Curry Barker’s 109-minute, $750,000 trauma thriller follows Bear (Michael Johnston), a boring young man who makes a wish (accidentally, through way of branded stick toy) that his work crush, Nikki (Inde Navarrette), will “love him more than anyone else in the entire world.” What I found attractive about Obsession is that it actually has its moments where it resembles a good horror movie. Though the film has all of the narrative engine power of an episode of SpongeBob or The Regular Show, a classic be careful what you wish for/phrase your one wish correctly tale, it is successful enough to elicit dread consistently.

When I made up my mind about Obsession a few days later, I landed on 2.5/5 stars. Continuing to stew over the month, I think it hurt my ego that I might’ve been intellectually bested by #bitchesbelike the movie. It hurt more when I had to read infographics about how it passed Sinners at the box office. It drove me over the edge to hear the words “Oscar” and “buzz” for a movie that I was beginning to suspect was just below okay.

Maybe Obsession is so seductive because it picks up one of the hottest cultural topics right now, abuse in straight dating and relationships! The movie fails to get its hands dirty, though, demonstrated by how flat the scare mechanisms are and how much the film relies on Nikki’s humiliations and abuses of Bear to disturb.

So much of the movie is shocked, static faces from Bear and blank stares from partygoers with all the agency of dormant Sims, bearing witness react-video-style to Nikki acting out. I’m all for extended metaphor about the isolation of an abusive relationship, but in its lo-fi, haze, and preoccupation with its protagonist, Obsession isn’t exact enough for a coherent narrative about its subject matter to make it out alive.

Is it about love and mutual abuse? Is it about how we should say how we feel, lest our projections turn us evil? Is it about an evil man who creates a sex bot that (accidentally) turns evil as a result?1 I think I could respect a movie where the answer to all of these questions was yes, but what’s surprising about Obsession is you can’t make the case, fully, for any of these readings. Every allegory is there but not quite. Every metaphor contradicts itself later. Nikki is cartoonishly evil, except for the two scenes where she suddenly stops. The rest of the time you must squint hard and think about the word “victim” over and over.

The scares, the only real points of emotionality and entertainment, rely on depictions of intimate partner violence from played straight (coercion, raised voices) to over the top (dead cat feeding, murder, skin-wearing). If the One Wish Willow is, say, a manifestation of Bear’s darkest desires (Nikki as sex doll), the function of the scares, again, relies on Bear’s displeasure, discomfort, and danger, not Nikki’s. They are both losers (victims, maybe), but the majority of the film’s scares have us feel for Bear at the hands of Nikki. Acknowledging her victimhood is optional, and most of the time the movie asks you not to, hence the laughter. Obsession is very much the “Don’t you hate it when your batshit crazy stupid psychotic girlfriend shits on your floor :(” movie, not a “Don’t you hate it when you get possessed by the sex demon that makes you shit on your boyfriend’s floor :(” movie.

Though some will say the film features just enough pre-wish Nikki for us to fake concern for her and her ruined writing career, Obsession fails to interrogate her true in-theatre, on-page story function as a villain for the other hour of the runtime. In a roundabout way, the film’s logic and Barker’s centering of Bear telegraph that the worst-case scenario for a man’s misguided desire is him experiencing all the pain, and she just happens to be there.

If your theatre was lucky, Obsession played to frequent and fervent laughter. For as widely seen as the film is, I’d be remiss to chalk all of those laughs up to discomfort. As much as I see it called a horror, I also see Obsession billed as a black comedy or twisted rom-com. For the first time, I will ask what exactly is so funny?

Tonally, Obsession distances itself from its black hole of a protagonist (because he’s evil, boring, and deserves it), but points and laughs at its victim (because Nikki’s horrors are where it’s time to keep it light, of course). It also relies on you imagining an alternate reality where Bear shared his feelings with Nikki, and things went fine, but at the same time you must also imagine Bear evil enough, subhuman enough, to not deserve a love in the first place.

Early on, the case could be made for Nikki as manic-pixie-dream girl whom Bear covets, not loves. However, since the film plays so fast and loose about the complications of relationships where love and abuse coincide, by its gruesome end the film is open-ended enough to imply that abuse — obsession — is actually on the spectrum of love, just a crush gone too far. The verbiage of Bear’s wish adds to the ambiguity.

Barker is interested in Bear’s capture, Bear’s punishment, but not what it’s like for Nikki to be a captive. If you’d like to call Nikki up and ask her how she’s feeling, you’ll be met with anonymous screams and a customer service representative who thinks it’s all very funny too.

Obsession is about an “evil” guy getting what he “deserves,” and that “justice” must be sublimated through a possessed woman first for reasons the text can’t explain. If Obsession needs you to laugh to make sense, but those laughs are at the expense of the female character, that makes the film “deep” and this specific vector of violent imagery justified; no one actually has to hold the bag for why it’s Nikki, and then Sarah (Megan Lawless), who have to suffer for Bear’s failures. Ha. Ha.

Barker also plays coy about his protagonist’s evils and pleasures at the expense of any dramatic tension around the fate of these two victims/perpetrators. In place of that tension, you get the opaque, convenient whims of the One Wish Willow. When Bear refuses to put Nikki out of her sometimes-apparent misery, it doesn’t feel like anything because the movie is already on Bear’s side in treating her like she’s dead. Post-wish, Nikki mostly superhuman and vacant, it quickly becomes clear there is no way out.

The merits of Obsession seem unrelated to some buried deep read about mutual abuse that everyone is able to pick up on and laugh over. Maybe this film is just highly successful in replicating and energizing images of intimate partner violence with such fidelity and with just enough plot to distract. However, for a society literate in abuse imagery in the short-form, Obsession’s scares are low-hanging fruit. A somatic, experiential exercise in trauma that no one, even me, wants to admit they get off on.

So much of what gets me to write criticism is a need to address not a thing but how we talk about a thing, but I think there’s a lot to learn about what a movie does by what people say about it. For a movie that has made nearly half a billion dollars, I’m observing more than the usual amount of confusion among viewers. The people who hate Obsession feel like they’re missing something, but those who adore it, identify with it, the young women who feel represented by Nikki — but don’t want to demand that even a fictional woman deserves better — keep begging you not to look into it too deeply. That is funny.

As for its popularity, the confusion, the controversy even, surrounding Obsession is written into it. A fragmented online collective blames themselves or one another for reading it wrong, drumming up engagement while projecting whatever they need to feel good about themselves. And who can blame them? It is strange to me, though, that Obsession’s defenders rely on the language of victimhood, abuse, manipulation, coercion, rape, etc. to justify the sidelining of Nikki and to make the case for Bear as the villain but reserve no space for feminism in that same conversation. We watch a different young woman, Sarah, get her head bashed in for what are ostensibly the same thoughtcrimes as the protagonist, yet the very framework that has us look inward about why we actually find that imagery, this whole farce, frightening has been treated as off limits as a way to point out the film’s shortcomings.

The most damning thing about Obsession is that so many people really like it. Or did we suddenly wake up in the timeline where general audiences react well and normally to stories about women’s abuse at the hands of men? The same culture that had a lot to say about a woman “suffering” at the “hands of a man” last summer? A good horror movie, as opposed to the wishy-washy thriller of Obsession, wouldn’t be shy about Bear’s evils, but Barker works around them so no men have to ask if they are Bear; they just have to ask themselves if they could come up with a better wish.

What we’re left with is a kind of diet horror that feels good going down, like some emotional work is being done, but ultimately lacks anything substantive. Obsession asks you to think very small about some of the biggest issues plaguing our time, and it’s not rigorous or fastidious enough in its logic to understand why it is able to amuse and scare and that those interests contradict and undermine any messages it pretends to have. It’s sloppy. Anything gruesome is “gritty” and “real,” anything goofy is “satirical” and “knowing,” but the film doesn’t operate at any level deft enough to entertain while also having Nikki, the character, transcend the headband and dead-wife-in-a-movie edits post-mortem. The film is unable or unwilling to alienate, so it coddles by being vague.

It is my hope that every year, many movies, stupid or not, make a lot of money so that more movies get made. I also have a great affection for movies that waste hours of your life for not making sense or fully coming together. I have publicly defended Poor Things, and I’d defend Promising Young Woman in the right company. I’m plenty generous, but just because Obsession can be read “generously” as a cultural artifact does not mean it should be. There also are tons of effective films that cost much less than $750,000 and make perfect sense.

Critically, though, I fear there has been a softer response to Obsession and how it handles the abuse and trauma of women in favor of lighter, tangentially related conversations about Gen Z and dating or being a white YouTuber who loves horror. Or, when all else fails, we can just talk about Backrooms instead! My only guess2 as to why is that it’s a tough pill to swallow that the movie to save movies this year, the movie with more upside than anyone knows what to do with, the one that checks marketers’ and audiences’ boxes alike is, at its core, kind of basic and hollow.

This critical softness may also demonstrate how film fans, even those whose job it is to be critical, feel a compulsion to make the general case for film, the medium, in their day-to-day lives now that everyone is more aware than they were a decade ago of theatre margins, box offices, and the woes of investors’ risk. The institutional urge to celebrate the underdog film where most of its underdogs didn’t get paid for the film’s wild successes… that is also kind of funny, I guess.

At Obsession’s end, I remember thinking of Romeo & Juliet, suicidal ill-fated lovers and whatnot. I can choose to think it was on purpose or convince myself this film has anything substantial on its mind, or I can choose to know better. You leave feeling empty for a reason. This crisis of horror is really quite modern: the film is stuffed with gestures and signs that lead nowhere except a sequel that will surely answer any questions or concerns I have about the antics going on at OWWLLC and the other young women they have trapped in the basement.

When awards season rolls around and you see the words “snubbed” next to Barker or Navarette’s names (sorry, Michael, it’s just what Twitter thinks), I don’t want that to be a bad thing. Maybe a sign that the Academy doesn’t have an abundance of avenues to acknowledge rising talent or more commercial endeavors, yes, but not a sign of the Academy’s inability to reward movies people actually watch and like, even when they suck. [I’m sure Project Hail Mary will fail upwards enough.]

Despite its modest upbringings, Obsession doesn’t need awards or for you to think it is “deep” to justify its place in our culture — that’s what the money was for.

Not a serious movie! So, let’s be serious people.

song of the blog:

let’s talk about something that is extremely popular, but actually extremely good. “the cure” (+this whole album) begs the question, isn’t love scary enough?

i loved this discussion of olivia’s face on the cover! is she in ecstasy? pain? it’s all very the bends. she embraces the contradiction and ambiguity to great success and leaves you with more answers than questions. i’m feeling a strong 10!

When I turned 23 at the end of last year, I knew I wanted to write a novel. While avoiding my book, I fantasize about what it will be like to have written it. The problem is that I feel like I’m in a constant search for authors to envy who aren’t millennials. I’m a fan of Rooney, the patron saint of millennial fiction writers everywhere, and if I were to go the essay collection route, I’d be thinking about Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror the whole time. You could classify R.F. Kuang as Gen Z, but I’m not sure how many younger writers, including me, have a Katabasis in them, and there was something too millennial about the racial politics of Yellowface.

I try to surround myself with writers, but I struggle to identify any of my friends under 25 who read fiction frequently, let alone ones who want to write it. Even if many of us like the idea of fiction, if I’m being generous, there are only one or two novels that dominate my circles each year. There has to be some kink in the pipeline that makes the concept of reading fiction in popular culture more a virtue signal of the performative male than a real pastime for the well-adjusted young adult.

If you’re lucky, your experiences in primary and secondary education coalesced to give you at least some sort of taste for reading at a young age, the kind of reading you now reminisce about on nights out. It is hard to remember having a brain that could consume one, let alone two books in a day. In a springtime episode of Limousine, the hosts compare Sarah Jessica Parker’s reading habits while judging the Booker Prize to those of an unemployed adult or, alternately, an elementary schooler.

I documented my mid-pandemic reading renaissance, a trend aligned with the market (books can make money again!) and anecdotal evidence from a few of my friends. Not to say my reading habits have maintained that book-a-week pace, but I’ve noticed that having any book in rotation isn’t as common as I thought it would be among those I encounter who are also post-grad.

I suspect our reading renaissance has been powered by the superconsumer. Men who only read nonfiction (and skim it) and women who only read romantasy are no doubt outreading me year over year, even though I consider myself a more engaged reader than average. The transition from child reader to overextended student to overextended employed adult who reads only a bit could be a standard part of growing up in the U.S., where the older you get, the less time you have. However, Gen Z’s sunsetting adolescence sits at a flashpoint for the changing value of fictional literature and media in general.

Since 2016, at least, the free time-to-money-to-entertainment ratios for young adults have been out of whack. Does Gen Z know what it means to enjoy literary fiction outside of a classroom? Can we distinguish good fiction from bad? Let’s ask a millennial.

While promoting his new novel, Minor Black Figures, American writer and Substack darling1 Brandon Taylor, born 1989, sat down for a chat with Lauren Michele Jackson, cultural critic and ‘for breakfast’ favorite. He talks about his Gen Z students:

It’s not objective by any means, but [in my work] I am trying to create a representation of society. And it strikes me that this is not true of my students. The representational element that we used to take as inherent to the act of fiction-making–that’s gone. I don’t think that they understand that within fiction writing there is this kind of secret bargain that you’re striking, that you’re representing a reality. I don’t think that that’s a thing on their minds anymore. I don’t think they’re representing anything. It’s the closest we’ve come to pointillist realism maybe. It’s kooky. It’s wild. [from “Brandon Taylor on the Quandary of Black Art”]

I notice Taylor’s baffled tone when talking about his students’ loyalty to realism. He gets at this idea that realism is created from the inside out, and maybe not from the outside in, where the writer should get the reader to experience something such that it would then feel or become real to them. Kooky stuff.

Lauren Michele Jackson pushes back. She has noticed her students’ tendency is to impose their representations onto the works they encounter:

I’m so intrigued by this, because I feel like I have almost an opposite experience with my students in trying to teach novels, in the sense that their primary inclination for reading novels is through a sociology of what’s going on.

Taylor responds — It’s not about the understanding of representation, it’s about the ability to generate something in the first place, then the two go back and forth:

I bet it’d be the opposite if you had them write a thing. I bet if they had to write a novel, they wouldn’t know where to begin trying to assemble a social. They don’t know that they’re writing a reality.

