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🗽 N Y C !! 🗽 A few things of note for you all, whether your local or popping through town this week and this month —
On September 17, Ben Dietz and I are hosting a live recording of HIP REPLACEMENT with special guest kate lindsay at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. It’ll be a fun night — and it’s free! With drinks too!! See you there: RSVP here!!!!
Here’s my agenda for the week, in case anyone is attending these things: Tuesday I’ll be attending carla lalli’s book launch and Friday I’m attending the opening of Peter Opheim at The Hole and Oscar Yi Hou at James Fuentes. I’ll be the guy with bright green hair! Say hi and I’ll give you a sticker!!!!
🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 this week featured Grace Weinstein, who chatted with Ben and I about the shifting state of media, the man who conned women by posing as an NFL player, and the rise of the reality star politician. Listen now on Substack, YouTube, and Spotify!
US strikes Iran sites on Larak Island
US Army Secretary Resigns After Hegseth Clash
Here we go again, which isn’t too reassuring as the American military is going through a reality show style pissing match that surely will result in people dying.
ICE arrested 50K in August, continuing record pace
As I saw someone explain on TikTok, ICE has been barreling forward because they do shit like kill innocent people, “pause,” then push: it’s a pattern of normalizing that is very much succeeding, coming to include the comedy of Milo Yiannopoulos’ deportation, the poetic justice of the Cuban MAGA, and the tragedy of high school student Pierre Damas Bel’s death by suicide. All bad, though.
90% of Americans: corruption widespread
As if in response to the items above, the US “has the highest level of perceived government corruption” compared to other advanced economies, as found by a Gallup poll of 1K people. How can that be? Is it because Sean Duffy — a our head of transportation — is on camera encouraging governmental distrust? Yes, as this is a feature, not a flaw: hammer how “corrupt” the government is, then claim to “fix it” as a distraction from your own corruption. This is how we end up with chopped down cherry trees, a Qatari presidential airline, and monuments and ballrooms built against our will.
A Germany State Could Have Far-Right Leaders
Minorities fear far-right in state election
Something Alarming Happening in Germany
Surprising to few who have been watching, a key figure in Europe may cede power to the far right. We can hope they go the way of Italy, via Giorgia Meloni’s softening fascism, but this is another Americanification example, which happens when you combine nationalism with weakening economies. I’m sure Slavoj Žižek has lots of thoughts on this!
Global warming will exceed limit, UN says
Is this surprising? No. Fucked up? Yes! But is this so deeply frustrating because it fits into a growing collection of UN statements — genocides, climate catastrophe, wealth inequality — that raise blood pressure but lack institutional change? Absolutely.
Floodwaters ravage Grand Canyon
“Flash flooding in the grand canyon”
Why Grand Canyon flood was so devastating
A terrible representation of a “new normal.”
Nvidia to buy AI platform Hugging Face
The rise of AI ‘civilizations’
OpenAI Hack Exposes “Insufficient” Protection
“Explaining Hugging Face”
I do not claim to fully understand the whole OpenAI jailbreaking the Hugging Face thing, but I thought the fourth item/TikTok helped with context. Nvidia’s purchase puts a cap on any further scrutiny, investigation, or understanding of what happened, maintaining a trend of tech safety going unmonitored and uncared for by governments.
NYC Schools ban AI use through middle school
Los Angeles District Bans Most A.I. for Students
This is definitely the new anti-tech trend.
I
It is one thing to be watched, it is another thing to feel like you’re never alone. This is a matter of haunting, but also a matter of Gods. Anyone who grew up in a faith will tell you this, that there is a monitoring of you and your thoughts. Growing up in deep Catholicism, I was convinced Jesus was listening to my lusting for men, which I had to constantly rationalize to him — in my mind — that these ideas weren’t to be taken seriously. It was a habit I would break for him. God — and the ghosts of anyone who died — were watching, listening, judging. My family’s relationship to the military industrial complex and federal law enforcement: they were watching, listening, judging too. Cameras as well, complicated by my acting ambition, extended my issues of God. Search histories too, where my desires were transmitted into data I would delete from the computer room. The web camera saw me naked before any other person did. Here I am, talking to myself, speaking my truths aloud, submitting very personal thoughts to the public record. Here I am, in deep conversation with myself, turning to the empty room around me to ask for comment, questions. Ceiling cat still watches me masturbate. The NSA is My Father.
