The Rise of the ‘Spit in My Mouth’ Meme, A Conversation with Filmmaker Gaspar Noé and How to Kick A… (2024)

If you care about your health, your cash flow and your sanity, don’t ever pick up a Juul, the trendy e-cigarette favored by high schoolers and MEL staffers everywhere. Just because it isn’t an actual cigarette yellowing up your teeth, stinking up your clothes and wheezing up your lungs, doesn’t make it not a filthy habit.

I didn’t need to read this Ian Lecklitner piece to learn that quitting the Juul is hard AF. But I’m glad I did, because it reinforces the fact that there’s no quick fix for a nicotine addiction. And that is the key to quitting.

All I want to say to a nicotine-free life is…

Must Read

“How ‘Spit in My Mouth’ Became the Internet’s Thirstiest Meme”
Ever since a GIF of a sex scene in Disobedience where Rachel Weisz deposits a load of saliva into Rachel McAdams’ gaping maw hit the internet, spitting in people’s mouths has reached full-on meme status. Rapper Meek Mill tweeted about it 👆; BuzzFeed put it in a headline; and there’s even a “Spit in My Mouth” musical on YouTube. While the act itself is nothing new — people have been doing the spit-swap in bed for years — what is new is the sudden cultural capital it’s gained, something kink coach and pro-Domme Hudsy Hawn to its increasing prevalence in p*rn. READ MORE

So Pho-King Good

From tit*-‘n’-wings purveyor Hooters to the delicious crabs you can get from Dirty Dick’s, Eddie Kim charts the new(ish) trend of restaurants with tongue-in-cheek names. A trend that has culminated in an entire generation of Vietnamese business owners getting in on the pun game.

Will the Real ‘Green Book’ Fans Please Stand Up?

Amidst an era when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has only begun to grapple with its #OscarsSoWhite problem, it’s peculiar that a milquetoast-y film about race like Green Book — a movie widely derided as made for (and by) white people — earned top honors at this year’s Oscars. But Miles Klee posits that blaming the Academy’s still overwhelmingly white, old and male membership would be a mistake.

Derby Dads

Are there any hobbies uber-competitive dads won’t ruin for their kids? Apparently not. Case in point: The Pinewood Derby, the annual race put on by the Boy Scouts of America featuring miniature wooden cars built (customarily) by young scouts. But recently, some hardcore Derby dads have supplanted their sons in an all-out effort to win — including spending hundreds on professionally engineered cars, and using CAD software to 3D-print their own.

The Dark Arts

Director Gaspar Noé is a specific type of filmmaker whose hyper-vivid, sexually explicit and sometimes feverishly violent movies are ones critics more often hate than love. But with his most recent film, Climax, Noé has done something truly rare: Create a risk-taking, groundbreaking cinematic provocation that just about everybody really likes.

Tim Grierson recently spoke with the infamous provocateur about drugs, death, sex and the future of film.

Paul Rudd, the Incredibly Ageless Man

It’s practically cliché these days to point out the fact that, rather strangely, Paul Rudd has not aged one single day since his star-turning effort in the 1990s suburban masterpiece, Clueless.

But, as BuzzFeed reminded us on Sunday, dude’s turning 50 in slightly over a month. So how does he do it? There are earthly reasons Rudd doesn’t seem to get old, but you might not like them.

Sleep Clothes

Lemme get this straight: It’s alright to sleep in pajama tops and bottoms, but sleep in jeans and a T-shirt and it’s a one-way ticket to side-eye city? Brian VanHooker investigated this unfortunate irony and found that, actually, there are some perfectly respectable reasons street clothes don’t double as sleep clothes.

TIL We’ve Been Drinking Coffee Wrong This Whole Time

Here’s a little bit of knowledge our good friends at McDonald’s and Starbucks would take care to internalize: There’s a vast difference between coffee’s ideal brew temperature (~200 degrees) and the ideal drinking temperature (~140 degrees). Thankfully, your tongue need not suffer unnecessarily — simply channel your inner child next time you order.

Juul Wanna Quit?

Count me among the many who’ve given up cigarettes only to find himself suckling from the poison teat of a different beast altogether: Juul, the Destructor, the Gatekeeper of Gozer.

What many of us believed was a pathway to quitting nicotine altogether is quite the opposite. So: How to quit? It won’t be easy, but Ian Lecklitner may have charted a way forward.