Happy Thursday! We have a gorgeous little Lore Drop today featuring the wonderful Nadira Goffe.

In case you forgot, Lore Drop is an interview series from Yap Year asking culture writers and makers about the formative interests and experiences that have led them to where they are today. Subscribe to the Yapper tier so you don’t miss it. 

Slate’s Nadira Goffe

Nadira Goffe is a staff writer at Slate. You may know her from her sharp takes on the latest Netflix hit or her on-the-ground coverage at the Diddy trial. Nadira is also a regular presence on our RSS feeds, yapping on podcasts like ICYMI and Normal Gossip.

As a pop culture writer, Nadira naturally has a lot of interests. Read on to see which ones have influenced her.

Everything’s Coming Up JONAS

I was a massive fan of the early 2000s era of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon programming — your That’s So Ravens and Drake & Joshes, if you will — but if there's one thing you need to know about what I know, it’s that I’ve borne witness to the entirety of the Jonas Brothers’ career. From the first time I heard them sing “Year 3000” on TV to now, as they’re low-key being “canceled” one-by-one, I was there. (Joe, I’mma stick beside him…)

Being a Jonatic included not only listening to the music and seeing the three curly-headed Jersey Boys in concert, but also following their funny era on YouTube, when they would post silly videos and memes that they still reference today. The Jonas Brothers are the only topic that has ever inspired me to write fanfic, which I did on YouTube under the pen name Ndira124 when I was a tween, using the now-defunct video editing software OneTrueMedia. (Fanfiction on YouTube sounds wild and it was, which is something Candice Lim noted in her own Lore Drop when she mentioned the Jonas Sister genre of fanfic. Unfortunately, I have no lasting evidence of my earliest work in the written word.) 

And then, there was also the added tension of the brothers being at the center of the larger web of Disney celebrity drama that defined zillennial teendom. From Joe and Demi Lovato’s long-standing will-they-won’t-they, to Nick falling in love for the first time with Miley Cyrus and then with Selena Gomez, and all of the easter eggs in their art referencing these shifting tectonic plates. I followed the spectacle like a vampire that hasn’t fed on human blood in 15 lifetimes.

While it may seem silly, my youth as a Jonas stan fed my love of music, inspired my first attempts at writing for an audience, fostered my never-ending goal to make sense of emerging teen phenomena, and helped build my insatiable appetite for good celebrity drama (especially if it comes in the form of a very tangled web of A-lister mess). Luckily for me, I get to use all of these in my day job. 

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