iT's aLL aN iLLuSiOn 🪄😵‍💫

On Spotify Wrapped and CEO shootings revealing techno trivialities and musing over a reordering of the holiday season.

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Police in Georgia turn increasingly brutal
Erdogan has interests in Syria's war
End of Assad rule will reshape region
South Korea's President Yoon reverses martial law
French government collapses
What is going on. I feel like there were so many “This is madness.” stories this week.

CEO of UnitedHealthcare Shot
Gunman left message on ammunition
Companies Take Down Leadership Pages
Obviously the story of the week, which we’ll talk more about in a moment. This feels like a flag in the sand. (See also: the Anthem anesthesia caps getting taken back.) The question, as The Weekly Work noted: are CEOs scared enough? This is what happens when the crystals, karma, manifesting, etc. don’t work anymore.

TikTok Faces Ban After Court Refuses to Block
Mark your calendars for January 19, in case TikTok goes dark the day before the inauguration 🫠

Democrats Will Losing Until They Cut Billionaires
Obviously but, as with obvious things, it has to be said. (Also: see above.)

Bernie Sanders says Elon is 'a very smart guy'
Is this obeying in advance? Is this billionaire simping? Bernie going mask off?

Elon Musk, Nigel Farage get flirty
Of course (if true).

Court ready to uphold ban on gender-affirming care
This makes me want to scream.

Muhammad overtakes Noah as most popular boy's name
In the UK. And you know what? Hell yeah. (Although this will spark up the same far right people who rioted during the Taylor Swift stabbing.)

German island to end spanking women
Of course they said this practice is “important to men.”

Bitcoin hits $100,000 as Trump hope grows
Crypto-Rich Russian Networks Shut Down
The 'Hawk Tuah' memecoin went poorly
Crypto, bitcoin, etc. items are usually dry but something definitely was going on this week. (And RE: Hawk Tuah: lots of fun to be had here.)

Unknown disease kills at least 79 in Congo
Not to worry you — but: watching this.

Black Friday Sales Accelerate
The good news is less people went to stores. The bad news is online sales went up — and I just know people were buying plastic shit from Temu. Please leave your house and buy things from local stores! Or go to antique stores! Give better gifts and not shit!!!!!!

The words of the year are…

• “demure,” according to Dictionary.com

• “enshittification,” according to Macquarie Dictionary

• “brat,” according to Collins Dictionary

• “manifest,” according to Cambridge Dictionary

• “brain rot,” according to Oxford

Amongst other digitally inspired words and phrases, these are the “official” capturings of the zeitgeist, of the time. What does it say about us? We’re in a slump, mentally and physically, blithely hoping change will just “happen.”

A great way to look at this, to see this in action, is this week’s other breakout moment: Spotify Wrapped, which fell flat this year perhaps from too much anticipation but also from some AI over-usage — but also something shifted in the techno-musical landscape between the person who made a lo-fi wrapped and the annual gong reminding that the service sucks. As people unknowingly yearn for Last.fm, Wrapped 2024 felt hollow because it was a manifesting of demure bratty brain rot enshittification mindset: our overindulgence has turned to overstimulation as there are too many “wrapped” concepts — Letterboxd, Apple, YouTube, TikTok, Duolingo, Grindr, Wikipedia, etc. — which took on a masturbatory note as music artists (WILLINGLY!!) revealed that they’re fanatically listening to themselves. The statistics surrounding the deeply mundane acts of our lives that we do alone — listening to music, watching movies, scrolling hot people — have become bright badges of content honor instead of cringe: Wrapped is not only a showing of “all this stuff” you play capitalism with but a show-and-tell of AI .jpgs you paid for with your money and your time, your life and your worth. Are the algorithms losing touch or are we starting to realize how lame this is? Why are we keeping that Duolingo streak going if we cannot properly say “Hi, how are you doing today?” in the language we’ve been studying for years? It’s all the same feeling: an illusion of action, a diamond encrusted fart, the main character mask slipping to reveal the loser underneath. “Nobody understands that it has to be an actual point of view that is something new,” the actor and comedian Ana Gasteyer said on Las Culturistas, bemoaning the TikTok “POV” trend. “What is wrong with people? You have to have some kind of a take.”