They’re so good at this high-rate, high-yield decoding of symbol. Everything decomposes to symbol almost instantaneously, where they’re not even parsing what’s actually happening on the surface. Again, I think this relates to the fact that reality just doesn’t mean anything to them anymore.

Maybe “it’s the phones,” as they’re so fond of saying, that we live in a constant mélange of the digital and the surface. We live in a system of reference.

[Jackson:]

It’s the Swiftie methodology of close reading–being so fastidious about finding reference, and yet not actually being able to assemble a theory of the case.

[Taylor:]

Students are maybe too good at reading metaphor, and they end up upside down on their backs in a valley of symbolic interpretation. They don’t have the experience of reading literature. No, no, no, you’re not reading to get the information, you’re reading to experience the thing. You’re experiencing the durée. You’re experiencing the donnée of the piece. The reading isn’t, “Oh, got it. Moving on.” Contemporary fiction as it is practiced today in many mainstream forms is honed to that rapid symbolic interpretation. It is a fiction that somehow misunderstands the function of fiction, or at least as I like it. Fiction back in the olden days.

I can’t be the only one who does this, but whenever I read or listen to critiques of Gen Z, I try to rigorously evaluate if I fit the description of whatever’s being talked about. I am the Gen Z zebra in the cage while millennials stand and gawk. While Jackson and Taylor aren’t saying anything so incriminating, seeing two highly accomplished writers almost wince at this thing, this way of being or access to understanding that their younger students lack, makes me wonder if my brain is as broken as I think it is. ‘for breakfast’ has been a 4-year long experiment in proving to myself that I’m a real thinker, but I still can’t tell if I’m made it out on the other side of brain rot with my ability to “write a reality” intact.

Does the shoe fit?

I will try my best not to dwell on this (Taylor)Swiftification of reading point for too long — I said everything I needed to say over a year before “Wood” hit the airwaves — but it’s pretty obvious what Michele Jackson is getting at here: There is possibly an erosion in Gen Z’s ability to take a work for what it is. Instead, young students are in favor of looking backward to confirm/affirm why a work had to exist in the first place. In Swiftie terms, does Jake Gyllenhaal need to have actually ever encountered a scarf to make “All Too Well” a worthwhile or relatable piece of songwriting?

It’s a skip to the close read before the regular read, what Taylor, in the same interview, refers to as “[engaging] with the text in a really boring, brass-tacks way.” Instead, his young students are getting comfortable reading without the reading.

In my analysis of how culture digests pop music in the 2020s, I frequently bring up this lack of a vacuumed, solitary experience. On release day for a major pop act, the formerly salient aspects of buying and listening to a new project have been squashed hydraulic-press-style into something shiny and smooth. The record store, the record player, the poster on your wall, the lyric book, the local newspaper, the national paper, your friend’s blog, your regional DJ, the Billboard charts are now chopped and screwed across a variety of flat, digital, instantaneous “experiences.”

You will likely see a review of an album before you hear it, you will likely read a lyric before you listen to it, and you will likely watch a vertical video showing you a sample before you know a song well enough to make the connection on your own. If you’re an avid listener, this process will also occur almost every week. As much as the individual now has everything catered to them by an algorithm, the process I describe above actually seems to have little room for the lone fan. Everything is personalized, but little is personal. Through this pop music lens, it’s no wonder that the cohort of young students raised in this media environment tends to put the cart before the horse when it comes to what to make of a piece of popular culture, and !on top of that! find where they themselves fit into it.

Tying pop music and literary fiction together, one can turn to the rise and current (?) fall of poptimism as critics have started to reexamine the phenomenon, digging for more reasons as to why we ended up here™. There are a number of economic and social incentives that would make a young person want to remove the friction of a contemporary aesthetic experience. A general aversion to being wrong, being late, or being earnest has placed the consumption of literary fiction at the bottom of a steep hierarchy where UGC, brainrot, franchise IP, and, yes, Taylor Swift, reign supreme.

On being wrong

In my lifetime, from pre-teen to post-grad, I’ve seen Taylor Swift the public figure morph in the public imagination and go from girl who makes popular music that is bad, to woman who makes popular music that is good, to woman who makes popular music that should be taken very seriously to billionaire who makes pop music that is… well… subtly fascistic?

Poptimism maps messily onto that. A shift beginning in the mid-2000s that moved the popular from manufactured slop unworthy of real examination to a genre in and of itself with the potential to churn out serious art worth spending time dissecting. Poptimism has a nice enough ring to it that it can now be blamed for everything: Why it stopped being uncool to say a superhero movie is your favorite film. Why popular conceptions of songwriting went from guys with guitars making music for radio to women with guitars making music for radio (and Target stores). Why there is a critical imperative that all of that music should be taken very seriously:

Poptimism was a way of interrogating the way people thought about music, about asking them to challenge their own preconceptions and their own confirmation biases about what did and did not constitute good music.

Now it is its own set of preconceptions and confirmation biases. And that’s no use to poptimism, to good critical thinking, or to music itself. [from Michael Hann’s 2017 essay “Is Poptimism Now As Blinkered As The Rockism It Replaced?”2]

As a critic, I wonder how being steeped in a culture that gave a resounding “yes!” to Carly Rae Jepsen after the mass hazing incident of “Call Me Maybe” informs my ability to parse the real deal from the slop pop. It’s like one day in my youth, someone noticed the untapped potential of a Western pop music industrial complex, and the culture has been spewing pop everywhere all the time.3 Now, stan wars powered by Big Tech make it normal and cool to pay attention to the charts, and you can make a career off of reading from Genius pages.

They’re calling Gen Z the most rejected generation, and for good reason. A constantly rejected consumer is voracious, conservative in taste, but insatiable in appetite. The rejected consumer would rather be generally right in their opinion than slightly wrong; hence, all of this regression toward a mean and a rampant repetition culture within online spaces dedicated to popular film, television, and music. For Gen Z, operating as a hivemind is the default, seeing as so many online spaces are quiet high-control groups where shared opinion is the basis for connection. It is no longer 2005. On the internet, you do not carve space for yourself; you see where the algorithm lands you and act accordingly.

Stan wars are an end symptom of the hoops the pop-optimistic have had to jump through to maintain legitimacy. As for how this aspect of 2020s poptimism translates to a lack of young literary fiction readers, can anyone think of any large-scale BookTok drama that had to do with a good novel?

More commercial fiction creates stronger binaries about the right and wrong opinions to have; the grey area induced by well-written literary fiction cannot create the online in-groups and out-groups of a Colleen Hoover novel. Hating Intermezzo means you have more in common with someone who loves Intermezzo than someone who didn’t read it. On BookTube and BookTok, there is an entire cottage industry dedicated to hating CoHo, where, I can hazard a guess, many consumers and ad-viewers have not read the books in question. You can never be wrong about a book if you never have to read it. For creators, it is also easier to have audiences come to you to do intellectual labor on their behalf than to “limit” your audience to those who have already done said labor; the content remains shallow even if the individual’s work is deep.4

On being late

These economic incentives to forego reading or writing the fiction novel also reveal the younger generation’s relationship to their own time.

This past summer, when I sat down to write a review of Man’s Best Friend, I felt like I couldn’t detach my feelings and analysis of the album itself from the fact that it seemed like an over-trodden topic only three weeks after its release. It’s not like I had read twenty reviews of Carpenter’s album, but I had probably scrolled past twenty snarky Substack titles that then weighed on my mind when I approached the blank Google doc.

The Substack title as genre of (copy)writing demonstrates how platforms compress the window of what has the potential to move from an unprofitable subculture to a profitable dominant culture. When you scroll through your “For You” Substack feed, observe what essays have the most engagement and likes. They’re short, quippy theses or questions that have to ring true regardless of the post’s content. “Everybody wants to be a DJ, but no one wants to dance.” Outside of the Substack bubble, a headline like “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing?” is generative and provocative enough that it allows you to make an educated guess about a concept, form your opinion, and read against it. Sound familiar? Thinking of the Taylor interview again, here is more reading without reading, more disordered processes of meaning-making. Writers and readers alike must seek efficiency if they want a shot at visibility or to feel that they can make a dent in their never-ending thinkpieces to-be-read list, respectively.

In “why you need parasocial relationships with critics,” I quote Ira Madison III, “The real problem isn’t Carpenter. It’s the algorithm that allows everyone to eat off an opinion on Carpenter.” I’d like to dwell on that “everyone” now. The extremes of poptimism have cultivated this vulturistic free-for-all mentality around objects of our pop cultural fascination. The potential energy of having a good or inflammatory opinion, anything slightly more effortful than the average viewer would have, has risen sharply with virality and social capital on the table for anyone with an account and a dream. This marketplace is built into Substack, and that exchange is not as optional for the writer as it used to be. The writing, its titles, its subheadings, and its restackable quotes are now all adjusted to only being above average and relatable rather than being exceptional and singular. The reader, like the pop music listener, then adjusts themselves accordingly.

There has never been a point in history where listening to an album is as laborious as reading a novel, but I could guess that young people’s aversion to immersive reading stems from the misconception that these consumptive experiences should feel the same. For the last decade, work-life creators and VC-backed startups alike have targeted Gen Z and millennials with “How to read 20 books in a day” content and apps that summarize books about how to earn your productivity back. If you believe, even slightly, that these kinds of consumption are aspirational, valuable, or achievable, then it follows that you would feel some shame for not being able to “keep up,” to read without difficulty or distraction, or to resist the urge to pick up your phone instead of the novel on your nightstand before bed.

We can know that understanding fiction is fun (hearing BookTubers talk about novels that sound great is often more pleasurable than reading the great novel), but experiencing fiction (pleasure, pain, boredom, and all) is much more unwieldy. For wannabe career writers or even the writing-curious, time spent on these platforms makes you wonder: if you can’t publish a good and then widely read essay in a night or a week or even a month and then expect a payout, why would you? Americans, particularly younger ones, are time poor. The addictive and flexible qualities of vertical video help it fill those time gaps that are too short or too infrequent for something more involved or blatantly “unproductive”.

If you’re looking for a job, an activity after 11 pm on a weeknight, or just to numb out, I get why fiction wouldn’t really do it for you. Reading fiction, without the goal of content creation, doesn’t quiet the voice in your head that your time could be spent monetizing the self. Personally, it took a lot of work over several years to make myself feel like I deserved to spend time with a book instead of mentally punishing myself with hours-long TikTok binges.

This aversion to lateness or a fulfilling use of one’s time, coupled with a quiet commitment to productivity and gratification, also explains why so many writers feel scandalized by the personal essay discourse. Most personal essays are long tweets or transcribed should-be TikToks, prioritizing individual thought leadership more than an earnest documentation of experience to benefit the collective.5 A good personal essay is one you can agree with and maybe see yourself in the place of the author, but a great personal essay is an experience using the rudimentary, boring literary devices that young writers abandon because they don’t want to feel like they’re in school anymore. See: the romanticization of Substack as a platform. Many have noticed that a genre of notes that does well is about how this very tech company has created a haven for the precocious students in English class, a place where she can really be herself (with no editor, no grading, no failure, and no real rigor either).

[i’ve started to grow weary of substack as *self-actualization* content like this. like are you SURE you couldn’t use a journal or start a wordpress blog. like i don’t get what SUBSTACK has to do with it. also why is it all so “silly”…]

The late poptimist ideal that seriousness6 is something to eschew leaves a vacuum that can only be filled by essays that could be written by anyone — perfectly timed to make a splash but rarely a lasting impression. The young writer starts to subconsciously seek a hit of subscribers or likes or bestseller pages because there is no longer a critical structure that can deem their work good. Substack, as a stand-in for other platforms emerging in the 2010s and on, confuses its users. Is writing a job or a hobby? Are my subscribers fans, other writers, future employers, or friends? If my writing isn’t personal, a direct telegraph from the folds of my brain, am I betraying the reader, desecrating an era of free writing for all, where we are all Carrie Bradshaw with the keyboard and cigarette?

I don’t doubt that this same genre of personal essay (or TikTok or tweet or podcast) as extended hot take is an authentic expression, but thinking of the Taylor/Jackson discussion, “good” writing is not always authentic. When it comes to fiction, an overloyalty to realism and timeliness makes a writer unable to produce a representation, unable to give themselves permission to lie and be lied to. However, these loyalties may be the only way to guarantee gratification at the end of the tunnel. In the fight against even mild addiction to screens and content, getting yourself to write and read is harrowing enough. No one has an incentive to take risks (be late, be boring, be annoying, be pretentious, or be long-winded7) if those risks guarantee audience alienation and the chilling affirmation that you are, in fact, publishing into a void.

On being earnest (and the dominance of what I call “poptimist realism”)

Substack is a later-stage example of the poptimist paradigm shift, where earnest reality trumps cynical fiction. From Taylor and Jackson’s impression of Gen Z (“upside down on their backs in a valley of symbolic interpretation”), this is a shift that puts finding an understanding above having an experience.

We still have to square this circle, though: How is it that a generation notoriously scared of earnestness is also obsessed with realism?

A few months ago, my friend Olu published a comprehensive dissection of the death of the hipster and our Gen Z fear of vulnerability and lust for irony in art and in life:

We keep reinventing the hipster wheel. Basic, corny, cheugy, cringe, negative aura points, we have so many descriptors solely intended to shame genuine enthusiasm. We ridicule ourselves and each other for being brave enough to do something unrefined and then wonder why we don’t feel connected to the people around us or when we lost our sense of self. News Flash: you can’t snark and mock your way into self-discovery. Perhaps the “you found it cringe, I found it fun and that’s why I’m happier than you” TikTokers are onto something. [from “how to kill the hipster in your head”]

Now that I’ve sat with Olu’s thesis for a few months, I’m ready to make my addition: Coming to you live from the panopticon, from the Substack editor, from the TikTok comment section, from the college application process, and from the depths of the LinkedIn job board, Gen Z spends its earnestness just by showing up at all.

