discuss their first foray into the genre.
Seth Maxon: What was your previous romance-novel exposure going into
The Duke and I?
Advertisement
Madeline Ducharme: I’ve always
hated those cheesy covers of thick, cheap, paperback romance novels. Maybe it was my latent queerness, but something about the bulging muscles and sighing women in that corny art style just immediately turned me off. Stuff like this.
Maxon: I am little bit older than you, and also a straight man, and these sorts of covers did always make me laugh more than anything. I think a youth spent with Fabio as a ubiquitous romance-novel cover model and cultural joke as a dumb hunk who women nonetheless fantasized about forged my general impression of romance novels as fundamentally silly, if hot to some.
When Jon Ossoff won his runoff election last week, becoming the youngest senator-elect since Joe Biden way back in the 1970s, there was an immediate media clamor over his Twitter account, which, in classic millennial fashion, he was foolish enough to actually use. As Seth Maxon reported for Slate, Ossoff was on Twitter pestering Pitchfork about reviewing a new record by Imagine Dragons, boasting about reaching zero inbox, and, worst of all, sharing an anime version of
Les Mis. He also used it to follow @Dril, the semi-pseudonymous Twitter writer who, more than anyone else, embodies 21st century culture in all its demented, self-obsessed glory.