We’ve talked a lot about surveillance — of Meta glasses, of social media panopticism — but what’s embedded here is a loss of privacy, a tomb hidden beneath culture we long to open. There is a curse placed on this tomb too, one that transmits a longing to be seen, validated, marked as human despite craving solitude: mass Truman Show delusion wrestling away anonymity. Before Kylie Jenner or buzzy Substack creators co-signed surveillance, we traded being alone with being seen, giving up privacy for both clout and cancer. The act shifted performance politics from a liberal arts field to a well-known phenomena like performing gender: your performance for cameras is different from your work self which is different from your casual self which is different from you, at home, behind closed doors. In 2026, we’re realizing that there is no longer a closed door anymore: social media’s gaze is one thing, but home cameras have created a constellation of normalizing in-home monitoring to watch your pet (Furbo) or your child (Chillax), to monitor a babysitter (“Whether you want to “pop in” and see what your child and nanny are up to…this home tech can be invaluable.”) or enforce curfew (“Make sure your kids are keeping their word by setting an alert to let you know when they come in the front door.”). Flock is bad because the state is watching us without our consent — but is that any different from filming strangers because it’s funny? Or a GoPro capturing an unknowing public? These are politically sticky for many reasons, but know such a long time of “this” has raised a generation. It has taught so many of us to internalize a lack of privacy in increasingly odd ways.
“Gen Z is the first generation to grow up with so much of their lives captured,” a representative of the dating app HUD told me weeks ago of a survey they did. “That creates an ‘always-on’ feeling.” The result, as shared, is that young people feel they have to “perform” sexually for a viewer even when alone, by themselves, masturbating and engaging in “solo” pleasure. “If you’ve spent your whole life thinking about how you look, how you sound, whether something is cringe, or how something is perceived, it makes sense that it can be difficult to completely switch that awareness off in the bedroom,” the HUD rep explained. This could explain the phenomena of filming your life’s disasters as a means of finding fame, less to tell your story but more to monopolize on the your intimacies as the assumption is anyone can access them, be they a content creation turned car accident or your getting catfished and scammed by a fake NFL player: go public with your most private details because it could all come out. New York wondered this in June, musing on our digital caches — private work gripes on Slack, nudes sent via app — being an easy hack away from surfacing. We each sit upon a trove of thoughts and feelings waiting to be jailbroken. Enter the paranoia of deleting, an economy to cleanse your timeline. Yet: who cares? We’re ready for our close up. I have already seen my friends naked. I’ve seen your darkest moments. For example: your bedroom, a former private sanctuary is no longer for private enjoyment but a background for content. As shows like Interior Motives prove as emphasized by a decade broadcasting on Zoom, one’s bedroom is a set not just for identity but to perform taste, make associations, and transmit desire. Interior design is the new fashion because any glimpse of your personal life is an opportunity to monetize. “Spaces for socializing in which we can relax and escape the pressure to exhibit ourselves are largely eliminated,” Slavoj Žižek wrote in 2022’s Heaven In Disorder of broadcasting the self, which he mused on as the “post”-Covid new normal. “One shines with energy on Zoom, one sits tired alone at home.” Žižek calls this “ego tiredness,” which I’d argue is now the ego defeat before ego death: with your most intimate spaces on camera too, I can go through your social media and construct an image of you at your most intimate. You’ve given the world a map to your soul and anyone can be your God.
Isn’t this mania inducing? AI psychosis, unlike other delusions, is built upon the sharing of the personal and private to construct an unreal reality that warps one’s world. “Chatbots tend to mirror the way users speak, generate highly personalized responses, and avoid contradicting people,” a report on the phenomena explained earlier this summer. “When these three features combine, they may actively reinforce and elaborate false beliefs rather than challenging them.” This pushes the far right and fascism — or the aimless and lost — by subtly embedding paranoia, as Richard Seymour wrote in 2025’s Disaster Nationalism: “If there can be a ‘Truman syndrome‘, might there not also be an ‘Infowars syndrome’, or a ‘QAnon syndrome’, in which psychotic experience is politicised?” Privacy rot crashes into a They Live via 1984 information deluge, where the loss of privacy means politicians are reality stars and reality stars are billionaires, where documentaries fake truth and truth is a personal preference: we are drowned by hagiographies. “We live in a culture and in a documentary universe, and in some ways in a journalistic universe, where the subject gets to dictate who they are to everybody,” the documentarian Ezra Edelman said last year of the rich and powerful presenting sanitized, performed “private” moments. He was speaking from experience, as Netflix canned his Prince documentary as it sought to confront the artist’s flaws when they and the artist’s estate wanted a non-factual product. “They’re afraid of his humanity.” Was this not the issue of the 2027 Met Gala? This may be why brain-rot has taken over San Francisco, where intelligence and innovation is eclipsed by personality content. “The old Bay Area fantasy was that merit would make hierarchy objective,” Nikita Walia posed on Friday. “The newer one seems to be that desirability can be made objective too.”
