your aura's disillusioned 😘😭

From why young people won't save us to things feeling bad despite being good, disillusionment is the vibe of the moment.

Love what you’re reading? Pass along the good vibes, babe 💌

French Far Right Wins Big
Map of the first round's results
re: last week’s essay: this is what the shadow of Trump looks like. Second election is today!

Starmer's Labour wins landslide victory
But the UK election? Incredible! Glad some places are righting their wrongs! Definitely take notes on the tacky v approach.

Court gives Trump some immunity
Sotomayor: President should not be 'king above law'
"in the process of the second American Revolution"
“retroactively made Watergate legal”
Supreme Court speedrunning the downfall of democracy.

Biden: 'screwed up' debate, vows to stay in
Biden needs to quickly demonstrate fitness
Biden’s Lapses Increasingly Worrisome
"President Biden’s motorcade drove past this"
“a bad episode”
ABC Interview Was Necessary
Much of the week was spent in the fallout of the debate, which ended in a non-redemptive ABC primetime interview. Not looking great!

Sure, Let's Run Kamala Harris
Buzz for Harris Grows
Are You Coconut-Pilled?
This might be the July change that astrologers have been alluding to. As I’ve said before, she is a meme icon — and maybe this is just what we need to spread non-insanity? Just ask Giorgia Meloni. Let’s turn this soft power machine into overdrive!

Right-Wing Plans to Make it Difficult to Replace Biden
Not to worry you but. And who are these right wingers? The Project 2025 people.

Trump distances himself from Project 2025
Meanwhile, Trump is doing backflips to feign ignorance.

Students at fake university set up by ICE can sue
Very fucked up!

FDA approves new Alzheimer's treatment
Some good news! Unless the monkeys have a say in it!

Infective SARS-CoV-2 in Skull Sawdust
Your uhhhhh news of the week is that Covid from the dust of bones is still active. Low risk, yes, but this basically means: Covid keeps on keeping on after a person dies 😬 Also: duh the sickness everyone (around the world) now has is not a cold.

Apparently the revolution is here, which feels like something that has been ignored as the left is too busy fighting with itself, policing itself, doing what it can to be anything but unified. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” said Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the organization architecting Project 2025. Lovely, no? This of course meant that the Incoming Fascism™ machine went into overdrive, as many, many, many, many were quick to draw a line from the Supreme Court immunity ruling to the erosion of democracy. This isn’t hyperbole! This is history in real time, a continuation of what we talked about last week but perhaps with a darker, more giddily sinister undertone.

Who will save us? Young people! Gen Z will save us! In the same way that Millennials saved us! Why? Well, they’re more queer, as the media loves to grab onto and shake in front of us at any chance they get. Does “that” matter? Is that even true? This is a core problem that isn’t necessarily being “missed” in the discourse as it actually comes up again and again and again and again: Gen Z is a greatly disillusioned populace, who were already wont to tune out due to issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict (and the treatment of those working against an active genocide). They see how the world works and they are increasingly unwilling to opt into the madness of “business as usual.” We’re reaching a dead end as far as generational divides and generational saviorism , which is becoming an interesting microcosms of contemporary life in the same way a child reflects their parents’ worst habits: Gen Z is cannablizing itself and the world, in the way that different generations cannabilized each other. They are their parents' children.

In one corner of young people are the truly disillusioned, angry, frustrated, and sad — a la: “normal” people. If you’ve been watching certain strands of social media, there has been an incredible void of varied conversation about politics; instead, creators and normies and anyone with an account are pining to get each other to simply vote. “Look in your backyard,” this strain of thought is saying. We can look to the future, we can look across the street — but the disaster is already here, if you choose to look at it. One generation’s “Politicians are all stupid! They don’t care about us!” is another generation’s making videos of Donald Trump and Joe Biden kissing each other (or, to a certain extent, all the coconut-pilled memes and media). The mirror has two faces and neither are pretty.