Poptimism was a reaction turned overcorrection to the villainization and undervaluing of the pop. Poptimism itself has degraded, and the pop has with it. In 2025, now that the door to profitable and serious pop remains wedged open and enshittification has walked in after it, the ceiling for young people’s idea of earnestness is enjoyment in the first place; enjoyment in spite of. Enjoying the popular is earnest in and of itself, even though many of us can barely remember a time when this act of enjoyment was that radical. As products have gotten worse, as any product will against calls for infinite growth, the enjoyment of pop has then become the degrading experience it was once made out to be. However, we now have a generation unequipped, without the vocabulary to describe their own humiliation.

Gen Z options? Lean in (brain rot, overconsumption, faux intellectualization, and a steady diet of pop slop) or opt out (Andrew Huberman’s tough love, nonfiction only, an allegiance to the niche, more misogyny, and more “locking in” for your girlboss era). Since everything is degrading, the consumption or rejection of the pop is really just a matter of taste or what the algorithm feeds you first.

To return to my Substack case study, I think most writers secretly find the practice of blogging embarrassing. Humiliation enough to make them need their rewards that much more. If you publish to a void and the void doesn’t yell back, then what was the humiliation for? The poptimist, Gen Z writer is pliable and writes to get a shot at justifying the vulnerability of showing up at all. See: “Taste as a privilege” discourse and the aspirational influencer life as the endpoint to “climbing cringe mountain.” At least you’re telling a truth (someone’s or your own), and at least you’re showing up and eating shit in front of everyone you know in the hopes of getting rich one day. What could be more relatable?

There is an overloyalty to realism, because realism is now the one infallible quality a cultural artifact can have. By realism, I don’t mean the truth, but more so any truth, an author making a “gesture” toward their realness or having a conscious engagement with their real life.

[Poptimism] becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, artists are taken seriously because they are treated seriously, and they are treated seriously because people want to read about them. [Again, from “Is Poptimism Now As Blinkered As The Rockism It Replaced?”]

To dig out the lede of this essay, a “poptimist realism” finds that for the pop to be good, it must also be true-feeling. The degradation of poptimism is actually a decline in pop literacy, the reader’s ability to make the case for albums in their rotation, the books on their shelf, the food on their plates. Online, it is easier, more profitable, and less personal to make a case that a piece of art is true than to make an argument for why you had a good time with it.

Over time, post the poptimist turn, a chicken/egg situation has emerged: Pop is true, therefore it is good has turned into A thing is popular, therefore, it is true and good. The fiction novel is the polar opposite of that, right? The “regular read” of a fiction novel is solitary, existing only once for an artifact that must also be marketed as untrue. The “regular read” and experience of fiction is impossible to meme or reproduce at rapid, monetizable, delicious scale. The “close read,” in bytes and 60-second videos, is now king.

Applying a poptimist realist read to contemporary ‘for breakfast’-feeling discourses, a few spring to mind:

• The success of Normal People, the show, versus Normal People, the book. The experience of Rooney versus the succinct, agreeable portrayal of Rooney. (After drafting this note, I saw a positive Letterboxd review of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World where someone said watching Normal People didn’t do much for them, so they didn’t understand the Sally Rooney comparisons. Girl, you didn’t read the Rooney in question, though!)

• Wicked and Wicked: For Good audience score versus the critics’ score. The degraded audience must now jump through the same hoops MCU fans did. It is popular, so its parts must add up to something true and good. Right. Right?!

• The romantasy of Fourth Wing and ACOTAR are the same kind of “romantasy” as Brené Brown and Glennon Doyle to me. They are pop literature coupled with the real predilections and addictions of readers e.g. smut, porn consumption, online echochambers, and personalized self-optimization (sorry, self-help) that make you, in your real life, feel normal or improved.

• Poptimist realism is why movies like Materialists and Challengers did not go down easily for a lot of people. Real relationship dynamics, when played up for a fictional (!) movie, make some feel betrayed and confused. This is why you’ll hear “no one talks like that” as a genuine critique. I’m also thinking about The Pitt, a hyperreal portrayal where an intense fan community (of what I presume to be mostly young viewers) has popped up based on projecting the fake onto it.

• Watching Severance like The Summer I Turned Pretty or vice versa. There is a mass confusion about how deeply to read or enjoy things. Hint: I don’t think Team Helly or Team Gemma is nearly as fun or productive a conversation topic as Team Jeremiah or Team Conrad.8 I’d imagine streamers would like you to watch all of their shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty though…

• A certain millennial English teacher gifting us her most confused fiction yet.

A society that cultivates a poptimist realism is a society that puts the derivative at the forefront. Franchise IP productions, based on popular products that are already real and justify their existence by already having existed, something original fiction cannot ever do.

Earlier, I referred to poptimism as an overcorrection, and while it would be simpler to deem poptimism the main and evil reason we ended up here™, I don’t think that that’s restorative or correct. I am also trying to balance this analysis with my own ambition. I want my essays, my novels, and my films to be popular. I want them to start discourse, and for the Gen X critics that I love to trash my work!

“Poptimist realism” is just another lens through which to see the current moment. I advise the reader to consider themselves poptimistic but to also weigh how something appears in front of them just as much as what appears in front of them (the page of the novel vs. the pane of the vertical video). If I’m still responding to Taylor and Michele Jackson’s discussion, I think young people are starving for an ecosystem that values fiction just as much as they’re starving to realize they can actually write it.

song of the blog! a side-by-side of Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party and The Life of a Showgirl is something I need to read.

Hayley Williams writes songs so good that the fact that any of the subject matter could be real is the least interesting part.

I wonder do you miss when having me felt brand new?
An elevator ride, slowest of your life
Can you feel how your heart’s beating?

Everything that follows the early season 3 time jump, where we find Belly and Jeremiah happily partnered, clued me in to the true reason for this show’s being. It was an emotional rollercoaster over it years on Prime Video: One that winds its viewers up with mildly bumpy twists and turns (S1), bores them on a steep incline (S2), then drops them from a thrilling 200-feet drop to the tune of screams, laughter, and sobs (S3).

TSITP is somehow more thought experiment or simulation than it is TV: Over so many hours, how can this show make the case for one girl to date one brother, then date the other one, and then somehow end up with the first one despite every social, financial, and narrative force saying that that shouldn’t happen?

Somehow, it works. Somehow, I buy that these two brothers were her only options. Somehow, I buy that Cousins is a real beach that this many people can talk about very seriously. Somehow, I buy that a girl can date a guy for 3 years, have 0 chemistry with him, and earnestly attempt to marry him. And most of all, somehow, I have developed a deep affection toward one Belly Conklin.2

In the same way TSITP failed upward into one of the best romantic climaxes of recent memory, Belly Conklin also failed her way into a secure, loving future despite constantly showing up a mess, making all the wrong decisions, saying all the wrong things, and never once seriously dating outside of these two white boys.

Belly Conklin is a fail girl. She yells at her mom. She embarrassed herself at her other mom’s funeral. She gets engaged to her cheating boyfriend. She makes the whole volleyball team hate her. She, with the help of her fail boy future husband, blows up her own life and the lives of everyone around her, so she can finally heal and eatpraylove across the Atlantic.

Episode 10 of season 3 — where we see the months-long fallout of Belly’s runaway bride stunt — was also one of the show’s best. It’s kind of opposite day, and we spend a depressing, frigid Thanksgiving and Christmas with our characters instead of a depressing, sweltering summer. It’s a collective rock bottom for the Fisher/Conklin hive, which was also supremely fun to watch! However, in the next episode, the finale, I didn’t just cry at the inevitable BellyConrad reunion, I also cried happy tears seeing the rest of the family get to be whole — toasting, laughing, and holding hands around the dinner table — a family somehow complete after all the holes torn through it over the years.

Despite all of the failure, everything turned out okay. For Belly, and for everyone she tried so hard to please and complete for the entirety of this stupid show.

TSITP ending is the cherry on top of what I can now call: a fail girl summer. A fail girl summer where most of the big pop stars went from widely beloved to widely annoying. Where Kamala Harris began her insufferable apology tour. Where I gave up TikTok to start using shorts and reels instead. Where only the women of Love Island got canceled, and the men got to coast on their partner’s fame or fade into quiet, peaceful obscurity.

I don’t think women lost in terms of money or power, but winning in an attention economy only brings more uneven scrutiny. Following a brat summer, I guess it has to be so over — fail girl summer — for it to be so back — whatever summer 2026 has to bring for women, if we even get there)…

I know I complained that The Summer I Turned Pretty was the only summertime option for serialized and widely-seen television, but now that it’s all over, I realize I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I can only hope and pray for this much fail girl representation next summer.

ugh the final song of the blog has been premeditated since its release:

in my song of the summer podcast, i said i love the yearn-y energy of “Loser” lyrically, i guess you could say it’s from the conrad OR the belly perspective:

I had to tell ya, it’s now or never
So much for closure, I lost composure
I get the message, I learned my lesson
Tried to correct it, I think I wrecked it
Man, it’s a crisis, I’m never like this
That’s how my life is, you couldn’t write this (ah)

I’m a loser, babe (babe)
Do you wanna tear my heart out?
I’m a tragedy
Tryna figure this whole mess out

i love you tame impala i love you belly conklin

loser 4 ever <3

1) song of the summer

2) shitty love island summer

3) it’s a fail girl summer (the summer i turned pretty)

4) at the movie theatre summer

5) [gen z free space]

6) l***** matcha d**** chocolate s*****

7) diverse girl group summer

8) my tiktok sober summer

9) sabrina 2.0 summer

10) [republish an old summer for breakfast essay]

*one of these topics will be a short podcast instead of a short essay!

Today, I’m cashing in on my one podcast allowance to hold a PMH (Pop Music Hearing) on our LOSOTS (Lack of Song of the Summer) in 2025.

In the pod, I explore our potential guilty parties: confused and fumbling music labels, streamers like Spotify and Apple Music plus their fuckass algorithms, and a dying monoculture. Then, I take a look inwards — maybe I am the problem…

Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts

song of the blog… maybe i’ll choose an anti song of the summer, a six-minute track from LA singer/songwriter, Annahstasia:

I agreed with most of what the two comedians had to say. MBF is a great album, but something is holding it back from occupying the same pop star hall of fame that Short ‘n’ Sweet did just a year before. When Rogers suggested the album could have worked more if Carpenter introduced it as a band concept (e.g. an imaginary ‘Sabrina and the BlankBlanks project2), things started to click a bit more for me in terms of why Man’s Best Friend is a musically excellent cultural let-down.

Just like our critical culture has become obsessed with marketing, it has, by extension, become obsessed with packaging. In thinking of an earlier summertime flop encounter, I’ve formed a new opinion on The Bear. The “comedy” is mostly a show about a family, but it’s packaged as a show about a restaurant. I’m guessing from the discourse that, four seasons in, most viewers actually do just want a show about a restaurant. I truly wonder: if The Bear was named The Berzattos, would there be all of this outrage about how the show fell off? How it changed? How there’s all this unnecessary time spent talking about our feelings? Who’s to say?

Applying that notion to Sabrina Carpenter, though, I don’t think packaging being mismatched with its product is always a bad thing; if anything, it feels inevitable, especially for a pop star.

Describing the listening experience of Man’s Best Friend as “round” reminded me of another pop juggernaut who irritated the masses this summer. Lorde’s Virgin is another album that feels symmetrical and even. An album with no skips also runs the risk of not having the must-listen-to primary entry point that starts your shuffle. Short n’ Sweet has songs I honest-to-god cannot stand/am wholly ambivalent about (“Pleasex3”, “Dumb & Poetic,” “Lie to Girls,” “Sharpest Tool”), but also some of the best pop compositions of the last few years, songs I’m taking to the desert island where they give you your streaming library and nothing else (“Juno,” “Bed Chem,” “DON’T SMILE”!!!). The strengths of my favorites on Short ‘n’ Sweet outweigh the low points, earning the album my most ardent thumbs up. While I greatly enjoy Man’s Best Friend and I love Virgin BAD, it’s difficult to enthusiastically argue on either album’s behalf because the songs don’t make a huge effort to distinguish themselves from the larger body of work.

Man’s Best Friend is easy listening. Carpenter sounds her absolute best, the concepts still feel witty and original, and it will make an excellent live show. There’s only a thin line between the album’s best tracks (“Manchild,” “Sugar Talking,” “Go Go Juice”) and its worst (“Tears,” “When Did You Get Hot?”), unlike the energetic chasm between the highs and lows of Short ‘n’ Sweet.

However, when we’re faced with an album that is truly a matter of personal preference for how you’d like to spend 38 minutes, we are not equipped as pop culture to deal with that. We would rather talk about packaging — album art, chart positions, and Rolling Stone quotes — because it’s more fun (and more lucrative than actual art criticism)! In Pitchfork we trust, because MBF is, in fact, about on par with Short ‘n’ Sweet in terms of quality3 — the rest of the discourse is just noise.

Pop stars, like the rest of us, are at the mercy of the market, irrespective of their actual product. The market is not interested in rewarding the album that comes after a woman’s atmospheric rise to fame and critical adoration, and it never has been; it’s a version of the sophomore slump, but only after a woman gets an album really right and then continues making any music at all… 4

Man’s Best Friend sounds, to me, like Sabrina Carpenter was well aware of those market forces and refused to bend over backwards5 to get the nation’s approval for the second time in a row.

Good for her.

I’ve done a lot of adjacent writing/podcasting about pop music, so check it out if you enjoyed this piece!:

song of the blog?!

what about an album that is pretty amazing the whole way through? thank you to emma and for separately pushing me to listen to this project from JADE.

i was an OG little mix fan! on this album, i hear the best parts of little mix plus carly rae jepsen, jessie ware, and (gasp) beyonce!

i don’t think i understood this album til i BLASTED it, so turn your volume up:

The thing is, none of these reviews ever make it to Letterboxd because I like to torture myself by batch-logging all the movies I’ve seen once a month to reduce my time spent on the app.

Using all of that summertime watching data, I’ve compiled a collection of all my would-be tweet-length reviews for every movie I watched in theatres since June 20th (the summer solstice duh).

Shout out AMC A-list, and shout out for fighting the good fight!