(Related and not is the increasingly bizarre parades of end-of-year “places you have to go,” which rank locations as if certain people are better than others, as if your being in one place is only valid if you can visit another, that big little you and your big little money have the power to colonize via vacation days. “Best and Places To Live” and “This Caribbean Beach Ranked No. 1 in the World” and “The 25 Best Cities To Live In The World” and “The World’s Best Food Markets” and “25 Trips to Take in 2025” and the incoming Times “52 Places To Go”: is there no end to the hunger? Have we become such bottomless pits that we have to travel all the way around the world for some mid hamburger just to believe we’re doing something with our lives? Manifestations of demure bratty brain rot enshittification, made all the better by Pantone’s soft squirt color of the year.)

This all seems so trivial considering that, the same day Wrapped dropped, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead with bullets that carried a brief, searing, ongoing manifesto against corporate greed. A shock to the system, to be certain, that illustrated the trivialness of Wrapped gazing while defining radical action. In a year when people withheld likes to protest rich people at the Met Gala while someone like Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolated in support of Palestine, there are so many opportunities to place ourselves within a much context bigger than our little screens and little lives. We started the year musing on hyperactive consumption and vibe personality disorder and are ending it with illusions of action, of telling ourselves we’re so busy that we have to eat beef out of bags instead of taking time to care for ourselves and others. Logging off will continue to be an aspiration but there will be more and more things that place online behavior in relief: this week showed that, once again, our manifestations of demure, bratty, enshittified brain rot only does so much. Will TikTok disappearing help or hurt this? Who knows, if there’s no place to post about it.

The Things Your Wedding Guests Despise
This feels like a state of the union on weddings.

The Verge Goes Behind a Paywall
As we know: the future of the internet (and culture) are more lo-fi gestures.

Diesel x Lee Rework Unsold Stock Into Hybrids
I could go on and on about how much I love this and how progressive this year but I will not. Instead, I want to try them on (and probably not buy them) (but I am very happy they exist).

You Guys Don’t Really Want a “Village”
A story I wish I wrote, that I feel like I’ve shadow written for the past four years.

Angels in America
A must read, another story I wish I wrote, which Nicolas Cevallos sent to me.

Pentagram unapologetically defends AI
“continue to devalue illustration”
The “cool” design agency Pentagram paraded their AI work for the government, doubling down on the act (and attributing the decision to their budget) while effectively lighting a match to all of design. This was a choice! (See also: HarperCollins’ AI dreams.)

Academic trolled for PhD
"just be normal"
RE: last week’s weight item, “smart women” are obviously in the bullseye too (not that this wasn’t embedded in such turns).

The Nonstop Gay Sex Party
Favorite read of the week, about how Mexico City has a culture of mlm fucking in the last train of subway cars. It’s hard reading about people living your dream!

Meet The Queens of Drag Race Season 17 🌊
Letting my Drag Race expertise go on main for a sec: it’s interesting that, 17 seasons later, drag as an art form has gone the way of fashion and most culture, where it’s a pastiche of everything that came before it. Lots of talented queens, sure, but are they not all references? Or children — Franchises! — of other queens? There’s a Hungry, a Plane Jane, a KimChi, a Nina Bonina Brown, a Jorgeous, a Daya Betty, a Plasma: I get paying homage, sure, but both the queens and the series on an optic level are imitating imitations of imitations, to the point of masturbatory gluttony. Enshittification, once again, made more complicated by it’s having been on for sixteen years.

Hard Truths
Hearing so much buzz about the new Mike Leigh movie which feels like a spiritual sequel to another movie of his, one that I don’t think enough people have seen: Happy-Go-Lucky.

Lemon-Turmeric Crinkle Cookies
"Chocolate Crinkle Cookies, by Eric"
Are crinkle cookies having a moment right now? I keep seeing them (that and sheer tops on red carpets).

The December Holiday Mixtape
The Fox Is Black made a very fun, very cute mix for the holidays! Turn it for your holiday parties and general festiveness!!

Maybe it was the switching between languages or the wine but I had forgotten words like “colonizers” and “Indigenous”: I had forgotten the non-sanitized origin of Thanksgiving. We were having our holiday dinner the Saturday after, Bobby and I and our friend Emily the lone trio of Americans at a table of Europeans. Was it a religious holiday? Do the dishes have any significance? Do you celebrate this with family? Is it more important than Christmas? There were so many questions that were as obvious as they were new, questions that Americans just sort of “know” and don’t really think about, not having to explain or consider the reasons for the seasons as they happen year after year after year. Zooming out, was there ever actually a dinner for anyone? Or was this a time for the religiously free to celebrate their survival and the stolen grace of locals who they would slaughter?