In the other corner — and what seems to be quietly, increasingly filling the vacuum — is a rebranding of what it means to be alternative, oppressed, and young: alt fascism, which is nothing new “in these times.” Something that keeps happening — perhaps because of self-victimhood, perhaps from organized efforts — is that young people seeking counter cultural gratification, who are seeking power and attention in a more plural world, are turning toward the far right as an outlet of expression, as a clinging to traditional life and values. This happens in small, benign ways — digital prudishness, soft and digital neo-conservativism, the reinvention of bigotry, Barstools conservatism, the non-sexual and non-drinking killjoyisms — but they have very large echoes. For example: the Italian far right youth wing adopting fascist salutes, which shows that it’s all fun until antisemitism and racism are codified into law. For example: the Patriot Front marching on Nashville this weekend, replete with Nazi salutes and verbiage that ladders into anti-immigrant white supremacy. Mix this up with the co-opting of identity and respectability politics and you’ll find that the bigger threat isn’t “that” but the liberalized trojan horses that are emerging: see France’s Jordan Bardella, the “clean cut” and “cute” 28 year old who has rehabbed a racist, anti-semitic far right party into a sanitized and sweet winning bid. By the end of today, we’ll see how well that gamble pays off before the playbook is duplicated worldwide.

We know Gen Z won’t save us because we’re seeing this truth in real time. Not because they’re not capable — They are! Just like any of us are! — but they too are breaking down by the same laws of human existence. Which are? Largely gender-cultural divides that have defined humanity since humans first started throwing rocks. Remember all that talk of the Gen Z political gender divides? Those chickens are coming home to roost, bringing along the baggage of our terrible fathers and our progressive mothers, all housed under the same conflicted roof. Everything is different but everything is the same, meaning categories dissolve and build up at the same time. Welcome to the best of times and the worst of times: it’s all the same times. What will we do about it?

TRL™ — Trend Report Live
I’m planning Trend Report™ events — and I’d love your help as far as logistics! If you love this newsletter and or are interested in participating, fill out this form. Thank you, angel!

Google’s footprint balloons in its Gemini era
“A thousand homes? Or a single data center?”
Did I not say last week that the climate toll of AI is what will undo it? If AI is so fucking smart, use it to — I don’t know. — solve the problems of our humanity instead of creating solutions for stakeholders. Naturally, this would mean big business, corporations, etc. actually cared about the planet, people, animals, etc. Clearly they don’t!

AI is ruining the internet
Figma disables its AI that ripped off Apple
AFRAID - Official Trailer
"The Sparkle Emoji Doesn’t Deserve This"
“Justice for the ✨”
I could give a shit about all this, which is why I’m noting it here instead of writing an essay on it: no one is making an “AI is good!” content, movies, etc. No amount of sparkles will correct the record.

Banksy's migrant boat artwork is ‘vile’
I am no Banksy fan but this seems right on the money for this moment.

"White guys ages 28-65 all giggling"
"Idk how else to put it”
Are You Screaming for Whipped Sunscreen?
1980s revivalism is here — especially in design — but there’s something so distinctly…joyless to it? I don’t know but it’s interesting that the 1980s aesthetic feels so robbed of joy, perhaps because it’s so closely aligned with the rise of computer technology which has ruined all of our lives.

Is That Drink Worth It to You?
Is Drinking Alcohol on Airplanes Bad For You?
"Is that nightly red wine worth it to you?”
There’s a larger story to be written on drinking culture in the 2020s but the Times is adamant that you know drinking is officially bad. However, this wine story they published is inspired — and plays into the larger history of wine, which neo-teetotalers may completely miss as they dig their head in the sands of the Philistine Seas.

SF couples work out issues with off-sites, performance reviews
“our marriage stack”
“putting my spouse on”
lmao

Can you pass a U.S. citizenship test?
Worry through the downfall of America by taking a citizenship test! I don’t know if I passed but I got 6/10! The ones I got wrong were because I wasn’t paying attention.

Kendrick Lamar - Not Like Us
Your homework — if you haven’t already done it — is to watch the new Kedrick video. It’s very much a definitive 2024 piece of media, perhaps the definitive piece of media.

DJ Ramon Sucesso | Boiler Room x Primavera
Wanna get silly? Crank this set by Rio’s own bubble beat king.

Thought Enthusiast
Thought Enthusiast interviewed me as a part of their very cute series with thought leaders. If you can’t get enough of my yap sessions…then keep the party going, babes!!

Crank this as you read.