This forms a new NIMBYism, where one seeks privacy for the self while craving a lack of privacy from (and for) others: a very modern catch-22, a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do fallacy. The rebellion against Flock is exactly this, a seeking to dismantle a specific type of surveillance (Lone cameras, within communities.) while agreeing to another form of surveillance (Personalized cameras had by everyone, which can be manipulated by Palantir and Oracle perusing your social media.). It’s not the kissing lawyers but the saga of Ellie and Lucas, two NCAA athletes whose social posts went viral and became swallowed up by Fox News against their will. Their simply existing made them fodder to make fun of. Such a situation rhymes with the hunting transpersons, which takes our agreeing to live unprivatize lives and pushes for permission to enter the underpants of little girls. Privacy becomes a luxury then, something to be bought to prove your humanity as those beneath become objects in the marketplace of ideas. “Luxury is disconnection,” Genesis’ CMO, Amy Marentic, said recently. “The ability to respect or give back someone time, the ability to respect their privacy, and the ability to remove friction from their life is something that we’re very focused on.” Solitude and anonymity: the hottest commodities. If you cannot afford this, you must succumb your life being accessible, searchable, consumable. Be not a human but information used to entertain and exploit at your own will.
Cancel the Met Gala Instead
There isn’t any other take about the cancelled Galliano Met Gala show other than this take from the always right Robin Givhan. To cancel something because the subject is #Cancelled is extremely American (And now!) in that it forgoes the interrogation and seeking to understand, opting instead for a binary right/wrong that offers no justice. It’s an echo of the 2020 cancelling of the Philip Guston shows, which was ill advised. The literati gets this, but know The Met Gala is very much beyond its moment and a situation like this represents a collapse.
Was “Defund the Police” Crazy?
Woke 1 was identity. Woke 2 is class
To exactly the item above: we will continue to untangle the “Woke 1 was craaaaazy” idea from weeks back for the rest of the decade.
Man Guilty in Murder of Tupac
Murders solved thirty years later fascinate me, especially as the man found guilty — Duane “Keffe D” Davis — lived a life between that moment and this one, writing a memoir and continuing to run a whole gang operation in LA. Jail as retirement, I guess.
How Much Is That Gene-Edited Dog?
Should we modify dogs “for us,” despite there being so many dogs already in the world? Is any of this needed? When is such science excessive and risking the lives of dogs? When we apply such tinkering to humans, would the answer change?
MrBeast, James Patterson’s Novel Collab Disaster
“historic bomb”
I am very pro-reading, but I am a lover of schadenfreude: you trained an audience to love braindead videos — then you expect them to buy books? His biggest game yet.
Poor Dad Author Goes Bust
The fascinating story of how the Rich Dad, Poor Dad author is now $1.2B (!!) in debt. I feel vindicated after my freshman year roommate told me I should read his books to learn about money, to which I laughed in his face. Granted: I had a lofted bed that I slept under. He was right to be worried about me.
An island appeared — then disappeared
“bigger a Canadian football field”
“Island in Canada mysteriously disappears”
Niche obsession of the week: a literal disappearing island in Canada. We need an explanation of this shit! But, as I explained in the Q2 Quarterly Report, this is one of the many happenings as of late that come and go and are never resolved.
l
Food is funny now: it’s something we all need to survive, but has become culture’s central expression. Food is what fashion once was, a means to show off taste that turns a utilitarian practice into an art. Food — and eating out — is about being seen exhibiting literal taste, an act requiring more discernment and is even more fleeting than what we wear. Easier to access but harder to excel at, food feels like the definitive obsession of the Millennial (and Gen Z) imagination. Chefs continue to be “the new rock star” as we await our moving on to the next taste flexor, as fashion feels like it’s a waning power and tech is incapable of rising to the occasion. Thus, we eat.
