Never News: IT IS FRIDAY ONCE AGAIN

[You wake up alone in a grand library, seated next to a fire in a leather arm chair. Around you are dark wooden shelves crowded with books, their gilded spines frosted with dust. On the other end of the room, framed by two oak cabinets, is an enormous, ovular mirror.

Looking at it, you see yourself in reverse, seated as you are in your chair. But you realize that in the mirror, someone else is there. Blinking in confusion you whip around to see who this figure is, but see nothing. Though there she remains in the mirror, standing behind you with one gloved hand gently placed on the chair back.

In mute terror you watch the mirror as the figure steps around you, passes across the room, and moves toward the glass surface of the mirror itself. You hear a distinct cracking as her palms press against the glass, eventually shattering it. In one swift movement, the figure in the mirror tumbles out and falls to the floor before you.

Dusting shards off her gown, she stands.]

Hello you little critters and welcome back to an installment of Never News! Has the dead of winter hooked its gnarled fingers into your ribcage rendering you incapable of imagining a time when it wasn't 15 degrees outside, or is that just me? Though soon enough the tulips will peek through the soil and a new season of change will be upon us BUT UNTIL THEN! There is the constant of this, your newsletter that I bestow humbly at your feet.

Some Internet aperitifs...

More evil-tinged tech news, this time from the U.K. But there IS some good tech news, which is that Hoopla is culling AI slop books from its site. Elsewhere, an exploration of what corners of the Internet call "Republican makeup." Glossy, glunky recipes from the depths of fake AI-recipes - who's hungry? If you need context for why, when, and how ye, AKA Kanye West, has gone fully off the rails, here is a timeline. And finally, a very good piece on how the far right is using social media to flood our brains and overwhelm us (no duh).

THE CUT: a California bill against the tweens at Sephora

Longtime listeners of the pod know that I am very interested in the way that tween fashion trends populate and are influenced by the social Internet. And in case you missed this, a very, very popular trend for that age group takes place at the beauty store Sephora (and Ulta, and online), where tween girls buy skincare products en masse. Much has been said about this (some by me), with lots of folks worrying specifically about why children would use anti-aging products like Retinol, and what it might do to them. This is the first I've heard of actual law that is responding to this, and I wonder if we'll see more of this sort of thing down the line.

SHOW NEWS: extended cuts and a new Never Watch!

Boy oh boy are there treasures for you beautiful Never Post members this week! First, we've got an extended cut of Mike's conversation with Rusty Foster from our episode "The One Thing You Can Do For Yourself." PLUS! Our whole team recorded a new episode of Never Watch, where we watch Internet-addled movies and record our live viewings so you can "watch" alongside us. This time we watched Hackers, a movie I hadn't seen before and have been forever changed since. Listen in real-time as I become convinced that I need to buy roller blades RIGHT NOW.

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DAZED: Maybe we know too much about each other

I know we all know this, but it is a strange thing to know where everybody is and what they're doing all the time. But it's also the state of life for those of us for whom the social internet is a kind of home: I use Find My Friends, I use and watch IG stories of the real-time activities of people I know (and a lot of people I don't know), I have an overabundance of information about everybody and their whereabouts. This piece in Dazed does a great job of picking at that particular scab, looking at our friendships and, notably, our dating lives, and what that much access can do to us.

CAITLEN DEWEY: how do we stay online when everything is so bad?

This is a question that we at Never Post have been discussing a lot. I'm sure a lot of you have also been wondering how in the world one remains online without becoming so overwhelmed and paralyzed by the state of things that you completely lose it. Here on Dewey's substack, I offer an interesting examination of that question, and some potential answers.

And that's it for this week! May you all have a restful, sweet weekend, and that the winter blues leave you be. If you live in a warm climate, I ask that you go out and stand in the sun on my behalf.

And because it's Friday, I am going to narrow cast this to all my fellow Severance lovers out there. This one's for us: