Notable Humans

Four Notable Human Beings This Week

The week of October 4–8, 2021.

We are starting a new weekly feature here at the Will Leitch Medium Experiment. It is a look back at the events of the week by focusing on five human beings of particular note. It will hopefully be informative and amusing but will likely be neither. Think of it as the Mount Rushmore of this week, if they carved statues on mountains every week, based on short observations on the news.

Dawn Dorland. The “Bad Art Friend” from Robert Kolker’s mesmerizing New York Times Magazine piece dominated the week, and we will confess, it feels like a sign of progress that we’ve freed up enough emotional cache from 18 months of battling the worst public health crisis of the last 100 years as well as forces attempting to dismantle the American democratic project to have mental space to care about crazy literary people and the seemingly endless amount of down time they have to full with pointless, self-aggrandizing bullshit. Everyone took their sides in the battle between the kidney-donating, desperately thirsty, profoundly, excruciatingly alone Dorland and the slightly (but only slightly?) more successful writer Sonya Larson…