can y'all to stop pouting
On the aesthetic vacancies that have become a youthful obsession and dissecting "immersive room" communal brain rot.
The Trend Report™ is a reader-supported publication. Consider upgrading to paid to support and such writing on life and culture now.
👠 Soo..what was fashion month? Well, J'Nae Phillips and I chatted with Ilia-Sybil Sdralli over at StyleTitle to reflect on the month, where we had very interesting complimentary but contrasting views: check it out here.
🦿 HIP REPLACEMENT 🦿 has social media
menacemanager ryan benson joins Ben Dietz and I to chat slopaganda, how everything is comedy, and the Backrooms as economic collapse horror. Listen on Substack, YouTube, or Spotify!
Trump Initially Laid Out Goals for Iran
Israel to ‘demolish’ houses in Lebanese border
Hegseth asks Army chief to step down
Welcome to month two of war, where things continue forward in not-great ways.
Secret Codes and Yuan Fees Get Ships Hormuz
Accelerating de-dollarization
Keep an eye on this, as a shift away from USD to yuan would really reshape the global economy while diminishing the dollar.
Macron criticises Trump
UK will seek closer ties with EU
Iran war warning Europe chose to ignore
Meanwhile, Europe carries on with their #StrongerTogether approach as other countries (Ahem, China.) plan to punch while the dog is down. But Europe? They’re tiptoeing on the high road. I’m tempted to set out a lettuce of concessions — but stay tuned! I hope to be wrong!
Americans: little appetite for troops to Iran
The new Trump-tech alliance cashes in
This should be the defining us-versus-them of the midterms, but I’m not sure who will run with such messaging even though it’s very obvious which side are the villains.
Ballroom commission changed documents
Why Republicans aren’t saving Trump’s ballroom
Trump’s Ballroom: Barely Been Scrutinized
As if things weren’t stupid enough! This will be a monument to these terrible times, to be certain, if (or when) it is made. The last story popped last week and is delightfully catty.
Why did Trump fire Pam Bondi?
It seems Trump’s plan to put women on the frontlines of the firing squad mostly worked, as he can now evolve his cabinet into an even more hellish spice rack of evil. Speaking of racks: get a load of Kristi Noem’s husband! Sigh. This should be a moment to advocate for gender difference and, while I love the jokes, such a situation will definitely enable provinçal queer harm. Just ask that poor pink top Zara Larsson gay!
Kenya enters rare earths race
Kenya secures China trade and rail deals
Kenya Airways sees surge in demand
Something’s happening around Kenya, as it partially benefits from the war and seems to be positioned as an alternative link between the east and west. All this, as tourism in the area in 2025 saw an uptick.
Artemis 2: First Beyond Earth Since 1970s
NASA: Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
Not to be a buzzkill, but I don’t give a fuck about any of this space shit. Enough tax dollars are being spent on useless stuff like war — and going to space for a fool’s errand to make nuclear power happen on the moon? Get this out of my fucking face, and I don’t want to see some depressing view of Earth either!! (I will, however, read about space pooping.)
I
Years and years ago, when I worked at Nickelodeon, the tween actress Anna Cathcart represented the type of talent I had in my mind in reenvisioning the channel: kids who were smart, interesting, upbeat, with a quirkiness that set them apart. The cool younger sisters of the world! I briefly worked with her during a Covid era production, where she really did embody the principles of who the network could embody. She was the face of a generation! Naturally, she was sixteen then and a lot has changed between that part of the decade and now — and so has her stardom, as she plays the titular role on Netflix’s tween breakout XO, Kitty. But you might not guess she has any of the qualities I mentioned — smart, interesting, upbeat, quirky — when swiping through her Instagram: now 22, she’s taken on a specific style that I remember some of her peers aspired to in 2020 but she shied away from, this dazed look, this idc look, this shocked-yet-unimpressed look that has now become a Gen Z staple. A lot of this is a performed I’m trying to be cool!-ness that comes with being barely out of teendom, a plea to be taken seriously as an adult, which has stained a certain strand of digi-tainment stars I worked with in the past like Jules LeBlanc — who has a more woeful, performative sexuality idc — and Lexi Rivera, whose idc is very pickled and slightly mischievous.
