February 29, 2024 Dispatch Fixer Upper: Larry McMurtry’s Library By Colin Ainsworth Photograph by Colin Ainsworth. Everybody in the New Wave–nostalgia hotel has their phones out, which makes me pretty much like everybody else. After breezing past the lobby desk, I peek around: slate colors, fresh leather. There are scented candles burning somewhere. There’s a coffee bar selling things at New York prices, and while I wait for what will be a bitter, strong, iced $5.50 Americano, I see them: maybe 1,500 antique books, lined up in a custom black bookcase that’s about twenty feet tall. In their latest show, Fixer Upper: The Hotel, the home-and-lifestyle reality stars Joanna and Chip Gaines renovate and redesign the Karem Hotel in downtown Waco, Texas, into what they name the Hotel 1928. (The original hotel was built in 1928.) The Gaines family struck gold in the 2010s with their house-flipping show Fixer Upper, and they eventually outgrew HGTV to form their own network, Magnolia. What’s not to like about the duo? Joanna Gaines looks like a movie star, and she’s unreasonably charming. And Chip is a dang goofball! Their dynamic onscreen is instantly recognizable, harkening back to classic sitcom marriages—loud, foolish husbands with extraordinary wives. Joanna barely bats an eye when Chip shows up in the first episode in a bellboy uniform just for some fun. The pair decided that their hotel lobby needed a library, and upon Joanna’s request for “a ton of books,” Chip purchased around 300,000, the entire collection of Larry McMurtry, the Texan writer who died in 2021. McMurtry spent a lifetime collecting books—more time collecting than writing, even. He opened a used-and-rare bookstore called Booked Up in Washington, D.C., in 1971; by the eighties, he had amassed enough books to outpace Georgetown real estate and expanded to stores in several cities out West. In 1986, he opened several locations of Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, where he eventually condensed his vast collection. Chip Gaines’s parents grew up in Archer City as well. In the third episode of Fixer Upper: The Hotel, Chip takes Joanna on a roadtrip to take a look at the books. In a tone just this side of menacing, he says to Joanna, “We’re gonna see … this amazing bookstore that I bought,” a combination of understatement and confession. (Gaines purchased both the books and the two remaining storefronts in Archer City.) After some standard husband-wife “Babe, what did you do” dialogue, Joanna concludes, as she wanders the stacks and stacks of the store, “I think this is the coolest thing you’ve ever bought in your entire life.” Read More
January 24, 2024 Dispatch How to Rizz (for the Lonely Weeb): Derpycon By Liby Hays My first brush with Derpycon lore—and by lore I mean its legally enforced code of conduct—was a scroll through its extensive weapons policy. “LIVE STEEL,” the website went, “is defined as bayonets, shuriken, star knives, metal armor—including chain mail.” Studs on clothing constituted a fringe case, subject to approval by convention staff. This precaution was not due to fear of terrorist attacks but to the preponderance of weapon-wielding anime characters, a popular costume choice among attendees. The rules, I imagined, had been set in response to years of disastrous horseplay, yaoi paddle hazing rituals, and airsoft-gun-as-ray-gun mishaps. Thankfully everyone on the registration line ahead of me had gotten the memo, and their cardboard scythes buckled innocuously. Derpycon was billed as a three-day, all-ages, “multi-genre” anime, gaming, sci-fi, and comics convention for nerds of all stripes. It boasted “panels, concerts, video gaming, cosplay, vendors, dances, LARPs, artists, and so much more.” The branding this year aligned the convention with the conventional definition of derpyness, meme-speak for bumbling or awkwardness, rather than the more controversial Derpy, a cross-eyed background character from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Any catering to the controversial “brony” (adult male fans of My Little Pony) set would have surprised me. Instead, images proliferated of mishaps: someone running late for the train with a slice of toast in their mouth and “under construction” imagery (the convention’s mascot is the Derpycone). The provisional or half-baked aspects of the con would therefore feel on-brand. The press pass I received contained a charming illustration of a blushing man struggling to stop a train with a large wooden beam in his arms. Read More
January 9, 2024 Dispatch Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group By Johannes Lichtman Aerial view of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters some time between 1990 and 2006. Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group. I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about. She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me. I asked what level the writers in the group were. She said the group had writers of all levels. I asked what the speaking fee was. She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee. I dwelled a little on this point. She confirmed that there was no speaking fee. When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee. But I was told that, in lieu of payment, the writing group would take me out to lunch in the executive dining room afterward. I would also have my picture taken in front of the CIA seal, and I could post that picture anywhere I wanted. “So my visit wouldn’t be classified?” Vivian confirmed that I could tell anyone I wanted. “Just don’t tell them my name—or I’ll have to kill you. Just kidding!” Read More
