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TGIF!
Today's selection takes us from the internet's war on authenticity to the frontiers of desire to a mother's fight against insurance bureaucracy:
The suspicion economy: How "performative reading" became social media's favorite accusation, revealing less about pretentious readers and more about a culture that can't imagine someone genuinely absorbed in "Infinite Jest" while literacy rates collapse around us.
The pleasure principle: Three generations wrestle with what sex actually means when Gen Z unlearns porn scripts, boomers discover ecstasy in garden work, and streaming shows explore desire as internal odyssey rather than physical performance.
Insurance versus survival: A mother who donated her son's heart thirteen years ago now offers to pay for the recipient's anti-rejection drugs after Anthem triples the copay, keeping a young woman alive through GoodRx coupons that could disappear tomorrow.
And we have some excellent stories from the archive down at the bottom.
Grab your lunch. Let's go.
By Brady Brickner-Wood
The concept of "performative reading" has seized the internet's imagination, transforming anyone who reads a hefty novel in public into a suspected fraud wielding books like accessories. This suspicion reveals something darker than cynicism about pretension: it exposes how social media has colonized our understanding of authenticity itself, making the very act of reading suspect because it cannot be replicated by scrolling. The essay traces this anxiety through Enlightenment philosophy, then pivots to Foucault's warning that obsessing over individual authenticity distracts us from examining actual power structures. Most devastating is the context: American literacy rates plummeting, fourth graders unable to comprehend basic texts, universities slashing humanities departments while partnering with OpenAI. The cruel irony? "Infinite Jest" itself diagnosed this exact predicament decades ago, depicting characters who medicate loneliness through consumption rather than the patient attention that reading demands.
By Cathrin Bradbury
A friend's offhand comment about being "done with penetrative sex" launches a sprawling investigation across generations trying to answer an impossible question. Gen Z redefines intimacy after unlearning porn tropes where fake orgasms were the script. Millennials navigate boundaries between pleasure and violence in an era of extreme openness. Boomers discover post-sexual ecstasy in chainsaw conversations and garden work, finding more sizzle than their coupled friends might imagine. The essay moves between Jungian analysts describing sex as communion beyond bodies, palliative nurses explaining sex as touching energy fields, and practicing Catholics reconciling orgasms with faith. Streaming shows like The White Lotus and Dying for Sex explore desire as internal journey rather than external performance, while porn's hyperspecific categories promise light-speed gratification that drains sex of its power to disarm us. The most radical suggestion emerges quietly: that the everything-is-sex post-sex life extending into our nineties might constitute a second sexual revolution, one boomers are pioneering while everyone else debates penetration statistics.
By Rhian Lubin
Mary Cutter donated her only son Christian's organs after he died unexpectedly in 2012, giving his heart to eleven-year-old Payton Herres, who wasn't expected to reach her twelfth birthday. Thirteen years later, Cutter offered to personally cover Herres' anti-rejection medications after Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield deemed everolimus "no longer medically necessary," then reinstated coverage but tripled the copay to unaffordable levels. The drug keeps Herres' body from rejecting Christian's heart and protects against coronary artery disease, yet it remains FDA-approved only for liver and kidney transplants despite evidence it works for heart recipients. Herres now bypasses insurance entirely, using GoodRx coupons that could vanish anytime, while earning $35,000 doing payroll and living with the terror that affordable access might disappear. Cutter, who has since lost her husband and brother, considers Herres' survival essential to her own grief: if anything happened to Christian's heart, "it would be like living the whole thing over again." Their first phone conversation dissolved into tears as Herres thanked the woman who saved her life and Cutter listened to a teddy bear playing her son's heartbeat, still steady in a stranger's chest, kept alive by prescription coupons rather than the insurance system designed to protect transplant patients.
From the Archives
2014: The Chaos Company
Wherever governments can’t—or won’t—maintain order, from oil fields in Africa to airports in Britain and nuclear facilities in America, the London-based “global security” behemoth G4S has been filling the void. It is the world’s third-largest private-sector employer and commands a force three times the size of the British military. On-site in South Sudan with G4S ordnance-disposal teams, William Langewiesche learns just how dirty the job can get, and how perilous the company’s control.
An excerpt from The Long Haul, by Finn Murphy.
That’s it for today.
Really hope you enjoyed the selection of stories today. I am always interested in hearing from you. If you have thoughts on how I can make this email even better, do not hesitate to reach out.
Brett
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