1. 28 Years Later

   Aaron Taylor-Johnson is more effective when he’s not doing an American accent. [also see: Tenet and Angus Thongs and the Perfect Snogging] 3.5/5

2. Ballerina

   Spent most of this movie waiting for it to be over. 2/5

3. Sorry, Baby

   One of the best of the year, and one of my favorites of the year — I kept thinking “Wow, I didn’t know you could make movies that look and feel like this!” 5/5

4. F1

   No way a recurring joke is how handsome Brad Pitt is supposed to still be. You produced the movie, Brad, have some class! Damson innocent! 4/5

5. Jurassic World Rebirth

   Cam Cameron, you saved the movie, and the whole theatre loved you very much. I love how Scarlett Johansson’s character is so fucking dumb that she only just starts to grasp the idea of universal healthcare in the last minutes of the movie after spending her whole life as a mercenary for BigPharma. Looked great, but felt kind of ghoulish overall. 2/5

6. Superman

   Is movie my friend? Everyone go watch We Own This City for more Corenswet content. 3.5/5

7. Eddington

   Looks and sounds about right. 4.5/5

8. I Know What You Did Last Summer

   This one had a review: “extra half star for jonah hauer-king’s slutty little earring.” I’d like to add: Sarah Pidgeon innocent! Music (syncs and score) was also pretty good… 3/5

9. The Fantastic Four: First Steps

   Does anyone remember anything about this movie? A joke, a performance, a line, a set piece. So flat. My review read: “i will not confuse my relief for enjoyment/glossy w no edge” 3/5

10. Together

    Is it too much to ask for 10 more of these kinds of movies per year? 4/5

11. Weapons

    Not as elegant as Barbarian, but if you try really hard to read into it, I’m sure you can come up with things. GREAT ENSEMBLE, LOOK, AND PACING. 3.5/5

12. Splitsville

    Mainstream non-monogamy movies have to be bad before they get good. 3.5/5

13. Twinless

    So, I am a twin! This movie lacked in boy/girl twin representation, but I’ll forgive it because it's excellent. I cheered at the credits dropping 20 minutes in! [also see: Fresh, Drive My Car] 4/5

14. Caught Stealing

    Zoe Kravitz makes Austin Butler more compelling. So, on a completely unrelated note, this movie is fundamentally flawed, and the script seems mismatched with a director of Aronofsky’s stature. Darren, you will never be caught stealing two hours of my life ever again. 2/5

15. Lurker

    Holy shit, another excellent debut [see: Sorry, Baby]! The sequences right after Matthew joins the group are like anti-wealth porn to me; that feeling of all the cool-looking things not actually feeling cool is so well-explored. 5/5

16. The Long Walk

    David Jonsson, I’ve loved you for so long. Cooper Hoffman, I’ll be watching Licorice Pizza. 4/5

Lurker is about a fictional pop star played by Archie Madekwe (Saltburn alum) who is COMPLETELY CONVINCING. The song of the blog is from the most haunting sequence in the film, and it’s also just great pop music about the weight of parasocial relationships?? I also love “Domicile” on this album.

Speaking lately of the American berserk, as summer comes to a close, the American political machine continues to churn out at least two stories a day that are impossible to ignore while also being inscrutable, crazy-making, and only unfathomable if you don’t know any better.

In response to the revisionist narratives of Charlie Kirk’s legacy and Ezra Klein’s most recent failures, representative of the entire liberalism project, Ta-Nehisi Coates asks a few questions:

What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? … And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize?

“Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause”

When you watch the guy who made his millions grifting and polarizing for the right drop dead from the gun rights he sought to protect, and then you find out one of the shell casings at the scene read “hey fascist, CATCH,” how can you do anything but laugh?

Re: Gen Z’s “empathy problem”

How could I cry for a man who reduced himself to clips and soundbites to sway a sector of my generation into having less empathy, when the lives I’ve cried for —government-sanctioned and facilitated killings — keep seeming like a blip on the radar?

Re: The very funny claims that the U.S. is “no place for political violence”

Are we suddenly safer today because millions of Americans performed the theatre of sadness for Charlie Kirk’s timely1 passing? No one is safer today than they were yesterday, than they were last week, last year, or over the last few decades.

Re: Ezra Klein’s assertion that Charlie Kirk was practicing politics in “the right way”

Liberals mistake their narcissism for empathy. They see themselves in Charlie Kirk and, like flies to a corpse, take every chance to publicly chew on the idea that “we’re not so different” to teach Americans a lesson about who actually deserves to die: Gazans, children in schools, George Floyd — take your pick.

If you’re already a grifter, Charlie Kirk is just your next deliverable, more useful in death. For everyone else, he doesn’t need your tears or your “empathy.” I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted them anyway.

song of the blog is a podcast episode I heard on a long drive just weeks ago from and ’s Diabolical Lies that takes a grounded and critical look at Turning Point’s recruitment of young religious women to the right:

Diabolical Lies

The Womanosphere Claims It's Winning Young Women—But Is It?

Listen now

a year ago · 161 likes · 59 comments · Katie Gatti Tassin and caro claire burke

Last year, I detailed why “Espresso” was the nail in the coffin for songs of the summer, but for essay #5 of summer ‘for breakfast’ 2025, we’re throwing it back exactly two years in the past.

What were my songs of the summer when Barbenheimer was still in theatres, I had just started my senior year, and I was entering/exiting two ill-fated “friendships” that still keep me up at night? Let’s find out!:

[Originally published right here on September 15, 2023. Lightly edited for grammar and spelling, cuz omg.]

songs of the summer 'for breakfast' pt 3: the finale

If you’ve been here since the beginning of summer ‘for breakfast’ 2023, you’ll remember one of my core tenets for song of the summer:

“a sots transcends space and time. A fall, spring, or winter release date is no match for a song built for summer.”

Today, the category is FINALE, and we’re crowning my official songs of the summer for 2023, a conversation I’m not even willing to speak on until it’s well after Labor Day. Part of accepting that summer is over is reflection and retrospection, and what better way to do that than to reminisce about the songs that made this summer feel like summer?

It’s hard to only pick three songs of the summer, so disclaimer: these are my personal favorites. The songs that have ruled my social circles, either online or off, for the past few months.

Lucky for you all, I’m introducing a new section. Check out “for snacking” wedged between ‘for lunch’ and ‘for dinner’ (as any good snack should be), and you’ll find a quick list of honorable mentions. The songs that in some universe count as 2023’s sots winners, but didn’t make my cut one way or another.

If you feel so strongly that I’ve missed something, leave me a comment, send me an email, or start beef in my Instagram comments. I love discourse!

The goal of 'for breakfast' is to break off a piece of the media landscape, giving you an easy way to find stuff you love and consume it in a way that works for you. Just like you are what you eat, I believe you are what you watch, read, and listen to as well. As simi for breakfast, I’ll be your guide to creating a balanced, nourishing media diet where the name of the game is enjoyment through critical analysis.

for breakfast: Troye Sivan - Rush

I read somewhere—meaning I saw a TikTok—that Olivia Rodrigo writes songs by only including the fun parts. Here at ‘for breakfast’ we’re dedicated to fun and here to reward songs that feel like non-stop hook after hook after hook.

“Rush” dropped on July 13th but was designated a song of the summer weeks before it was even out. I’ve never clung to a 15-second snippet of a song for so long, but in an era of teasing and building anticipation I understand why this long-ass pre-release period was necessary.

Troye Sivan may be my favorite pop act releasing music today. I’m not exaggerating when I say the IN A DREAM - EP changed my life.

“Rush” is sexy, unapologetic, and mind-numbingly catchy. I’ve talked about summer days and summer nights, and “Rush” transports me to the hot and frantic nights out that are just important as any beach day or pool party.

For breakfast, is a queer anthem song that is guaranteed to be a time machine to summer 2023 for years to come.

for lunch: Back On 74 - Jungle

The problem with our fragmented media landscape is that *I* can confidently call this a song of the summer, but I’m not at all confident y’all have any idea what this song is.

Speaking of long-ass pre-release periods, I’ve been waiting for this Jungle project since May, and this album didn’t drop until mid-August! Well worth the wait, and while Volcano is full of summery hits, “Back On 74” seems to have captured many hearts and minds in a way I don’t even think the artists expected.

The nostalgic and wavy track is accompanied by a gorgeous music video and to match its catchiness is even catchier choreography. Watch the video and you’ll see that when the director yelled “Take five!” the dancer in the white tank top heard “Change lives!”

This sots represents the importance of creative direction and music that invites you to dance along. If you use TikTok, just search “Back on 74” and you’ll see that this track is nothing less than infectious. For lunch, I recommend the entire VOLCANO album, because I can’t imagine a person who wouldn’t enjoy it. Summer is for everyone.

for snacking: sots honorable mentions

If ’for breakfast’ is the number one arbiter of songs of the summer, I’ll give Billboard second place—and it’s not close. Every year Billboard uses chart data to compile a list of songs of the summer, but if you read it it doesn’t make much sense if you even care a little bit about what a summer song is. A sots requires a human touch and is more than just numbers and chart positions. For a quick snack, here’s my commentary on some of what Billboard declares as a sots.

Morgan Wallen - “Last Night”

The streets haven’t forgotten what you said Mr. Wallen.

“Last Night” has been #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for too long for me to have only heard it 1.5 times, but I’m happy keeping it that way.

Rema & Selena Gomez - “Calm Down”

A+ for unadulterated afrobeats on the charts featuring a main pop girl. One day I’ll write about how I’m a Selena truther, but while you wait read about ’s assessment of Gomez’s other attempt at sots (that has recently become suspiciously unstreamable?), “Single Soon.”

Rema also features on another personal favorite sots:

Olivia Rodrigo - “Vampire”

It’s a song, and it came out during summer. These facts do not a song of the summer make.

Dua Lipa - “Dance The Night”

I admire Dua for her summer to summer consistency. I’d give Dua Lipa an “artist of the summer” title and she would join the likes of Dominic Fike, Miguel, and Janelle Monae.

Nicki Minaj & Ice Spice With Aqua - “Barbie World”

I love this one, and if this song was 25% more summery and a minute longer it could’ve made it out of honorable mentions.

for dinner: NewJeans - “Super Shy”

The only thing better than NewJeans is getting to talk about NewJeans. Everything about the Korean girl group is refreshing: The name, the look, the sound, just wow!

“Super Shy” has been in my back pocket as THE crowned winner for 2023’s song of the summer. It’s infectious and bubbly and so much fun. I smile just thinking about it. “Super Shy” is sunshine in a bottle.

For dinner, I never have much to say except listen to the damn song. In fact, stream the whole EP, it’ll take you 15 minutes and it’s back to back hits. NewJeans has had such a moment this year, and I love reading about their success and seeing all the love they get. Check out this NME piece on their Lolla debut!

NEWJEANS. ON. TOP.

lmao RIP NEWJEANS!! for today’s song of the blog it’s a 2025 song of the summer with distinct 2023 energy in the best way:

i found the FLO controversy earlier this summer extremely entertaining and only a little sad!

this song is a banger. i heard it for the first time in the back of a friend’s car at 1:30 am racing across town before the club closed. it’s a happy summer indeed <3

The biggest addictions of my life so far have all been digital. Today, I can’t stand to be on Instagram for more than a few minutes at a time — FOMO/ROMO1 are strong emotions I don’t deal with well. However, at certain points in my life, Instagram was an app I could not tear myself away from. Screen time limits, body dysmorphia, and unfollow sprees be damned.

Compared to other platforms, TikTok is extremely difficult to moderate my relationship with because I’m not usually unhappy with the kinds of content I’m getting.2 The issue is that there’s no way to get a small dose.

When I quit TikTok this summer, I finally started feeling hungry when I woke up in the morning. I still look at my phone in my first 30 seconds of consciousness, but nothing is stimulating enough to drown out my hunger cues and make me skip breakfast the way TikTok did.

-

I’ve quit every social media platform I’ve loved at least once. I’ve relapsed on every social media platform I’ve loved at least once. I’ve learned that the phrase, “I can quit whenever I want,” is true and real for these cycles of delete and redownload — once I delete an app, it’s like I don’t remember why I used it so much in the first place. I don’t even crave it afterward. In a way, quitting is the easiest part, just a few taps on the screen; it’s the even wanting to quit that is pretty elusive to me.

I like my phone. I like being “tapped in.” I like the high of finding a video four hours into a doomscroll session that makes all the sifting feel worth it.

Sometimes I think my addiction to my phone has really just been another addiction to work. I force myself to sit, scroll, be present, be critical, and produce something good enough to justify the hundreds of hours spent online. TikTok makes it hard to know all the stuff you’re missing out on if you weren’t using TikTok, but unlike most apps, I still think quite fondly of the attentive labor I’ve put into it and the social and intellectual connections I’ve gotten out of it.

I’ve been TikTok sober for the last two months, and I 100% have plans of getting back into the game soon. Maybe I’m never sober, and maybe I’m never quitting. Like any good mind-altering substance, maybe it just takes an extended t-break to keep the good times rolling.

i mentioned my “songs ab phone” playlist a few blogs ago, and while that playlist is still top secret, here is another one of its features for today’s song of the blog!:

maybe substack writers like so much this summer because we feel seen. i’m completely jealous of how she captures the complex ups and downs of trying to be a person™ who is social™ through media™. it’s like how park chan wook makes phones seem so matter of fact and normal on screen - audrey does that for phones in music??? high praise i know, i just love this quirked-up white girl!

“thirst trap” song of the summer or song of my life?

I listen to my playlists and pretend I'm you
Look at what I posted and pretend I'm you
I'm sick and twisted and borin'
But all yours, so let me adore you
I'm not what I used to be
And you don't want me, it's easy to see
And I'll move on eventually
But for now, I'm takin' pictures

Despite there being a booming pop-star-think-piece economy on the platform, cultural analysis on KATSEYE, a joint venture between HYBE — the Korean record label behind BTS’s debut and cultural domination — and Geffen Records — a division of Interscope (a U.S. label) — feels slightly under-explored, considering how the group was formed:

KATSEYE debuted in summer 2024, but before that, its members duked it out in a Hunger-Games-style pop music survival show that they didn’t know they were signing up for. Twenty young girls uprooted their lives for what they thought was a Netflix documentary about an American version of the classic K-pop training program model. Over the course of a year, an underpaid development team, in collaboration with the American public, whittled down that group of twenty talented and skinny young women to six talented and skinny young women. But don’t worry! They made sure at least a few were injured, mentally scarred, and financially vulnerable before shipping them back to where they came from.

