5 things you should read this week

she's finally doing it

happy monday! this week’s heavily-requested reading list includes ruminations on sex, sexlessness, Black art, dissociative feminist literature (AGAIN???, my audience screams, throwing tomatoes at my head!!), and an insider perspective on memetic warfare (enrichment question: guess which meme accounts i’m now actually convinced are right-wing psyops).

as will become custom, the first 2-3 recs will be free to everyone. i’m also adding a free trial feature to this post — let me know if you like that and if it’s something i should keep doing!

p.s. i am in meetings with substack and they are saying, rayne, please post regularly, please, we are begging you, and i am crying and saying, i’m just a baby, i can’t, i’m just a baby, and they are saying take a multivitamin or something, and i am throwing myself on the floor in submission!! (just kidding they’re actually being way too nice to me.) for real, i am determined to not let depression take this from me so i will be working so hard to get you guys at least one piece of juicy content a week. hopefully much more with your thoughts and prayers. <3

and now, the reading list…

How to Plant a Meme by Joshua Citarella

in my opinion, Joshua Citarella is one of the most important public thinkers working right now. as an artist and researcher specializing in niche online political subcultures, he’s one of the preeminent scholars tracking Gen Z radicalization, and one of the only people who i feel truly understands the importance of memes as an influencing agent to the larger political zeitgeist (aside from the CIA, that is, who is Doing The Work extensively). i’ve been fanatically interested in memetic warfare for years now, but this post to Citarella’s patreon about his infiltration of right-wing meme communities (free to everyone, btw) still blew my mind and plunged me into a multi-day research-hole. the obvious question is this: if we’re doing this to them, they’re doing this to us. what does it look like? and what do we do about it? hoping the comments sound off on this because i need to discuss.

America Doesn’t Know How to Read the Work of Black Writers by Tajja Isen

this is an excerpt from Tajja Isen’s upcoming book, Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service. it reads wonderfully and brings up a fascinating and necessary point — while the writing of white people is viewed as worth reading for artfulness and aesthetic alone, the work of Black writers — no matter how personal — is often only admired for what it can teach white people about racism. “… people still look to The Bluest Eye as a guide for unlearning racism rather than an aesthetic achievement. The surge of antiracist reading lists was yet another reminder that the work of Black artists gets read, as Morrison put it back in 2003, ‘as sociology, as tolerance, but not as a serious and rigorous art form.’ Books explicitly framed as guides to antiracism were corralled onto ‘syllabi’ alongside texts whose only educational aspect was that they happened to be written by somebody Black,” she writes — it’s a necessary reality check for the white consumer and an ode to how Black writing deserves to be read, and it made me even more eager to read the whole collection when it comes out next month.

The death of sex by Haley Nahman