Shirley Wang

Writing is not linearly productive. You can write something no one wants and spend months or years on it; it’s not wasted time. It’s time spent learning how to do things you’ll put into practice elsewhere, so long as you don’t get discouraged and stop.

Classy basketball / Dollars to donuts Today: Tommy Craggs, late of "Game Theory" on HBO and writer and editor at Mother Jones, HuffPost, Slate, Gawker Media, and Deadspin; and Hamilton Nolan, author of the newsletter How Things Work and t...

Check to make sure you're not around any open gas lines when you click this link, because @tcraggs22.bsky.social drops some fire about the WNBA, Caitlin Clark, and class in this @flaminghydra.com piece: flaminghydra.com/issue-110/

This has been a fun outlet for me, and I've written some stuff there I'm really happy with. More than that, though, it has been reliably excellent to read every day, with a wide array of posts from a very diverse and talented group of people. I'm biased, but I think it's a steal for the price.

Dumb Asian Smart Blonde by Shirley Wang I began rewatching The Suite Life of Zach and Cody again recently, a Disney show I loved as a tween. It’s about mischief-making identical twins who live in the Tipton Hotel in Bosto...

ALSO TODAY: @shirleyw.bsky.social on the sneakily subversive message of London from The Suite Life of Zach and Cody (deep cut!!) flaminghydra.com/dumb-asian-s...

When a former Pitchfork editor stops you in the hallway of your building asking if you saw @flaminghydra today, you know you’ve crossed that elusive nerdy Brooklyn underemployed writer rubicon.

Classical Fo-Fo-Fo-evah @csmcgowan.bsky.social

That’s right John Mountain Goats.

I cannot stress strongly enough how much you need to read this immediately

@katzonearth.bsky.social has the sharpest political sense of anybody, I always learn a lot when we talk, and also he should be running the NYT op ed page

BONUS: a crazy Sarah Palin anecdote

People really liked this one and I’m always glad when it pops back up.

Came across an article about Disney World by @thielman.bsky.social that helped me better understand why I love the art that I love
the-toast.net/2014/11/25/d...

Congrats as always to those who made it to the end of the thread, and to me for not forgetting what I was doing mid-task and then jolting up from the couch in horror to finish writing it 20 minutes later. Have a lovely weekend, FH friends.

Flaming Hydra a collective of 60 writers, on fire and hard to kill

Will today’s @flaminghydra.com newsletter have comics, serious news, podcasts or reviews, diatribes or diaries??? It’s a SURPRISE and there’s only one way to find out → flaminghydra.com/subscribe

Flaming Hydra a collective of 60 writers, on fire and hard to kill

If you miss the good websites

flaminghydra.com

It reminds me of a bar that always has good bands. You just show up when you can and see something good you wouldn't have been able to find on my own. It's a beautiful thing to feel like you're in community with talented people making wonderful stuff.

Part of what's been fun about the Flaming Hydra experience is the opportunity to do the sort of work that mainstream publications won't. That includes service journalism like this.

Aneurysm much??

🤦🏻‍♀️

It Looks Like You Need Help by Tom Scocca I was on my way up and out of town, following Google's orders to get to the Palisades Parkway in a rented Toyota Prius, when I hit a little bit of traffic—hardly any traffic, the bare...

TODAY: @tomscocca.bsky.social on terrifying "assistance" features: "Support! Not the first word I would have chosen to describe a car that slows down, without consulting the driver, in the crowding on the way to the George Washington Bridge." flaminghydra.com/it-looks-lik...

Strictly speaking, ties do not matter. But what should we make of the system of sartorial values that’s doing away with them? As egalitarian as it might seem, the idea at the heart of business casual is that one has to earn the right to look special—a right the powerful forfeit more and more often in the interest of obscuring or minimizing their power. And looking special, for those at the top who bother, increasingly means looking like you’ve just stumbled out of bed—a fake insouciance those working below you can’t afford to try on themselves—especially, it should be said, if they happen to be women or minorities.

Rigid dress codes of any kind are insupportable and it is, of course, possible to look lovely without a tie. But the tieless look has now been taken up as the costume of meritocracy—atop a thicket of unacknowledged inequities, we’re to define ourselves, it seems, by how narrowly useful we make ourselves. Personal style, we’re asked to believe, is an irrelevant trifle. Never mind the fact that the markers or status and standing are merely more hidden now—the important thing, it’s suggested, is that the worker who can earn and the one who can’t hack it will look, to the untrained eye, exactly the same. The worker who earns most of all will, one day, earn the privilege of looking like garbage.

I wrote about ties and what they mean for @flaminghydra.com. flaminghydra.com/cultural-ties/

congratulations to you, Flaming Hydra. I have resisted a number of your headlines but this is the one that makes me a subscriber.

Kind of shocked to see flaming hydra with less than 2000 followers, are you guys even aware of how much good work these guys are doing? Follow their account, read their stuff, this is the good stuff!

Friends of Learning! THIS IS THE PLACE FOR Are You a Student? Apply for a free student subscription to Flaming Hydra, courtesy of readers and friends of students, writers, Hydras, artists, journalism, enlightenment, an...

STUDENTS! People who WANT STUDENTS TO BE ABLE TO READ FLAMING HYDRA FOR FREE! Both types of people should click on this link! flaminghydra.com/students/

Onion updates:

@leilza.bsky.social Brillson, Flaming Hydra writer and former exec at the communist app TikTok, is our Chief Marketing Officer.

Danielle @strle.bsky.social, Tumblr alum from when Tumblr was the best, is our Chief Product Officer.

The chairman of The Onion is overlord Jeff Lawson.

i have enjoyed a lot of what @flaminghydra.com has published since subscribing but today's essay is the first i've read that i've thought, "I MUST TEACH THIS" sooooo good

Blank book Today: Carrie Frye, writer and book editor at Black Cardigan Edit. Issue No. 61 The Journalist and the Other Murderer Carrie Frye The Journalist and the Other Murderer by Carrie Frye In July ...

Really stunning read today from Carrie Frye in @flaminghydra.com , about why a writer w a fat publishing deal would abandon a book flaminghydra.com/r/772fb32f?m...

GET YER FEED, GET YOUR PRIVATE RSS FEED! THREE DOLLA THREE DOLLA flaminghydra.com/account

'NPR is cool!' How Tiny Desk Concerts became a pop culture phenomenon With more than 1,100 tapings, Tiny Desk has drawn heavy comparisons to MTV’s groundbreaking “Unplugged” series of the ’90s.

"NPR is cool!" because of Tiny Desk. NPR is crushing it on TikTok... AND still laying off journalists and canceling shows. What exactly is all this brand awareness good for if it's not keeping the core product of NPR afloat?

Flaming Hydra: An Idiosyncratic Writing Community That’s Built to Last January of 2024 was a “bloodbath” for the media industry. Hundreds of journalists were laid off, outlets like The Messenger and Vice.com stopped publishing, and others like Pitchfork

@davidjroth.bsky.social, on why he helped found flaminghydra.com 
studyhall.xyz/free-newslet...

“I need to believe that there’s another way that things can be instead of just endless layoffs and retrenchment that you see everywhere else in the industry.”