my favorite people on the internet

Hello, friends!

In case you missed it on LinkedIn, some exciting news: I was recently selected as the Bitch Media Writing Fellow for Pop Culture Criticism in 2021! 🎉🍾The fellowship program is designed to “develop, support, and amplify emerging, diverse voices in feminist, activist, and pop culture media.” Over 2,600 people applied to four different fellowships: Global Feminism, Pop Culture Criticism, Sexual Politics, and Technology. I’m ecstatic to work with Andi Zeisler, a feminist legend, and so many other talented writers, and to be lucky enough to write about my favorite subject with a feminist perspective for such a prestigious magazine. Thank you to my friend Angeline who recommended me for the program, and keep an eye out for my writing in October of next year :)

But on another celebratory note—it is my sixth year of writing this blog, which feels like a lifetime in internet years. I think this is my longest sustained project, which is quite an accomplishment, and reading my old writing still feels like opening a time capsule of my own life, which is oddly comforting.

Writing is one of those things at which the better you are, the more liberties you take, the more you can deviate from conventional rules. And I’ve always admired this about great writers, that they’re able to manipulate sentence structures with a clever turn of phrase, draw from an endless well of cultural references and tie everything together with a neat little bow at the end. I’ve been a good writer for almost my entire life, but I think I’m still figuring out how to be a great one. But I think the writers I’ve chosen are a reflection of the way I wish I could write: conversational, but witty and insightful. Poetic yet unpretentious.

So as a little tribute to the time I’ve spent on the internet, I wanted to share my favorite people that I’ve followed over the years whose writing I love, and have undoubtedly influenced my own writing. I put together a shortlist of all of the pieces I loved from each person, and then reread or rewatched every single one of them and carefully selected a top five (in no particular order), which was extremely difficult given how immensely talented they all are. I hope you enjoy their work as much as I do, and appreciate the incredible amount creativity they’re putting into the world.

I met Jia at The Cosmos Book Club event, after which I babbled to her excitedly about being on the same brainwave

Writers

Jia Tolentino

I first found Jia when I read “The Year That Skin Care Became a Coping Mechanism” in 2017, and now I read every single thing she writes. The critical success of her debut novel, Trick Mirror, and the fact that she’s both an incredibly gifted writer (often hailed as “this generation’s Joan Didion”) and also seems like a very chill person in real life, means that she’s become a kind of cultural icon transcending purely literary circles; she’s been profiled in Into the Gloss, Elle, Grub Street, and Vanity Fair, and you may recognize her as a talking head in the Hulu Fyre Festival documentary. But she is probably the only person that has come out of a trashy reality show as a teenager and become a prolific, successful writer.

From Into the Gloss:

The type of comedy I find funniest is when the comedian plucks some normal thing out of the everyday and shines just enough light on it to make it seem bizarre ... whose work often reads like what would happen if you let a 15-year-old girl choose the subject of a Harvard course. Nothing is too small, or odd, or frivolous to be observed, and dissected, and intellectualized...

1. Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston

2. Athleisure, barre and kale: the tyranny of the ideal woman

3. Virtue and Vanity at Reformation

4. Please, My Wife, She’s Very Online

5. Refinery29, Kylie Jenner, and the Denial Underlying Millennial Financial Resentment

Helena Fitzgerald

She writes a now-discontinued but incredibly astute and beautiful essay newsletter with an archive worth revisiting called Griefbacon (mentioned in my 2018 Year in Review). She’s a truly incredibly writer—she has the ability to pluck an obscure or unnamed feeling from universal experience and expertly unspool it, extracting sensations and emotions that you’ve always felt deeply and intimately but could never quite articulate. I think about her writing long after I read it, and I think some of my favorite writing of my own, like “Organicism” and “Vacation People,” is unconsciously modeled after hers.

1. california

2. long distance

3. things to do in new york city

4. BedCoffee

5. airport

Scaachi Koul

Scaachi is a BuzzFeed writer that I found from her piece about Lauren Duca and the misappropriation of feminism. She delivers incisive criticism and sharp observations and I admire her endlessly; her long-form essays are always worth reading and do a great job of thoroughly examining the origins of pop culture phenomena.

