Many Such Takes: Morning Routine, Sabrina Carpenter, Harry Sisson, Abundance

The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free

Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to. If you see yourself featured here and you don’t like it, simply send me a Substack message and I will happily remove, no matter who you are or what you said.

For previous issues of Many Such Takes, see this tab on my main page.

Morning Routine

This week, a morning routine video went viral on Twitter, but unlike other “hustle culture productivity biohack bro” videos, people were struck by how this guy woke up at 3:53 AM and did literally fuck all for two hours.

Other people noticed the video was product placement for Saratoga still water, which he drinks repeatedly throughout the video. At one point he even dunks his face in it, and stages breaking a different bottle to show how sturdy the Saratoga bottles are.

People also noticed that the job he began at 9 AM looked suspiciously fake, with a clip of him on the phone saying “We got to go ahead and get it to at least 10,000.” Look, as I wrote about before, bullshit jobs are still work!

Most importantly, a bunch of people missed the subtle “rubbing a banana peel on my face” moment at 8:45 AM. What does he know about banana peels that we don’t?

Sabrina Carpenter

Sabrina Carpenter pantomiming an Eiffel Tower MMF threesome sex position at her Paris concert (get it? Paris) sparked controversy all over Twitter this week.

Some people felt that she was degrading herself by simulating a sex act that’s demeaning to women, others insisted women do, in fact, enjoy the Eiffel Tower, and others yet just said, “Think of the children!” The majority opinion (which I hold) was that it was too goofy to be a concern, especially for a teenage and young adult audience.

Some people argued over the physics of an Eiffel Tower and whether there was an escape route:

I censored usernames since the content is slightly sensitive, but, Person A:

Person B:

Person A:

Person C:

I’m 35 and AFRAID of penises:

*Trump voice* you’re telling me this now for the first time

Anyway, if you want my take on the whole thing, I wrote a full article which you can see below, based on the fact that Sabrina was maligned as “lying” to women about such a sex act being empowering, when in fact, she never talked about empowerment:

Harry Sisson

One thing I’m noticing about Gen Z sex scandals (speaking broadly of course) is that the always require a very lengthy explanation of what happened, because what actually happened isn’t bad enough to fit in an elevator pitch. Like, if you had to explain why Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein was bad in thirty seconds, you could probably do that very easily. You may even be able to do it with one particular word!

But this week, liberal influencer Harry Sisson (who I’m discovering many people thought was gay?) was “exposed” for texting multiple women at once and implying exclusivity in order to obtain nudes. The exposition came from conservative pundit Sarah Fields, who apparently has preexisting beef with Sisson (unrelated to nudes.) Another girl released a nine-minute video full of printed texts to explain that Harry’s depravity goes much deeper than that, but to be honest, I got about four minutes into the video (which uses the term “grapist”) without any idea of what was going on (I think he allegedly was on a Discord with someone who might have been a groomer of some sort? Confusing.)

Basically, imagine if Andrew Huberman just got lots of nudes from women but never actually had sex with them. Not fantastic behavior, but most of us agreed that it wasn’t a true MeToo moment. Can a guy not be a horny cad now and again?

One thing I find particularly dishonest was the framing of one of Harry’s “victims” as a DV survivor, including texts about the DV she experienced at the hands of someone else. When I first perused the thread, I didn’t read everything and I mistook those texts to be about Harry, which was probably the intended outcome for Fields. Not great to lead anyone on, DV survivor not, but this salacious detail was intended to confuse.

On the bright side, we all have a new reaction image:

Also, new Twitter inside joke just dropped. Talk about rizz (ngl this would work on me?? Am I broken?)

Anyway, I didn’t write about this in detail but I did do a free Trump impression about it. The great writer

Magdalene J. Taylor

wrote about our culture of sexual surveillance and how it relates to this “scandal.” Give it a read! Personally, I find it worrying that our current generation’s sex scandals don’t actually involve sex.

And now, a good take from

Ben Dreyfuss

of

Calm Down

(can a man in his late thirties even consent to receive nudes, or is that elder abuse?)

Abundance

I’m a huge fan of both

Ezra Klein

and

David Shor

so naturally I was thrilled when I got the crossover episode of my life: David Shor on the Ezra Klein show, going through some nerdy but fascinating data about the electorate and strategies for the Democratic party! You can catch the episode here. The launch of this episode coincides with Abundance-mania, where people are apparently people are waiting outside bookstores to buy Ezra Klein’s new book:

I’ll be honest, I haven’t read Abundance yet, but I plan to buy it for my long-haul flight in a week. But whatever, I like it already. Who doesn’t like abundance? I like when things are nice and abundant. It makes me feel happy. Consider me a convert.

Some surprising allegiances came out: progressive liberal Will Stancil (who I interviewed) is apparently not in favor of Abundance, while Cassie Pritchard, the socialist woman best known for insisting there would be no bananas under a socialist degrowth utopia, is in favor. To be fair, Cassie has repeatedly shown herself to align with practical liberal ideas if they make sense, despite being a socialist herself. One of the more goal-oriented leftists on Twitter, and a fun follow too.

And I didn’t think liberals did the whole infighting thing! Oh well. I can’t say anything else until I’ve actually, you know, read the book.

CHH Love of the Week

I’m a massive narcissist, so I want to highlight some great reviews of my Substack from some of my subscribers. If you’re on the fence about becoming a paid or free subscriber, let them convince you! Paid subscribers get paid content 4x a week, while free subscribers get Many Such Takes every week, plus one paywalled post will become free every Saturday. Here’s a collection of my other free posts.

Funny Tweets/Other Happenings

• Perhaps you’re familiar with the phrase “ACAB” (all cops are bastards.) Every day I’m learning about new people who count as cops. This week, we’re doing teachers:

(Username censored because I don’t want to inadvertently be a cop.) Anyway, this was the person’s explanation.

In case you missed it…