pretty people are pretty bad
On the rise of imprisoning pretty politics and a new Trend Reporting With™ featuring a music industry superstar.
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🗓️ NEW QUARTERLY TREND REPORT JUST DROPPED!!! 🗓️ We talked about this on Tuesday but I’m proud to share I launched my first ~ product ~ a legitimate 60+ page trend report recapping Q1 and 2026 so far: grab a copy here.
🦿 HIP REPLACEMENT 🦿 this week features NYLON Editor in Chief, Lauren McCarthy, who joined Ben Dietz and I fresh from COACHELLA to report on what the vibe was, if Bieber is chopped, the importance of party reporting, and how an editor works in 2026. Listen on Substack, YouTube, or Spotify!
Orbán Loss in Hungary Is a Big Moment
Who Is Peter Magyar?
Viktor Orbán’s loss is big, in that a new European power alignment will emerge as American conservatism looks a bit haggard. While it’s exciting he’s out, his successor isn’t exactly Zohran but a former disciple. Economist Aline Blankertz put it well: “Don’t embrace Magyar. Just because he is your enemy’s enemy, that does not make him your friend.”
Trump Posted a Picture of Himself as Jesus
Trump’s Christ-like sloppy symbolism
“Trump’s followers are calling him Antichrist”
Pope Leo says he does not fear Trump
How Leo became Trump’s fearless foe
”Pope Leo is clearly fearless”
The Trump-versus-Pope drama has been juicy, a clear signal that the conservative right’s religiosity is as performative as their beliefs. I appreciate Leo running laps around Trump, essentially yelling “BITCH IM FROM CHICAGO!!” while hammering him with a cross. Trump’s response? Talking an old actress playing a DoorDash character.
US-Iran Deal Will Take Months
Tehran reopens Strait of Hormuz
Israel agrees to halt its war with Lebanon
Europe Could Run Out of Fuel in 6 Weeks
‘Bit of pain’ worth long-term
This week from the frontlines of a stupid, needless, evil war that makes an already rough patch rougher. Enough!!!!
Trump praises Palantir, stock has worst week
Palantir CEO: AI ‘will destroy’ humanities jobs
“freaked out by his demeanour”
Might the Iran conflict burst Palantir’s bubble as they fail to perform? I doubt it, but I appreciate that its stock isn’t doing well as it may not be the war lord it claims to be after all. The second two items are a reminder of how evil these goons are. (Related and not, here’s a long piece on Mexico’s answer to Palantir.)
Swalwell, Gonzales to leave Congress
How Swalwell’s exit reset CA race
Newsom faces pressure to intervene
The California governor’s race is giving me a headache. You know it’s bad when a billionaire’s shaping up to be the best guy for the job ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Bad Entry-Level Market Is Everyone’s Problem
Young Job Hunters on Getting Hired
This is a story touching on a theme of the decade that is most pronounced for young people: un — and under — employment, a too talented workforce who has nowhere appropriate to put their skills. Yes, we’re in a job drought (that may rebound) but also another K-economic reflection of only enabling the older, accomplished, and well-off to thrive while the younger and less-fortunate are boxed out. No wonder things are bad: a huge part of the global population are barred from shaping culture via economic — and therefore civic — participation. Welcome back, mid-aughts!
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Poor Clavicular. He and his hammers, he and his syringes, he and his substances, pumping himself with anything when he’s not getting arrested: he is in a constant state of imprisonment — one of his own making, although ghostwritten by tragedians like Edgar Allen Poe and Sophocles — performing his and our final act of a culture too obsessed with television. He is the finale for a reality where one dies not in private, in a sublime spiritual moment, but in slow motion as a thousand cuts are made viewable, monetized, blink-and-you-miss-it loss after loss after loss shiny with right wing incel gloss. He is a bundle of sorrow whose death is being delivered instantly, via microtransaction and predictive bet. He is birthed from the oozing screen much of Gen Z emerges from, representing how beauty has come to imprison us all, a toxic construct that is collapsing as it spreads: he is forced to make and remake himself clip after clip after clip, to present a maximum of masculinity while suppressing a fallen boyhood that longs to breathe once more. He is being measured by the same ruler that has beaten women for the whole of humanity while pushing forward a truth that kids are no longer allowed to be kids. I have sympathy for Clavicular as a human but not as a public figure: he is willingly penning his tragedy, one overdose at a time.