The question that inspired the most discussion was if the holiday was more popular than Christmas: Bobby said no, Emily was undecided, and I said yes. Why? the group wondered. Because — despite the colonizing nod — it’s a holiday that is now about family and friends and food and giving thanks for what you have, divorced from religion and nationalism and capitalism alike (although with strains of all of those, all the same). If we look at some stats, Thanksgiving may be the main holiday girlie that we repeatedly overlook, as her approach is subtle, more cared for, and less commercial (despite PSLs and Butterballs): while Christmas is a busy travel day, the Wednesday before and Sunday after Thanksgiving are the busiest travel days of the year — and this year’s holiday marked the busiest travel day ever. While a YouGov poll from earlier in the year places Christmas over Thanksgiving, it’s certainly competitive for the nation’s “favorite” day. After all: there isn’t a “Friendsmas” but Friendsgiving continues as a new holiday tradition.

Christmas, it seems, has become the quieter, more intimate of the two holidays by emphasizing the home while Thanksgiving emphasizes the community, the expansiveness of all around you. There’s a key element at play here: Christmas — unlike Thanksgiving, but much like Halloween — is a politicized holiday. In Trump’s America, the “war on Christmas” has been waged to prop up the failing industry of religion — and is perhaps how we ended up with young guys headed back to religion eight later. As more people say “happy holidays” and polls show that the Christian aspect of the holiday waning, Christmas as we know it is becoming a memory in need of making “great again,” where women are still in the kitchen making cookies as men sip scotch, leaving kids silenced, rolling around zeppelins (instead of a time to consider inclusivity, to consider everyone’s celebration of the year’s end). Like Halloween, Christmas went from a quaint, contained time to a creeping, quarter-long sensation to a capitalist end. Look no further than the advent calendars, a once Catholic tradition that is now an unsubtle Trojan Horse for pushing needless products all month. The reason for the season is consumption: duh. Then there’s the question of the environment: what does Christmas mean on a dying planet? When white Christmases become fiction instead of fact, does the holiday lose its charm, its magic and meaning? What carols will we sing in future desert lands?

Christmas will remain an important tradition but, as our Thanksgiving dinner discussion showed, the holiday landscape is shifting with Halloween as the appetizer, Thanksgiving as the entree, and Christmas as dessert. (New Year’s now competes to move beyond aperitif to a cheese course before sweets.) Too much stuff, too little meaning, Christmas — like us — is steeped in an identity crisis. Instead of addressing its problems, our minds wander to other times, divorced from baggage, from stuff: it may not matter what “Thanksgiving means” because, like New Year’s, this is a time to get together with people to share in each other versus stuff, versus things. Will Christmas ever return from the depths of consumption? I’m doubtful — but a rethinking of the holiday is likely to emerge, lest the turkey gobble up the saint.

“like Jenny Slate doing PubliZity”
“tweet of the year”
“Who would you like to see on hot ones?”
“showed my mom”
“so beautiful”
“how many cuts”
“Godzilla x Kong x Carol”
“nothing to do with the movie”
HOLIDAY POSTS!!! Watch the last one because skipping over 2020 is crazy.

“my dad showing me this”
So we all had the same dad? I feel like the Bush lines of this “song” are ingrained in my psyche. (See also, which I’d love a Hearing Things essay on.)

“don don”
“granite”
The typo meme really fills my spirit.

“no other headline will top this”
Surprisingly, this wasn’t from Bossip.

“tell my friends a bad decision”
This was me talking about depression two months ago.

“ONCE YOU SEE YONCÉ”
“twinyoncé”
A very good Smile and Aphex Twin meme, which reminds of these pictures.

“Hello, Substack people”
Does Katya have a Substack? If she does, I just know it’s like ten pages of fart sounds and “OOOoo there ain’t no other way!”

"I was not ready for this scene"
The whole Dave Blunts thing was wild, but not as wild as this bar.

"every couple running a pit bull rescue"
One of my tias in Puerto Rico and her wife look exactly like this. (Related: another good queer post.)

“a toothless chihuahua”
What’s wild is I can see this dog, despite only hearing an impression.

“holistic pizza”
Almond moms of LA must be stopped.

“Grain Husband”
Obama is not beating the bad taste allegations.

“I love little”
The absolute wildest song about little cats that you will hear this week.

And, finally, how I respond when people say “You must love living in abroad!”

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