What they do tell you about reality TV is everything else: how it's reductive and superficial, how it's cultural rot. It's a circus, they shout. It microwaves the mind to mush.
It's also the most dominant form of entertainment today. Reality TV has been called a "volume business"; many of us swallow whole seasons in a single sitting. The shows are operatic, polarizing, and unrepentant about what they are-all id and impulse. Name a setup, pastime, premise, gimmick, and it probably exists as a reality TV show.
We refuse to look away. Or maybe it's that we can't. Perhaps it's because we're addicted to spectacle. Or because we demand our pop culture in every color, shape, and size. Everything is primed for content-making. No, seriously-everything. Across Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, we optimize our lives for the screen. We enjoy letting other people into our curated worlds and being let into theirs in return. It's OK to admit it: You are good and truly hooked.
So am I. In the best of times, I watch a fair amount of reality TV. But it was only during this past year-one shot through with heartache, a breakup, and what felt like piled-up grief-that I came to depend on it. In a genre built on stock phrases and digestible tropes, let me offer one more: Reality TV saved me.
LAST SPRING, I grieved for a lost friend. By August, I grieved for my grandmother who was here and then suddenly wasn't. Weeks after that, I grieved for my relationship with T, one that had cratered right in front of me, one that I'd felt-finally-might not end in what-ifs, or end exactly as it did: with a lingering unanswered voice note. I felt like a bodiless thing outside myself.
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Denne historien er fra June 2023-utgaven av WIRED.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.
Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.
Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.
Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.
This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.
DAMAGE CONTROL
According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.
AN IMPERFECT STORM
CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?
THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD
ON THE SURFACE, THERE'S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT IT. JUST A SPOT OF OCEAN. BUT BENEATH THE WAVES LURKS SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: A MASSIVE WATERFALL. AND IN ITS MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS, THE FATE OF THE WORLD CHURNS.
COOLER HEADS
The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.
TERMINAL VELOCITY
IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.
THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.
