DONT LET THEM 😤

On this moment before something happens and just some thoughts on this little heart of mine.

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A Stunned World Reckons
List of global responses, countermeasures
Africa’s trade pact upended by tariffs
“how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far”
“dumbest people”
Did you hear about the tariffs? Well, we’ll never not hear about them for the rest of the year (Maybe decade!) as we plunge into a global economic crisis that will further the power of the rich while decimating the small business landscape and normal, working people. Thanks again, ChatGPT!

Trump ‘not joking’ about third term
Elon handed out $1M, defying courts
‘Error’ Sends Father to Salvadoran Prison
Court blocked DOGE from blocking USAID.
Judge rejects bid to move Mahmoud Khalil to LA
Trump’s War on Big Law
This is important and I should write a bigger essay on post-courts, post-truth culture — but I don’t care. I simply don’t. It’s upsetting and frustrating and fascist and that’s all there is to it. Anyway, Joe Rogan pulled his head out from his deep inner sphincter to say Trump’s deportations are bad.

“‘Robin Hood’ like figure”
Prosecutors Seek Death for Luigi Mangione
“Justice is coming.”
“Pam Bondi just announced”
"may as well do something much more"
Then there was this. This is your permission to riot. More in a moment.

Democratic judge wins Wisconsin race
Let’s get out of bad news and into…some good fucking news. This race was heavily subsidized by Elon literally giving out money for votes, as the above lawsuit gets at.

Le Pen banned from office for 5 years
South Korea president removed
More good news!! To the former, hopefully this doesn’t speedrun Jordan Bardella into office.

Microsoft Pulls Back on Data Centers
Also some good! For what it’s worth: Microsoft stood by DEI when Trump said to dump it and didn’t attend the inauguration, despite donating to it.

Health risks from air pollution are worse than we thought
This is why I have a Temtop air monitor.

Millions of bees have died this year
Ukraine War Caused Environmental Damage
Why Are Sea Lions Washing Up Dead?
“I’m worried about contamination”
These stories make me want to cry :(

I recently caught a survey of Colombian artist Fernando Botero. His paintings are known not because of their subjects (bathing women, street scenes, art history meditations) but because of their style: he creates corpulent people, chubby, moon-faced persons with bodies unconcerned with size more an expression of stature and society, connecting literal largess with space. In a certain section siloed to the basement, a fascinating switch occurred from cherry cherubs to a series of mid-aughts pieces of unlikely inspiration: the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. With the same pudgy people, he piled bloody bodies atop of each other, depicting American soldiers urinating on captive bodies and dogs ripping flesh of the incarcerated. In a way, because of the “cuteness” of his imagery, the series is even more shocking and devastating than the very real, very graphic photos that emerged at the time. “The United States presents itself as a defender of human rights and of course as an artist I was very shocked with this and angry,” Botero said, reported by SFGATE in 2007. “Anti-American it's not," he added. "Anti-brutality, anti-inhumanity, yes.” The works were specifically not-for-sale and were donated to UC Berkeley. The artist also felt they should be housed only in the United States of Baghdad.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, about art in times of tragedy but also how we, as people, respond. Unlike 2016, the past few months have been quiet times or, rather, dumbstruck times as the system floods. What has emerged is a lot of “La la la: I can’t hear you!!” shit: Lizzo’s return to gushing pop optimism sequels “Women’s World” by singing about turning pain into Champagne; despite being outspoken about politics, Chappell Roan right-and-wrongfully served herself cake and ate it by saying celebrity opinions shouldn’t matter; Chuck Schumer’s work-with-them approach embodies the spinal void of the Democrats. The best expression of the moment is Mel Robbins’ “Let Them” theory, which offers brain rotted intellectual catnip to the masses, enabling people to sit back, relax, and watch shit burn. “This passive aggressive approach to life is bad enough for one’s personal life,” Hanna Phifer wrote of the concept. “But it’s another thing entirely when someone uses this repackaged detachment theory to address structural problems.” As so many get on their knees to down the fly of power — the anti-DEI parade, Rachel Zegler’s pro-Palestine crucifixion, law firms doing dictatorial pro bono work — it’s feeling like we’ve entered a space of being forced a shitty cake of dealing-with-it. But why? Are we that lame to simply grin and bear it, allowing them to take out our teeth as they shovel shit in? “It’s easy to feel powerless to shape the direction of a country,”

Adam Grant

recently wrote of our learned helplessness. “When it feels as if nothing works, the answer is not to do nothing. It’s to do something different.”

