Adult TikTok users in the U.S. use the platform to follow pop culture and entertainment accounts much more than news and politics.
A new Pew Research Center analysis of the accounts Americans follow on TikTok highlights the centrality of internet-native content creators, prominent influencers and traditional celebrities on the popular short-form video platform.
It also finds that users choose to follow far more accounts that post about pop culture and entertainment than those posting about news or politics.
To conduct this analysis, we surveyed a nationally representative group of U.S. adults who gave us access to their TikTok handles and identified all the accounts those users follow. We then categorized all of those followed accounts based on who they are and what sorts of things they tend to post about. These are some of the main findings…”
James Salter wrote sumptuous descriptions of meals, houses, and ejaculations. But his greatest subject was failure... more »
Perhaps the most important is “constitutive luck”, which covers all the fortunate or unfortunate circumstances of your very existence; the period of history in which you were born, your parents, background, genes and character traits. - The Guardian
Where I write . . . Mariana Enríque
Where I write . . . Mariana Enríquez channels the spirits of Capote and Dali on the Costa Brava
A haunted house on the Catalan coast inspires the Argentine author in mysterious ways
The only place where I can write — headphones on, in complete surrender to the words — is at home in Buenos Aires. I can’t write when I travel, and I rarely apply for creative retreats or writing programs that ask you to stay at a campus or a castle; I don’t crave a year-long residency in a great city or a remote cabin. It just doesn’t work for me: I tried it once or twice and was just distracted or bored, or both. I needed my books, my mess — piles of papers, the picture of a young Keith Richards staring at me, the old piles of CDs that I can’t throw away for sentimental reasons — my moka pot, my non-view to my small patio.
Many writers who stay here see ghosts. I spent nights walking the empty house in the dark, taking pictures. Nothing, not even an orb
So I was reluctant to say yes to an invite to Casa Sanià, near Palamós, on the Costa Brava. Of course the offer was marvellous, as these invitations tend to be, and an absolute privilege for a writer. In fact, it can sometimes feel difficult to say “no” when asked — it’s such a generous thing, and it feels like you have to take it before such things all fade away. The pitch for the house was great. Truman Capote wrote parts of In Cold Blood there; he was basically waiting for the execution of Perry and Dick, so the stay in this paradise was surely punctuated by tragedy, darkness, and guilt. (Once, apparently, there was a fire in the woods around the house, and Capote escaped with the manuscript — he was found by the firefighters shaking and holding the papers.) Nearby is a small cabin, built for Salvador Dali. Today, it’s empty and spooky, but you can tell it was made for the artist because the door is almost transversal. Thirteen kilometres away is Llafranc, where Thom Sharpe lived for 18 years, and around 16km is Romanya de la Selva, where the most important writer in Catalán, Mercé Rodoreda, spent her last years. Of course, none of this helps anyone to write. Not even the house itself, with its modest yet somehow obvious beauty, standing alone near the edge of a cliff, the Mediterranean in full view. Nor the gardens, with their flowers and scented herbs; the cooks that make delicious meals; the chickens that wake you up at the crack of dawn; the dog that prances around; the owls that hoot outside the windows at night. The air at Sanià feels transparent, due in part to the relentless Tramontane wind — it sweeps away everything but also makes you crazy, as any wind that has a name will do. And there’s mica everywhere in the rocks, shining silver, so when the sun is setting the world becomes haunted by glitter. I soon discovered that this beauty can be a distraction: why sit in a room working while the sky looks so heavenly?
When I arrived at the retreat, I thought, “OK, if it doesn’t work then at least I will rest properly and get to walk around under this glorious sun.” I took time to get to know my fellow guests, who were all smart, interesting people. My hopes for being able to write were not high. But then it happened. After a few days, things started to move in my head. Many writers who stay in this house feel or see ghosts. I didn’t feel a thing. But I spent nights walking the empty house in the dark, taking pictures and then looking at them in the morning. Nothing, not even an orb. But it became a ritual.
And then: pages and pages. A story far away from the protected woods, in a rundown city. Young people, the 1990s, fanzines and cheap beer. The never-ending economic crisis of Argentina. The fear, the lack of future. The heat of my city in the summer — nothing like the breezy Costa Brava. The house and the sea and the cliffs didn’t interfere with the darkness and the anxiety I was writing about — in fact, I came to love the contrast. I started to call the house “home”. If we went for a beer on Cap Roig, it was coming back “home”. Scheduling a phone call was “I’ll be home”. Dinners listening to sad songs were evenings at “home”. And I can write when I’m home.
Now that I’m back in my usual city, I still haven’t continued to work on what I wrote there. I’m waiting for the right moment to open that file and meet the world that came to me while I was in Sanià, in the middle of the night, silence all around except for the sea and the nocturnal birds. I will always miss the house. And I will never understand its mystery.
Mariana Enríquez’s latest book is ‘A Sunny Place for Shady People’, translated by Megan McDowell (Granta)