1. The Slick Rise Of Vintage Masculinity

2. When Did Celebrities Get So Bad At Taking Criticism?

3. The Worst Thing About “The Goop Lab” Is How Reasonable It Seems

4. What Were The Makers Of “Joker” Even Upset About?

5. Meghan McCain On “The View” Is The Epitome Of White Women Tears

John Saito

John is a UX writer-turned-product designer for Dropbox that I admire and someone that I met in a very random way. I was reading Medium a lot in 2017 when I was living in Singapore, and I kept seeing his name pop up on UX writing pieces. So I emailed him and asked him if I could interview him about being a UX writer, because it sounded so fascinating and I admired his writing so much. My office was closing for the night, so I went downstairs to the McDonald’s in HarbourFront and Skyped him from a booth, just as he was waking up. We had a great conversation, and he has such a great perspective on writing that I read everything he publishes.

1. How to design words

2. Design words with data

3. The magic of microcopy

4. Making up metaphors

5. How to stay scrappy

Rachel Miller

She writes the aptly-named Just Good Shit newsletter and she coined the term Friday Night Chores, which I have been obsessed with for the past year. A great service journalist focused on maintaining relationships in your life and general organizational odds and ends.

1. Notes on Camp (Pride)

2. Should you happen to find yourself spinning out, try cleaning your bathroom

3. Why Venmo Is My Favorite Sympathy Card

4. The best $16 I ever spent: Old Navy pajamas after my husband left

5. A Practical Guide to Making Friends

Amanda Mull

I first heard Amanda described as “someone who always writes what you want to know about” and it’s so true. She writes some of the most well-researched pieces on the consumer economy, and is also very funny on Twitter.

1. The Best Skin-Care Trick Is Being Rich

2. I Gooped Myself

3. The Girlboss Has Left the Building

4. It’s All So...Premiocre

5. The Difference Between Feeling Safe and Being Safe

Rebecca Traister

One of the best writers on modern feminism I’ve come across; she’s not afraid to dive right into the zeitgeist because she always has something fresh and insightful to say. I love the way her phrasing feels—like that Gary Provost quote—but also the fact that every single word feels like it was chosen with extreme, deliberate care and precision.

1. Wide Awake

2. The Poison of Male Incivility

3. ‘The Meanie, the Lightweight, the Crazies, and the Angry, Dissembling Elitists’

4. Why Sex That’s Consensual Can Still Be Bad. And Why We’re Not Talking About It.

5. Why Do We Humanize White Guys Who Kill People?

Amanda Taub

I was first introduced to Amanda’s work via her excellent The Interpreter column that she writes at The New York Times with Max Fisher. It does a spectacular job of contextualizing current events; I always thought there needed to be something that could give you a smart understanding of what was happening in the current geopolitical space without needing an extensive history lesson on it, and The Interpreter is exactly that. But she also does amazing writing on her own, and my favorite piece of hers is a personal account of her experience in law school and the systemic consequences of sexual assault.

1. The #MeToo Moment: How One Harasser Can Rob a Generation of Women

2. Social media has a mob violence problem. Could soccer hooliganism prevention offer a model for solving it?

3. Of All the Moments for a Backlash to Saudi Arabia, Why Now?

4. Every Political Fight Is About Social Hierarchies Now

5. Atrocities. Norms. Bicycles. See Where We’re Going With This?

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I mentioned this in last year’s Year in Review, but one of the few books I read was Between the World and Me, an incredibly powerful rumination on being a Black man in America (fun fact: he also wrote the Black Panther graphic novels). He writes devastatingly and beautifully about race and power, and from his writing you kind of get a sense of the inherent loneliness of being a successful Black man in academia. The way he articulates specific nuances of human emotion will make you rethink everything you know about race and the way you think (or don’t think) about your own existence.

1. I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye

2. My President Was Black and subsequent Obama interviews (part I, part II, part III)

3. The First White President

4. The Paranoid Style of American Policing

5. The Enduring Solidarity of Whiteness

Anne Helen Petersen

She writes a brilliant newsletter called “Culture Study,” which is somehow both extremely relevant and also a unique and compelling take. She went super viral a while ago for her piece on (and coinage of) millennial burnout, a phrase that has defined not only this generation but Gen Z as well. She makes you—rather uncomfortably—reckon with institutions in millennial life that we (willingly or not) participate in, and she also has the cutest dog named Steve!