December 22, 2023 Dispatch The Sphere By Elena Saavedra Buckley Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple seconds later, when we realized the light was only the shining moon rising over the peaks, we began laughing so hard that my parents heard and stumbled out into the front yard. I thought of this memory a few weeks ago while in a Lyft in Las Vegas, also at twilight. A man named June was driving me to the Sphere, the giant 20,000-capacity arena built just off the Strip by the Madison Square Garden Company and designed by the firm Populous, which opened earlier in the fall. The Sphere is (mostly) its titular shape, 157 meters wide, and covered in what is reputedly the largest LED screen on earth, and inside is a smaller sphere, holding a lobby and an arena with a curved screen that bears down at and envelopes the audience, a massive take on a planetarium with 4D features. The globular animations on the outer surface are what first captivated the attention of online viewers; since the Sphere turned on, it has featured rotating basketballs, mercurial ripples, AI-generated washes of color, and advertisements that cost brands nearly half a million dollars per day to display. Its most iconic exterior images are all the kinds of things middle schoolers like to draw in the margins of their notebooks: an eyeball, an emoji face, and, yes, the moon. Read More
December 7, 2023 Dispatch In the Spin Room: At the Republican Debate By Antonia Hitchens Photograph by Antonia Hitchens. Last night, the fourth Republican debate took place in Alabama; Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Ron DeSantis took the stage. Immediately thereafter, news outlets started publishing “takeaways” and declaring winners. (Notably absent was the frontrunner in the polls, Donald Trump.) We were curious, in the lead-up to this debate, about what goes on behind the scenes of this staged media event, so we asked Antonia Hitchens, who’s been reporting on the presidential campaign, to write a dispatch from the “spin room,” where she spent one of the previous debates, in September, in Simi Valley. I drove from my apartment in LA to Simi Valley to attend the second Republican presidential debate, and when I arrived, at 1 P.M., the media lot was already so full that I had to park on grass, like at a music festival. Three women from a national newspaper got out of the rental car next to me, carrying their blazers over their arms to put on later, talking about trying the twenty-dollar smoothie at Erewhon while they were in town. I waited in line to board a bus that brought us to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a mission-style building on a mountaintop, overlooking the valley below. I followed streams of people from the bus into a huge white tent, like at a wedding, for journalists to file their stories. Read More
September 25, 2023 Dispatch Lost and Found By Sophie Haigney The MTA lost and found. Photograph by Sophie Haigney. I was thinking, recently, of a scene from the animated movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The island of lost toys, I remembered, was a place in the North Pole where the stuffed bears and Hot Wheels cars and waddling wind-up penguins that disappear from children’s lives ended up. They lived happily in their own colony, tinged only slightly with the sad shadow of their severance from their human caretakers. I went to look up this scene, and it turned out I had misremembered it and had been doing so for years. There is no island of lost toys. In the movie it is the island of misfit toys—all the more poignant, for the toys are not lost but abandoned, because they don’t quite belong. Children don’t want them and so they find one another. Eventually this odd cast of characters comes together to teach Rudolph a lesson about the beauty of being a misfit; as we all know, that particular story ends happily ever after. But if the misfits have found one another, where do the lost toys go? That question sort of answers itself: they’re lost. They’re unaccounted for. There are some possible explanations. Perhaps that treasured stuffed lion, worn around the ears, was forgotten on the red banquette at an Italian restaurant where the child was drawing in crayon on a paper tablecloth. Perhaps it fell between the seats of a Land Rover, or worse, into the bottomless netherland of “under the bed.” But even if these scenarios are plausible or true, they might be unverifiable, and so some things simply seem to be erased from earth. I lose things all the time—credit cards, keys, jackets, sunglasses, books, a necklace, two necklaces—actually, three necklaces, all of them gifts from people who loved me. Sometimes I joke that I practice nonattachment, the Buddhist thing, though the real explanation is that I am clumsy and careless. I do wonder where it is that my things have gone. I have always been bothered by this, so much so that it seems I invented and sustained a belief in a fictional Arctic island populated by reindeer where lost things might one day be restored. Read More