Hello and welcome to Outward, your one-stop shop for the two behind all that shade being thrown, you know,

by that one bookish friend of yours on their Instagram stories who's like going on about

that film or that book or that magazine article that you haven't actually read, but you can

tell is apparently very important to the queers this week. I'm Jules Gil Peterson, ever the trend setter.

That is such a great and co-solution of our show, Jules. Wow. I've never heard it stated so well

before. I'm Brian Lauder. I'm an editor at Slate, and yes, we got the shade behind the tea.

Yeah, the shade behind the shade. The tea behind the shade. But, you know, there might be some shade behind that tea also. Now, it's kind of also like a confession. So, you know, I think, Brian, you know this, but, but maybe listeners wouldn't have any reason to know. I'm in what I might call like a cocoonier, by which I mean mean I'm tucked away writing one of those little old

books on transhiscite that I like to do. But one of the side effects of being so immersed in the

past, but I think also probably getting rid of all social media except for aforementioned Instagram,

is that I've just been feeling like very out of the cultural loop lately.

I think part of that is just like I don't have my Twitter dolls and my Twitter twinks in my media

diet anymore, basically feeding me things that I'm already too old to know about.

And so like whenever something does drop, that's potentially the new like it thing for however

ludicrously short fame and clout is actually these

days in our fragmented niche attention economy you know i try to haul myself out of obscurity

and consume like any good american but i guess i'm just like starting to feel like we're just

in such a severe pop culture rut and And I wanted to like make a very

small case to you and see what you think. So so my case is this new Ariana Grande album, Eternal Sunshine

that that has dropped. And you know, it's like I still, I hear the gays talking about it saying,

you know, fairly complimentary things, I guess, for these days.

And I've been really well behaved.

So I've listened to it like three times.

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