1. habituation to horror

2. deep normalness

3. when you realize you’re on the wrong side

4. the wages of productivity

5. a privilege to eat slowly

Rebecca Jennings

If you’re looking for explainers on TikTok and Gen Z, Rebecca Jennings is your girl. But she also writes extremely relevant pieces for Vox—essentially all of the questions you were afraid to ask about what’s happening on the internet at the present moment.

1. 11 pieces of clothing that explain 2018

2. Hustlers is a recession-era period piece. Here’s how the costume designer created it.

3. Why is everyone on Tinder so obsessed with tacos?

4. Why are so many brands pivoting to coziness?

5. How the brow lift went mainstream

Haley Nahman

The former deputy editor for Man Repeller (she wrote a review of Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, which felt like, dare I say, the most ambitious crossover event in history?!), Haley now writes an excellent newsletter called Maybe Baby, about “hard-to-describe feelings” that read like dreamy, distinct musings but deliver a punch to the gut at the very end when she ties all of them together as one narrative. She writes a lot of other things, too, but I still always find short little refrains from Maybe Baby whispering through my brain like a mantra. Writing that stays with you is the best kind of writing.

1. #24: The Emily Ratajkowski effect

2. #29: On being a “public” figure

3. #9: I’ve been wanting to talk about this for a long time

4. #1: A message from the void (my apartment)

5. #26: Are you wearing despair goggles?

Lili Loofbourow

A culture critic at The Week and Slate whose writing I was a fan of before I even knew her name, she writes deeply and incisively about both specific pieces of pop culture and broad cultural phenomena (the range!). She writes a lot of things that I personally enjoy, like Frasier, Killing Eve, Jessica Jones, and The Good Place, but she’s at her best when she’s writing about cultural idiosyncrasies and applying them in broad strokes to a greater societal motif; her ability to connect dots is astounding and something I personally aspire to as a strategist.

1. The myth of the male bumbler

2. What happens when Jane the Virgin isn’t a virgin?

3. Why Do We Think “Believing” Rape Victims Is Enough?

4. The female price of male pleasure

5. Illiberalism Isn’t to Blame for the Death of Good-Faith Debate

Colin Nagy & Noah Brier

Colin and Noah write the daily Why is this interesting? newsletter, in which they do a short breakdown of a random interesting topic. I’m consistently amazed by how good their content is and how they’re able to tease out such interesting insights of rather ordinary and/or unexciting-sounding things.

1. The Information Fiduciary Edition

2. The Sackler Edition

3. The Polling Edition

4. The Medium is the Message Edition

5. The Micro-Kleptocracy Edition

bloggers

The Pudding

The Pudding is actually multiple people, but they all deserve a place on this list because the content they produce is so damn interesting. They write and design beautiful interactive visual essays that answer questions about culture, questions you didn’t even realize you had but were always curious about (like how many people misspell “Gyllenhaal”), and use original datasets and research to discuss complex topics. The Pudding team’s goal is to “advance public discourse and avoid media echo chambers,” and so while their content is relevant and interesting, it’s not too topical.

1. The World through the Eyes of the U.S.

2. Rappers, Sorted by the Size of their Vocabulary

3. Ali Wong and the Structure of Stand-Up Comedy

4. The Diversity of Makeup Shades

5. The Emergence Of Slang, Using Search Data

Chrissy Teigen

Obviously. You know Chrissy from Twitter, probably, and I wasn’t originally going to include her, because what would I even recommend? But then she relaunched her wonderful website (remember the SoDelushious.com days?) and she wrote an extremely moving essay about her recent miscarriage, and I thought she was definitely worth including. The other recommendations are all from her cookbooks, and let me tell you, they are wonderful and I use them both regularly. And I’ve bookmarked all of her favorite places in New York to try one day when I can afford to regularly eat at four-dollar-sign restaurants.