Again: we could learn from Botero — and perhaps we’re starting to see the seedlings of this thought processing. A not-so-obvious ennui expression is setting into the pop landscape in a fascinating way: Miley Cyrus dropped three new songs this week, two of which are situated in having a front row seat to the end of the world. “Tell me something beautiful about this world,” she begs in “Something Beautiful” as her surroundings explode, before losing her breath in obsession. Is this song about love? Anxiety? Both? “Let’s pretend it’s not the end of the world,” she pleas over and over on “End of the World,” with strings and synths backing her fantasies about what we’d do if we weren’t dying. The sound of the songs are equally fascinating as they reframe 1970s AM radio as apocalyptic, as an old model falling apart. Miley is joined by others meditating on disaster too: Kali Uchis’ new “Sunshine & Rain” looks for someone to make the earth feel more heavenly; Kesha covers the latest PAPER, proclaiming “WHEN THE WORLD IS CRUMBLING . WE PARTY .”; Gaga’s “Die With A Smile” posits being together during catastrophe making it all worth it (all while dance as a salve to mayhem). Everyone is going through it or, more accurately, media is starting to address macro-collapse (versus the collapse of itself).

Beyond songs, thunder is grumbling where societal storm clouds meet: take Cory Booker’s 25-hour marathon non-filibuster. Definitely critique his politics and track record but, in this economy, such performances matter as it’s something different, something inspiring, something meaningful, something that breaks people out of the hamster wheel of doom. Condemn his arming Israel days after — but understand that constant critique is a yap trap to coerce submission, doomerism in action/doomerism inaction as a puritan pandemic enables a desire for “perfect” leaders, movements, and politics. In the face of the government trying to literally kill off dissent, swing for the fences to smash the system. These songs, this yapping, is the left blinking its third eye of action — but we’re not fully there yet. “We are too timid,” Tim Walz said in an Intelligencer interview this week. “I’ve been making the case [...] to be bold. I think that’s the AOC-Bernie message, too.” In a landscape where anomie is trending, as there is a craving for blood, the question is: are we Waiting for Godot? Or planning to actually do something? This weekend’s “hands off” rally and its overwhelming whiteness paired with Susan Crawford’s win say something — but what’s next? Just shifting your shopping isn’t enough.

Unfortunately timely, I’m reading How To Blow Up A Pipeline which offers both a map and time capsule of recent history: much of the book muses on how the 2010s was the perfect catalyst for change-making revolt for the planet. Greta, soup throwing, self-immolation: that was the mid-2010s through the early 2020s — but what did that turn into, by the mid 2020s? Hunger for nothing, it seems. “It is strange and striking that climate change activists have not committed any acts of terrorism,” John Lanchester wrote in 2007, happening in parallel to Botero’s Abu Ghraib painting conversations. “After all, terrorism is for the individual by far the modern world’s most effective form of political action.” Perhaps if Trump had rolled from 2016 into a 2020 presidency, these times would be different — but it seems that the sleepy Joe Biden time between lulled us to sleep and we’re just now starting to wake up, unshocking the systems. Is that what's happening? We’re so close to something happening because of the tariffs, because of the deportations, because of the collective loss of power: we’re in the chaotic calm before a big boom. What will the explosion be? Hopefully we won’t be too sleepy or distracted to notice.

Some updates!!

• First: if you are in Paris on April 27, I’d like to meet you for a drink!!

  Bobby Aaron Solomon
  and I will be in the city for the last two weeks of the month and we’ll be camped out somewhere for drinks. Stop on by?

• This week’s 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 podcast with

  Ben Dietz
  and myself featured the Gen Z genius
  Rachel Janfaza
  for a conversation on everything from Gen Z’s American dream to Gen X’s creative meltdowns. We did the convo live on Substack (Which I saw some of you pop in for 🥹) but you can also catch it on Spotify and YouTube.

• I had the pleasure of joining

  Global Advisory
  ’s After Work Thing podcast where we chatted about freelance life, the history of The Trend Report™, the domination of American politics, and post-2010s culture. Listen to it here!

• Trend Report Live™ was really cute last weekend!! Thank you to everyone who came!!!!! Here’s the deck of what we talked about and here are the results on the game board. The next Trend Report Live™ will be in Barcelona on May 4: RSVP with Partiful please! And if you RSVP…please actually come so I know how many snacks to buy 🤭

On to regular programming!