And this tragedy grows as it is draped over anyone online as we all have a working knowledge of deep plane face lifts, lower blephs, GLP-1 use cases, and any and all ways to upgrade the self. Bodily maintenance and aesthetic upgrades are no longer a niche Kardashian specialty but a shared undoing of living as our bodies convert from temples to depressing unfinished construction sites. We’re all in this prison, it seems, teen boys taking steroids to have adult male bodies, monstering themselves as they die for our attention — and it catches our attention every time! If drugging yourself on camera isn’t enough, then what is? What teen somewhere is penning their own grand tragedy of self-mutilation for views? And who is there to guide them through, to monetize every minute? How has a love affair with permanent adolescence created a generation producing their own face of death? These are people who “embody the belief that the self can be constructed entirely from scratch,” a classic Hollywood trope that magnifies American bootstrapping with the camera’s lens as you step atop tens and thousands into millions and billions of views to ascend. And — Soon! — your child will be in this cage too, graduating from Sephora simplicity to RFK’s peptide paradise. What could go wrong? A nose job is no longer an cushy curiosity but a box to tick by all genders, all ages, to become the same. “All I do is get on this app and cry,” I repeat and repeat as the mirror cracks, shards going into my eyes.
This is the great equilibrium where the “male gaze” has become panoptic, where all men are required to fit a homogenous state of white, hairless, homoerotic muscledom as all women are forced to become as skinny as possible, to delete themselves, so they can slip between the cabinets to clean and cook food they are barred from eating all so men can devour everything and each other. Morning sheds to lock the body in time, Gen Z swapping happy hour for the gym, shared obsessions with tech health optimizations, trading housing for beauty procedures, executives paying surgeons to look fresh-faced and approachable, friendships traded for fame: everyone is starved for beauty as we merchandise the void to maintain a teen body so supple that our President and other billionaire pedophiles will find them beautiful enough to fuck and fuck over. We dabble in fascism marketed as fun, eugenics marketed as wellness, mass environmental destruction as celebrity lifestyle. “Prettiness itself is a kind of dysmorphia, a perpetual prison of being forced to evaluate one’s social acceptability through the eyes of others, who evaluate whether the pretty person can be useful to them,” Heidi N. Moore observed. “It is a constant scanning of one’s eligibility for self-exploitation and exploitation by others…Being untethered from the body for so long — seeing the body only as a vehicle to and for others — leads to self-disfigurement.” Who are we, then, to question the aspirations of Lauren Sánchez Bezos if we want to be her?
Everyone is hot but no one having fun. Now is a time of muscles without strength, pretty faces without sound minds. Now is a time of emptiness, where these pursuits of perfection have become so flattened as to ultimately become irrelevant: Drone bomb me, we beg, magazine worthy and no longer human but content content. If the screen is a place to broadcast the world’s tragedies for views, why should we be deprived of such screen time and starring roles? Why not enact self-mutilation and torture for attention? Why must those dying in Palestine and Lebanon and Iran be the only ones earning the media’s gaze? Shouldn’t we — the beautiful, the white, the rich — be given the same amount of air time?
Such pursuits of pretty privileges may yield the equal and opposite. We may find the low-tech and not-young (Wired headphones, anyone?) rise again in tandem with the ugly and lame and fat and small, the evilness and unsightliness of Aunt Gladys and The Ugly Stepsister, the television glowing until the earth opens up again to allow us Monstros to run loose and free. We wouldn’t cut off our noses despite our faces! Ugliness as mantra, imperfection as living proof, all to counter the overly tech-obsessed now and its pretty AI machinations. But beware: “everyone is designing imperfection” which means “what’s actually taken on weight is the idea of analogue, and the set of values now projected onto it.” Nothing’s not a performance anymore.
You, like me, are not above the influence despite our repeated attempts to cling to body positivity and hedonism as the walls reshape the club into a skinny run club sober rave chapel. “I take advantage of people’s insecurities and their desire to thrive in a society where no one can improve,” Beatriz Serrano (translated by Mara Faye Lethem) wrote of a pathetic advertiser in Discontent. Without a hard reset, a counter-movement will never transcend beyond the 1990s, the aughts, the 2010s, the 2020s: this is the new normal, a plasticized eternal techno beauty where classes and castes more prominently factor in prettiness. Lookism no longer fiction but a reality based on a subscription model. Who says money can’t buy happiness when it can buy beauty?
Marvel Undergoes Layoffs
Hollywood’s First Big Budget AI Movie
If this happened at the tippy top-top of the food chain of entertainment, you can only imagine how bad it is at the bottom. (Note this is a little over a week after a similar culling at Sony.) The chaser of this is news of the “first big budget AI” movie, starring Casey Affleck and Gal Gadot in a movie about Bitcoin. Clown shows for clown times!
Condé Nast will close Self
After 47 years, taking with it a few Glamour and Wired imprints. What industry isn’t in a tailspin right now? No wonder Anna Wintour has been so visible lately, hawking shit like Devil Wears Prada: it’s to save her empire. There’s a larger story about how leaders like her and Bob Iger ruined their companies by making their influence inseparable from the business, making their leadership a form of generational hostage taking that makes it impossible for younger generations or any predecessor to run the business successfully. I say it again: let me fight an old man.
