For the past few days GameStop, the beleaguered retailer that’s seen its share price skyrocket under the influence of a Reddit mob attempting the mother of all short squeezes, has dominated the text group I have with a handful of high school friends. Not usually a crew for deep-dives into finance, we’re suddenly following every twist of the saga. I suspect we’re not alone. While a slice of the world is dissecting the logic of r/WallStreetBets or analyzing the deeper meaning of it all (of which there is plenty and also none), the rest of us who aren’t foolishly joining the pile-on are just giddy spectators.
Last week, HBO Max released a film called Locked Down, a thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The film is mostly unremarkable, with two likable actors being likable but not particularly inspired, and the thriller aspect is especially limp; it’s a heist movie that really doesn’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a complicated heist. It is the very definition of a movie you forget about an hour after you’ve seen it.
After months of hype, endless speculation, and a wave of last-minute rumors about production delays, the iPhone X is finally here. Apple says it’s a complete reimagining of what the iPhone should be, 10 years after the original revolutionized the world. That means some fundamental aspects of the iPhone are totally different here — most notably, the home button and fingerprint sensor are gone, replaced by a new system of navigation gestures and Apple’s new Face ID unlocking system. These are major changes.
New iPhones and major changes usually command a ton of hype, and Apple’s pushing the hype level around the iPhone X even higher than usual, especially given the new thousand-dollar starting price point. For the last few years, we've said some variation of "it's a new iPhone" when we’ve reviewed these devices. But Apple wants this to be the beginning of the next 10 years. It wants the iPhone 10 to be more than just the new iPhone. It wants it to be the beginning of a new generation of iPhones. That's a lot to live up to.
It is nearly a year now, though time no longer passes with any structure. Each day is the same, weekends bleed into weeks, days into months, the seasons blur into each other.
There are three categories of people in lockdown: couples without children, couples with children, and single people. The couples without children have learned languages, watched box sets, and made sourdough bread. They’ve gone for long walks, played board games, argued, and made love. The couples with children have been running exclusive boarding schools: being parents, teachers, playmates, nannies, and cooks. The single people have been trapped in a massive sociology experiment to see what happens if you lock someone in their home for months on end. They are on Zoom drinks, chat apps, fantasy swiping on Tinder, pacing, walking, learning about themselves.
Atsome point in the last six months, I realized almost every conversation I have is exactly the same. All anyone can talk about anymore is their Covid fatigue, their projected timeline for when and whether this will all end, and how life under shutdowns has caused them to lose their grip on reality. No one ever knows what day it is; everyone has opinions about vaccine efficacy, reopening strategies, and those assholes who went to Tulum in the middle of a pandemic.
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