Feeling This: Sharing an Instapaper Account with Someone Close to You

Welcome to Feeling This, a Friday column about cool stuff site editor Chris Gayomali has been digging.

Like most good things in my life, this one was a complete accident. Back in 2012, I told my then-new girlfriend about an app I'd been using called Instapaper, which made it easy to save articles to read later by clicking a little bookmarking icon. At the time, these "Save It Later" apps were a revelation, a self-curated list of only the stuff you cared about.

Intrigued, she asked me to set it up on her iPhone 4 (the last great phone, honestly), but when I asked her what email she wanted to use for her login, she said, "Why don't you just enter yours for now?"

So I did, not thinking much of it. And thus our shared Instapaper account was born.

We both began saving stories without realizing that the same list of articles would populate across two devices. At the time, I was a wannabe writer (still am), so I'd save a ton of longform that I didn't have time to read at my day job (have you heard of a guy named... TA-NEHISI COATES?!?). She, on the other hand, was just starting out her career working for the city, and her media diet mostly consisted of stuff about climate change and urban planning.

Sharing a reading queue, in its own weird way, unearthed a new level of depth in our relationship. At the end of the day we'd frequently find ourselves discussing about what we read during our commutes, talking about stuff we otherwise wouldn't have had an entry point into—whether that was about whiteness in food culture or how Downtown Manhattan will be underwater by 2050. It was a side door into one another's curiosities, with none of the performance calculus—"you might like this!"—entering the equation.

A month or two later, I was burning through The Life and Death of Great American Cities, a perspective-reframing book that I might not have picked up otherwise.

We still keep it up today. Now that we're married, the main difference is GQ stories are overrepresented in our queue.

A Good Song

It really is criminal that The-Dream doesn't get more shine. The official music video for "Bedroom," one of the some 40 tracks on his last album, debuted on on Tidal last week. But since like three people not named Jay-Z are actual Tidal subscribers, here is the audio via YouTube.

What We're Reading

At the New York Times Magazine: What Happens to a Factory Town When the Factory Shuts Down?

Admittedly late on this, but Jay Kang also in the New York Times Magazine on certain members of the media's fascination with Pete Buttigieg's brainy side. The whole piece is terrific but this here is bars: "Gillibrand’s Mandarin can be written off as the résumé-building accomplishment of a striver, while [Buttigieg's] Norwegian, which has no practical value for an American president, is taken as a sign of intellectual curiosity and authenticity—the sort of whimsical surplus achievement that often upstages workaday accomplishments."

At BuzzFeed News, Rosie Gray wrote an unflinching profile of Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart writer who recently left the alt right.

At the Verge, how a compounding mix of greed and human error caused two Boeing 737 Max planes to crash and kill hundreds of passengers.

This is a bit old, but I enjoyed this Politico profile of Elizabeth Warren, former "diehard conservative."

ICYMI on GQ

Drew Magary made a clear-eyed case for banning certain Republican politicians from social media, and Elizabeth Spiers explained by Trump can get away with lying indiscriminately about abortion to his base. Alex Siquig wrote a barnburner ranking the best fighters left standing in Game of Thrones, and Cam Wolf asked why Sonic the Hedgehog's realism did not include him wearing pants. Really enjoyed this Q+A with the rapper Leikeli47 from Max Cea. We also hired Tom's mom to review a new indie movie everyone's talking about called Avengers: Endgame.

Also: Aaron Williams wrote a beautiful remembrance of John Singleton, who brought South Central to the world; Rachel Tashjian explained CAMP; and the homie Marian Bull shared her secret to getting super buff. Alex Pappademas did a hang with fellow Echo Park legend Mac Demarco, and Zach Baron talked to the stars of Rocketman about the Elton John songs that changed their lives. You can definitely feel the love tonight, it is where we are.

That's all for this week. Remember to moisturize and subscribe to geeeeeee cuuuueeee.