The Monday Media Diet with Lauren Goode

On Big Sur, connection, and the weaponization of internet memes

Lauren Goode (LG) is a longtime pal of WITI. She writes for Wired and is based in San Francisco.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a writer. I’ve been a senior staff writer at WIRED since 2018, and I host some podcasts. But primarily I’m a writer. Some things get published, many things never see the light of day, which is good. 

Describe your media diet. 

I’m sorry to say that I’m addicted to Twitter. The first thing I do when I wake up is check Messages, and then I check Twitter. Then I go to Slack, to see if there’s anything going on in our Slack channels, and then I’m back to Twitter.

I check our own home page, Wired.com, every day, and I subscribe to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, but I rarely go directly to home pages anymore. I either check apps, or, news finds its way into my feeds, either through push notifications or social media. Sometimes I go to aggregators, like Google News and Techmeme. 

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I like to read people who cover stuff I don’t, or who make me think about things in a completely different way. I read Dan Primack and Ina Fried from Axios. Shira Ovide is great. I read Casey Newton because he’s so deeply invested in covering the major tech platforms. I love Anne Helen Petersen’s threads, and how she manages to convince people to not be total butts on the internet. I appreciate Brandon Taylor’s sweater weather, especially his analysis last year of Succession. I sometimes read Noahpinion. Lyz Lenz’s Dingus of the Week is always worth a read. It’s so darkly funny.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I find it hard to get into a routine with podcasts. Right now I’m listening to Fiasco season 5. And then at night I’m usually reading or watching something. But it really varies. Like right now I’m switching it up between the 24-episode series on the Cold War that CNN produced in the late 1990’s, and those AD videos of celebrity homes or Vogue skincare videos. One needs an occasional break from thoughts of armageddon. 

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What’s the last great book you read?

“Normal Family,” by Chrysta Bilton. It’s riveting. It’s a memoir about her many, many siblings—her father was an extremely prolific sperm donor—but it’s about more than that. It’s really more of a story about Chrysta’s mother, who is this magnetic, loving person who also had a lot of demons and struggled with addiction. She’s an incredibly complex character. I think what struck me most about the book was how much compassion Chrysta shows through her writing, even when she’s detached. Forgiveness takes a lot of forms and sometimes never comes at all, but I think it’s more common these days to look at past trauma and say “That’s it, I’m done, that person’s canceled or out of my life” and it’s a lot harder to try to hold all those sharp edges in your hands and say, “OK, there’s still  a lot of love here, maybe there’s a path forward.”  

Anyway, it’s easy to be scripted in these kinds of Q&A’s and I’m trying not to be scripted so I’ll just say I finished Chrysta’s book while I was on a plane, incidentally going to see her that day, and I was that person crying on the plane. 

What are you reading now?

I was just reading Meme Wars, by Dr. Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg, which is about the weaponization of internet memes over the past decade. But I’m sort of in between books right now. 

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

When I see WIRED on a newsstand, I pick up several more copies, and I place them over the other magazines on the rack. That’s my airport trick. Does that count as a reading strategy? 

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I don’t really have a good answer to this right now. Can I use my lifeline? 

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? 

Twitter. Just kidding. I check Surfline every day. And there’s a paid app called Florence that I haven’t taken off my phone even though I haven’t used it in a few years. It’s an interactive video game about heartbreak. I just really appreciate the elements the designers built into the game. It feels more like art than an app. 

Plane or train?

I love trains. This is why I need to go back to New York more often, to take the trains. 

What is one place everyone should visit? 

If I told you, everyone would go there. OK. It’s in Big Sur, along the coast. It’s this inn built in 1937 that has no WiFi, no cell service, thin walls, possibly a ghost or multiple ghosts. I’m trying to make it an annual thing to visit there and just unplug. And I write a thing in the guest book every year. People take the guest book very seriously. But that’s the only place you’ll find those pieces, sorry. They’re not on the internet. 

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into. 

I recently wrote a story for WIRED about the insane number of fake accounts popping up on dating apps, Hinge in particular, that all culminated in a guy calling me on Telegram one Saturday night and saying over and over again, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” I love my job. But really, I do. (LG)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Lauren (LG)

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