In late June, a friend and I watched this “documentary,” Popstar Academy: KATSEYE, on Netflix with our undivided attention.

Clearly, this is all just a new age model of the American pop star complex that exploits young women for public consumption, how we make our Britney Spearses and Keshas and Willow Smiths and Miley Cyruses.

Many aspects of how the sausage gets made for women in music are fraught, but what sticks out to me about KATSEYE is that that fraught nature is now part of the appeal. The Gen Z, diverse and multicultural version of a girl group has 10 hours of television behind it that make the road to pop stardom seem 1) normal and achievable, 2) like a transparent and logical process, and 3) like something grueling and therefore worthwhile and aspirational.

Watching Popstar Academy, you also realize how difficult crafting a passable girl group was for these labels. You start empathizing with the downtrodden ring leaders (their producers and dance coaches and vocal coaches and wellness coaches) and wishing that these teenage girls could just lock in and do a high kick while serving face and probably being underfed. In many moments, the documentary makes you think there is not a young woman on earth who could meet the demands of what KATSEYE would ultimately become.

Effectively, by igniting the hearts and minds of the most culturally influential group of individuals in the world, young women, the mythology of KATSEYE has laid the groundwork for the next generation of wannabe pop stars. It’s almost impressive. Labels can now begin the audition process for the next global group before they’ve even begun market testing the name of the “documentary” they’ll use to build its following.

These labels have legitimized the prospect of being plucked from obscurity, and when a young girl films herself dancing to “Gnarly,” she can rest easy knowing a HYBE intern (or executive) is combing the internet looking for it. Crazier things have happened.

At least now we have another flavor of denim ad to keep us in-fighting about representation. Who are you in these pictures? I’m obviously the Debbie Downer (@taraalami):

song of the blog!!

Foiled again, Adéla! i’m still giving KATSEYE a song of the summer nod, because “Gabriela” is a hood classic.

In short, for the uninitiated, Labubus are ugly collectible toys that a lot of people like. Matcha has been inescapable in major US cities since about 2019 and trends extra hard in combination with any trendy culinary flavor of the moment, including Dubai chocolate. This chocolate bar is filled with a sweet, crunchy neon green pistachio filling and is now viral and mass-produced because it makes a great mukbang video.

Now that you’re up to speed, how do you feel? In all honesty, I’ve spent the last few months quietly judging the Labubu lovers. Scoffing at friends of friends who’ve fallen victim to Lafufus — fake Labubus obvs — and feeling grateful my coworkers aren’t the ones throwing Labubu-themed birthday parties in our office.1 However, Labubus, in conversation with what matcha has become and in conversation with what Dubai chocolate has become, signals something else about this American-need-to-entertain-oneself™ that makes me look inward.

labubumatchadubaichocolate is a self-referential gag that summarizes the ephemeral and interchangeable nature of widely purchasable and edible internet trends. That’s why we can abstract the term to be derogatory, a way to express that something is too mainstream and maybe inorganic:

Rejection of these trends can be a place to morally grandstand how impervious one is to algorithmic influence. However, I’d argue that not liking Labubus or matcha or Dubai chocolate is more so just a matter of taste than a show of mental fortitude.

We all have our digital drugs. We all have our Labubus! Maybe this brain rot term gives us some vocabulary to discuss the things that override our rational actors within that already know consumerism is bad:

Your Labubu is what you gamble about. Labubu’s aren’t just fun because they’re ugly — they’re fun because of the rush enthusiasts get from scoring a rare one for inordinate amounts of money. Kind of like ordering a pricey pair of jeans sight unseen off of Depop to get the blood pumping and then letting them rot in your closet.

Your matcha is what you rely on for a consistent burst of joy at a price you’re probably uncomfortable with. My matcha is actually matcha. My two standout matcha tastings this season were bicoastal. One was at LA’s Community Goods, where a friend and I went during Coachella weekend, hoping to beat the line. It still took an hour, and the drink was a 6/10. The other rare matcha I collected was at NYC’s Sorate, probably one of the most authentic matchas you can get outside of Japan. This line also took an hour, and the drink was also a 6/10.2

Your Dubai chocolate is what you can’t scroll away from because it itches something in your brain that you’re scared to articulate. This podcast deep dive refers to the OG Dubai chocolate video as a genre of social media porn-not-porn that is incredibly lucrative for creators and addicting to watchers. You’re not alone: sometimes watching other people eat something to feel like you have eaten it is better than eating said thing. Dubai chocolate will likely always look better than it tastes.3

Right now, my own personal version of our titular phrase is facebookmarketplace-icedamericano-youtubechemistryasmr.

No further questions at this time.

song of the blog!

okay, yes, who is the labubumatchadubaichocolate summer artist?

i think sombr is mostly innocent. however, he is guilty of making music that sounds like Inhaler but American and guilty of leaning into a great sound only once on his most recent album, I Barely Know Her (ha ha). i claim “12 to 12” and “12 to 12” only:

The team gets ready for corporate events like those erotic challenges that are somehow HR approved. They go through mergers, Casa Amor, and when coworkers move on to greener pastures, the industry can keep up with them on LinkedIn (Instagram and Snapchat).

I’ve started to feel like I also work at the Love Island villa. In the literal sense, it’s normal for reality TV to extract labor from its viewers as a means of interactive entertainment:

• viewers as fan voters, a method of direct narrative participation

• viewers as the looming threat of mass shaming to disincentivize contestants’ bigoted or unsavory behavior

• viewers as future employers, auditioning a future generation of influencers they’d like to see sell them things like Victoria’s Secret bras and WingStop.

In the more abstract sense, though, as a consumer, Love Island requires a tremendous amount of effort, visibility, and attention to even be tolerable. When Love Island is good, it functions like an anthropological study, a form of Slow TV to have in the background, or a consistently entertaining piece of appointment TV to watch among friends. However, when a show that films and airs almost every single day fails to deliver these functions, it still requires the same level of participation and meaning-making from its viewers, if not more.

I understand this is a totally personal problem, but this is the American berserk of it all: Experiencing enshittification is addictive. I’m the rat with the cocaine lever. I’m the lover with the ex. I’m hitting the same button over and over because I know I’ll strike gold 10% of the time.

In our case, our collective shitty summer job, the gold is getting to make a generalized culture take related to Love Island by coincidence only. Most unrelated thinkpieces or quippy liners about the following topics are encouraged: modern dating, politics, cancel culture, manipulation, feminism, friendship, heterofatalism, surveillance capitalism, etc.

In the spirit of transparency, I think I feel bad about my inability to moderate my consumption of this product I don't like very much. I’m then constantly reminded of my personal failures when I beg my friends for information about these ill-fated couples.

In terms of viewership, ad-spend, and partnership, ITV’s Love Island USA is simply too big to fail, but when a season falters—not enough “hot” guys, not enough “smart” girls, not enough messiness—the onus is on the viewer to rationalize all that time they’ve spent with Islanders they can’t even enjoy ironically. By the time you realize Love Island is unwatchable, you possess too much knowledge to stop paying attention. Then, you’re trapped. We totally have a dominant, mono- culture here, but at what cost?

Time to clock in to The Pitt again like @baldanndowd.

song of the blog! my second sots cotender

really digging these news songs that are over 4 minutes (!) from The Last Dinner Party. Great soundtrack for those feminine rage edits that only feature white women, or for a “classic Huda crashout” (words not in the bible), or just to sing hard while driving…

“If only you'd been honest, could have spared this bloodshed
Now I'm wanted 'cross several county lines
When your hand is bigger than my heart
You can crush it, just the way I like
You got a whole lotta' nerve and a whole lotta' spite
When you leave, don't look me in the eye”

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1) song of the summer

2) shitty love island summer

3) it's a fail girl summer (the summer i turned pretty)

4) at the movie theatre summer

5) [gen z free space]

6) l***** matcha d**** chocolate s*****

7) diverse girl group summer

8) my tiktok sober summer

9) sabrina 2.0 summer

10) [republish an old summer for breakfast essay]

*one of these topics will be a short podcast instead of a short essay!

As time is a flat circle, I did something similar last year for summer ‘for breakfast’ 2024! Back then (over only five essays), I explored our mass compulsion to declare summer over prematurely, along with its economic incentives:

Your things, your bucket list items, and your hot-weather aspirations wither and die before you get the chance to try them on. We think the fall will bring stability, so we break out the knits and corduroy far too soon. As a consumer, master of your seasonal domain, it would be the worst thing to be caught outside without a jacket. So, we sweat in our layers a month before we should.

summer ‘for breakfast’ 2024 is late. It’s unseasonable and out of place.

I’m aware the attention economy booms when trends cycle faster and faster, but this year it feels like our desire to justmoveonalready may actually be well-earned.

The closest thing we have to HBO Sunday is a never-ending season of The Summer I Turned Pretty. This season of Love Island USA was the worst one yet, but its central figures have had just as much cultural staying power. Sabrina Carpenter is back with 12 songs, yet we have no true contenders for the song of the summer outside of secular praise music and The Voice audition pop.1 The cycles of American war and terror are still accelerating and horrific.

It’s not so much the volume of oppressive sameness, but the different costumes that that sameness puts on season after season. The summer is a sweaty whiplash of where you should turn your head, but maybe that’s nothing new.

A recent episode of Critics At Large left me with another framing to interrogate: Philip Roth’s phrase, “the indigenous American berserk”. Naomi Fry describes the author’s stance:

The culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. So Roth is saying in this essay, I cannot write a reality or a take on reality, a fiction that is as crazy as American reality.

Roth expressed this sentiment in 1961. In reference to the continued global conflict to ensue. Alex Schwartz states plainly:

Already, [Roth is] saying, [American reality] is too crazy. This is too hard trying to take hold of… Americans are a bewildered people.

If last year’s summer ‘for breakfast’ theme was [OFF-TREND], this year’s is AMERICAN SUMMER TIME (AST). Frenzied. Chaotic. Exhausting.

Much in the spirit of this titular American berserk, I won’t be explaining much more about this concept yet, so you’ll just have to keep up!2

Because I feel the urge to start blogging3 like it’s the early 2000s, I’ve decided to keep each of these pieces under 500 words, light on graphics, and light on hyperlinks. I also won’t be liable for where any of these topics take me. So, when my Love Island essay turns into a bleak diatribe about racism and surveillance capitalism, don’t be surprised.

The days I don’t publish will be when I announce (via Notes) the next day’s topic as chosen by this gorgeous digitally-generated wheel:

See you tomorrow for my first take on AMERICAN SUMMER TIME (AST): a series of pop culture essays with that frothy summertime spin to close out the season right.

as usual, song of the blog! all sfb25 entries will be eligible contenders for songs of this summer obvs

Might use my [gen z free space] to explore how Virgin, and this song in particular, is a great encapsulation of the American berserk. To me, “Current Affairs” is a thrilling commentary right from the center of our voyeuristic online culture.

current public political social affairs! a little random! a little cringe! yes lorde i understand…

ICYMI! I published a lengthy review, commentary, and podcast about my thoughts on Materialists and the reaction to Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend album cover. Read and listen here:

^this piece gives some helpful context for the one below!

I think about one of my favorite reviewers every time I drink a cup of coffee. I work an office job, so the ritual of coffee — from a machine or from the shop we walk to to leave said office — is now a constant in my life.

I like coffee,1 but I don’t like coffee like that. I don’t have needs. I’m not aware of tasting notes. I kind of enjoy the experiment of feelings aroused by a packet of dark brown powder stirred into a cup of hot (recycled?) airplane water. However, I think extra about coffee because of James Hoffmann, a 2007 World Barista Champion,2 who now makes the most satisfying, elegant videos about coffee on his YouTube channel. He orders weird espresso makers, compares filter papers, and does taste tests. What motivated me to dust off this draft was this painfully apt tweet:

When I talk about the weird shit I get into on my phone, Hoffmann always comes up. How strange to be so enamored about a subject you don’t care about, and yet there’s something about someone just speaking critically and passionately that soothes the brain… I think this comment sums it up pretty well:

“I’m here for the art of the review.” Hell yeah.

I’ve taken some time away from Twitter, TikTok, and Substack Notes (I can really be addicted to anything), and I’ve finally had some time to think about why so many consumers are miserable about things that shouldn’t take up their brain space for more than a few hours.

Post-Man’s Best Friend discourse, I’ve noticed a pattern of cyclical, shallow, and bad-faith of critiques of the summer’s buzziest topics. Was Materialists bad? Is Weapons good? Is Superman a political win for the left? Is Huda from Love Island a bad person? Why does Addison Rae suck? Why is Addison Rae the best? Is Lorde washed? Are we all fucking cooked?!

I’m not under the illusion I should be able to look at my phone and find answers for anything anymore, but I’m wondering if this general dissatisfaction in how we’re able (or unable) to talk about complicated subjects online is a result of a deteriorating respect for and knowledge of the art of the review.

Reading and watching negative reviews, on things I hate, things I love, and things I’ve never seen is how I spend the majority of my time online. That wide range of consumption has also made it clear to me that many readers, watchers, and listeners think reviews and criticism are just things that happen by accident rather than a tradition with constants and formats and values.

If the content you encounter constantly leaves you wanting, if you feel your algorithms regularly fail to show you things you agree with wholeheartedly, I ask you to look inward: On an individual level, we have to ask ourselves not just about the TikTok you just watched or the tweet you saw, but what these media artifacts aim to make you feel in the first place. Everything is a review if you look hard enough, and most of those reviews are bad.

Once you start evaluating the strength of a review, of a base argument, you can actually start enjoying and hating things to their fullest extent.

Consequently, when you start getting off on the art of the review, then whether or not a writer (or any random poster) thinks something is good! or bad!, holds less power over you as a consumer.

The barrier to entry for criticism is at an all-time low, so the way to create your own filter is latching on to writers and creators that consistently form strong, intentional arguments regardless of what the algorithm will reward.

