That One Thing Everyone's Talking About.
Plus: Gatekeeping drugs? Self-imposed deadlines, or not! In the immortal words of Elton John: Saturday! Saturday. Saturday?
It’s Saturday, June 15th, 2024.
It’s the fourth [issue of] Summer Friday of the year, 11 to go until Labor Day.
Donna Summer’s “Heaven Knows” is on the radio.
The 77th Annual Tony Awards are on Sunday night. Sufjan Stevens will battle Alicia Keys for Best New Musical, and Stereophonic — a play about a Fleetwood Mac-esque band' as they make a new record — is the most nominated new play in Tony history.1
A great weekend for sports: In baseball, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox start their first 2024 series in Boston. In soccer, there’s the Euro 2024 (the UEFA European Championship). And in the WNBA, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese face off again when the Indiana Fever play the Chicago Sky on Sunday.
Finally, around the world today, the weather: New York City: 83/66, partly cloudy • Cannes: 75/61, partly cloudy • Positano: 74/67, mostly clear • The Hague: 64/53, cloudy • Cavtat: 74/64, clea—
—hang on, wait, I know what you’re thinking: Summer Fridays, on a Saturday? Quelle horreur! It’s true, and it’s okay: We’re not trying to abdicate the laws of quantum physics as much as remind you that the Summer Friday is, above all, a state of mind. Forget what you’ve heard, the death of the Summer Friday has been greatly exaggerated. As a real Boy of Summer once put it: Blessed are the vibeless, for they shall inherit a literalist interpretation of the seven day week. Let’s go, we’ll keep this one short.
What Are We Gatekeeping Now?
PLACES TO SCORE ADDERALL. This summer, look around — anyone seem, say, a few cards short of a deck, lately? Anyone with a little less je ne sais quoi, and a little more je ne sais HANH? Such is The 2024 Adderall Shortage.
It’s far from the first. They’ve been happening on and off every year since 2011 — when I reported on the very first adderall shortage.2 The reason you hear about them more regularly is because — like Ozempic — so, so many people you know are secretly on it. But the shortage on its own doesn’t constitute gatekeeping. What does? Knowing where to score, and selling the spots.
Before we get there, some table stakes: The drug’s more popular than ever and not enough of it’s made, but for a sense of the supply/demand dynamic at scale, here, the market for ADHD drugs is projected to be worth $45 billion by 2027. Plenty of blame gets passed around as to who’s actually at fault for the shortage, but the better question is how Adderall keeps exploding in popularity, for which there’s a pretty clear, obvious answer: Humans were meant to be on amphetamines in the first place, like I was meant to keep writing this sentence, because there’s a bigger point here, and actually why am I writing this when I’ve got a 2,000-word semi-satire about the thing about Tavi and Taylor that’s actually about our quasiparasocial no, just kidding. It’s the Telehealth Dealers. They’re the problem.
Believe it or not, kids, there was once a time when you actually had to truck it to the Upper East Side to drop in on Dr. Goldschmuck (as he was in my phone) and caterwaul enough to annoy him into handing you a piece of paper with which to score Adderall, usually only after you were first forced to dignify prescriptions for Vyvanse, Ritalin, and Concerta3. Given the situation all these years later, this feels like explaining Internet Cafes to a bonobo (on meth): Anyone can sign up for a telehealth service, many of which are set up to function as patient mills, playing a numbers game, churning through patients, pumping out scrips.
What you end up with is a legal amphetamine dealing operation at scale. But really. One of those aforementioned telehealth pushers, Done, is soon to realize its potential as an all-timer aptonym: Their CEO was just arrested by the Justice Department on charges relating to a “a $100 million scheme…to provide easy access to Adderall and other stimulants for no legitimate medical purpose.”
Remember, you gotta really fuck up to be arrested as a chief executive around these parts. If you’re looking for an obvious this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things reason for the shortage, there it is. It got so bad last year, I know people Brooklynites who hit drugstores in Yonkers to get their fix. Meanwhile, blessed are those who actually need adderall, may they soon to return to Aunt Dexie’s warm, speedy embrace.