Carla Lalli is certainly someone aware of — and working through — this as her work in food and in culture represents just how much culinary obsessions have created literal and spiritual economies. The producer, writer, and cookbook author is days away from the release of her new book Food is a Feeling, which I found to be an effort to guide the food conversation forward by linking living with eating. This is because the book is part cookbook and part memoir, where Carla looks at her life through food and at her food through life. She share experiences as dishes, the accessories to her working through life’s moments like a divorce. You are what you eat, which means every big and little moments is catered. For fans of Food Processing, the book extends carla lalli’s fusion of living with cooking in very satisfying ways. To say Food is a Feeling is “just a cookbook” not only overlooks her work but overlooks this moment: we are “beyond food” while being steeped in it. Food is truly a feeling now.
To check in — and follow up on our conversation untangling the creator economy from last year — I asked Carla about the trends that she’s into, touching on food and books and everything in between. She’s a lover of kids cursing on camera, is enjoying how we’re dismantling Flock, sees an opening between personal lives and personal foods, and thinks the future of food is more naturalistic. Grab something yummy as Carla dishes on trends!
Tell me about a trend you’re following that you’re really into.
I’m really into the trend where people in head-to-toe camouflage dismantle Flock cameras, or otherwise sabotage them, or do those straight-to-camera videos where they say “you should DEFINITELY not shine a tiny green laser into a Flock camera, which will destroy it,” wink wink. It doesn’t tie into my work, exactly, but it aligns with my general revulsion towards state-sanctioned surveillance. In general, I appreciate everyone in the world who is rebelling against the police state (she says as we descend into full-blown fascism).On a lighter note, I’m not sick of the “prepping for my Netflix documentary” trend and even though I was super late to it, enjoyed making my own.
What’s a trend you hope never dies?
A small child who is cursing on camera will never not be funny to me, for obvious reasons.What’s a trend you are so over?
The GRWM videos where the person eats an entire 200mg+ bag of weed gummies and then goes—where? to Home Goods? Those stress me out so much. First of all, I’m afraid they will choke on all that gelatin. Second of all, how long are they going to be high for? What if someone rings the doorbell? What will they do then???Are there any noticings you’ve had writing at the overlap of food and nonfiction?
I’ve loved reading memoirs since I was a teenager. Mary Karr, MFK Fisher, Dorothy Allison, A.J. Liebling, Caroline Knapp, and Joan Didion (obviously, and in her own way) all had lasting impact on me. More recently, Alexander Chee (How to Write an Autobiographical Novel), Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart), Maggie Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful), Leslie Jamison (Splinters), Anthony Veasna So (Afterparties), and Hua Hsu (Stay True) all made me cry, which is what happens when I read something that articulates an aspect of my own existence that I had never been able to put into words.In film I think about I Am Love, Heartburn (which we’re screening on my tour!) and even the scene in Kramer vs. Kramer, where the dad and the kid are freaking out because the dad doesn’t know how to make breakfast right, and it’s pure chaos,, but then towards the end of the movie you see them serenely eating doughnuts at the breakfast table. Such an amazing way to show how time has passed and they found their own, new routine, together.
Some of the books I mentioned hit more directly on food, in some it’s more oblique, but because food is such a large part of our lived experience, and because smell and taste are intimately linked to memory, it’s hard not to mix the two. I think going in the opposite direction, the way a headnote functions in a recipe is often as a little story about the dish, which can bring the author’s voice into it.
There are plenty of essay-driven memoirs that include recipes, but for Food is a Feeling I had a very hard time coming up with a sales comp — similar book already in the market — which is seen as an essential part of any cookbook proposal. The struggle to find a solid reference for my book was a sign that I might be onto something new, and instead of being frustrating, that really energized me and Zan Goodman, who designed and art directed the book. I wanted to see how far we could push the cookbook form to accommodate the stories I wanted to tell, without either the essays or the recipes being compromised. The book functions as a cookbook if you’re in the kitchen, and as memoir if you’re lying in bed. I’m really psyched about how it turned out!
What’s next in food? What do you think the next food item of the moment will be?