1. Hi.

2. Sweet and Salty Coconut Rice

3. Armadillo Cheesy Garlic Bread

4. Twitter (and Uncle Mike's) Banana Bread

5. Spicy Miso Pasta

Jessica Merchant

How Sweet Eats is mainly a food blog, but her lifestyle posts are equally entertaining (her addictive Tuesday Things series inspired my Minute Thoughts series, the difference being that she is super disciplined and actually keeps a post schedule). I like her Summer Fridays, posts to kick off the weekend and give inspiration for what to eat, make, drink, read, and watch. The way she writes makes it sound like you’re talking to your best friend, and she’s very popular with other older millennial/young Gen X moms. In fact, I’m part of a Facebook group called “The Pretty Dish Book Club” and it’s literally just a bunch of moms posting pictures of the recipes they’ve made from the book and other moms commenting, “This looks so delicious! I substituted cinnamon for nutmeg and it worked out great,” and it’s so wholesome and good.

1. Maple BBQ Salmon with Brown Butter Couscous (this is a weeknight staple; I substitute honey for maple syrup and it’s amazing)

2. Kale Cacio e Pepe

3. French Onion Meatballs

4. Chipotle Beer BBQ Chicken and Creamed Grilled Corn

5. Blueberry Peach Galette with Cinnamon Sugar Crust

Krystal Bick

Krystal writes a truly unique fashion blog called This Time Tomorrow, and it’s truly one of the most visually stunning things I’ve ever seen. I found her when quarantine first began, and her gorgeous photography even within the confines of her apartment has always impressed me, but she’s also a really beautiful writer as well—her sobering reflections on quarantine and isolation are a nice reminder that everyone is living through a similar experience and that we are not alone, even though it feels like it.

1. 5 small joys

2. a time capsule

3. nyc holiday guide

4. the art of flânerie

5. romanticize your life (I like that this isn’t that TikTok “everything is great,” rose-colored glasses kind of thing, but more about appreciating the small moments that bring you joy in difficult times)

Molly Yeh

I have adored this woman ever since Gwendolyn introduced me to her blog with the note “I think you’d really like her.” She’s Chinese-Jewish, so a lot of her recipes are an homage to the hodgepodge of cultures she was exposed to growing up (I’ve made her scallion pancake challah on several occasions and it’s amazing) and a lot of grown-up takes on childhood favorites like Lunchables and Dunkaroos. She also makes really, really beautiful cakes and has adorable little daughter named Bernadette who she calls “Bernie.” Her cookbook, Molly on the Range, which my very thoughtful great-grandlittle got me as a present, is written in the same conversational tone as her blog and is one of my favorites to leaf through for inspiration.

1. garlic and onion latkes and sour cream

2. falafel with preserved lemon yogurt, spicy pickled onions, and fresh mint

3. scallion pancake challah

4. valentine’s day almond cake

5. glazed sugar cookies with buttercream “embroidery”

youtubers

Joss Fong

She’s a senior editorial producer at Vox, and she produces videos on some of the most fascinating topics. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism, which is extremely cool, and her videos interrogate a lot of things that we take for granted in a working society, equal parts investigative and entertaining.

1. How Snapchat’s filters work

2. The state of gun violence in the US, explained in 18 charts

3. Why some Asian accents swap Ls and Rs in English

4. How the BBC makes Planet Earth look like a Hollywood movie

5. What facial recognition steals from us

Erik Singer

He doesn’t actually produce his own content, but he’s probably best known from his slate as the inaugural star of WIRED’s “Technique Critique” series. I like the way he’s very technical about his discussion of accents; it really helps you to understand how languages develop and how they proliferate.

1. Movie Accent Expert Breaks Down 32 Actors’ Accents

2. Accent Expert Breaks Down 6 Fictional Languages From Film & TV

3. Movie Accent Expert Breaks Down 31 Actors Playing Real People

4. Movie Accent Expert Breaks Down 28 More Actors’ Accents

5. Movie Accent Expert Breaks Down 28 Actors Playing Presidents

Safiya Nygaard

Truthfully, I don’t really watch most of her videos, because I don’t love “I tried X” or social experiment videos, but I just like her as a person and her vlogs are really entertaining and well-edited. I just like how she narrates her process, and her wedding content was A+.

