It turns out the last thing the internet needs is another newsletter waxing philosophic about the profound mundanities of life. I’m just here to recommend cool shit to consume. Do with it what you will.
Congrats to those of you who hit “subscribe”! You all are a small - but mighty - faction of the internet. You all deserve trophies, and hopefully you will gain cult-like status soon. Please continue to share Deepcut Gems and also encourage others to subscribe. And since the last issue (Issue 1) went out to one subscriber (shoutout to them!), I am including the first issue at the end of Issue 1.5 for all the neophytes. Does that make sense? Okay, good.
Read
As someone who has to navigate the healthcare system often, and as someone with a lot of patience, until I have literally *none* - this piece on the American corporate healthcare industry, and the ways in which they stand to make a profit, often at the expense of individuals, struck close.
Lizzie Presser for ProPublica reported on one man just trying to do everything “right” in order to be eligible to receive a new kidney. JeMarcus Crews found that his journey as a poor Black man with diabetes, a disease which she describes as “slow violence (that) destroys the body,” to be all the more difficult. Read Tethered to the Machine and be prepared for your blood to boil and for your heart to break.
Watch
Without sounding like a pretentious ass, my favorite movie this year was a Romanian documentary called “Collective.” After a devastating fire in 2015 at a popular nightclub in Bucharest killed dozens of, mostly young, Romanians, revelations about a corrupt government and an even more corrupt healthcare system were magnified by a journalist at a sports newspaper. Watch, in horror, as greed and profit take center stage over the lives of tax-paying citizens.
On a lighter note than that of fire and surreptitious government malevolence, I often find myself deep in the archives of an Instagram page called @plasticcelelbs. The old adage - or rather - the old meme, of “you’re not ugly, you’re just broke,” rings devastatingly true here, as images of celebrities’ little secrets are revealed, one by one - nose job by brow lift. Those little secrets? Big, expensive plastic surgeries.
I find myself gleefully looking for nose jobs and jaw shaves, while I doom scroll jaw-slacked and double-chinned. There’s something comforting to me about knowing our most beautiful had to pay hefty, hefty sums to achieve a level of glamour and gorgeousness I thought was womb-derived.
Listen
Caroline Polachek, formerly of the band “Chairlift,” knows how to croon. Her newest song, a cover of the 2000 song Breathless by the Irish pop group, The Corrs, hits your sweet tooth with all the right nostalgic undertones. TLDR; this is good ear candy that won’t give you an audio cavity.
(Issue 1)
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Cazzie David’s book “No One Asked for This” is rousing prose for the type addicted to celebrity gossip and those who need to up their SSRI dose. If you were around on Twitter when the PR blitz happened and you have some CD fatigue; that’s certainly understandable. But don’t give up on nepotism just yet. I personally can’t get enough of celebrity children. It started with Suri Cruise. Skip to the part about her breaking up with Pete Davidson, or read (for free) about why she cannot commit to fornication after having eaten too much in this excerpt from The Cut.
Watch
The funniest person on Tiktok, a site where brains go to die, is a 16 year old self-identified socialist named Ivy. I’ll let the TikToks speak for themselves,
but her joke about psychological evaluations being needed for men to purchase guitars sits with me.
https://www.tiktok.com/@lives_in_a_society?lang=en
Listen
The boss covering the lord. New Jersey takes its chance on New Zealand.
Now that Jack Antonoff has some time off, hopefully he stops writing songs with Taylor Swift in which they pander to the cottagecore bisexuals and gets me some new Lorde music. (No offense to Taylor Swift.)