The Sabrina Carpenter drama, which now feels stale to discuss, should clarify the difference between most Substack writing and that of critics employed by structured publications with, you know, editors. In viewing the cover of Man’s Best Friend and talking about it, most of us can agree we are among friends. The majority of us do not think women are dogs. The majority of us3 understand what patriarchy is and why it’s bad. The majority of us think feminism is a worthy and fundamental pursuit, so why are we wasting our time pandering to or dunking on those who believe the opposite? Is the urge to be a cop that strong? Not on my phone! I’m Black!

Parasocial relationships get a lot of flak, but I think a lot of pop culture junkies could benefit from them. You guys need people you trust. You need soft spots. You need blind faith! You need to fall in love with a critic and then disagree with them wholeheartedly to remind you that you’ll live afterward. You need to interface with media you despise to realize that it won’t stick to you, even if you happen to like it a little bit.

I have a critical roster to keep me honest. Some feminists I admire think this Sabrina thing is overblown. My favorite music critics invited Addison Rae on their podcast, and it was pretty good. The only people whose taste in movies I trust strongly recommended the worst movie I’ve seen in ages. Andrea Long Chu makes me feel a little dumb sometimes, and I love that!! I’ve listened to Critic At Large since its first episode, and I disagree with said critics all the time.

If you’re constantly a stranger to those you engage with, you don’t develop loyalties that make you more resilient to conflict. The apps brainwash us into thinking we ARE our reactions to things, that we should wholly identify with how something makes us feel and what that feeling looks like typed out on a screen. Our reactions don’t mean much at all, especially because we’re constantly goaded into having them in the first place.

came with a heater, saying:

The real problem isn’t Carpenter. It’s the algorithm that allows everyone to eat off an opinion on Carpenter. [from When Sabrina Carpenter Burns the Holy Bible in Public... How Can I Stand By Silently!]

Almost nobody saw the Man’s Best Friend cover in a casual, neutral environment like a vinyl store or on the side of a bus. You saw the announcement, then you saw the comments underneath, then the talking heads on your phone, then the thinkpieces came.

If you’re lucky enough not to need the algorithm to eat, you at least need it to experience anything while it’s “relevant.” The interference, the arguments over an album with one single out, is a steep price to pay to be in the loop about new music. I’ve accepted I’m not opting out any time soon, but I sure as hell can’t act like Sabrina Carpenter or Materialists will be the places feminism lives or dies (but I can try!) if a living, breathing feminism is anywhere to be found in these online discussions at all.

A real critical perspective is not always satisfying or conclusive, but it is cathartic! An essay should make you shudder in fear and then sigh with relief, or make those things happen in the opposite order. If my years on Substack have taught me anything, it’s that reading takes you agree with is only fun like the first two times.

All of this to say, if a TikTok or Substack essay disturbs you enough to shake the core foundations of whether you believe there’s hope for women4 I have a few suggestions.

1) touch grass 2) open a book 3) throw on a James Hoffmann video as a sedative, or 4) just buy a New Yorker subscription.

song of the blog! a recent addition to my “songs about phone” playlist from Pitchfork darling, Amaarae — long live the review.

[SPOTIFY]

[APPLE PODCASTS]

[POCKETCASTS]

[NOTES: If you have yet to see ‘Materialists,’ I recommend you read this piece. Think of it as an extended trigger warning. Mild spoilers, but the movie is hard to spoil. You kind of just need to experience it.]

You can also listen to me read this! I share my Substack writing process (AT LENGTH), give commentary on the piece, and share some extra takes after the voiceover @ [00:15:00]! If you want to listen on Spotify or elsewhere, go here.

The first surprise of Materialists is that its protagonist earns $80,000 a year as a mid-level matchmaker in New York City. In the film and its promotional materials, Dakota Johnson’s Lucy is never slouchy but always starched, pristine, and fresh. This salary reveal immediately changes the chemistry of the forthcoming love triangle. Lucy is not some high-powered executive choosing between a stay-at-home, broke boyfriend (Chris Evans) and a rich one who would make her job optional (Pedro Pascal). Instead, we can glean that almost all of Lucy’s money goes to rent, leaving very little capital to keep up appearances. With a job like this, in a city like this, with a salary like that, Lucy’s life is not one full of friends or relaxation. To craft her signature look, she likely relies on PR packages (she works at an all-women company called Adore), a Rent the Runway subscription, and a metric ton of credit card debt.

Materialists feels slightly out of time, and I almost imagine it occurring 10 years in the future or on some alternate timeline where dating for a middle-class working woman is a tad more hellish than it is now.

In its first 20 minutes, Materialists demonstrates that if you had $10,000 to burn, you still may not be matched with someone who checks all of your boxes and also happen to really love them. Once Lucy urges a distraught bride to get married despite that lack, her story with us begins. Celine Song asks, what would have to occur for a person equipped with the cold, calculating knowledge of matchmaking (and 9 weddings under her belt) to choose love over never having to do the “math” of being poor again?

Though divisive, I found this film slick, seductive, and consuming. A pleasure and release.

A few weeks ago, Sabrina Carpenter announced her upcoming album, Man’s Best Friend, and with it a controversial piece of cover art. A faceless man holds a fistful of Carpenter’s hair as she’s frozen, on her knees, staring down the viewer like she’s been caught in some act. Around the same time this album art hit the discourse machines, ICE crackdowns spiked throughout the state of California. I could not get off my phone.

I live in Los Angeles. My feeds are an equal mix of global disaster and real, local struggles alongside pop culture discourse and arguments that only exist online. We can “Kim, people are dying” our way around it all we want, but the two are still in some ways connected. I find it hard to want to write about the state of things™ or the pop culture that happens concurrently when we reach these sorts of peaks, but I can observe how pop cultural discourse gets more agitated as a vent for people’s frustrations with one another.

With these two sets of issues, Materialist and Carpenter, I notice a divide amongst the liberal left that is more polarized and nasty than we’ve seen in a long time. The communication breakdown about women and feminism online is disturbing and but not something that was unpredictable post-2016 and post-#MeToo. We disagree on the male gaze, AND we disagree on white feminism, AND we disagree on the meaning of satire. On the left, we all agree something is wrong, but can’t quite agree how we’re allowed to express that wrong or the proper or worthy channels of correcting it.

When nothing is bleaker than the material reality of being a woman, and that reality worsens the farther you stray from being an “ideal”1 woman, the whole point of an online feminism gets murkier. The material harm always, without a doubt, exceeds the digital and pop cultural. In Carpenter's case, a reality (of dating as a straight woman) reflected back at itself is labeled transgressive when an awareness may just signal some progression. Even if awareness is not good enough on its own, feminism shouldn’t only work for those who “opt in” to it.

Treating Sabrina Carpenter as the default, blank version of a woman we can all project ourselves onto is the problem we’re having. She’s an outlier with a lot of influence, a rich white woman born in the United States who has her very own wealth-making apparatus. Her subjugation is already wildly different from her Black and brown pop star peers, let alone the entire spectrum of women who consume her music.

On the global scale, we have to understand that some, maybe most, women are not able to speak the language of feminism or play nice with its parameters the way we do in certain online spheres. This does not mean these women should not reap the benefits of feminism; in fact, they need this framework the most.

Sabrina Carpenter, alone, is the butt of the joke on her Man’s Best Friend album cover. She’s saying: You are all familiar with the fact I am rich, hot, successful, and autonomous, but why can’t I seem to avoid the trap of becoming a man’s pet? What if I kind of like it sometimes? Isn’t it strange that all this “power” I’ve accrued still keeps me on my knees? An ugly thought created by the tool of patriarchy to attempt to reflect the tool of patriarchy.

Materialists is full of these ugly thoughts. We hear daters share their desires. No uglies. No fatties. No men under 6 ft tall, and no women over 27 years old. I’m looking for a man in finance. Trust fund. Blue eyes. I don’t want to hate you because you’re poor, but I’m starting to hate you because you’re poor. Basic stuff.

If you don’t date like Lucy’s clients, you’re lucky if you haven’t been on the receiving end of that oppressive scrutiny.

Materialists is the morally ugliest version of dating, and that New York Times “Modern Love”2 that circles around to shape the next crop of romantic media and ideals that trickle down the cultural pipeline. Love Is Blind, Jubilee, Barstool/Dave Portnoy, The Breakfast Club, and other “lower-brow” media share this interest in the roles of money, sex, and heterosexual dating.3 [The Love Island villa isolates its contestants from class stratification and makes sure everyone is skinny so the fun can begin.]

Despite its ugliness, Materialists is still romantic, sentimental, and fantastical in breaking open the feeling, the ideal, that drives why people opt into any of this dating stuff in the first place.

The film is totally broke boy propaganda, though! If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think the text supports Lucy and John staying together after the film’s end.4 My money’s out on if they’d even make it to the altar, which is one last doubt Song leaves you with. Though the surveys show over half of young Americans would marry for money over love, very few of us would ever have to choose. Song insists that Lucy’s love for John is unavoidable despite her protagonist’s best efforts and better judgment. Her take on love is that if you find it, there’s nothing (even a loveless marriage to a rich man who looks like Pedro Pascal) that could be better than having it.

My reading is in stark contrast to one of the only negative reviews of Materialists I take seriously.5 Angelica Jade Bastién writes:

[Materialists] glances at the structural issues warping heterosexual love, only to argue on behalf of the dishonest cliché that love is always enough if you choose for it to be, powerful enough even to overcome the pesky matters of class strife and misogyny.

While people claim the film’s message is repetitive or obvious, it’s clear some viewers would like that message to come as easily as it does in other films where people just happen to fall in love with people who are richer, just as rich, or just as upper-middle-class as they are.6 Those are not the same movies as Materialists, which uses hard numbers and the threat of financial instability to inform its characters’ romantic worldviews. Song multiplies and simulates that rom-com logic of monetary equity, and then demonstrates how it falls short. In Materialists, if love and wealth are the two rare conditions for a successful pairing, the statistics show that many will find love, many fewer will find wealth, and almost no one will find both.

Lucy is so troubled and unstable, because her existence as a full-time matchmaker is founded on the philosophy of selling that elusive7 both. She’s having a Truman Show style crisis of faith as she dates Harry the Unicorn, which drives her back into the arms of John whose love she couldn’t accept or believe in the past if it didn’t come with wealth. I call Materialists “fantastical” because it’s so literal about Lucy’s conundrum between the two men, like a Greek myth or an experimental play.8 Celine Song’s Materialists “syllabus” primed me to draw parallels between her film and a personal favorite, Mike Nichols’ melodrama Closer (2006). On my own, I think toward the manifesto-style dating commentary of Payton Reed’s Down With Love (2003), or (hear me out) an imaginary, really good episode of Black Mirror.

Maybe I have Black Mirror on the mind, because Materialists sits on the edge of the romance and rom-com until a darker turn that pushes it somewhere else. At the midway point of the film, Lucy finds out that one of her pickiest clients, Sophie (Zoë Winters), has been sexually assaulted on her most recent date. Though the reveal is jarring, it’s not more surprising or odd than what can happen to real-life women who date real-life men. This event is a catalyst for why Lucy finds the top of the dating mountain with Harry to be freezing cold. Her spiral shows the audience how depraved this kind of work, the commoditization of love, gets.

In the scenes where Lucy grapples with the “collateral damage” of her occupation, which drives her to seek out Sophie in person, I imagine her character as a physical embodiment of a dating app. In a costume straight out of Fincher’s The Killer (2023), Lucy trails Sophie and doesn’t let up when Sophie tells her to stop. We are not watching a good person attempting to support their friend. We are watching the tool of a company intimidate a victim and prolong their suffering. A scared, and under-informed Lucy performs the company’s dirty work to keep the system from collapsing under the weight of its unfulfilled promises: With all the money in the world and in the pursuit of the perfect match, no one can guarantee a woman finds love. No one can guarantee her safety either.

I’ve seen reviews cite Sophie’s initial portrayal as shallow, stuck-up, and undesirable as a reason her character feels unsympathetic. I wasn’t aware that victims of sexual assault needed to be morally agreeable to be worthy of our sympathy or narrative buy-in.

With the Materialists discourse, we’re seeing people get quite upset that they weren’t ready to take a rom-com (or a romance) that seriously. The film, and this plot point, is a Rorschach test for what parts of women’s experiences a viewer is tuned to consider first. If they’re attuned to the material and social realities of American dating mediated by apps, a sexual assault is a disturbing but logical progression of a fictional dating operation at scale. If one can only imagine dating for love, and is truly perplexed or even disgusted at women who earnestly try another way to consider a match, a sexual assault occurring plays like a woman’s punishment for choosing wrong, rather than an earned narrative choice that demonstrates no one can always “choose” right.

In our current world, right now, women trust services to look for love. Women isolate themselves socially in pursuit of romantic relationships. Women let their abusers walk them home. Couples get back together after five years for no good reason.

When John tries to console Lucy after she hints at something going wrong at work, he dismisses her. Lucy turns it back on him and asks if he can’t imagine something “that bad” happening, because it’s just “girl shit” to him. Dinners, flowers, wedding invitations. Once again, Materialists is very literal in pointing the finger back at us. Audiences want the girl shit, a fairytale about love and matchmaking, without the girl shit, uncertainty, danger, and women’s complicity.

If you want to calculate the material harm of Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album cover, that math is not for the faint of heart.

A few points for “man-hating” lyrics (+), and a few more for showcasing some kind of sex positivity (+).

Points off for having a man on her cover (-), but a few points back for the fact he’s faceless (+).

Points off for getting on her knees in public (-), but points for looking hot while doing it (+).

Points for using the ironic title of “Man’s Best Friend” (+), but only if she verbally clarifies her stance that women are not dogs in her next public statement.

Points off for having a man grab a fistful of her hair on camera (-), and additional points off if she even enjoys that sort of thing in real life (-).

I don’t think Carpenter’s album art is feminist or cleanly satirical. I also don’t think she set feminism backward by 100 years for releasing it, and it’s quite sad that many women think feminism can be toppled that easily.

While the impact of any pop cultural artifact is worth exploring, especially in an intersectional context, I have to reiterate that there is nothing bleaker than the reality of being a woman. Dating is worse than the fantasy of Materialists. An album cover of a wealthy woman simulating sexual submission is not so transgressive as to be the root cause of why women’s sexual subjugation continues to flourish.

