What Is A Gesture? + Phetasy Digest
Bring Back Cooking | Thomas Massie Blames Israel…Again | Hasan Pikfer, Chill | The Never-Ending Political Comedy Game | The Internet Is Getting Dark, Y’all | People, Stand Up
My six-year-old recently asked me to define “gesture,” and I felt flustered because I had so much to say. I told her that a gesture is when you reach out to someone. But why? Why reach out to anyone?
Gesture expresses the impossibility of speaking. It rises from performance, from repetition that captures the meaning of an event, a motion, a sound, a crisis, a spectacle. Gestures serve as expressive forms, true symbols. A life without gesture lacks personality and music. Gesture expresses the impossibility of speaking. Here’s a lovely and confusing quote from a lovely and confusing writer, Giorgio Agamben: “An epoch that has lost its gestures is, by the same token, obsessed by them; for men from whom all authenticity has been taken, gesture becomes destiny. And the more gestures lost their ease under the pressure of unknown powers, the more life became indecipherable. And once the simplest and most everyday gestures had become as foreign as the gesciculations of marionettes, humanity — whose very bodily existence had already become sacred to the degree that it had made itself impenetrable — was ready for the massacre.”
To live as a human being demands vulnerability, love, disgust, contradiction. The swell of a melody, the wash of a chord, the simplicity of enjoying rain.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #318
Hasan Piker Won’t Shut Up
Twitch streamer and communist LARPer Hasan Piker has been subpoenaed by the US Treasury over his Cuba trip — and instead of lawyering up, he immediately went on a livestream and started spilling everything. Bridget Phetasy breaks down the Piker legal saga, why the far left has always been allowed to play by different rules, and what it means that Elon’s baby mama ended up on a communist’s livestream giving away hoodies. Also: a meditation on Podcastistan, the nihilistic slop economy, and why livestreams are the laziest form of entertainment ever invented.
THE JEREMY BOREING SHOW
Tucker and Jon Stewart Are Running the Same Grift
The defining illness of new media isn’t bias. It’s audience capture — and a generation of hosts on both the left and the right have stopped trying to lead an audience and started trying to be picked by one. Bridget Phetasy has watched it happen, written about it, and shed followers for refusing to play along.
WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #392
The DoorDash Generation Can’t Feed Itself | Courtney O’Dell
Bridget Phetasy sits down with Courtney O’Dell, food blogger and creator behind Sweet C’s Designs, to dig into the viral DoorDash discourse that exploded online and ask the obvious question: how did we end up with a generation that genuinely doesn’t know how to feed itself? They get into why convenience culture has replaced basic life skills with helplessness, what food blogging actually looks like as a career, how AI is changing the industry, and why the simple act of cooking dinner might be one of the most underrated forms of self-sufficiency left.
DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #319
Thomas Massie Lost and It Wasn’t Israel’s Fault
Thomas Massie lost his Kentucky primary by 10 points and immediately blamed Israel. Bridget’s not buying it. She breaks down why Massie lost his own constituents, why Israel derangement syndrome is the new woke, and why the anti-woke comedians who’ve gone down this road are starting to sound exactly like the people they used to make fun of. Also: Trump trolling the right by saying he’ll run for prime minister of Israel.
THE SPECTATOR
The internet is dying and so are we
There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.
A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down
Mar 22
I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…
THE DAILY WIRE
America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.
America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.
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