This newsletter is a weekly (rarely) list of people I am mad at. This is the list for May 19, 2023.
I thought my friends in Toronto cared about me. I haven’t lived there in years but I’ve stayed in close contact with all my friends there, and yet, I realize that they haven’t really been thinking about me at all. Because if my friends did care about me, they would have told me about this promotional campaign for Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s new-ish CBC podcast, Commotion. For weeks, this image has been plastered around Toronto. No one told me until a week ago.
All my friends were sitting on this. For weeks and weeks, not one person told me that Elamin did a prayer hands emoji in a national ad campaign. No one told me that he was doing Eckhart Tolle as Grimace. No one told me he was cosplaying as the desk clerk at a TriBeCa-based yoga studio that only lets you join if you sign a contract promising to never talk to your mother again. No one told me he was taking book cover headshots for his forthcoming self-help memoir, Namaslay The Day. No one warned me that upon my return home, I would be confronted by Elamin acting like Drake in 2013. (Not even recent Drake! “Tuscan Leather” Drake! Jesus Christ!) I should have been warned. I should have been prepared. If my friends were real friends — if I had friends at all — they would have told me. Even Ben Affleck would never do this to me.
Ben Affleck.
Long time no talk. Since you saw me last, BuzzFeed News shut down, and so I am now a free agent. My last piece for them is a sprawling, comprehensive, perplexing look into Girls Gone Wild and its former CEO, Joe Francis. Please read my swan song.
That profile was a hell of a mic drop, Scaachi. You've accomplished a fuckton with this one, including but not limited to educating Joe Francis who needed to learn, in the year of our lord 2023, that nonconsensual sex can in fact occur between people in a relationship! I'm not sure how you keep your composure around such a person, but I'm grateful that you've put this skill to such informative use.
Great piece on Joe Francis.