A rape culture brainwashes women into thinking that if we play it safe and obscure the harmful patterns we’re forced into against our wishes or because of them, then men will be deprived of their pleasure. Men derive pleasure from women who wish to be submissive and women who don’t. Men sexualize a woman’s youth, purity, and innocence as much as they sexualize her dominance, power, and embodied autonomy.

Cool with the Madonna. Uncool with the whore. I don’t see how we can accept one end of things, purity and sexlessness, while pretending we’re safe from the other half as long as we don’t participate in those ways of being, such as sexy, brash, or even funny, in public or on purpose. Was Sophie in Materialists “just asking for it” when she thought she could buy a perfect partner? Is Sabrina “just asking for it” when she willingly puts herself in sexual positions?

If women live and die by men’s perception of them while making art, we will be stuck in time.

Materialists and the visuals for Man’s Best Friend make people uncomfortable. They make me uncomfortable, but it’s because they speak to some truth somewhere, that women are unsafe, and sometimes (even more likely if you’re wealthy) complicit in our current conditions. We have to be able to discuss that double bind even if the conditions of our current sociopolitical reality make that inconvenient or more high stakes. Most women, especially those in the global South, are used to their oppression being obfuscated and perpetuated regardless of who’s in office and whether or not the systems that kill them make headlines.

We have to imagine creating art for a world that will change for the better. We have to imagine we’re creating for women who will know better than to accept the basic moves of patriarchy at face value, even if they’re not equipped or ready to do so today.

In a few decades, if (or when) humans start mining landfills for precious metals, a woman will stumble upon the perfectly preserved hard plastic case of Man’s Best Friend. Maybe she’ll look back fondly. Or, maybe, she’ll look back with mild confusion about why we gave pop stars so much airtime while democracy died, and life for women and girls in the 99% got worse and worse.

pssst… song of the blog…

NOTE: I start commenting on Lorde, “What Was That”, ‘Solar Power’ and ‘Virgin’ in the second half of this piece. Stick with me!

ALSO NOTE: I drafted most of this piece pre-Rolling Stone profile Pamela Anderson sex tape controversy. If you want my hot take on that, I kick off the discussion in the comments!

ALSO ALSO NOTE: THIS BLOG WAS 100% WRITTEN IN BLOOD

I’m about to write something no one has ever written before: I love being an Apple Music user.

Not because of the interface or streaming fidelity, but solely because of the conversations I get to have about Big Tech’s effect on casual music listening. I live to conduct sneaky informational interviews about algorithms, recommendation bias, and the evolution of Spotify Wrapped!1

On my first beach day of the season a few weeks ago, my friends and I laid on a towel and discussed the moody selection that Spotify bestowed upon us. I vented about how even though I think Spotify has a slight edge in terms of recommendation and discovery, none of the major platforms have been able to fully automate the curation of songs that sound similar to one another —despite the billions in investment dollars, a metric ton of listening data, and nearly a decade of music streaming monopolies.

It’s almost a bit creepy. Good recommendation at scale is the theoretical key to infinite profit, yet Apple Music will still look you in the face and tell you — if you enjoyed the work of this obscure, defunct indie-pop band from 2008,2 be sure to check out this dad rock Arctic Monkeys album (that you’ve already heard, and no one likes)!

Amidst a faltering monoculture, Apple Music, Spotify, and their competitors recommend songs that regress toward a mean of what most people are listening to. I can’t tell if this regression is a feature driven by profits (to keep us in a cycle of frustrated searching with no end) or a bug (that means no one knows how to make a recommendation algorithm that actually works).

If Spotify and Apple Music cannot reliably3 say, “Here is a song that sounds somewhat like this other one you like,” then I’m starting to doubt if it’s even possible.

Or maybe, not everything feels like something else.

I rediscovered this Tumblr-era line of poetry turned out-of-context quote while scrolling through a TikTok comment section. The context? A creator making an all-familiar plea for a digital crowdsourcing project: “Does anyone know any songs that sound just like this???”

While playing the mental game of scrolling through the comments and critiquing the subpar sound-alike recommendations, the quote stuck to me. A simple reminder to answer a question we all have all the time: A glib but non-judgmental “not everything feels like something else.”

I’ve been mulling over these ideas for the past few weeks. Have I ever in my whole life loved a song so much, searched for one that made me feel the same way, and actually been satisfied with what I found? What about an album or a TV show, or a movie? I’ve gotten close, but never perfect. Even artists who are in conversation with one another or blatantly stealing can’t ever seem to capture the same kind of magic they originally seek, even if they do stumble upon another kind of magic along the way.

[Not to keep whacking Arctic Monkeys, but the lyric, “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes/Now look at the mess you made me make,” is exactly what I mean on that last point. I laughed extra hard, realizing this lyric is from that dad rock album I hate.]4

I had a piece gain some traction on here (Substack), nearly a year after I published it. On the reread, I noticed I was rubbing against this same question: Can anything feel like something else?:

To me, what is so frustrating about the Taylor’s Version project is that it seems like we, as listeners, have to pretend we’re getting a 1 to 1 substitute for the original record when that just isn’t true. If you’ve put in enough hours with any original Taylor record, the recreations will never sound the same… It’s like Taylor Swift recording Taylor Swift cover albums, a good effort, and they don’t necessarily sound bad, but they don’t sound like the songs that changed country music. They don’t sound like the songs that changed pop. And they surely don’t sound like the songs that changed me.

In that same piece, I answer my question a little bit:

When I consider why I love a piece of art, I can’t help but wonder what it was like to make it. I imagine the interiority of an artist, how they arrived at a conclusion, what they wanted—needed—to get across…

If you spend even a few minutes, or I guess a few years, getting into the mindset of what it took to get any piece of art across the finish line, you start to understand why nothing would feel like anything else.

The sad and gorgeous truth is that the conditions and circumstances that made your favorite song are once-in-a-lifetime, never to be found again. The biggest lesson I’ve learned in pop cultural consumption is that every piece is singular, even when our recommendation culture tries to trick you into thinking it’s not.

Not everything, maybe nothing, feels like something else.

Funnily enough, “What Was That” actually does feel a lot like a younger Lorde.5 The synths, the syncopated delivery, and lyrics you have to chew on (vocally and mentally).

If you’re 4 years out from your last release, you basically have two choices for your lead single: A song that sounds mostly like something your fans have heard before or something that sounds completely different. If you’re selling tickets to a tour, attempting to own a whole season, and your last album received middling reviews, then playing it safe with your lead single is the obvious and smart choice.

So, let’s address the solar-powered elephant in the room. Whenever I bring up that Solar Power didn’t “work” the same way Pure Heroine or Melodrama did, the other Lorde fans in the room assert how much they liked it. When the Ultrasound Tour presale opened, so-called Solar-Power-enjoyers proclaimed they deserved to be at the front of the ticketing queue. It is a very rare thing for a pop album to change the face of pop music as we know it. It’s an even rarer thing for a sophomore album to do the same. Solar Power can be considered a kind of pop greatness, but it’s not a crime to acknowledge it lacks something compared to Lorde’s prior projects. That lack is only made more obvious on the relisten.

When an artist I love lets me know that a new project is imminent, I try to prepare for it. I’ll listen to a whole discography in chronological order, leading up to the minute of a new drop. I’ll time my binge-watching in anticipation of show’s return after a long hiatus. I’ll get at least a little familiar with a director before booking a ticket to see a new (or old) release in theatres.

I feel like I’ve been preparing myself for Virgin for 4 years. I think I must listen to Solar Power for a few days straight every 6 months. While I understand the album and where it came from more each time I return, I also understand why it’s an album that washes over you more than it sticks to you. I’m part of a generation of young people who walk around with Pure Heroine and Melodrama all but tattooed on their foreheads.6 In 2025, even a die-hard fan can’t make the reasonable claim that Solar Power has a similar place in culture.

Given the amount of time Lorde has spent away from an album cycle, my assessment of what it was like to make Virgin is as follows: Lorde sits at the center of the pop star contradiction. The critical and popular reception to Solar Power is an artist’s blessing and curse—true feedback. Lorde has had the privilege of knowing exactly what her listeners think they want from her. Synth pop, stories of being sad at a party. Songs to dance to that make them feel intellectual but not pretentious.

The instinct that drives us back toward Melodrama is the same one that makes a fan tweet about how good an album will be when their favorite artist goes through a breakup or divorce. However, if every piece of pop culture is singular, we as consumers can’t pretend to know what an artist needs to do to take us somewhere with their art. It’s okay to chase a feeling, but not if you get disappointed when you inevitably find something that makes you start feeling something new.

Even though I’m a serial album-preparer, I think the biggest favor I can do for Virgin is come to it with a clean slate and an open mind. I’m not 16 or 20 anymore, and it’s not Lorde’s artistic responsibility to make me feel like I am.

I’m interested in seeing how Lorde balances the scales. Knowing what people want from you, but also knowing that if you don’t push the envelope, you’ll get told you’re playing it too safe.

“What Was That” is simply an exercise. She’s teasing us for thinking something new can survive under the expectations for what once was. If you get sad that not everything feels like something else (Melodrama)—look on the bright side—not everything feels like something else (Solar Power).

song of the blog!

If you want a taste of Virgin, spin some its producers and then get ready to contend with how ill-prepared you still are.

A few days before the Virgin announcement a random TikTok recommended me Fabiana Palladino. Algorithms aren’t fate, but it’s nice to get ahead of the curve…

In 2024, Charli XCX modified every cover of every one of her albums across major streaming platforms to match her impending brat era: sans-serif text on a solid wash of color. Many, myself included, thought the change to be temporary, as most marketing stunts for studio albums are. However, after nearly a year of minimalist text boxes in place of their favorite album covers, Charli’s fans started to get antsy.

In response, Charli had an answer: that everything she does has a purpose. And, in the lead up to this year’s Coachella, she teased the start of that purpose, a scratched out version of the brat art on a billboard for those heading to the festival. That change in artwork then made its way to streaming platforms (and the brat generator) this past Tuesday.

Between Charli’s tease and the actual digital switch to brat’s cover art on streaming, Ke$ha was next in line for this promotional move. For her, the trend came in the form of a bright pink dot on all of her records in honor of her upcoming album… period.

While Charli and Ke$ha are not the first musicians to use modded covers for an album cycle (see: Doja Cat, Lil Uzi Vert), I feel confident this won’t be the last time we see this tactic, especially as a tool in the pop star playbook.

Fairly recently, Tate McRae attempted a variation: an album cover bait-and-switch with the release and quick rerelease of So Close To What with a new cover, new tracklist order, and one extra song (that wasn’t very good). After a mixed to negative response, Tate’s team reinstated the original version of the art and scrubbed the new artwork from streaming, even as a digital deluxe.

Therein lies the question, and two different ways it plays out. 1) An artist changes their album art and it’s chic and fresh and surprising OR 2) an artist changes their album art and it feels haphazard and sloppy. Should artists be able to change their album art at all?

I’m going to go with my gut reaction to this scribbled out version of the brat era. I think (mostly) this is a good thing:

Altering album art isn’t the only way musicians have modified the digital streaming experience of their projects. Spotify plays videos in the background, Apple Music allows overlays on its interface and animated components of the art. These customizations are hit or miss depending on the artist or project, but most of these changes are subtle and disappear after a week or two.

Most of us can agree: It’s fun and cool for artists (and their teams) to modulate how you experience their work.

But what about other parts of a rollout? Think bigger. Think Billie Eilish adding all 110 million of her followers to her close friends list on Instagram stories bigger. Outside of music streaming, we can observe how the biggest, most profitable platforms are able to bend or even break their own rules for their most influential users.

Considering a recent episode of Hard Fork, it seems the tech oligarchs of today (Zuck, Elon, Bezos, Cook) are ready to “bend the knee” to the Trump administration. I suggest the pop cultural arms of their businesses bend the knee to the biggest pop stars. — Maybe Chappell Roan was onto something about wanting the president to be a pop star…

For as long as music has been profitable, larger artists have had access to tools and resources smaller artists haven’t. It’s not a level playing field, but there are many things that are fixed about the music industry as well. Artists release albums. Albums have songs. Songs go in a certain order. Shorter albums are EPs. And on and on. These conventions and standards aren’t something we question because there’s no real way to go about changing or subverting them unless you for some reason don’t have Apple or Spotify as part of your pop music takeover plan. The larger the musical artist, the more power they have to challenge a standard, but that artist can only go as far as a digital platform lets them.

Of course, labels can do whatever they want when it comes to what .png shows up on what platforms, and there’s a monetary incentive for streamers to play into the marketing moves of the biggest stars. However, it’s possible we’re going to have to start considering streaming platforms like Spotify as a kind of public service as much as Twitter or network television are. The role streamers have in our lives is an important one to confront, especially if these platforms continue to take up most of the market cap when it comes to the dissemination of culture.

Despite physical media like vinyl records, CDs, or album merch as tangible proof of the visuals associated with music, I wonder if platforms have some sort of responsibility to preserve any part of a musical project that comes out on release day. Or, if we’ll wade further and further into a gray area of digital music release with promotion cycles that never really end.

What if you just don’t want to participate?1 Is getting a new brat cover like getting a U2 album added to your library without your consent? What if you like the stray hair on the evermore cover, but Taylor decides to remove it one day? Is it a matter of time before Spotify charges you for the special version of Lorde’s new single where the visuals form a complete narrative of what happened between her and Jack Antonoff? Who’s to say?

[I haven’t even touched on the fact labels can change the actual .mp3 file on streaming, and erase the old one from a high fidelity existence whenever they so choose. See: Kehlani and the out of tune drums.]

The verdict: I love to see artists shift what we think is a given when it comes to how we get our music, but I don’t love having to trust corporate boardrooms to make that innovation accessible or sustainable if that cuts into their bottom line. Overall, we seem very worried about what’s temporary online (marketing stunts), when maybe we should more heavily scrutinize what could or should be permanent (getting to tap on the Crash artwork).

There’s simply no need for a new season of Black Mirror under these conditions.

I’ve become a kind of brat correspondent, so here’s links to some previous coverage:

Two songs of the blog because I forgot last week:

Charli XCX - Constant Repeat [Now that I’ve seen the film that inspired these album visuals, I’m missing the OG cover art even more! I guess you can just Google it though???]

