ENOUGH WITH OFFICE SIRENS!!! 🤓💋

On the relationship between aesthetics like "office siren" and outsourcing your life, and why "Latinx" has become such a no-no word.

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Thousands injured as pagers explode
What to know about the two waves of deadly explosions
Funeral Held for 9-Year-Old Girl Killed in Pager Attack
Pagers Sound Alarm for Supply-Chain Security
Surely I am ignorant to myriad attacks as such executed by America, but this is one of the more fucked up modern warfare stories I’ve read maybe ever. That Israel perhaps tainted the Lebanese supply chain of pagers and walkie talkies, causing simultaneous explosions of these devices that harmed thousands of civilians? Diabolical. Just gross.

Teamsters won’t endorse in presidential race
Why? Because internal polling said people were for Trump and now they’re making no national endorsements, a first since 1996. This story is absolutely dizzying and — I don’t mean for this to be rude — but this video comes to mind 🫠

Will Trump Beat Expectations Again?
It’s my job to keep an eye on this and I have been (because I’ve been thinking about it too).

America's long history of anti-Haitian racism, explained
Two elementary schools evacuated due to threats in Springfield
"Our Haitian fans and friends deserve better"
See above. The echo of Trump’s “They’re eating our dogs.” quote has been quite wide. Anyway, JD Vance got a college professor to delete a story where he rebuked the GOP’s anti-immigration stance. Poor Usha Vance, you boot licker.

“Why is Putin not a war criminal, but Netanyahu is?”
"Jill Stein hasn’t won"
I deleted the Breakfast Club interview from last week’s Report™ but, as Medhi took her to task this week, we can officially say calling out Jill Stein to her face is a very good trend.

Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa
You must read of the week, which I don’t think enough people are seeing the connection to.

Senator attacks Arab American advocate
"hearing was to address hate crimes"
Related and not, this makes my blood boil.

Rich countries silencing climate protest
Speaking of blood boils!

Portugal wildfire deaths rise
Epic floods are wreaking havoc
Guess The Hague’s ban on fossil fuel-related ads came too late.

Americans can now renew passports online
Will this make the process faster? Who knows!

More Americans getting news on TikTok
GUILTY! SO SUE ME!!!!!!!

A week ago, FKA Twigs dropped the video for her (very good) new song “Eusexua.” Have you seen it?

The video is in two parts, the latter half featuring the title track as Twigs slinks around in Rick Owens and dramatic headpieces while doing choreo that is equal parts Pina Bausch and below-ground rave room. The first part is what needs to be studied though, as it has Twigs playacting a bespectacled office worker with a pixie cut. She rushes into bullpen, an environment that is part Office Space and part The Matrix, to battle a computer that is on a desk with a literal inbox and Thermos. Her computer malfunctions then the phone rings — a landline — which she picks up, zones out, and creates a vortex that undoes the office space, aided by an undoubtedly Koreless thump. Glitchy organized chaos follows, as she sloughs off office wears — and her hair — for intimates and a skullet. The office daydreaming transforms into a nightclub fantasy that eventually pulls the space apart. “I’d never really fully understood the importance of dance music,” she told Marg.mp3 of this era. “It really caught me by surprise to be able to heal myself.”

What goes unsaid in all of this is the office-ness, this “soulless” setting, which is something we saw similarly in visual aesthetic in Charli XCX’s “360” along with Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” and Yeonjun’s “GGUM” (“waiting room” and radio station, respectively). I point this out because…none of these people have ever “worked” in an office, particularly not the very American, suburban The Office style offices with hard-lined phones and giant monitors, ergonomic chairs and staplers. These all, in ways, conjure the final girl of the 2020s aesthetic craze (the office siren) and very fittingly captures something that Max Berlinger and I talked about in our conversation about fashion this week: these are all examples of modern cultural productions that tap into — And long for? — a culture and time that has never been experienced by most viewers, most of whom have a strange longing to “go there” as these far these sites no longer exist in our world. Of all things, the office of the 1990s and early 2000s has become the site to lust, a space where nothing is wireless and where one can constantly edge toward Secretary-ing someone. Having worked in such spaces around these times, I can tell you that the most exciting thing to happen in these buildings was being releasing every so often for ten to twenty minutes, to grab lunch or a coffee outside before you are summoned back. Like liminal spaces and backrooms, “the office” is an imagined space for young people to project a fantasy of adulthood in a similar way that teens today lust for living in earlier generations, be this the teenage years of ten years ago or twenty years ago. “seemed so fun,” someone says in the comments. “it'll never be like this again” (The technical name for this is anemoia, a nostalgia for a period you never lived through or, as Freya India observed earlier this year, “grieving something I never knew.“)

