Leather and lasagna

The most scintillating feature of Google Maps is the fact that you can review practically everything: not just the standard fodder like restaurants and museums, but infrastructure, public toilets or geographic features. A personal favorite, now discontinued, was the option to review entire countries and continents.

Despite the inability to scroll through pages of witty repartee and vacation-centric complaints about the entirety of Italy or Canada, I’ve still found entertainment in the infinite scroll through reviews of smaller, non-sovereign entities. This isn’t a cloutified platform like Yelp where writing more and gaining name recognition counts and can earn you “elite” status. (You can be anointed a “local guide”, it’s a responsibility-without-glory, à la editing Wikipedia.)

The trick is to look beyond the obvious (trendy eateries that invite down-the-line reviews like “saw it on Thrillist, not as good as I hoped”) in favor of places that invite a wider range of experiences. Iconic tourist attractions can be fun for the pure delusion of the negative reviews, but my go-to has been nightclubs in Berlin, where I live.

The sensory overload of Berlin nightlife is an environment ripe for engaging Google reviews. While cringey to admit, the clichéd descriptions of Berlin clubs skew true: there’s generally a lot of drugs, sex, and people who haven’t slept for over 24 hours. Plus, the many party tourists in the city go into these spaces with certain expectations (usually based around those clichés). No Berlin club invites greater expectations than Berghain, mythologized for everything from its sound system to its selective door policy and no-photos rule (though, the latter two elements are common policy across many Berlin venues).

There’s a certain irony in writing online reviews for Berghain, as a space where the (unwritten) ethos is that you should be present and not immersed in the digital world–plus, but for those who haven’t visited, it’s a way to get at least a hint of the club’s interior; an imperfect circumvention of the photography ban.

For drama and entertainment, I go directly to the bad reviews. These are mostly people who never made it past the bouncers, but the real juicy material is the one-star ratings from those who went in. There’s poetic descriptions of the drug-addled fatigue-dumpster crowd, someone bothered that you can’t bring in hot food (did they show up with a curry or a lasagne?), or the mystifying declaration that Berghain is not a place for people who like making “gun fingers” while they dance.

Filling the gap between the box office and the ballot box

Pop culture has always been the nexus between society’s image and reality, from the most lowbrow Bravo series all the way up to the Oscars shortlist. But despite its status as the ultimate temp check, entertainment’s impact on social movements is constantly undervalued by traditional media outlets.

That’s not the case at Impact Delivered. Every week, the BIPOC, queer-led newsletter discusses the week’s top cultural conversations from a social justice perspective. What does Taylor Swift’s relationship with Matt Healy say about performative activism? How is Hollywood’s nostalgia economy lulling us into a MAGA mentality? These are the questions Impact Delivered attempts to answer, alongside a slate of the week’s top news & social campaigns.

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