Crowds flock to newest Catholic saint
“patron of the internet”
I meant to talk about this last week on 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 but alas: the Millennial saint is such a wild PR push for young people when pivoting to fascism would work better (as that is what’s working).

“Pure cinema”
“Flint and steel”
“Why did I see this”
“Wildest theater experience”
These videos will all be removed because of copyrighting — but: we know the Minecraft movie is bad but 1.) it’s not for us but for literal teens and 2.) seeing so many rowdy viewings is a reminder that theaters are not churches. People should be able to act out and have some fun! Let them be on the their phones, within reason!! Poo-pooing inconvenience and over-manicuring real life robs you of interest. And? Jennifer Coolidge’s press for the movie is just great.

"trailer for the new season of The Rehearsal"
NATHAN FIELDER HIVE LET’S GOOOOOO

Erykah Badu’s Outfit at the Women in Music Awards
"Erykah Badu last night”
An early contender for a look of the year, as Badu’s Myah Hasbany “booty” bodysuit meditates on the history of civilization’s gaze upon Black women.

Blue Origin’s First Female Flight Crew
Olivia Munn calls space flight 'gluttonous'
“What are we trying to do?”
Don’t read that first story but put it on the mood board of big media’s oligarchy simping, in that it’s ridiculous for Elle to legitimizing this waste of money, which effectively is a haha-hehe effort to burn a hole in the atmosphere in the name of richie riches self-fellating. Be for real.

I.V.F., Gene Selection and Embryo Screening
"In humans. In IVF centers. Right now."
The debates about “what makes a human” are getting more and more heated!! Less that this story is “the heat” but that we’re getting into very sticky ethics. While we’re here — and to the point of Elle — the Times needs to get up off its sci-fi simping ass because the AI robo-butler story is just as embarrassing as the above Blue Origin coverage.

Morgan Wallen ruffles feathers with SNL exit
“everyone is a grifter”
“What the fuck do you mean”
This is less about “what happened” and more about SNL and the meme-as-PR machine: this is televised rage bait to amplify loserdom.

I hate my phone so I got rid of it
The return of dumb things
I Tried Out This "Dumb" Phone
“could you use this minimal phone??”
Not a new trend — but the calls (lol) are getting louder: this may be the year dumb things crossover, from niche designer non-tech tech items into a everyone-get-off-constant-internet movement aided by tariffs.

Read while listening to.

The doctor pressed the wand into my sternum, rolling the black ball over a pectoral, into the armpit. “It’s perfectly healthy,” he said. He briefly turned on the sound, which was like a washing machine sloshing itself around to create a dubstep beat. “You can look at it,” he said, tapping my shoulder. I turned my head from the window to the monitor behind me. He readjusted the wand deeper into my armpit, a brief non-hug with this man I had only spent five minutes with before taking off my shirt, laying on a bed half-naked for him. “That’s your heart.” He pointed at the flapping valves, pumping blood from left and right atrium to left and right ventricle. “It’s a good heart,” he said. “It’s as good as any heart.” It looked like a sea creature lost in space, like a baby stingray flapping its wings at you from within a tricorder. Was it going to stop? Was it going to just keep going? How was it inside of me? I felt it in my chest as I watched it work, both viewer and actor at the same time. I will never have a child, not that I have the physical capability or personal desire, but it was an unexpected surprise on this random Thursday in 2025: meeting my near-forty year old heart. I’ve spent more than three decades with it in my chest: I’ve forced it to pump through years of over-drinking, brief moments of toying with drugs, college sports requiring constant exercise, years of using the body as an instrument on stage and off, all those literal and figurative times I almost died. Once I was given last rites because doctors didn’t think I’d make it. I don’t remember because I was unconscious — but I lived, bitch. This thing, this fist inside of mem was why. I never thought I’d meet it, not that I had a desire to. Like so much of life, it just sort of happened, a chance over-the-shoulder encounter in the arms of a man I didn’t know.