This situation is less the longing for old times or to be pre-internet but embodies what happens when an aesthetic is adopted without critical thinking, meaning that it’s one thing to say “Dang, I wish phones weren’t everywhere!” and then go spend three hours on TikTok versus saying “Dang, I wish phones weren’t everywhere!” and then turn off your phone for the weekend, delete your Amazon account, cook a meal from a cookbook, spend time with friends in a park, etc. There is a deep failure of imagination right now, that just because things are “this way” doesn’t mean you cannot escape it — or that such signs and symbols actually have a context that can be researched and discovered, to understand how such phenomenon were formed, to know that an encore isn’t a TikTok trend, that Levi’s are in fact a jeans brand. Consider the friendship apps that we spoke about last week: just because there’s an app for that doesn’t mean you have to use it.

In the past week, these calls have gotten louder and louder, gaining sentience, shaking people to unlock greater self-awareness. “Get off your ADHD ass and go to the store,” Steven Phillips-Horst observed this week. “Being able to say hello and help people who are in need…is about being pro-social,” Wildlin Pierrevil observed on TikTok this week, of the discourse surrounding kindness, customer service, “harm,” and the lost art of small talk. A TikTok mused what Nonna’s biggest insecurity was a teenager — only to discover it was Mussolini. “We need to go to war,” Stinky Asher joked of twentysomethings, followed by a comparison to twentysomethings now, who struggle to talk to waiters. Someone in my chat pointed to the idea of The Shut-In Economy, a story from almost ten years ago that we all still feel in our bodies, that app-based social stratifications allow the more-well-off to stay at home as “essential workers” shuttle goods in and out of their lobbies. “The Forbes list of billionaires is filled with individuals who got rich via parasitical business strategies—creating almost nothing, but gorging themselves on the creativity of others,” Ted Gioia wrote of parasite culture days ago.

What do we call this phenomena? Well, it’s actually quite simple: laziness. It’s all physical and mental laziness. Unimaginative, boring, glutted in a rut without the thought that things can change. We’re reaching the end of a cycle, perhaps collectively acknowledging that technology has gone too far, that unrestricted capitalism doesn’t actually yield greater and greater things. The planet is dying and we are all losing our minds, as we’re sold connection after disconnecting from the over-connection that was sold to us at The Facebook™’s cultural ground zero. The near 25 year old tools of the digital era are increasingly meaningless as both businesses and consumers (Yuck.) realize that this shit sucks. “With AI, Dead Celebrities Are Working Again—And Making Millions,” Bloomberg wrote this week, building on the very 2020s trend of celebrity zombiecore, which in turn means the creative world is saturated with non-human entities vying for your attention and competing with actual human creativity, all as Hollywood sputters in the background, an industry and creatives gasping for air as tech entities continue to squeeze the human out of deeply human acts. Searchlight Pictures put out a sizzle reel for itself this week. Talk about down bad. Yet we sit here, longing for the old days we never lived through, dreaming of freedom instead working together to tunnel out of the now.

Offices may never return — nor are offices the solution — but it is the best symbol we have, as “the office” as an aesthetic, device, and cultural language distills down culture’s desire to be not-here, to become unburdened, to embrace tradition, to have mindless work that can be contained in a mindless space. The wind might be blowing in this direction too, as SPIN starts to print magazines again, as J.Crew brings its catalogue back, as viewership for the Emmy Awards and awards shows goes up. We can learn from the past and make change — but that requires us to stop longing and lusting for lives what we never had, to step out of our imagination and start shaping the present world for the better.

Land of the Flea
Obsessed with this story about the 127, a six hundred mile “flea market” from the south to midwest. It’s a fantastic cross-section of America.

China’s ‘Silver Economy’ Is Thriving
We will be hearing a lot about “silver economies” until Millennials’ parents all go bye bye. Put this on the trends-of-our-lifetime mood board, people!

What’s next in the investigation into ‘Diddy’
The Diddy news was the story of the week and made me think that, in the 1990s, rappers were like “I’ll drive-by you! Lock me up!” and now it’s, um, going to jail for sex trafficking with male sex workers. How times change!