Black Kids - IFFY [More fun cover art! I got weirdly into this defunct band two summers ago. And by “weirdly into” I mean I was in their top 100 listeners… I love both of their quirky millennial albums <3 I credit the discovery to Glee.]

The Pitt is an easy sell: 15 episodes. 15 hours. 1 shift. It also has no score, just straight, juicy, medical Drama. That Sunday, as I inched closer and closer to getting caught up for the second-to-last Pitt Thursday, I started to get nervous. The kind of nervous where you’re having a great time on a night out, but you know the club is closing in 30 minutes. I needed my afters—a television equivalent to keep my blood pumping—and find those afters I did!

ER, which aired its first episode in 1994 and its last in 2009, is somehow an even simpler pitch than The Pitt, so I’ll jazz it up a bit. 90% of ER takes place in a hospital, and it follows an ensemble of strangely attractive doctors, nurses, and med students. ER is just as much a workplace drama as it is a medical drama, the team saving lives by taking on all the rich and varied emergencies that the heart of Chicago has to offer.

Nearly 3 weeks ago, I began the show on a lazy Sunday afternoon to get some more innocent looks at Noah Wyle (The Pitt’s Dr. Robby and ER’s Dr. Carter). Since then, I haven’t gone a single day without spending at least a few hours at County General Hospital. I’m clocking shifts! I’ve entered a kind of fugue state, really. This is Olympic-level television watching with no end in sight (Did I mention there are 15 seasons?!).

Even though I wrote a similarly impassioned essay about ABC’s Dr. Odyssey last fall, I’ve never much considered myself the kind of person who loves a medical drama. While a few seasons of Grey’s Anatomy were a blip on my radar back in high school, something about it failed to stick or make me understand the genre. No shade to Shonda, but how long can you watch one white woman suffer?

The beauty of ER is that I can’t imagine who it isn’t for. It’s timeless, pitch-perfect, and surprisingly politically engaged. It checks all my boxes for what I crave from any show, so why have I never thought to watch it before?

To answer this question, I present 4 key takeaways from the now 762 episodes of this show I’ve devoured. ER has my wheels turning about the modern television landscape, especially as someone who came of age as a TV-watcher during the 2010s streaming era.

1) the 22-episode season is all it’s cracked up to be.

Forgive me for sounding very young, but hear me out: We’ve heard this refrain over and over again in the last 5 years. The people yearn for longer seasons, but if your TV diet consists of Netflix or Hulu and you enjoy shows where characters have iPhones, you’re out of luck if you want anything longer than 10 episodes. It’s strange to be in an era where television is constantly delightful and disappointing. However, on the whole, we still have an embarrassment of riches in terms of contemporary, quality television.

Watching ER, I’ve taken a television vacation of sorts, now accustomed to the rhythms and beats of a “drawn-out” season. While watching, I actually feel some presence because I’m not worried about how the writers are going to stick the landing in 3 more episodes. I’m also not worried I’ll get attached to the characters, the season will end mid-arcs, and then I’ll never see them again.

4 Christmas episodes, 3 sizzling finales, and about 10 appendectomies in, and I’ve hit my stride ER, something I’ll never be able to say about mini-series turned multi-series dragged out over several years.

I struggle to endorse a current-day equivalent of the 22-episode season order. Maybe I’m just painfully aware that we don’t have the entertainment infrastructure or pop cultural bandwidth for it anymore…

2) maybe rediscovery is part of the equation for a good television diet.

Reckoning with the fact that we have 24/7 non-stop access to the best works film and television have to offer is simply not an issue people had 10, 20, 30 years ago!

I envy the 90s television viewer in a way. There was no one telling them their time could be better spent revisiting the classics. Even if there was a cultural awareness of the great TV of the past, it wasn’t easy or expected to seek it out and be familiar. The growing sensation that your eyeballs could be witnessing the peaks of television at all times is the modern problem for the avid viewer.

My answer? Modern problems require modern solutions: Instead of chasing the high of knowing you’re watching the show of the year or complaining about nothing good being on, I encourage you to rediscover what’s already there. ER isn’t the only show of its kind: 1) excellent 2) not going anywhere.3 Use the older stuff to fill out your diet and reset your tastes, so when something new comes along, you’ll really know when its worth your time.

3) some shows actually have it all, and that’s due to a strong ensemble.

Before settling into the warm embrace of George Clooney’s eyes for the past few weeks, my TV watching was at its dirt-baggiest. By that I mean, 5 to 6 shows on rotation: some week-to-week, some older stuff I needed to catch up on, or rewatches where I was chasing some sort of high from when I was 19.

Due to the nature of streaming and my compulsive need to satisfy my every television whim,4 my watching has been an emotional piecemeal. Severance for the mystery and visual stimulation. The White Lotus for the sex, mess, and death. A Scandal rewatch because there aren’t enough Black female leads to project onto right now.

Streaming television shows seem to have an awareness that you’re watching something else, so they just give you a piece of what you’re looking for. What has me so caught up in ER is that I feel like I’m watching every kind of show. Dr. Carter and his angsty mid-twenties coming-of-age drama. Doug and Carol giving the slowest of slow burns and making me pause to breathe. The politics of managing a hospital in conflict with Dr. Benton navigating being the sole Black man in surgical residency. The nurses even serve some slapstick comedy. There’s death and blood and births, and being in the titular Emergency Room is never not exciting until you get the rare and beautiful moments outside of it. There’s always someone at their peak and someone at rock bottom. Yes, even on Christmas.

4) waiting for a resurgence pays off.

Re: what I was saying in #2: Maybe the way to deal with this backlog of epic television isn’t actually to seek it out, but to wait for it to come to you.

The Pitt is obviously a spiritual successor to ER. The shows share the same DNA in a few of their actors and creators, but I still love that The Pitt stands alone as its own IP.5 Now that we’re discussing a new, popular medical drama, It’s interesting to hear critics and OG fans of ER (like my mom) share fond memories of and reverence for a time when it was on the air.

As long as TV is produced at its current pace and volume, I’m trying to accept that great stuff will keep falling through the cracks—until it doesn’t. The nice thing is on some random Sunday, what’s new on your screen will send you back in time to something older. You’ll be given a smooth on-ramp (The Pitt) to something you’ll like just as much if not more (ER), and you won’t be the only one!

One more reason I’m loving my first watch of ER is having communities of people online watching it too. It’s supremely silly and fun to see discourse about plotlines that resolved before I was born, or to see edits about characters who use answering machines.

Now, to address my question: Who was gatekeeping ER from me?

The short answer: Gen X.

The longer answer: Gen X and elder millennials. Additionally, our fractured pop cultural moment where 22 episodes of a simple premise cannot compete with the constant churn of new streaming shows. Currently, TV is always on the cutting edge—for better (Adolescence) or for worse (Suits LA), and it takes a lot of time and energy to sort out what’s what.

Who knows if I’ll ever make it to Season 15 of ER, but since I still haven’t bothered to watch the season finale of The White Lotus, I find The Studio extremely irritating, and HBO Sundays are based on a video game, this show is where my priorities lie.

[editor’s note: I’m aware Timmy is not Gen Z (he is 29, so close), but I do think his speech embodies a Gen Z attitude! You don’t need to be Gen Z to exude the aura!!]

In the first-ever ‘for breakfast’ podcast, I spoke about Charli XCX’s Vulture feature from October of last year. In it, she plays coy about her desire to win a Grammy:

I’m not assuming I’ll win a Grammy. I need that to be in print,” she says after our food arrives and talk turns to what she would do onstage if she did (she wouldn’t say). “Do you think I will win a Grammy?” Charli asks. I tell her I don’t pretend to know how those sorts of things work. She shovels a spoonful of a rice bowl into her mouth and reframes it: “Do you think I should be nominated for a Grammy?”

She doesn’t care, she tells me several times, about what she considers the old rules of pop stardom: streaming (except her Spotify numbers are pretty solid), magazine profiles (like this one), talk-show appearances (she was on Seth Meyers with Sivan in April), or awards. But she “wouldn’t mind” a Grammy, she admits.

While I declared that I don’t think an artist can “not care” their way to Grammys, I’m not surprised that Charli ended up bagging a few.

It’s one thing to try hard, and it’s another to talk about how hard you try and the things you deserve or desire as a result. Charli keeps up her brat era in exemplifying the status quo for public figures of the last few decades. That status quo is duck syndrome. It’s shut up and dribble, it’s smile and wave, and it’s nonchalance.

Charli actually tries very hard, and she has for the entirety of her career. We can look to her pop star peers who also won big last year and at the Grammys ceremony. The narrative? Overnight success isn’t so overnight. Doechii, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan also embody this trope.

People are catching on:

writes:

Terms & Conditions Apply

The Nonchalant Era Is Over: Be Great or Be Forgotten

For a while, not caring was the move…

Read more

a year ago · 1373 likes · 38 comments · Kaysha

We have video essays:

F1 royalty and my #1 pookie, Lewis Hamilton says:

Maybe it is now the cool thing to try hard.

Timothée Chalamet has been on a losing streak for most of his career, something even he poked fun at during his recent SNL appearance. In January, the actor did double duty as host and musical guest, ending the episode with several earnest renditions of his favorite Bob Dylan deep cuts.

Chalamet’s whole award campaign for his performance as the folk singer in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown was the epitome of trying hard. College Game Day for the boys. Camp fashion tributes for the gays. A Theo Von podcast appearance for the conservatives. A Brittany Broski interview for their liberal girlfriends.

After losing most major acting awards to Adrien Brody for his role in The Brutalist, Timothée needed a win to hopefully change the tide before the Oscars and he got it. When accepting his SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role Award (when did award titles get so long?), Timothée delivered what then became his last public address during awards season:

I know the classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me. But the truth is, this was five and a half years of my life…

And lastly, I can't downplay the significance of this award. Cause it means the most to me. And I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight. I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there. So I’m deeply grateful. This doesn’t signify that, but it’s a little more fuel. It’s a little more ammo to keep going. Thank you so much.

If you’re anything like me (or, as of this week, Viola Davis), you found Chalamet’s speech gracious and refreshing amid what felt like one of the longest Oscars season in recent memory. On the other hand, certain corners found the speech divisive: Vogue ponders “Was Timothée Chalamet’s SAG Award Speech Endearingly Honest or Manosphere-Enabled Overconfidence?”

While the reception to Timothée’s speech leans positive, there is still a generational divide of what can be deemed tasteful or not to express in the public eye. Timothée takes things one step further than most: He name checks the greats, he acknowledges how hard he as worked, and even states plainly what he and his peers quietly know to be true: that a SAG award is just a step to the real thing, an Oscar. Call it gauche, but it’s hard to argue he’s wrong.

In a cultural moment controlled by the maligned and ill-defined Gen Z, his speech was a well-calculated move bound to go over well. If anything, Chalamet’s subsequent loss to his bumbling, rambling peer helps his case. He made a public declaration of his work ethic and ambition, and we all got to see him humbled in the face of it. It’s smart, because even though Timothée doesn’t have the award he was gunning for, he’s shown himself to be comfortable and aware in an industry where those traits are hard to exude.

On the other hand, you could say an actor like Timothée (white, male, young, French) was poised for success long before and regardless of what he had to say on the SAG stage. I spoke about this last summer as we witnessed Glen Powell’s bid for a more American kind of this movie stardom:

Zendaya and Glen Powell both work hard, but only one of them really gets to talk about it—constantly. I feel overly familiar with how scared Glen Powell was of not "making it." That talk track is reserved for the whitest and brightest it seems.

While Chalamet’s speech may not be the best litmus test for what we require to start respecting our movie stars, it may be a good marker for where we’re moving in a broader pop culture.

Chalamet was nominated for his first Oscar at 22-years-old for his performance in Call Me by Your Name (2017). Since then, he has led a top-grossing franchise, been in a collective seven Best Picture nominees, and remained generally likable, brand-safe, and consistently compelling after nearly 10 years in the public eye.

If Timothée Chalamet, a generational talent and beloved inside and outside his industry, can’t claim his hard work and track record of success without some sort of backlash, it makes sense that those his age and younger ask: who among us can?

If you’ve held a corporate job or applied for one in the past few years, you may have noticed this idea of “visibility” popping up over and over.

You come to an office, you do all the work you’re assigned and more, and then your manager pulls you into a meeting about how to make that work — the work you talk about ad nauseam every day — more “visible” than it already is. It’s the corporate equivalent of keeping up appearances, and it’s another form of invisible labor that in some organizational structures can eclipse the work itself.

You need to send Elon five bullet points about your government job to prove the job exists or has value. On your resume you need to make up percentages to prove your underpaid presence made a difference or had “impact.”

As the language of visibility rises in the workplace, we also the see the slow and fervent backlash to our 2020 racial reckoning and with it the rise of DEI policies as well. Post-Trump a switch has flipped and visibility went from just one method of climbing the corporate ladder to possibly the only way to stay on it.

Most of Gen Z, young Americans in general, have known nothing different than a punishing ,crazy-making work culture once they leave or even while they experience their secondary or higher education. The hellish job market, LinkedInfluencing, rising tuition costs, layoff brain, unpaid internships, and no guarantee of affordable housing even while you’re employed full-time — all add up to working hard no longer leading to playing hard.

Talk about numbers and impact? Timothée Chalamet’s face can draw hundred of millions of dollars in a recessing global box office. If we turn up our noses at the most visible, one of the most hard-working of his profession, a Timothée Chalamet, then that has bleak implications for what the average person would have to do to feel they’ve earned their place at work and are allowed to express that, especially if they’re already marginalized!

Even though we get called whiny, it is still quintessential Gen Z to refuse to grin and bear it when it comes to the workplace. Young users’ tend to gloat and flex online, because digital validation is a consolation prize for all the economic precarity despite one’s hard work.

When working is punishment, it makes sense that young people don’t want to be punished for acknowledging that. Lucky for Chalamet, it’s clear most of us don’t even want to do the punishing anymore.

let’s not forget the song of the blog:

Sad to be missing DJOchella this weekend because the album is great!

My only Bob Dylan reference is A Complete Unknown - but the intro to this song feels sooo Bob Dylan to me. Real Dylan-heads feel free to check me tho.