Virginia Aabram

Years ago, I had a dream about a strange room. I was swimming in a pool that went up to a wall with an orange sunset painted on it, but the whole thing was eerily cast in fluorescent overhead lights that made the room both overlit and shadowy. There were fake palm trees on the concrete beach behind me, and I could tell that this room was just one part of a vast complex. It was silent except for the echoing water. Some time later, I saw an image (below) very reminiscent of this dream on a Facebook page called “Liminal Spaces.” Somehow, other people knew this place. The A24 movie The Backrooms tapped into a growing online fascination with the horror of liminal spaces. On the latest episode of Secret Third Thing, we talked to @giantgio about the history of liminality in art and memes, and what it tells us about our modern era.

Is Gen Z really the broke, teetotaling, trad, religious, heath-prioritizing, Nixon-obsessed generation that will usher in a golden age of the Tradwife and slay the dragon of the Girlboss all while going no contact with their parents and living in a tiny apartment alone because they’re too scared to date? Or are all these stats just “three TikToks in a trench coat” that make easy fodder for lazy journalists and activists? On the latest episode of Secret Third Thing, we had Reason Magazine reporter @_meagan_orourke on to discuss the data (or lack thereof) for these characterizations of our generation.

Charlie Kirk died over a year ago, but his legacy has been dying an absurd death over and over again in meme trend called "kirkification." The reasons for this bifurcation between the online and offline memories of Kirk are complicated and strange, going beyond politcal polarization or Gen Z nihilism. Maybe it's because the internet is a mirror-world that operates under it's own rules. On the latest episode of Secret Third Thing, @default_friend joined us to explain how what was once called the realm of Faerie might be responsible the second death of Charlie Kirk.

FANTASTIC piece today by @credenzaclear2. There are foundational problems with the rationalist approach to romance, as exemplified by SlutCon. "Our society is filled with the lonely and socially awkward, a problem that the thin prescriptions of a sexual ethic built almost entirely around consent cannot address. But instead of asking whether sexual alienation might arise from the logic itself, SlutCon doubles down on the same logic, treating people as bundles of preferences, as if ever more granular binaries and flowcharts could make desire clear and manageable." firstthings.com/slutcons-emo…