Back to 2011: Using company time to report on that first shortage, I attempted to create a real-time map of NYC drugstores at which you could score. Despite my editors and I disagreeing on just how altruistic (and “undeniably legal…I think”) a stripe of service journalism this was, I somehow still get emails from randos asking me where they can get Adderall.
So, where’s the gatekeeping in all of this? Thirteen years later, in the form of a service that did a capitalism on my pure and beautiful attempt at charity, which gets people to fork over $50 for a bunch of underpaid Filipino workers who call around to pharmacies for Adderall until they find some for you to buy. It’s called Insito Health.
It’s not foolproof: For one thing, there’s still a shortage. For another, plenty of pharmacies won’t tell callers what they do or don’t have in stock, and others simply won’t fill for you if you’re not a longtime customer (always patronize your local, independent pharmacy, folks). But the reviews, per 404 Media, are pretty good. The lesson here is that friends….tell friends…where to buy their legal speed…for free? But mostly, probably, just that there’s always good money to be made in the shortcut business.
PREVIOUSLY, IN GATEKEEPING: CitiBikes, Secret Strategist.
A Perfect Piece of Summer Wisdom
“Time isn’t real and neither is a self-imposed deadline.”
- Liz Lenkinski, unhingement specialist, giving me permission to send this on a Saturday afternoon, who also coined the term “unwellness culture” after trying the Ehrewon Sunscreen Smoothie and living to tell the tale. Now there’s something you should read.
Sex
Is this the Summer of Threesomes? A horny New York Post wants to know. (Via Carly.)
Related: Everyone can rest easy. The New York Post — America’s horniest newspaper — is reporting, to our great relief, that the Olympians will, in fact, be able to bang on the anti-banging beds.
Conversation Pits (or: That One Thing, Explained)
WHAT IS IT? That one essay on GQ.com published last week by a quasi-famous very online person, who wants to be friends with a semi-famous person, that People On The Internet are talking about.
WHAT IS IT? A lengthy tale of aspirant fame and friendship…that reads like something between Portnoy’s Complaint meets the Unibomber’s Manifesto, as typed into a Notes app by someone who actually has (and has eaten) all the Adderall. While standing in the checkout line at Glossier. And also, yelling at their therapist.
WHAT ARE PEOPLE SAYING? “reads like a bottom tier alt lit bitch’s rejected submission to thought catalog.” “welcome back blog-based performance art.” “such a specific in-joke that to the uninformed reader, it's just a manic wash of words.” “an obvious troll…the problem with your editor thinking you’re cool.” And: “this genre of essay is one of the few forms of affirmative action left open to white people.”
WAIT: WHO? Well, Annie Hamilton, its author, is a part-time actor playing a full-time downtown character, or vice-versa. Nobody’s really sure. [Much like the plot of Tenet, if you dwell on this point too much, you’ll turn into an anthropomorphized bong rip.] She clearly knows a good opportunity for a pratfall when she sees one. Meanwhile: Tavi Gevinson is the former teen publishing wunderkind (who has acted, on Broadway), and most recently published a zine about Taylor Swift, which The Cut called “genius.”
WHY DOES ANYONE CARE? Because the essay, taken at face value is — while occasionally funny! — patently unhinged, and reads either as intentionally poorly written, or as something ostensibly poorly written (but actually). And because GQ decided to publish it. As such, the essay is serving as a kind of cultural Rorschach Test, in which people either get the joke — that it’s a “meta prank” — or they don’t; in which they either Get Mad At Things On The Internet, or they’re in on things.
SO….WHAT’S THE JOKE? The part you should care about the least: It might be about Tavi and her zine; or it might be about a certain kind of aspirant person' thirsting for proximity to fame; or it might be about online publishing, or about you, the reader. If you want to like it, you could argue that GQ publishing something as attention-grabbing as this is a brilliant move. If you want to hate it, you could say that GQ’s doing their best impression of The Cut, as satire, or not — i.e. publishing something engineered for provocation — and failing.
OKAY, BUT WHAT DO YOU THINK? Who cares? That’s the point, this is the editorial equivalent of the monster from Nope: If you look at it in the eyes, it eats you. I’ve got an idea who the culprit behind all this might be over at GQ, I can see the strings here, and the touch of a professional, and the floating of a Can we be The Cut and do Cut-like things? question.
