JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

A FRIEND of mine complains about how many of the men she meets on Tinder use corporate language to chat her up. First, they “reach out.” Then, after spending the night together, they “follow up.”

This kind of flirting is banal, but it makes sense. We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. Few people today refer to women as “damaged goods” or wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” but we have “friends with benefits” and “invest in relationships.” An ex may be “on” or “off the market.” Online dating makes “shopping around” explicit. Blog after blog strategizes about how to maximize your “return on investment” on OkCupid.

We use this kind of language because the ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.

When parents worry about how their 20-something kids are (or aren’t) pairing off, or the authors of trend pieces lament “the death of courtship,” they seem to forget that the pursuit of sex and romance didn’t remain unchanged from the moment when the first Homo sapiens sidled across the savanna toward his soul mate until Steve Jobs rolled out the iPhone.

Read it in the New York Times.

WHAT A COMFORT it is after an intense and contentious election to hear a musical that makes you want to give standing ovations to the idea of nationhood. The hairs on my arms rose, there were icy sparks down my backbone, and an irresistible force propelled me out of my seat to applaud this work. And I was all alone in my room.

Good luck getting tickets to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which apart from earning a MacArthur genius grant for its author has won a Pulitzer, a Grammy, Obie, and Drama Desk Awards, and is poised to win a truckload of Tonys. Hamilton has united two often opposing camps, the critics and the audience, with its rousing hip-hop treatment of American history. Until you manage to book your tickets, you’ll have to content yourself with listening to the original Broadway cast recording.

The subject of the play is Alexander Hamilton, the founding father who established the American financial system and is best known today as the face on the ten dollar bill. As a line from the show says: He doesn’t get enough credit for all the credit that he gave (them). I know little about American history, but I know who Hamilton is because I read a Justice League comic book in which he and his adversary Aaron Burr traveled through time and met Superman and company.

Continue reading The Binge, my column at BusinessWorld.

Listen to the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton at Spotify.

To recover from a very intense month I am going to my lovely dermatologist Dr Mary Anne Amon at Derma 360 in Rockwell (which is under renovation so I have to go to her clinic at Makati Med) to get my warts zapped. Afterwards I will look like a chocolate chip cookie so I’m taking myself out of human society and declaring quarantine in my library. My wonderful, cluttered, neglected but deeply comforting library. Where would I be without the consolations of literature? And the second season of Better Call Saul.

Are you glum, dispirited, boggled? Do you need to talk? Post your issues in Comments and let’s see what we can do.

So Hodor, everyone! Hodor! This convoluted parallel universe, we understand.

In episode 3, Bran has a vision of the Tower of Joy. Meaning we may be close to uncovering someone’s mysterious parentage. The Tower of Joy scenes are filmed at the Castillo de Zafra in Guadalajara. My keep.

Stray observations:

Jon Snow is lying on the table being washed, so it stands to reason that he should be naked. At least as naked as women frequently are on the show. But there was strategic cloth cover.

They forgot Rickon! This is like the time some people I know forgot their kid in the elevator, because they had their hands full with their two other kids.

Arya’s training proceeds apace. This season is going faster than the last two. I’ve had enough of seeing Arya suffer. Let her hit people.

Still waiting to see Uncle Blackfish gut Walder Frey.

Thom, get a haircut.

Their new album A Moon-Shaped Pool dropped yesterday. Critics call it A Haunting, Stunning Triumph.

The usual suspects, from left: Ambeth Ocampo (Rizal Without The Overcoat, Looking Back), Karina, Nestor Pagulayan, Tina Cuyugan (Forbidden Fruit), RayVi Sunico, Ige Ramos (who’s designed many of our books), me (Twisted).

Karina Bolasco, publisher, dear friend, and keeper of the flame of literature, retired last month after 35 years with Anvil Publishing and National Bookstore. Under her watch Anvil became the preeminent publisher of contemporary Filipino literature and writing on popular culture. My books could not have been published without Karina’s trust and guidance. Seriously, you look at my writing, who’s going to buy that? But Karina saw something in it and took a chance, and because of her I am a published author.

Tina and I organized dinner for Karina last week at Tapenade in Discovery Primea. We invited our regular dinner group and ate a ton of oysters. I expect this is the first of many appreciation dinners and lunches for the woman who invented our book publishing careers.