MrBeast's Amazon Series Hit With Class Action Lawsuit
"world’s largest online retailer and the richest YouTuber"
Will this end Mr. Beast? Or Amazon? No. But dents in the crown? For sure — and a continued ding in the armor of reality shows. Maybe I’ll write an essay about the years I worked in reality television for Tuesday. Hmm.

Martha & Corey Shut Down Goonies 2' Rumors
Circling back: Goonies movie ain’t happening (thank heavens).

Here’s What ChatGPT Sounds Like When It Screams
Let me hear your descriptions of this “scream.” I found it to be like a wheezy old man trying to get through a really awful bowel movement. (Also FYI: opt out of LinkedIn’s AI stuff.)

The Hidden Environmental Costs of Food
Love this story on food and how environmental problems mean legitimate food costs rising — and how people recognizing that may help curb the issues. Whatever it takes! (Granted, when my beat was things like this a decade ago, they didn’t work. But these are different times!)

Connie and Maury’s secret? Don’t take it seriously.
Move over Ina and Jeffrey because Connie Chung and Maury Povich are coming for your crown!! Obsessed with this story.

"Nora Langdon struggled to climb stairs"
Everyone send this video of an 81 year old powerlifter to their parents. (You can send this story too but that guy’s too intimidating.)

Data on extreme human ageing is rotten
"i am not an expert"
The drama of the week is related to the above and is so good: people who “live to 110” likely are that “age” because record keeping where they’re from was non-existent 100+ years ago. Cue Caleb Hearon talking about old people!

“Terms and identity, history and geography, skin color and experience are revealing how language can be a faulty tool.”

I wrote that four years ago, in one of the earliest dispatches of this newsletter. The subject was on the word Latinx, unpacking my relationship to it, the community’s relationship to it, and the world’s relationship to it as it had very much become a “trend.” In the past four years, the word has popped up here and there, always with my caveat “great but flawed,” an attempt to contextualize something that shouldn’t need defense. And yet that was the only way to use “Latinx,” to say that you get it but that you get it. “Words like ‘queer’ and ‘Latinx’ check those identity boxes,” I wrote almost a year ago. “Are they me? Yes. But are they cringe, weird, and pick-me? Absolutely. Specifically ‘Latinx,’ which I think about all the time.”

I got a DM from longtime mutual and Los Angeles Times editor Daniel Hernandez earlier this week related to this. Had I seen the Pew study on Latinx? I had not! He thought I would like to know about it — and I did. The short of the study is that the majority of the Latin, hispanic, etc. community knows the word (75%!!) but only 4% actually use it and, of people who use it, a small majority of sub-communities like queer persons (13%) and Afro-Latinos (9%) are using it. To me, the takeaway from the community is, “We know y’all using it. But, shut up about it, gringos — or should we say gringxs.” 

The X in Latinx is so well meaning but so misunderstood. It embodies everything that people say about they/them pronouns but makes the confusion real, adding an abstraction onto a language where the politics of difference may exist but don’t exist in the same way that human gender exists. Spanish is gendered, yes, just like French and Italian are gendered languages. But these languages do not carry the crosses of second generation bilingualism and no sabo-ism, of US-American politics, 2010s and 2020s politics, meaning that these words and languages mean one thing from the outside and something else entirely from the inside. This is complicated by Latinx being used mostly in English-language contexts, on the fringes of the mainstream. Which is to say: have I been in predominantly Spanish-speaking spaces where I have used Latinx? No. Have I been in predominately queer spaces where I have? Yes. Have I been in spaces with a mix of the two where I have? Yes and no. Five years ago? Absolutely. Today? Not really.

The thing about words and language, cultures and people, is that it is in our nature to change, to shift. What’s in one day may be out the next, whether because of the winds of change or because we simply do not “like” that thing anymore. For Latinx, this is the case: something that felt good to one community got caught up in the storm of politics and culture, where it was battered, turned ugly. Blame the Democrats! Blame white liberals! Blame whatever we want but, if we’re looking for the best proof of 2020s left-wing brain rot that enabled non-left-wing persons to be annoyed or disconnected from forward thinkingness, look to Latinx and the larger community’s reaction to it: while the word originates from queer progressives in the early 2000s who longed to reflect identity in language, the concept was microwaved by the college campus factory system in the 2010s, baked too long by Tumblr queer circles, ground up by the media machine in the 2020s, only to get spat out by the masses for feeling too forced, overworked, like something that tasted too politically processed on the tongue. The X — that beautiful letter, forced to carry the weight of so many marginalized identities — has turned to a cross, one that has to carry the significance of progress. Now, the X captures all the over-sensitive “triggered” infantilism of the left.