It’s such a disappointing look, less in a misogynistic “You should smile, sweetheart 😏” way and more that it stares down the barrel of life with a shrug, an apathy. We can categorize this as the Gen Z pout, which is getting a lot of press right now for being the younger generation’s duck face, a mark of disaffection that serves as armor. The look — which someone speaking with the New York Times described as trying to appear as if newly photographed “whilst contemplating your abject disaffection with the world around you” — is hardly the only expression of the idc aesthetic as it goes beyond the visual and into a worldview as we see with “youthful” voiceovers now. “[Gen Z] think a conversational voice and emotion in general is corny,” voice actor Tawny Platis explains, in an analysis comparing the John Krasinski certified Millennial conversational voiceover with the disaffected Gen Z idc voiceover. “Now what we see in our scripts and commercials is something called ‘detached,’ which is supposed to sound flat and like you’re talking to someone without looking up from your phone.” You all know who is being faxed here, or at least who embodies these vibes best: Rachel Sennott, the comedian-actor whose idc qualities has rocketed her out from a sunny “It’s LA!” video to a frustrating, lazy eyed I Love L.A. series. She, like her peers, like my poor baby Anna, embody our desaturated now more than any Devil Wears Prada or Harry Potter sequel: Netflix lighting as personality, this says.
If we think critically about this feeling, the performative disaffection is less the vacuousness of youth and more uncertainty as a defining trait. Do I smile? Do I glower? Do I laugh? Do I cry? Yes, the face and the voices say, pinning these traits almost exclusively on women as young men are similarly lost in looks that seek to numb expression and dull difference. The gooner face — like gooner culture — functions similarly, a waiting-to-exhale pre-ejaculate state that seeks to sustain pleasure while perhaps raising the bar of what fulfillment could ever be. We’re far enough into Gen Z staring at their adulthood to understand that this clarifies a narrowing narrative around them similarly to what emerged around Millennials nearly a decade ago, that all they care about was avocado toasts and selfies: it’s all revealing their truth to be based in deep uncertainty, a “Who am I?” not as existential question but as casting call for the day’s persona, for someone to place an ad on the face to offer meaning — and I say that literally as Starface and eyepatch trends posit the face-as-ad for the young to maxx out on whatever someone will pay them for, everyone a creator, everyone a billboard to spray on. “I’m increasingly interacting with people who have logo eyepatches on,” someone explained on TikTok this week. “Talking to someone who has two large logos on their face feels really good and makes me excited about the future.” As someone chirped back: my face is the front of shop.
I see this vacancy everywhere, or at least the pushes for vacancy, to blend in, to be more bland and lifeless, a tool to be used instead of being a breathing, autonomous someone. Casting chic water bottles as if a personality, marking the time this year by AI slop and pop culture dramas, sleepwalking from CBK spring to cigarette, loafer, ralph lauren summer, copying and pasting personality expressions to the point of homogeneity: idc, idc, idc, the folly of youth now an apathetic holding pattern. Tell me what to do! Give me permission to live. This was something I kept thinking about during the new Backrooms trailer, which made the film look worse to me because it coalesced this aesthetic: the horrors of nothingness, a blank space of lifelessness, of having to be alone and yourself, a horror genre made and consumed by a young demographic who are increasingly expressing themselves as emptiness. Life as liminal space, which I understand and completely get when we consider the generation grew up and continue to come of age in the horrors of modern economic waste, of collapsing (literal hollow) capitalism in the 2000s that led to the excesses of the 2010s that brought them into the 2020s bitter and ready to cash out via charlatans like Trump, et al, only to find that their own vacancies of values was reflected back to them as an even darker path.
What we’re learning in the idc era isn’t that nihilism breeds apathy but permission, waiting orders as you outsource life — Will a dating app I hate solve my love problems? Will a job site I know doesn’t work fix my career? Will a prediction market that I know is gambling make me rich? Will a belief system I don’t care for save me? — instead of taking charge and making change. I wonder this, as we come closer and closer to key elections in so many key sites around the world, if this is the year a generation defies a self-defined uncertainty to confidently declare values, to pick a smile over a frown or vice versa. In will-they-won’t-they times, staring blankly back at the world as it happens to you isn’t working as life is already too close to the knives: you can’t just lie there, edging yourself through life. Caring says a lot about you and, to not care, marks you as just that: a mark, someone — or, worse, something — to be exploited. Don’t sell yourself so easily.
