On My Soft Machine, Arlo Parks juxtaposes sharp emotional truths with super palatable production, which I find super poetic — this 22-year-old Brit has moved to LA to pursue pop-stardom, and here she is serving classic Gen-Z candor, mitigated by a stiff upper lip. On “Impurities,” that contrast builds a foundation for more opposites in lines like, “When you embrace all my impurities / And I feel clean again.” I love how succinctly she opens up possibility: Is dirt clean? Is bad good? Is vulnerability strength? Consider all of that here.

You like opposites? Let’s talk hair, my big preoccupation at present. Really. I went to this. I witnessed this in person (lol). Most importantly, I helped make this.

The last “this,” for those of you who can’t be bothered to click links, is an episode of Articles of Interest, the wonderful fashion podcast by my pal Avery Trufelman, where we explore why we don’t make textiles out of human hair.

There is a reason for this inquiry, I promise. A while back, I texted Avery a link about this company trying to make sweaters and stuff out of people’s hair, and we were both struck by how absolutely repulsive we found that idea. But also.. why? We love hair when it’s on someone’s head. We want to touch it and style it and toss it around. The second it hits the drain, though? Disgusting. Also, why are we cool with wearing other animals’ hair and not our own? Has it always been this way?

What we found on our way to answering those questions was actually a new way to think about wool, so if you were over there thinking this was all esoteric and irrelevant, think again! And listen here.

RELATED: Amanda Mull in The Atlantic on why you can’t get a good sweater these days. The reasons are many, and can be summed up this way: we don’t really bother with wool any more.

Instead of simply knitting clothes out of natural fibers, we lean on synthetics now because they’re cheaper, in more ways than unit price. “They can be spun up in astronomical quantities to meet the sudden whims of clothing manufacturers—there’s no waiting for whole flocks of sheep to get fluffy enough to hand shear,” Mull writes. That convenience makes up for the gap in quality, evidently: despite the fact that synthetics pill instead of doing any of the great stuff that wool does (see: holding a shape; retaining warmth without overheating; wicking moisture), everyone uses them, from Zara right on up to Gucci. That’s pretty fucked up, so why don’t we just opt out and make things from our own hair? RIGHT?