1. Creating A Custom Lipstick At The Bite Lip Lab

2. I Tried Unique Japanese Vending Machines In Tokyo

3. Our Wedding | Safiya & Tyler

4. Mixing My Own Lip Colors with the Anastasia Beverly Hills Lip Palette

5. Choosing My Wedding Dress

Natalie Tran

One of the OG YouTubers and perhaps the most relatable woman on the internet, Natalie Tran (or “communitychannel”) is known for her dry wit and searing hot takes on everyday annoyances. To understand her place in the YouTube community, all you have to do is watch her 10-year anniversary video to see how well-loved she is. She was also, in a weird worlds colliding moment for me, on Mark Pollard’s Sweathead podcast, in which he accurately describes her as “a national treasure.”

1. Must Contain One Uppercase Letter

2. I Was Here First

3. Just One

4. The YEP System

5. But I just brushed!

Jonathan McIntosh (Pop Culture Detective)

He does fantastic video essays on entertainment, particularly through the lens of masculinity. I appreciate this perspective because he addresses the ways in which feminism is helpful for men and toxic masculinity is damaging to them. He notes:

My hope is that this video series can open up conversations about how we, as a society, can work to achieve more constructive, cooperative and empathetic forms of masculinity.

1. Born Sexy Yesterday

2. Wall-E as Sociological Storytelling

3. The Adorkable Misogyny of The Big Bang Theory

4. Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs - Part 1 Male Perpetrators

5. Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs - Part 2 Female Perpetrators

Andrew Rea (Binging with Babish)

This guy recreates food from movies and TV shows, i.e. my dream job. But he also notoriously does The Most™ like making “instant” mac and cheese from scratch or doing experiments to find out what the hell is so special about Turkish Delight or recreating the infamous turturkeykey from How I Met Your Mother—my favorites are always the ones that look particularly delicious or the ones that he goes to outrageous lengths to film. I particularly admire that he always makes the gross foods, and then improves upon them. And it made me happy to see movies like Waitress and shows like Psych and Frasier represented.

1. Pasta Aglio e Olio from Chef

2. Arrested Development Special (feat. Sean Evans)

3. Parks and Rec Burger Cookoff

4. Harry Potter Special

5. The Good Place

Awesome Restorations

I got super into restoration videos this year (I have no idea why or how, but I’m obsessed with them), and this guy’s are my favorite. Really the only thing I know about him is that his name is Marty and he learned about restoration from his father, but I love his videos. His cinematography is great; they’re so nicely filmed and really soothing to watch, and seeing something really rusty and broken restored to its shiny, clean glory is so exquisitely satisfying. I would be down to do this for a living, honestly.

1. Zippo lighter restoration - Vietnam War repair

2. Vietnamese army gun oil bottle restoration - Vietnam War Repair

3. Rare Japanese lighter restoration - SAROME blue bird rocket car

4. Zippo Lighter Restoration, Harley Davidson edition gold plated

5. Restoration of 18 inch Bahco adjustable wrench

Debra Minoff & Susannah McCullough (The Take)

The Take is the brainchild of two women, Debra and Susannah, who both studied film at Yale and wanted to see more smart analysis of pop culture through an academic lens:

So much of our world today revolves around visual storytelling, but we don't learn how to read visual language in school. Understanding pop culture and the stories we share is key to interpreting our world and our times. We bring our own expertise in film and visual storytelling, along with our network of writers, researchers, professors and collaborators, to offer viewers helpful insights on these subjects.

I like watching these even when I haven’t watched the movie or TV show in question; their thorough and critical analysis of everything they tackle reminds me of my favorite video essay (yes, it’s nine parts, but completely worth it!) on Mad Max: Fury Road. Just super thoughtful and well-constructed videos. It was genuinely difficult to choose just a couple to recommend, because all of their videos are great.

1. The Cool Girl Trope, Explained

2. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Trope, Explained

3. What Pretty Woman Says About Money

4. Mad Men: The Tragedy of Betty Draper

5. Margot Tenenbaum - Anatomy of a Style Icon

This year is almost over. Unbelievable, because the passage of time feels like a myth and nothing and everything has happened simultaneously. I’ve found myself at a kind of loss for words over the past couple of months just learning how to grieve for so many different things at once, recalibrating my life and my expectations with every new piece of information. It’s a strange time to be alive. But I truly do think good writing can feel like a dreamy little island of hope in what feels like an endless emotional storm; I think it can be calming and rejuvenating or just something to slip away into for a small moment, so I hope this brings you joy. God knows we need it.