- Look, this would be a better story if the pillows were good. That would be complicated, and maybe confronting such an inconvenient truth would yield some kind of worthwhile insight about the nature of man and how we can tolerate evil in exchange for comfort. I don’t know if it comes through, but that’s sort of what I’m going for here, generally, in my work as Washington correspondent for New York Magazine. I take no pleasure at all in reporting that these pillows are just as bad as you would assume they are.
My father-in-law has a MyPillow. He bought my wife a MyPillow. He didn't buy me one. That's A-OK.
My wife tolerates her MyPillow. She's mentioned lately that she should probably burn it, considering, but despaired when my last voyage to Bed Bath & Beyond revealed that they're swirling the bankruptcy bowl and have gotten rid of things like... housewares. It's kind of an As-Seen-on-TV store with coupons now. When I told her that BB&B was no longer carrying MyPillow she asked what other pillows they carried. "I didn't see any," I said. Thus, she continues to sleep on a MyPillow.
The principle advantage of the MyPillow is I don't take it and fold it in half when she's not around to take a nap on. The arrival of the MyPillow mostly served to encourage my wife to tell me to leave her fucking pillow alone. She's a spectacular woman with exceedingly simple needs so I don't so much as touch her pillow anymore. The principal advantage, as far as she's concerned, is that it doesn't have a crease in the middle.
I would say that a MyPillow is basically a Tempurpedic pillow run through a wood chipper and stuffed in a cotton bag. This means it is lighter, lumpier and breathes just as shittily as a Tempurpedic pillow. A Tempurpedic pillow, on the other hand, becomes the sweaty thigh of your least favorite aunt in the summer and a wet bag of sand in the winter so running one through a chipper is, I suppose, innovative.
I have a wood-chipper pillow. I like it. Mine is "Coop Home Goods" brand and I got it on Amazon years ago. It took me several tries to get a pillow I liked because Amazon's search optimization steered me toward a lot of junk. Better customer unfriendly searches and worker abuse than supporting fascism, though.
I have quite a large number of US colleagues and enjoy visiting the states (pre-covid) regularly. Watching from a distance what is happening is really painful, and the distance means that I only get ~1% of the experience so its pretty difficult to get a sense for what its like 'on the ground'. I don't pretend to understand any of it. I could not comprehend how any country could entertain the idea of electing Trump, let alone elect him AFTER the details that emerged during his campaign. I still cannot comprehend how he got 75M odd votes to come within a hairs breath of a second term given the daily shit show he ran. I have met people in my own country who praise him and even though they have zero skin in the game (he is not our shit-show to deal with). I've had long discussions with them to try and understand what the fuck is wrong with them, what is preventing them from seeing what is so CLEARLY obvious to me and most other people in terms of his shortcomings as a person let alone a world leader. The QANON shit, its the same thing, I don't get it. People I work with revealing a considerable lack of reasoning ability, following some dogshit conspiracy theory down a rabbit hole, and being so sure about it that they post it on social media. And its spreading, I've no doubt of that. The rest of the world absorbs quite a bit of American culture by osmosis, much of it good or at least neutral, but you can sense that the Atlantic wont be enough to hold back the crazy virus kicking off here in some shape. The biggest revelation for me over the last 5+ years is, while most people are good, kind and reasonable if given a chance they can also be led astray very easily, and some significant % of the population were fucking nuts all along.