Twilight is not a good book

And yet people still like it.

Hello Scam Fam!  

Because I am lazy, I've never kept a journal, but I have made efforts to document the books I read and the movies I watch so I can feel superior to the philistines who receive less culture into their hearts and have worse taste than I do when it comes to year-end lists. Many years ago, I read Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (ever heard of it?). I did not care for that novel for reasons I probably don't need to explain to you and won't waste your time with, and yet, I also remember that I folded down a page with a line I found to be knock-my-socks-off powerful. I copied that into my notebook with the rest of my rEacTiOns when I logged the title. Do you want to know the quote? I should tell you that it's real dumb. Ok, fine, here it is: 

𝓛𝓲𝓴𝓮 𝓪 𝓬𝓪𝓻𝓷𝓲𝓿𝓸𝓻𝓸𝓾𝓼 𝓯𝓵𝓸𝔀𝓮𝓻, 𝔀𝓮 𝓪𝓻𝓮 𝓹𝓱𝔂𝓼𝓲𝓬𝓪𝓵𝓵𝔂 𝓪𝓽𝓽𝓻𝓪𝓬𝓽𝓲𝓿𝓮 𝓽𝓸 𝓸𝓾𝓻 𝓹𝓻𝓮𝔂.

Ugh, Scam Fam, can you imagine? 🙈 I'd tell you more about why that particular line lodged itself somewhere in my soul, but I actually don't remember and by the time I rediscovered the notebook in which I'd stored those thoughts, the line had thoroughly dislodged itself, and I was so ashamed to see my trite emotions on the page that I destroyed the entire list. Best of luck to the Ruthie Historians of the future who would like to know what I read before 2016! 

I think about the line a lot. Looking at it now, I don't understand what about it could possibly speak to anyone, least of all someone as discerning and brilliant as I, but I know it was meaningful to me at the time I first read it. 

That's how meaning works, right? You're bopping along, you read a sentence, and the words take root in your heart. Or you hear something on the radio, and it grips your brain. A TV show hacks into whatever your mainframe is and very subtly reprograms your whole worldview. It's all deeply personal, yet sometimes it happens in a collective way that intensifies its power. It's all mostly mysterious, and that implicit question mark is foundational to a lot of religion, so I'm sure you're glad I decided to use this newsletter about scams to add something new to the discourse ;). 

I'm neither religious nor especially spiritual; I love a ritual as much as the next heathen, but many of the big ideas leave me cold. I feel the same way about the language of self-help, which one could argue is a different thing, but I categorize under a wide umbrella of divinity and belief. Part of the reason for the categorization, besides a worldview that is heavily shaped by the sections at the Borders where I used to hang out after school, is that I spent the better part of this decade working as an editor for Oprah's magazine and website. 

While I was there, I thought a lot about how self-improvement works. Publishing new stories required us to find new information; failing that, we'd need new angles or new experts. That's especially hard to do when most good advice is simple and obvious (not that it's always simple or obvious to follow). It made for a lot of packaging, dressing old ideas up in Instagram-friendly clothing. On bad days, I felt like we were peddling snake oil. On better ones, I believed we were tinkering with the snake oil formula so that it could deliver on its promised benefits and fix your life. 

Readers often found something in the work that I didn't: Meaning. It was easy to dismiss the connection (after all, I am just, like, a little bit smarter and cooler than the rest of you chumps), but I came to respect it. Who doesn't want to know better, do better, be better? And who am I to judge? I once found a Stephanie Meyer sentence about lust in toxic relationships to be aspirational and transcendent. 

That's why, when Caroline Calloway and her flower crowns came across my radar back in January, I wrote: 

A handful of loyal scambassadors alerted me to the Caroline Calloway drama. My lukewarm take on that sitch is that she's only sort of a scammer! We shall discuss that in more detail, though not today, Satan.

If you don't know who Caroline Calloway is, first of all, congratulations, I'd advise you keep it that way and stop reading now, it's probably not going to get better from here, sorry for wasting your time this beautiful morning. The NYT has a pretty thorough and enjoyable explainer, but if you've hit a paywall limit or you'd just generally prefer to look at life through my cracked lenses: Caroline Calloway is an influencer. I still can't really explain why because I do not care, but for our purposes it helps to know she was a minor player when she became the subject of a viral Twitter thread about a series of overpriced creativity workshops she was leading.

According to the endless reaction posts that followed because we live in hell, some people found the workship meaningful, some people thought it was the self-help equivalent of Fyre Festival, Caroline Calloway became famous as a scammer (despite never having really pulled off a scam) and I stopped following it because that isn't how I want to spend my limited time on this planet but other people kept up and other things probably happened, like I say, I don't know.  

Anyway, earlier this week, The Cut ran an essay by Natalie Beach (who, fun fact, used to freelance for O Mag sometimes) called I Was Caroline Calloway about ghostwriting Caroline Calloway's Instagram captions and book proposal. It is quite something. Apparently in the weeks leading up to the essay's publication, Caroline Calloway wrote a bunch of her own Instagram captions about the piece so it was hotly anticipated and I guess lived up to the hype. Nobody comes out of it looking good, but nobody comes out of it looking all that bad either. I read it as a story about the decay and collapse of a complicated, transactional friendship between two flawed, ambitious, privileged women. I felt badly for both of them as I read it — as I mentioned, we live in hell — but I didn't spot any scammers, so my lukewarm take from January stands. 

Connecting to Twilight quotes or charismatic people who tell weird lies about Yale plates, it's all very embarrassing. It'd be nice to blame it on an elaborate scam. Honestly, though, finding meaning wherever we can is kind of the whole point, one of the few authentic experiences still available in this scam-ridden world. 

Carnivorous flowers are the ultimate scammers, 

Ruthie

My Week in Consumption

• Over Labor Day, I went to Maine, a great state, with some of my friends, who are great people. I got a chance to wear these Aquasox I bought last year. They are so dorky, and yet I cannot recommend them highly enough for getting into the ocean in rocky areas, which is one of the great joys of life.  

• I also purchased this wildly expensive puzzle and oh boy did we enjoy assembling it. I want to spend a million dollars on jigsaw puzzles. Please help.  

• People often ask me what newsletters I like. My favorite one I don't write or edit is Molly Young's Read Like the Wind. The latest issue is on Vulture and the archives stay fresh.  

• Nepotism alert (but I kind of don't want to give it that tag because my family name was sullied by a humiliating loss): Zach wrote a wonderful profile of Tom Holland, a movie star Gwyneth Paltrow definitely doesn't know. 

• This essay. Everything about this essay.