Zara Cofounder: Real Estate Baron
World’s richest, that is, in a very evil story that makes my blood boil: this billionaire who built an empire off exploitation is hogging global real estate — and not getting taxed much of it. All these scumbags are the same, no matter the country and no matter the industry.
America wakes up to AI’s dangerous power
Analysis: Google’s AI Overview Misinformation
Unsurprising, as it certainly represents poor Goog’s enshittification. This also plays into a trend that has been rising for some time: people breaking AI simply by using it. Your thoughts, Reese Witherspoon?
GLP-1 Experimentation Is Everywhere
It remains to be seen what will come of GLP-1s on small and large scales (See the above essay lol) but it is cool that issues like long Covid and addictions are being curbed by these advancements. Science can be great! But: experiments are experiments.
Private colleges are at risk of closing
“Hampshire College is closing”
…a quarter of them! Hate this trend, which is certainly tied to economics but also to the continued rising anti-intellectualism that has stained culture for the past decade.
Mr. Wash paints Compton’s past
Mr. Wash is an icon and I hope he succeeds in building a new center for incarcerated artists in Compton.
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I could not tell you exactly when I first met Sam Valenti IV, but he’s been a bit of a looming musical godfather since Bobby Aaron Solomon and I got together in 2010 given he and Sam’s friendship. Sam is the founder of the record label Ghostly International, who have put out definitive American electronic (Matthew Dear, Galcher Lustwerk), re-releases of modern classics (Emeralds, Studio), indie experimentalists (Julie Byrne, Mary Lattimore), and dance’s best (Ciel, Russell E. L. Butler). He is an icon when it comes to shaping a part of the contemporary electronic tapestry, which is something you all likely know I care a lot about; thus, the shadow of his work in my life, which has been funny because he is someone I literally know.
Over the past few years running Trend Report™, Sam and I have exchanged many correspondences about music via his newsletter Herb Sundays, a weekly dispatch (that comes out just after these weekly dispatches) built around playlists made by cool creatives. He has an incredible roster of contributors (Panda Bear! Laurel Halo! Laraaji! Patrick Holland! james K! Nick León!), forming a time capsule of creative sound from those defining the moment. It’s a very cool project.
After chatting for a few weeks about songs similar to my favorite song of all time, “HALCYON + ON + ON,” as I was trying to build a playlist of similar songs, I dropped him a line to see if he’d be down to share thoughts on music trends, the art of the playlist, and the various things he’s into and not-into. Our conversation turned out to be quite fruitful, an unsurprisingly deep untangling of what cool means, why music sharing is a love language, and how culture is like being “drawn and quartered now instead of led.” All fascinating stuff.
Tell me about a trend you’re following that you’re really into.
Your timing is prescient. I’ve been thinking about trends recently, how they really impact our lives. There’s sort of an aversion to admitting that as a late Gen Xer or whatever I am, but they have played a bigger role in my life than I imagined, back to what I was into as a kid, etc. But if I think of it in more abstract terms, like a connection to the zeitgeist, I guess that is a good thing. Being sensitive to the times you are living in, or to the coming moment, is important.If I’m honest, some of my favorite eras have been when we as a team have been inside the wave of bigger trends, often unintentionally, and when you can get a head of steam with other people, it glides further. I think timing is always a matter of luck. There’s a Tom Ford quote from one of his Charlie Rose interviews that’s something akin to “the right thing at the right time is the right thing, the right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing,” and sometimes you’re just killed by that earliness or lateness to some degree.
It’s fun to be a fan or participant in that ineffable feelings when culture clicks, and the “Post N*t Clarity” of looking back a moment later and being sickened is fascinating to me. Why did that work? And (why) will we go back to it later? In music, BPMs have always been a barometer for me, some stuff from the early 2000s seemed insanely fast in the 2010s, and then all of a sudden felt right, but you can’t logically explain it, it just is.
What’s a trend you hope never dies?
I like physical media a lot and think it’s great that it seems to be exciting again. Big stacks of CDs and cassettes and speakers, all cool stuff to look at and live with, I’ll always be a maximalist for these things. The cynical part of me wonders though if its not a sign of failure however, like we didn’t come up with a better version of things, so there’s this backslide to safer environs, and the music that we used to like. Mark Fisher’s slow cancellation of the future over-referenced, but for a reason.What’s a trend you are so over?
I’m contributing to it right now! The ouroboros of trend-as-content can feel like we stopped talking about art itself. I think it’s tied to the isolation thing; we aren’t really talking about the same thing anymore. A film has to now function as both a pop spectacle, a political allegory, buzzy studio status symbol, and align with a star actor’s politics, etc. It’s sort of an impossible hill to climb to meet of all those things that form opinion. Maybe it’s always been that way.I’m also dubious that what are considered trends now are actually trends, or if talking about them are the trends, it feels good to fixate on certain things. Dan Frommer of The New Consumer was talking about the “smoking is back” idea and then debunking that with data. But maybe we don’t care if it’s true: it’s more do we think it is true.
