a site like this?

The recent Vanity Fair article on the way Tinder is changing dating — or possibly even destroying it, depending on your reading — seems to be taking the internet by storm this week.

One way to read it is that no one cares about relationships at all anymore. It’s just convenient, on-demand sex with acceptably attractive partners, and this is how young people live now. Another is that this generation is going to lose all understanding of how relationships work because of their glut of options for sexual partners.

One thing the article doesn’t seem to address is how the existence of Tinder is changing how people behave in order to do better on Tinder. Are they all obsessed with skin care in ways we weren’t before? Driven harder than ever to have gym-hardened bodies so they get swiped more often when their appearance is their only opportunity to impress? Do they spend hours faking smiles for practice selfies? Become nearly-professional photographers in their quest for the best-lit, perfectly framed headshots?

The image-first style of these apps, and the superficiality and judgment that comes with them, is barely mentioned at all in the article, but that’s what interested me (as someone who has never used Tinder). So.

What would an app with the opposite priorities of Tinder look like?

How would it work? Would you use it if you were single? If not, who would?

Would those people be having as much sex? Better dates? More relationships?

Now the coworkers you can’t stand and the roommates that drive you nuts can be the SAME PEOPLE.

Buzzfeed News has a long piece about a potential new trend that builds on the trendy shared “co-working” spaces so hot with the hopeful startup crowd. Apparently the next step is “co-living”:

Co-living offers up the same short-term leases and the same promises as co-working, except community members (it is always a “community”) get a bed instead of a desk. In both cases, practitioners sacrifice space for proximity to like-minded people and access to perks. WeLive and Common and The Caravanserai and their ilk purport, essentially, to do for the home what WeWork has already done for the office: Sweat the small stuff. Make you feel like a boss. Feed your body and your intellect. “WE TAKE CARE OF ALL THE ‘STUFF’, SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO ANYMORE,” The Caravanserai’s Haid promises on his website; the impossible-to-spell startup says it’s geared toward “professionals who seek a great work life balance and don’t want to waste time piecing it together themselves.”

In typical startup fashion, the promise is not having to do any normal boring human stuff, so you have more time to focus on bringing your brilliant ideas into the world. But also, erasing the line (and that bothersome transition) between work and non-work, since when you’re changing the world, isn’t it all about the work, man?

Is erasing the division between work and life by living and working in the same place just another step on a terrible trajectory?

Or are the people who love what they do so much that it becomes their whole reason for being actually the ones we should be envious of?

What kind of people would you want to work with, or what kind of project would you want to work on, that would make this setup a good thing?

A seemingly innocent article in The New York Times discusses how start-ups are capitalizing on the GIF craze in mobile messaging. But it caught my attention not just because its author seems like a stodgy business writer coming several years late to the party. More eyebrow-raising are the handful of somewhat troubling quotes he casually drops in that hint at something bigger, deeper, and possibly more depressing going on with how we use images to connect:

“I’m not that great with words,” Mr. Howlett said. “But if I find the perfect GIF, it nails it.”

…

“A GIF packages your message for you, so you don’t have to figure out how to express yourself,” Ms. Baron said.

…

”Typing is an antiquated input method and you can’t express emotional dimension adequately with just a handful of emoji,” said Adam Leibsohn, the chief operating officer of Giphy, which is based in Manhattan. “GIFs have trumped all of it.”

In isolation, these can sound like cries for help from a generation incapable of speaking to one another; or on the other side, for anyone who places real value in articulating meaning through words, like the last gasp of our society giving up any pretense of attempted sophistication.

Are we willingly dumbing ourselves down by falling back on emojis and GIFs to communicate?

Will society gradually value words less and less as a form, in favor of the simplicity of images?

Or will there be a growing divide between those who care enough to use words and those who don’t, based on class, or education, or age?

Or is this all just reactionary, and we’ll simply have a richer variety of ways to express ourselves?

In even greater need of examination and fresh ideas: travel Instagramming.

In the Boston Review, Jessa Crispin writes “How Not to Be Elizabeth Gilbert” (which, great title for sure), examining the pitfalls of the contemporary female travel memoir trend.

As she looks back at the history of travel writing, she observes differences between classic male travelogues and this new wave of personal travel diaries:

We still look to men to tell us about what they do and to women to tell us how they feel.

And even diving deeper into various female travel writers:

Maillart traveled because she was trying to understand something in herself; Stark traveled because she was trying to understand something in the world.

And about modern travel writing in particular, at her most pointed:

The travel writer sells not only lovely prose and insights into a new land but also the lifestyle of the rootless and adventurous. Yet, when you establish your life and yourself as goals to aspire to, you take yourself out of the world. Every interaction is sculpted for its eventual presentation, and the aim of every presentation is to show how wonderful your life is.

 

How would you best describe your reason for traveling?

How do you process and package travel when presenting it to others? What kind of stories do you end up telling?

Is travel in general enriching, or really just indulgent?