On Friday the earth was the furthest from the sun. This happens every year around this time and, while this doesn’t really mean anything, it really did feel like we were as far as possible from the sun this week, as if we were teetering out of orbit to wander alone, maybe to visit a new star or two, maybe to take a day trip to dip a finger in the Milky Way. Who knows what we’d get into?

We’re halfway through the year and I think this year has been weird. Has it not? 2023 was weird. 2022 was weird. 2021 and 2020 too. We can trace the clock back to 2016, if we’re being honest. Some would say 2012, 2008. Some would say 2000. Was it in the 1990s? The 1980s? Was it because I was born? Was it because you were born? Was it because a monkey wanted to become a man?

“This isn’t the summer we were promised,” I told a friend on a video chat at the end of my day Thursday and the start of their day Thursday. They’re recovering from a break up, they’re recovering from many plans disappearing from what was to be their summer 2024. “Same,” I said. I’ve been dealing with a persistent back issue, recovering from a broken arm, and getting over being sick with something that I suspect to be flirty. I’m behind on emails and texts, I haven’t gone to the gym in a week. My to-do list from the winter became my to-do list for the spring which is now my to-do list for the summer. “We will figure it out, we always do,” I said. “We are not the first or only people in the history of humanity to experience ‘this.’”

There is this feeling that everything is good inside but bad outside. “Does anyone else feel that, personally, they’re doing really well?” someone on TikTok asks. “It’s weird to be doing really well in your personal life and have the backdrop be the fall of democracy.” That’s the thing: things have been objectively good, personally. Spiritually, even. Could I have more friends? Could I have more money? Could I see more art? Could I help my community more? Could I write more? Could I love others more? Myself? Yes — but everything is going great until the camera zooms out. Such is the Millennial experience! Such is your thirties. Such is humanity, life: just when things are good, the bat remembers you have kneecaps.

This “blah” was once languishing. All these years later, we may be entering the era of disillusionment. “Disillusionment feels like an existential crisis,” one health scientist explained recently. “It’s when we’re lost or confused because the ideas that we have in our head are not meeting what is happening in our life experiences.” With capitalism, with politics, with the economy, with Palestine, with Facebook, with AI: disillusionment is the feeling of the moment, something that we’re all searching through. But here’s the thing about disillusionment: it’s often the moment before enlightenment, before innovation. Change always comes.

Tell me stories of underdogs before I go to sleep. Chappell Roan spent 7 years becoming an overnight success. Victoria Monét was told it was 'too early' to be ambitious — then she won three Grammys. The twenty year overnight success of Glen Powell. June Squibb on her first starring role at 94. “You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang,” someone once said. What was I made for? What was she made for? I guess they really don’t make them like they used to.

"RFK Jr. talking about dogs"
"kamala and"
“Girl who just”
“called on in the Proust seminar”
“VEEP coded”
“FDR numbers when”
“momala starter pack”
“she would immediately win”
“the passage of time”
Some of the best memes re: the Kamala neo-renaissance. The last one…art.

“cadence wrong”
“took two days”
“NO FUNERAL”
“war criminals”
icymi the Democrats did a really bad Chappell Roan Tweet, as expected.

“bumping that”
“365 PARTY GIRL HAHA”
“coconut tree”
“Bratmala”
Best BRAT posts before BRAT is officially over. I’m both of them btw.

“The bears are taking ozempic”
Been thinking about this Tweet for days.

"exceptional things are happening in the hudson river"
Is it still 2016 in Hudson Valley?

“IT KEPT GOING”
I too have sent accidental multiple gifs. Thank you, Apple!

“exactly how your father does”
“moody fathers can”
Some great/awful posts about dads.

“when I randomly remember”
Are those people on that boat okay?

“hope this deer doesn’t run into traffic”
Sorry to this deer but that noise…incredible. No deers were harmed though!

“Are you okay?”
This post and the post before have the same energy, down to surprising and funny sounds.

"It's spaghetti time."
Me, if I had to go to court.

“How I deliver”
Every delivery person should do this tbh

“Chris Angel MINDFREAK”
I cannot stop thinking about this dog or this caption. (This caption is good too.)

And, finally, how it feels to read every link in this email.

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