What’s a music trend you’re keeping an eye on?
In thinking about this via music of course, I love the Mat Dryhurst quote, “Pop music is a promise that you aren’t listening alone,” a sentiment that I thought the long arc of the internet would lean against, but in fact has done the opposite; our need for a global campfire feels stronger. So Dryhurst is not worried about AI/personalized music, as it goes against our nature, which I agree with to some degree, but it is messing up the royalty pool.I think Simon Reynolds’ “20 year cycle” is still somewhat true, but obviously the decay rate etc has moped after covid and the lack of collective memory or canon makes it feel like we’re starting over in many ways. It was comforting to exclaim that “bands are back” (like Charli’s quote essentially) but culture is more like being drawn and quartered now instead of led, which is why the need to develop personal taste feels more dire than ever before.
How do you think the playlist will evolve?
I just hit five years of doing Herb Sundays and requesting playlists and have thought about it. We are just far enough away from cassette mixtapes and now even burning a disc that it’s an abstract thought, probably, but making a playlist, I have to believe, is a forever gambit or just sharing who you are in song is incredibly vulnerable. Herb is about that vulnerability and sincerity, putting yourself out there, and being ok being misunderstood.I still believe that playlists can be very personal and powerful vessels, and something everyone can partake in, but when you are in the midst of a great one, you can just feel it, it’s hard to describe. There are a lot of new services that will come out this year for independent music sales and distribution, so that will be interesting to watch how that plays out. Also Substacks as blogs, I can see some becoming really powerful taste beacons.
The nostalgia for the iPod (again, maybe a “return of smoking” phenomenon) is, I think, both a nostalgic complex and the joy of tangibility, a single-use device. Loading up your music with some sort of intention has a special feeling, the same with picking a record, CD, or book from your shelf. There is an air of control in it all, that you have some sense of say in the moment and also a library of self, which is nice as a travelouge. I view record shopping as diary writing if done right.
Follow Sam over on Herb Sundays, and be sure to follow Ghostly for more. Wanna listen to more songs like “HALCYON + ON + ON”? I ended up making the playlist with some songs from Sam: check it out here. I recommend listening in-order, but shuffle is fine too. If you have another “Halcyon” suggestion, drop me a line.
“more poetic and less stupid”
“Holy shit”
“Bryon Noem”
“headline for the ages”
“WEAK on crime”
“demonic sacreligious shit”
“Too, too good.”
“be nice”
Big week for jokes about tech-enabled conservative religious psychosis. This is the best explanation of why Trump said he was a “doctor” too.
“job-specific insults”
The meowing/barking pilots are one thing, but the buried burn at the end is legendary.
“upsetting”
“time to shine”
The fun thing about maps is there’s no right or wrong way to look at them, so Manhattan The Long Way™ is simply the same information delivered from a different accent.
“Debra loves her dogs”
“seen it all”
“#historic”
“you’re the”
“obsessed”
“be good”
“CHOOSE YOUR CHARACTER”
“keeping up with that lady”
Any post about the mangey, soon-to-die Lida Bida Boda Butt bring me joy. What a wild dog. And what a name! I was going to write about this on Tuesday but feel I won’t: given Debra’s meet-and-greet yesterday, this is a great study in micro-celebrity.
“Mario if he was a”
Would love to hear more characters as political podcasters.
“already overwhelmed”
“overstimulated”
“mad and overstimulated”
“already overstimulated”
Love the “already overstimulated” world of posts, especially the last one which is the best literal dog shit / Toy Story crossover post you’ll see this week. “Overstimulated” an easy frontrunner for word-of-the-year.
“Amor Carnal”
“este tarro”
“Al telefono una Conchi”
“Relajarnos”
Everyone will enjoy this, but know this is specifically for mi gente: Rafillo dropped a new series about an old couple, which is as insane as his videos are known to be. He is a deep inspiration for me, although I’m unsure I could ever translate such absurdity into fiction. But I should try harder!
And, finally, my favorite thought about having favorites.
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This whole "designing imperfection", "being real", "non-curated lifestyle" thing is so funny to me. How do you design imperfection? This shit happens when you make stuff, you don't have to implement it if you actually do the work — that's literally a part of the creative process. And being honest/not curated on social media is even more funny — social media is literally a curation of your life, unless you're filming yourself 24/7. Just because you talk in a slightly less corporate way doesn't make anything real if the end goal is still selling something. God, I hate society.
skinny run club sober rave chapel is crazy lmfao. we really do have to laugh. so we don't cry!