Dry Cleaning says this song is about how Brexit has interrupted romantic relationships, but if you went into it without context, you’d hear a nonsensical talk-sing crankily running through lines such as, “I spent £17 on mushrooms for you
‘Cause I’m silly” and “It’s seems like a lot of garlic.” It feels like the musical interpretation of a stranger oversharing on the subway. You miss that, right? Listen here to “Strong Feelings” and look out for the full album, New Long Leg, dropping April 2nd.

If you read anything today, make it this New Yorker article on the work it takes to moderate Ravelry, the knitting social network whose community began to — forgive me — unravel around the Trump era. Run by a queer married couple with a staff of five, it was a peaceful little website until the dawn of the pussy hat, which as it took off inspired pro-Trump patterns in retaliation (for every pink hat, a red). In light of political discourse on and off the site, the company banned all Trump content in 2019 (“We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy”)— but that paved the way for trolls to slam Ravelry, who in turn banned some right-wing knitters flat-out. That didn’t quite work out either. The company still doesn’t seem to have figured out how to just be a knitting platform that’s both safe and inclusive (what a string of words) but they are trying their — sorry — darndest to get there.

If a team of five can stick it out for a community of nine million knitters, you’d think the paper of record could handle an 80,000-person Facebook group. But will they? New York Times Cooking, one of the company’s most innovative and lucrative verticals, started a Facebook group years ago to build “community” around their recipes. Of course, with community comes bickering, particularly when you’re the New York Times and Donald Trump is president. People started fighting over whether members should be able to post political content, which posed a moderation dilemma a rung above the racist rhetoric around international recipes and MSG. Sam Sifton, the boss of the food operation, said the situation had become “a Times employee moderating comments for fb rather than working for the Times”— which is too bad, since you’d think that a person moderating comments for Facebook might be a crucial piece of work for the Times. Anyway, instead of, say, hiring staff to help the four people who’d been moderating, the Times is dropping the group entirely, removing company branding and handing it over to the community to self-regulate. That’s one way to do it.

Of course, at the crux of the ~moderation discourse~ is Substack, the company that now hosts this very content in addition to a growing number of publications by high-profile trolls, many of whom have been paid advances to polarize the masses in exchange for the revenue they kick back to $ubstack. Even as the company specifically recruits writers like “free speech advocate” Glenn Greenwald and transphobe Graham Lineham to publish on their site, they’re playing the typical social media line — “we’re just a platform!” — refusing to moderate their own content even when it borders on harassment. The lefties in the room 🙋‍♀️  are predictably disappointed, asking whether to leave or push for change from within. What would you do?