Well, it’s certainly a moment! I think personality-driven food videos are Dead, Dead, DEAD. Dead. Dead and gone. Over.After spending many years trying to find the editorial service in everything I did, for Food is a Feeling, I wanted to prioritize the emotional connection between cooking and eating. Maybe cooking is not about solving some other problem, but is about centering an activity that is both essential to live, and brings pleasure into our daily existence. Is that something? No? Just want to meal prep? Food is fuel? Cool cool cool.
I’m surely wrong about this, but I’m hoping that the antidote to all these sped-up, quick-cut food videos we’ve subjected ourselves to will give way to videos that feature long sustained shots of someone stirring risotto for 20 minutes, like Andy Warhol filming people asleep. No talking, no graphics, no background music, just stirring. This is the future.
As for home cooking, food is so expensive right now that it’s shocking to shop for food (a box of kosher salt used to be $6 and is now double that — SALT). It’s increasingly very challenging to eat out — if I go to a nice-ish dinner and spend less than $100 per person, we’re literally high-fiving each other at the table. I mean, that’s insane. I hope that financial barrier drives more business to less-expensive restaurants that are run by humans instead of funded by big restaurant groups; that aligns with my dining habits, anyway!
If I were smart, I’d be working on getting creatine into my Alone Popcorn spice mix the way they’re adding protein to water. THERE IS PROTEIN IN THE WATER NOW. I digress. I hope we can ditch the obsession with “new” ideas as the driving force in recipe development. Just because you never saw someone make a chicken breast smoothie before, doesn’t mean it’s good. FFS. Maybe we could spend more time exploring and sharing recipes for dishes that have been around forever, are always good, and leave a lot to the individual cook’s interpretation and creativity. I’d watch that.
Follow Carla on Instagram and Substack. You can pre-order her book Food is a Feeling now, which drops Tuesday. Carla’s embarking on a tour for the book too and, if you’re in NYC on Tuesday, she’s doing a book launch that I’ll be attending — and we’d love to see you there: grab tickets here.
“will you be my”
“will you be my”
“first Kirkiversary”
“kirkmas”
“kirkaversary funcs”
“1AK”
“Kirkification was started”
“I wouldn’t mind”
“will radicalize millions”
“a million different”
“#Polska”
This is like Christmas week for memes! Or, technically: Kirkmas or Kirkentine, as people are saying. What gifts will the Kirkaversary bring us? I hope you all are ready! I warned you!
“2 likes isn’t a lot”
“99 likes isn’t”
“five likes”
“17 likes”
The “X likes isn’t a lot” text meme went crazy at the end of the month, which we’re continuing to see a great halo around. This all reminds of a TikTok post I cannot find but this post gets at: any amount of likes is a lot when you think about that many fingers (or people) in your ass. What a bounty every like is!
“Best relationship advice”
“I would do another acting job”
Comedian Grace Kuhlenschmidt’s “podcast” videos are a brilliant innovation in editing that I’m surprised haven’t been making the rounds sooner.
“Hot dogs just be”
“Yall gotta read the comments”
“Me if Dolores”
“NOT TOO MUCH ON DOLORES”
“can’t stop thinking about Dolores”
“most famous TikTok comment”
This message is for Dolores: I hope you are having a fantastic Labor Day weekend. She will have a brand moment this week, if this DoorDash post is indication of anything. Here’s another great hot dog post too.
“I hallucinated this Buzzfeed piece”
The more I think about it, the 2010s weren’t real and a collective dream we had about an accepting future. I maintain the 2010s were our 1920s!
“Velvet Cowboy”
“dumbles”
“Arrive with the USB”
This week in brilliant, brilliant misspellings. While we’re here, stop spelling words the same.
“You’re here to help us?”
“better be this chaotic”
Cannot wait for the new X-Men movie. My people! Also: life in #NewYork.
“new fear unlocked”
This reminds me that I met someone this week who was telling me they were in an Uber, on the highway, and halfway through the driver of the car — which was a Tesla — told them how much they had been enjoying autopilot. Meanwhile, the passenger had no idea. Shouldn’t one consent to that? Near fears everywhere
“ASSAULT SUSPECT”
The full moon always does look better in LA 🌚
And, finally, how it feels to share something that no one replies to.
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Carla's book just arrived last night and I cannot wait to dig in!
my interview is the least interesting part of this newsletter 💟💟💟