To use the word is to carry all the baggage of political frustrations in America now as it stinks of an unrealistic and bygone warm-and-fuzzy (Democrat) optimism associated with Obama’s “Yes, we can! Love is love!” 2010s. Those times are now a memory — and no longer compatible with a post-Trump time when trans persons are being illegalized, when conversation therapy is largely still legal, when anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment rages from the right, when this hate seems to be spreading. Identity politics shifted from revolutionary to whiny as it collided with the digital high-speed rail car that is the “What about me? effect, which departed from TikTok’s central station around 2021. When we were all too online a handful of years ago, as Buzzfeed rose and fell, as social media was a salve, queerness felt powerful, free, transformative. Those times still exist but not necessarily online or in the same spaces and in the same ways: given Covid, given Trump, given climate change, given all the bad things that we’re faced with each and every day, suffering pity parties centers the self over the collective struggle. That is the weight that Latinx carries, a paw of the tenderqueer, which @Dolly Rose best described in 2020 as a queer expression that avoids “responsibility or culpability at all costs, paired with the use of social justice and personal advocacy language to ensure that lack of accountability.”

The time for debate on body diversity in FKA Twigs’ new video is over as such statements have become a form of rage bait considering there is real work to be done to help real people who are in real danger in the real world. As “The Grad School Shuffle” continues to play, I will keep an eye on Latine, which may fare better in the efforts to queer Spanish and open up the community to the future. These efforts are good, concepts that the world needs to push change forward — that is until Kamala Harris says it, which will be the day when we start up this discussion once more, when the linguistic half-life has been reached.

All this to say: Happy Hispanic Heritage Month.

"his torso kinda looks like"
"bless u time traveler ryan gosling"
"girl who is"
“Trump’s alleged shooter”
"Incredible post"
Best assassination posts — which I forgot was this week — and one insane Melania post.

"if you have read her profile of RFK jr"
"when he makes eyes at you 😍"
"was olivia nuzzi born in 1993 this whole time"
"i guess the signs were there all allong"
"I bet RFK Jr"
Best RFK Jr.-is-in-a-relationship-with-31-year-old-political-journalist-Olivia Nuzzi posts. What a moment this was.

"Listening to Talk Tuah"
“Notes from Talk Tuah”
"embrace tradition"
"Watched Talk Tuah!"
“NO!”
“r//TalkTuah”
I have been saying this for weeks but: Hawk Tuah memes are the meme. A top ten of the year!

“I had to laugh”
"Looks like she's leaving the house"
"Jeremy Allen White in Los Angeles"
Another great meme of the now. Here’s the thing though: I get the original post, as I live in a place where wearing fairly normal clothes has people staring like “Huh?” I feel you, small town girl <3

"Insane choice for JonBenét"
My thoughts exactly, when I saw this headline.

"Chappell on the possibility of winning a Grammy"
I am no Chappell fan, but I am a fan of her being anti-media trained. Is this maybe a wlw trend?

"Engineer for Halloween"
"the DIVA downstairs"
I was going to write a longer post theorizing about this but: what do we think the 2024 “it” costumes will be? I think it will be Longlegs, Travis and Taylor, Chappell Roan, “brats,” Kamala and Tim, and Moo Deng. We might even see a resurgence in shitty Willy Wonka stuff? Unsure.

"looking like moo deng with a nike deal"
I have said little on Moo Deng in this newsletter (But over on Business Edition™? We been on this case for weeks.) but this is the single best post on her. All this baby hippo chat conjures one of the best Tumblrs of all time: The Worst Cat.

"do you think the ai prompt"
Classic example of Schrödinger's fat American baby.

“Happiness is free”
I, too, pretend my microwave is a bomb. It’s the little things!

“WANT WHATEVER SHE’S ON”
Video I watched the most this week.

"This is haunting me."
“Off the coast of South Carolina”
Been thinking about these two disconcerting items all week.

"Sychronized drinking"
Bobby, me, and…who??? Submit applications now. Extra points if you are very rich!

And, finally, how I look as the writer of The Trend Report™.

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