Tuesday's Trailheads

Gen Z Is Lost in the Backrooms by Jack Butler "These places are easy to ignore. But an entire subculture, mostly populated by the digital natives of Gen Z, is obsessed with them. To zoomers, they have a sterile, stifling quality. They’re oppressively nondescript and seemingly endless. Their very purposelessness conveys some insidious design. Now the idea has gone from online forums and YouTube to the big screen, enshrining it as one of Gen Z’s most significant contributions to popular culture." "As befits the best folklore, no one can identify the true origin of the backrooms. The closest one can come is a photo posted on 4Chan in 2019 in response to a call for “disquieting images that just seem off.” Someone responded with a photo of a yellow-hued room, unsettling for its very lack of definition, function or identifiable location (it was eventually found to be a picture of a Wisconsin furniture store under renovation). In 2022, Kane Parsons, then 16, entered the backrooms by creating a short film on YouTube titled “Found Footage,” calling forth an entire world inspired by that first image." The Kids Who Grew Up Online Are Coming for Hollywood by Spencer Klavan "From that haunted origin point, a collaborative fictional universe sprang into being, boundless and confusing as the Backrooms themselves, filled with homemade video games and spooky stories. Parsons himself made his first mark at this stage under the name Kane Pixels, creating wildly successful YouTube shorts set in the Backrooms. When A24 hired him to make a feature-length version, his challenge was to shape the narrative behind this urban legend—more of an atmosphere than a plot, really—into a cohesive story that could be told from beginning to end." "He did this by making Backrooms into an allegory for the way art has been devouring itself in the digital age. It can be read as a parable about how the internet feeds into remake culture, and how remake culture eats us alive. It isn’t perfect—the screenplay, by Will Soodik, gets a bit heavy-handed, and Parsons can’t quite get the whole unwieldy mythology to come together. But as a piece of commentary, it’s riveting." The Trump losses keep piling up by Andrew Desiderio, Laura Weiss, John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman "Most prominently, Republicans are also in the process of killing Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, a direct rebuke to the president." "Trump and Hill Republicans are trapped in a dangerous paradox. Trump’s political endorsement is worth more than ever in GOP primaries, yet his legislative agenda and fixation on personal projects are growing more toxic heading into the fall campaign season. As more Republicans move past their primaries, they’re suddenly finding it advantageous to oppose him." The Joyless Art of Jew-Hatred by Abe Greenwald "Anti-Semites hate Jews not because it’s joyful to hate Jews. They hate Jews because their own lives are joyless. And this is important for Jews to remember because it accounts for the depths of the anti-Semite’s depravity. They’re not celebrating anything, and we shouldn’t view their obsession as a dark party theme. They’re taking out their assorted failures on us. As I’ve said before, anti-Semitism is chicken soup for losers. So long as we recognize that, anti-Semites will never win.      "