Month: December 2020

On 9/11, a mommy posts a picture of two people jumping from the Twin Towers and captions it this photo right here is why I’m willing to speak out against the synagogue of Satan. Are the lizards in control, I wonder, or is the synagogue of Satan? Is there some relationship between the two? The mommies sell essential oils, get hair extensions, hold large indoor parties where they fete their one-year-olds. They post gender reveals and they pray the end of Roe v. Wade is near. October 17th comes and goes; JFK Jr. is nowhere to be seen. The year is winding down, but what is a year anymore? Time is a bowl of mush. One of my mommies puts up her Christmas tree the day before Halloween and posts a time-lapse of her children trimming its branches with tinsel. Some of my friends start their sentences, As soon as there’s a vaccine. The mommies start theirs, As soon as Jesus comes back. Election day comes and goes. The Saturday after, at 11:27 am, Brooklyn is one happy shout. But my mommies warn me that ten days of darkness are coming, that this has all been scripted, that the Texas Rangers are about to take Sleepy Joe into custody. We are entering a period of spiritual warfare, they say. We are coming to the end of everything.

Soon after quitting Bloomberg, Smythe visited Shkreli again, fuming about the book industry’s rejection of him—and her. “I was so angry at the establishment, and people who wouldn’t let me tell my story in the book: publishers, Bloomberg, everybody,” she says. Without her job or her marriage “that totally eroded any defenses I had left.” Before, she had tamped down the sparks between her and Shkreli, but now, she gave them air. She thought about when he’d teased her about being a nerd in an old photo he glimpsed, and how she felt when he added her to his visitors’ list (he’s not a big fan of visitors, but wanted her to come). A realization hit her. In the visitors’ room, “I told Martin I loved him,” Smythe says. “And he told me he loved me, too.” She asked if she could kiss him, and he said yes. The room smelled of chicken wings, she remembers.

The story of the Trump campaign’s attack on our elections could have been the story of the Trump administration’s four-year-long attack on our institutions. If, early on, the Justice Department lawyers charged with selling the administration’s lies had emptied the ranks — withholding our talents and reputations and demanding the same of our professional peers — the work of defending President Trump’s policies would have been left to the types of attorneys now representing his campaign. Lawyers like Mr. Giuliani would have had to defend the Muslim ban in court.

“We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this,” Mr. Connolly said.

Fennell started writing after thinking over all the conversations she’d participated in about alcohol and consent — all the rollicking stories guys told about hitting on drunken girls, or getting them drunk to “loosen them up.” None of this was taboo when she was younger: “It was all completely normalized by all the American ‘raunch era’ films and TV that everyone watched,” she told me. “Drinking was part of seduction culture — and if people couldn’t remember things, it was often met with an eye roll.” Fennell questioned that logic. If having sex with a girl who was blackout drunk was nothing to feel bad about, then a man wouldn’t feel guilty if she turned out not to be drunk, would he? It made her wonder. “What if I went to a nightclub and pretended to be really, really drunk, and somebody took me home, and then just as they were removing my pants, I revealed I wasn’t drunk?” An image formed in her mind of a woman sitting up in bed, suddenly sober, and asking, “What are you doing?” She later described this very scenario to a producer. “I said, ‘And then she sits up, and she’s not drunk!’ And he went, ‘Holy [expletive], she’s a psycho!’”