Hollywood’s Job Market Is Collapsing
The Hollywood I knew no longer exists — and it’s bumming me out! Not that this is surprising to anyone who has been following this storyline this decade, but it’s so sad. I’m pouring one out! A big part of this is something I discussed earlier this year: America has priced out key parts of its culture, forcing industries like Hollywood to “make it work” internationally. (Flip side: thanks to the best LA account, @americanaatbrandmemes, for identifying the worst intersection in the city. The winner is bad — and the runner up is also bad — but the Beverly/Virgil/Silver Lake/Temple intersection was robbed. I demand a recount!)
Jobs report March 2026
“average new hire was 42”
“entering the job search with me?!”
Sure, sure jobs are “good” — but the mumblings about 42 (!!) being the average age of new hires all as the Oracle mega-layoff happened aren’t making me too confident in the working world now. We gotta fight these robots, man.
Hershey to resume using chocolate
Easter eggs stay pricey
“Fuck you nestle”
We talk about water wars, yes, but we also need to talk about the chocolate wars, as prices and tastes are changing as availability is all over the place due to climate change.
Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men
As someone who grew up extremely Catholic, I will always follow the news of my people — and this seems like an inside job, as we see with similar PR pushes via conservative platforms like NY Post and Evie also advancing the narrative. Like the JD Vance new book conversations, I need everyone to read the book Opus real fast to “get” that all this chatter is connected. I just know all this shit pisses my boy Leo off real bad!
I Got the Tucker Carlson Merch
Thank you to Luke Winkie of Slate for doing critical work wearing Tucker Carlson merch around Brooklyn, to reveal that — Yes. — it is appealing to left wing people. I’m not letting this story put me into cold sweats as anyone non-ironically wearing this will get spat on by those-who-know.
This $400 (Not) AI Keychain Is Pointless
Something like this is an extension of the above essay, as we’re in a place where truly — and intentionally — pointless products rise. This keychain is cute but, like a NeeDoh or Labubu, no one needs this shit and yet it is being made. Says a lot about the state of humanity!
Adam Friedland Meets Maury Povich
And so what if I think Adam is a babe? Obviously!
Heirs to Bic Pen Fortune Seek Painting
Rich people shit of the week, as the Bic family is fighting to get a painting back that was…allegedly stolen by one of the family’s chauffeurs in 2006.
l
There’s a screen in front of you. There’s also one to the left and to the right. The ceiling is a screen. The floor you stand on: it too is a screen. You are within a television, or that is the idea even if the screens themselves aren’t television but more open spaces to project something. Children. There are children running around in here! They roll on the ground. They stand in front of the screens. They chase and jump after the moving images. An old woman falls, but not in a way that is scary but more that she clumsily went off balance while trying to walk in an enveloping space depicting what it’s like to walk through a grassy savannah in the horn of Africa. She laughs, now on the floor with the children, as her adult children bend down to help her up. Silly, silly, she says. Why the fuck are you inside the television? And why is the television playing nature clips?
This isn’t your first journey into the television, although this one was accidental as it was included with a ticket to a Matisse exhibit. The signs said it was an “audiovisual immersion” about nature, which sounded nice until you walked in and it was a television, just like the Gaudi television at the basement of Casa Batllo, just like the giant David Hockney television at Foundation Louis Vuitton, just like that one corner in Soho in London that sucks in tourists as if an eyeball vacuum that confuses advertisements for art. What was thrust forward by global Van Gogh experiences — which monopolized energy in the late 2010s from advertorial adult play place moments like the Museum of Ice Cream and installation “art” trends like Yayoi Kusama’s steroidal masses — has now created a grotesque economy of alone-together television experiences that are like movie theaters but even less appealing as they promise more (You’re in the movie!) while offering you less (It’s not a real movie!), often doubling prices (A ticket today in Athens is 17€, compared with an 8.50€ movie ticket.) but halving the runtime (“60 to 90 minutes” versus the 156 minutes of Project Hail Mary). Like an STD, these concepts have spread, colonizing high streets to confuse viewership with activity, eventually branching off to form a permanent parasitic relationship to a culture as expressed as Artechouse and Summit in NYC and Lightroom in London and Atelier des Lumières in Paris. Inter-television experiences seek to elevate and reinvent video while delivering sub-par activities: few places to sit, unconcentrated centers of viewership, minimal storylines, kids running over your feet, people falling down, motion sickness, induced vertigo, all that leaves you feeling nothing, robbing both Hollywood and the history museums to deliver you digital cotton candy. “Experience” as viewership but not really either, although you did get off of the couch to walk into the television instead of simply staring at it. There’s that?