We’re always dying, aren’t we? I think about that a lot, especially when I’m going to sleep. It used to wake me up: I would be drifting away and would remember that one day all this ends, trying to work through that moment that could be tomorrow or seven decades from now. It always takes my breath away, both in awe and fear. What will that be like? “It’s like when before you’re born,” Bob The Drag Queen told Scott Evans recently. “Just, like, nothing.” They continued, in a different conversation with Drew Afualo: “The idea of eternal life…that’s a curse. I have to do some version of this?” I’ve had those thoughts before and spent a lot of time with them again this week but, unlike years ago, it didn’t keep me up at night. It picked at me because, as I tend to do, it’s a subject I write a lot about. I just finished a novel on the subject and, for a few days, I thought the next novel would be about having to flip through the channels of other people’s lives for all of eternity, the boredom of being forced to watch forever a bureaucratic nightmare of consumption. This used to make my palms sweat, my heart beat faster: that’s why I would wake up. I still sleep on my stomach, but more to the right because I don’t like feeling my heartbeat against the bed. I love being alive but I don’t want to be reminded of it because then I start thinking about how I’ll never know what old Justin Bieber looks like because, whether he dies before or after me, it’s impossible to see those younger than me at certain ages. Same with my nieces and nephews. I will always be older than the child born as I write this. I will never see them in old age in the same way I will never see my parents in their youth. It’s beautiful and horrifying. That’s why I sleep more on my right side than my left.

I met the heart doctor because he said something was funny about my heart after a physical two months back. He mentioned this casually, that I should come in whenever. I made the appointment and, as he said, it’s a perfect heart. He showed me the cardiogram from February. “It’s like a fingerprint,” he explained. “Yours is interesting.” That’s why he wanted to see me, why he said it wasn’t urgent: my heartbeat was just interesting or did I have a condition that could kill me? He assured me that, no, it was just interesting as my cardiogram in that meeting was the same as the last time. I had been thinking about my heart all week, in the days leading up, taking the stairs more to keep it healthy, considering little maths to keep an eye on it. All this because I had too much wine last weekend, waking up in the middle of the night feeling my little heart beating too fast, trying to crawl up and out my throat. I was living but I was dying. Obviously. So are you, etc.

As a child, I had a vision that I was in an attic, seated in a chair, telling a story to a captive audience of children. I’m very old. I may have a cane. They grab my hand when I’m done, showing me something. I’ve always known this is a deja vu that has yet to happen, that is decades in the making — or in the coming weeks, if my body has other ideas. “Your cholesterol is slightly high,” the doctor told me before we were done. “It’s very strange. You are thin.” Skinny? I would take the compliment, but I also knew this was generations of dead family on both sides letting me know I would be with them soon enough: blame the one before, I guess. This is and isn’t the reason why I’ve been on a cleanse this week and why I do a cleanse for two weeks every quarter: to reset myself, to buy more time, to try to make the most of what I have, to clean my temple of shit.

There are videos of teens whose faces are painted with makeup that looks like they have a case of stripes. “If I was a teen today, I would definitely look like this kid,” I tell Bobby. My heart would still look the same and, if I knew then what I knew now, maybe the time between us would be different. “You have to live life,” the doctor told me — which is true. The world is ending a little more every day, both inside and out, and so am I. It’s not as bad as we think but also just as bad as we think: don’t dream it’s over. Let’s pretend it’s not the end of the world! Give me peace and chemicals, at some point, hence wellness as the new status symbol. Should I start intermittent fasting? Should I quit drinking forever? I don’t know. Who does? “When I’m in a little bit of a funk, I like to do this time travelling day,”

Sonya Trachsel

explains in a recent TikTok, “where I pretend like my 80 year old self gets to come to this day today and relive it.” Imagine, then, how my heart will be. Will it beat as fast? Will it slow with weariness? What will happen between then and now? You and me and my little heart will see.

"don't worry kitten"
“FUTURES SINK”
“DEI stood for”
“Seen on Slack”
“on podcast equipment”
“wrong type of recession”
“it’s called Switch 2”
Economy and tariff memes because…they offset the madness.

"no one:”
“Hinge is going really well”
“Someone with diahrrea would say”
“I would drink a bucket”
Big week for poo poo posts.

“Cross-dressing goes back so far”
“drag queens are dangerous”
“obsessed with this”
“motivate myself”
“Why are you so interested in us?”
“low-key Clairo shade”
“sigh name cuff”
“music at gay club”
“WE’RE WE !!”
”Unfortunately the funniest”
Queer posts of the week and, if you haven’t seen this RuPaul TikTok, you are legally required to watch it.

“2009 starting to look like 1980”
Really hated this video.

“Welcome back to tri-county”
“I can’t stop”
Lost count of how many times I’ve lost this. The comment “almost lost you there girl” sent me into orbit.

“The impact that”
Also watched this Nikki Blonsky video a lot to figure out what’s happening in her mouth. Also watched the Nikki chorus a lot too.

And, finally, a look at one of Bobby and I’s biggest relationship issues.

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