Happy Friday!
I cackled out loud reading Rosa Lyster’s guide to the “gentle art of the slow burn” this week at the Hairpin. The slow burn, Lyster explained, is a special kind of takedown: a subtle-but-searing sleight that comes cloaked in plausible deniability.
By way of example, she held up her grandmother Jean’s masterful use of the word “extraordinary,” and other seemingly benign—but potentially devastating—phrases such as, “good heavens” and “goodness me.” They leave the victim more unsettled than insulted.
“Even nice old Catholic ladies called Jean need to cut loose every once in a while,” wrote Lyster. “When someone was being nasty or rude around her, she’d just whip out a single ‘Good heavens,’ and they would be shamed immediately into silence.”
Think about it next time a “wow” text message slowly unravels you, or someone tells you look “comfortable.” The slow burn.
This one was more like a fire-bomb. Seemingly unprovoked, four Vogue editors published a conversational synopsis of their impressions of Milan Fashion Week and devoted an extraordinary amount of space to the “embarrassing,” “desperate,” and “pathetic” scourge of people they still call ”bloggers” (ie: journalists, consultants, models, and social media stars not employed by print magazines) who are “heralding the death of style” by wearing designer clothes to fashion shows and posing for photographers.
If you’re like, “Wait. Didn’t we have this conversation back when Tavi was a tween, and several times thereafter?” Yes. But we’re having it again.
This time the “blogger” camp delivered a series of well-crafted retorts. Caroline Vreeland—a musician, model, and the great-granddaughter of the legendary Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland—called the Vogue editors “just plain rude,” and then invoked her great-grandmother for a slow burn from beyond the grave:
I find it shameful that an institution such as Vogue would demean and belittle these young people who are building their own paths, especially since they are mostly young women… This certainly isn’t the Vogue voice my great-grandmother once stood for.
Good heavens, Vogue.
Woo! Okay. I thought by now we’d be sick of talking about Monday night’s debate, but the series of slow, immaculate burns Hillary Clinton delivered—again, cloaked in Who me? plausible deniability—smolder on. Perhaps most obvious was when Clinton let Donald Trump’s tantrum about his presidential temperament fully unravel before taking a breath, exclaiming, “Woo! Okay,” and shaking it off with a shimmy of her shoulders. I am pretty sure both my mother and older sister pulled something similar when I was a fury of a first-grader, and my head nearly exploded. To fully revel in the moment, I suggest this surprisingly catchy song and video.
A theory on political fashion sabotage: The seeds for Trump’s undoing were sown on Between Two Ferns the Thursday before the debate, when Clinton told Zach Galifianakis she assumed Trump would wear his “red power tie,” thereby turning Trump’s trademark accessory into a predictable joke. It was a devastating, genius act of sartorial sabotage—somewhere between a casually dropped “Is that what you’re going to wear?” from your mother, and a mean girl in high school fashion-shaming a frenemy. She sucked the power right out of that red tie. And then she wore a red suit.
The best slow-cooked pork shoulder. This recipe, from London’s River Café, is a standby of Quartzy editor Indrani Sen. She says you can skip the step of starting out at 450°F (230°C) and just go straight to cooking it slow at 250°F (120°C) the whole time. She also doesn’t bother with the additional lemon-juice basting, but rather just puts it in the oven before bed and lets it roast until mid-morning. It’s great for a dinner party, or to simply shred into a pile, which crisps up beautifully in a frying pan to serve over salads, in tacos, and on pulled pork sandwiches for days to come (or months, in frozen bags). It is the best.
For serious burners. The “iPhone of vaporizers” is real, and a new one, the Pax 3, was released this week.
At $275, it’s not cheap, but some of you might appreciate that it has three different ovens—one for concentrates, one for old-fashioned herb, and one for “half-packing.” For the real light traveler (but you know, not an analog pot-smoker) there’s the $59 Pax Era, which—no kidding—has its own exclusive Keurig-like cartridges of cannabis oil. Each cartridge is $40 and equivalent to about 1/8 ounce of pot. The future is now!
Ali Griswold kept her iPhone battery going for an entire weekend of camping, and you can too. Her instructions are super-specific, and involve mostly keeping it in airplane mode and using it only as a camera—solid advice, whether you’re trying to preserve your battery or just make the most of your weekend outdoors. If you’re trying to slow that battery burn in more typical circumstances, Apple advises dimming your screen (just swipe up from the bottom of your home-screen for the dimmer control) and using wireless, rather than 3G, for data when it’s available.
I’ll be away next week, so Quartzy will be back in action on October 14. Now let’s shake it off and let this weekend burn slowly!
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HBO’s new series, Westworld debuts on Sunday at 9pm EST, and Quartz TV writer Adam Epstein is feeling it! It’s a sci-fi-meets-Western drama, set in a place where rich people can act out their fantasies—sex and violence, included, of course—with a cast of human-like robot hosts. It sounds a bit like The Hunger Games crossed with Lonesome Dove (or the real-life Pioneertown, tbh). I’m looking forward to checking it out and perhaps joining the world of Sunday night HBO addicts who left me behind with Game of Thrones.