We know this style is going out of style, or at least evolving to make being in the television feel quaint when compared to the Sphere’s gluttonous, Elisasue-style smudging of film history that takes you out of the television and places you within the camera’s lens. Smaller Spheres like the buzzy Cosm posit domes as “the future of entertainment,” dropping you into live sporting events and concerts without having to travel anywhere, versus the hollow Holodecks that that one friend with no taste dragged you to or that one relative who doesn’t follow the news bought tickets for while in a new city. What becomes the television when Hollywood is dying and everyone is a movie star? “Communal experiences,” it seems, as people lack the imagination to understand how gaming offers the same but better or cannot fathom that they’re craving live theater but don’t see that as an “option.” We are simply too unimaginative to process anything other than reality, preferring to sit in someone else’s eyeballs to view the world instead of imagining anything ourselves. Non-fiction books about some historic old pricks over contemporary fiction any day: hydrogen bomb of basicness singeing off the flesh of a coughing baby.
And yet: standing inside of the television in the south of Europe, watching nature videos from a decade ago, you would never guess the future of entertainment was anything more. Dare to dream less, the room says, videos playing everywhere but none of them interactive, none of them live, none of them offering anything else but a pacifier, an activity and culture that has you stand inside of TikTok instead of laying down, watching it on your phone. Ironic, as most people within the television were on their phone, not just filming their children but swiping and watching something, bored by the spectacle. The kids don’t seem to care either, as they run laps around the people, carrying only that their skin has been painted. No one cares deeply about anything here, you think, the thitysomething watching the scene, scribbling notes for an essay on the decay of entertainment and the collapse of culture as audiences flatline possibility. You’re different, you think. You’re writing on your phone inside the television instead of watching something else.
“They won’t let us!”
“do have to feel bad”
“maybe Noem’s dog”
“that gay guy’s dog”
“between this and her shooting”
“Kristi Noem to her husband”
“while she was out back”
“If his fetish is humiliation”
”boobmog”
“Kristi Noem’s husband”
“Busty Bryon”
“Turns out”
Kristi Noem’s husband, the busty Bryon Noem, had the best week ever as his sissy tendencies were revealed, making way for many a great post. He had tough competition this week too, given someone in Jill Biden’s secret service shot himself in the ass while Pam Bondi got axed. This Monica Hesse piece on the matter was very smart.
“3 p.m. on a friday”
“my horny ass”
“Sources tell me”
”Romans suffer”
”Catholics on Easter”
”already overstimulated”
”I didn’t know that”
“celebate gay guys channeling”
“last supper was sooooo fierce”
“jesus on good friday”
”los católicos”
Best Easter week/weekend posts.
“I have to respect”
“a perfect match”
“Woah Vicki-an”
“I genuinely fear her”
Are we about to reach a Woah Vicky renaissance? Feels like it!
“The real audio”
“She DGAF”
Very big week for very malfunctioning Disney robots!
“She ate him up”
“stepping on that toe”
A return of toe stepping discourse for one, final, great post.
“Monopoly 2026”
“no time for the silly shit”
“asking people ‘the question’”
Best gaming content of the week. Screaming “LARA” was my stim for a few days.
“meeting Tung Tung”
Only Tiger Woods post that really mattered to me. (Actually, I lied: I liked this one too.)
“my alpha boyfriend”
Boyfriend of the week!!!
And, finally, my policy on confidential information.
Subscribe to Horstman and gift a paid subscription today.
Gay 👏 guys 👏 channeling 👏
In the “I Can’t Even” section, this idea becomes particularly striking.
What this piece surfaces so precisely about the face as a site of projection (and increasingly, of vacancy) finds a very literal parallel in beauty and fashion over the past few seasons.
I’m thinking in particular of the rise of graphic beauty patches on the runway (Eckhaus Latta x Dieux, Ashley Williams x Starface), where what was once a functional, intimate skincare gesture became aestheticized, stylized and ultimately branded. These were not discreet hydrogel patches worn in private, but highly visible, often logo-emblazoned elements integrated into the look. The face, in that moment, ceased to be merely expressive; it became a surface. A medium. A placement!
There is something quite telling in that shift. Care becomes spectacle, but more than that, it becomes communication. The patch is no longer about repair or restoration, it signals affiliation, taste, belonging. It says: I am this brand. Or perhaps more accurately: this brand speaks through me.
Thank you for sharing your thinking and your lens on the world. It’s consistently enriching to read <3