As an editor, you wanna publish things that meet two standards: Those which are good, and those which are read. Ideally, both. They wouldn’t run something they actively believed was bad. That said: You know that Vonnegut line from “Mother Night,” about being careful about what we pretend to be? Right. While I genuinely have no idea who they think this is for, or if this is a sincere attempt at “expanding” the audience, and the execution does nothing for me, I admire the moxie behind trying. It’s fine, so long as everyone involved is demonstrably compos mentis. Big if. But ultimately, they’re doing, as James likes to say, a Whole Thing.
SO: DO I NEED TO READ IT? This puts the “I” in "optional,” as in, “I nor Christ can help you if you do, though if you do, you probably need more of at least one of us in your life.” Read about the Sudanese refugee crisis, or, like, the thing about the CitiBikes. Again: This newsletter is free. Please don’t let my sacrifice live in vain.
Travel
American Airlines flight attendants are about to strike, because at a base of ~$27K, they can’t afford food or shelter. Reddit found the letter they give to new flight attendants in big cities in lieu of a proof of income statement, effectively saying as much. One commenter put it into perspective: Your average McDonald’s worker in a large city makes more than they do.
Public Service Announcement: If you have a Chase card, today (Saturday) is the last day you can transfer Chase to Virgin points with a 20% bonus. I once flew Virgin First Class from Delhi to London for, like, 50K points. It was great, got off the plane half-drunk perfumed by champagne and teeming with Jaipur’s finest rabies vaccine, hopped the Elizabeth straight to Kettner’s, checked in, wobbled right over to J. Sheeky, and pounded my first great martini in eleven days and a monkey bite. Honestly, a perfect day of travel.
Adventures in the changing definition of “Peak Season” continue apace: Imagine traveling to Greece, and waiting your entire life to see the Acropolis, only to have them close it because of record heat, which is what happened this week (twice).
And that’s it for this week! A short one, I know, but given that most of you are on a beautiful beach right now, somewhere, working on that second base layer tan: I’d rather you not look at your phone too long. Get that sun, and stay hydrated, you know the drill: The night is on the way. Next week, a guide to taking steroids, the Summer Fridays travel survey results, and so, so much more. Finally, congratulations to a very special branch of the SUMMER FRIDAYS family — if you see any of them, you know what to do: buy them a drink with an umbrella in it, and be etched into the Book of Vibes forever.
As ever,
-f.
Fun FOSTERTALK trivia: Technically, a Tony Winner. After I decided not to be a CAA agent, I ended up working as an assistant producer of Pulitzer Prize-winning play August: Osage County when it took home the 2008 Tony for Best Play. I also worked on Mamet’s November and the last Pinter play on Broadway while he was alive, The Homecoming. I quit and took my first job in media shortly after the lead producer, my boss, tried casting Lindsay Lohan in Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow and before he (famously, hilariously, disastrously) actually cast Jeremy Piven in it. But the most interesting bit here is who I worked for, and: Just control-F this story with the words “relatively intense.”
Which was only — perhaps, incidentally — one year after I reported on the Montrose stop’s version of the Falklands War, the Four Loko Rebellion.
Respectfully, the Don Jr., Eric, and Baron of pharmaceutical tweak. If only they made a drug that could obliterate memories of watching a college roommate disassemble Concerta, a drug one academic paper falsely argued is impossible to break apart and snort. Get around the world enough, and a fundamentally hilarious and fucked up truth and testament to human ingenuity will emerge: Pretty much anything can (and will) be snorted. I assure you, somewhere, there’s a piece of parchment with Dead Sea Scroll residue on it.
FOSTER! Send your newsletter whenever you want — time isn’t real and enabling is my passion. Thanks so much for the shoutout !! I just read this at the beach so more summer wisdom imminent. 🌞
OMG, sentence of the month:
"One of those aforementioned telehealth pushers, Done, is soon to realize its potential as an all-timer aptonym: Their CEO was just arrested by the Justice Department on charges relating to a “a $100 million scheme…to provide easy access to Adderall and other stimulants for no legitimate medical purpose.”