Brain rot

The essential Dirt reading list.

04 Dec

Curfew Hour, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1882

The Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’ which they defined as: “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”

Awesome! With that in mind, here are some of our favorite brain rot-adjacent Dirt reads from 2024. 

1. Rot all over by Michelle Santiago Cortés

“You know you have brain rot when your life online does nothing to serve your life off-line, and vice-versa.”

2. Low vibrations by Ashley Bardhan 

“I'm fond of seed oils, and I don't want to think of this as a problem. But I'm feeling pressured to leave my room right away and take on more sun-kissed, radiant high vibrations.”

3. It's Obviously the Phones by Magdalene Taylor

“We don’t know how to make friends or date or follow the news or even buy clothing without the help of our phones, and none of it is really our fault.”

4. Baby’s all right by Alexandra Tanner

“Through Baby, I could capture what I never could in my diaries: how funny it often was to be in pain; how beautiful it could be to surrender to it…”

5. Death’s signature scent by Daniel Pearce

“How strange that what conceals the smells of aging can become the primary smell of aging.”

“These bots live beautifully transitory lives, like mayflies. They are born, they ░P░U░S░S░Y░ ░I░N░ ░B░I░O░, and they die.”

7. Sex Goblin by Lauren Cook 

“Sitting like a bird rotting in its nest / I can’t help you if you don’t use your words”

8. Trash metaphors by Nika Simovich Fisher

“Being able to quite literally drag something into the trash was a novelty of the early days of desktop computing and helped build literacy around file management.” 

9. Disordered Attention by Sarah Moroz

“Why would you pick a museum display when you can be shown appearing from a toilet bowl or riding a unicorn?”

10. Coke Sober by Jameson Rich

“Once when coming down off of surgical anesthesia, I imagined the first Coke I would drink upon my release—poured tableside from an eight-ounce glass bottle into a highball of ice—and wept.”

11. On filler by Daisy Alioto 

“Without good cultural curators we are surrounded by ice cream truck song, basically.”

12. Now, I’m Thomas Kinkade by Sunday Mancini

“AI is great at Kinkade because Kinkade himself was AI—a repetition of theme, feeling, sky color, cottage exterior. Each of these pieces combine over and over, like shared common ingredients in a charming little soup.”

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PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

  • “Modern in its perspective yet fetishistically accurate to its time, Eggers’ horny-as-hell but highly repressed ‘Nosferatu’ is nothing if not the version of this story you would expect him to make.” (IndieWire)

    • See what the Fragrantica girlies are saying about the 𝔑𝔬𝔰𝔣𝔢𝔯𝔞𝔱𝔲 perfume (Fragrantica)

  • LeBron James is apparently not the LeBron James of media (Bloomberg)

  • Kyle Mooney takes us back to 1999 (YouTube)

MIXTAPE

  • Imagine seeing James Salter from across the bar and liking his vibe (Paris Review)

  • “Slow-release perfumes that stretch out your scent are on the horizon.” Ok, yay! (Allure)

  • What’s the deal with the Enron “relaunch”? (Sherwood) 

  • Dwight Garner on Joe Brainard: “There was something fragile about him; his slim ego was a vine he had precariously trained along a wall.” (New York Times)

  • An extremely thorough breakdown of “the cult of the new fun drink” (Helena Aeberli)

  • Jack Hanson on Simone Weil: "Manufacturing a digestible version of a thinker as demanding as Simone Weil is, on first glance, far from an enviable task. And yet, when a market exists, supply will meet demand." (The Drift)

  • I can’t stop thinking about the nectar wolves. Might have a little cry about it later. (Defector) 🐺 🌼