proud to be...confused???
Why this will be the most confusing Pride ever and why dogs are very important in art.
State Farm will no longer offer home insurance in CA
Arizona Limits Construction as Water Supply Dwindles
These are certainly related. Neither is new, but these happenings will play into larger migrations due to climate change (and how only the rich will survive), which is mapped out very well in the new book The Great Displacement.
Mars bar plastic wrapper swapped for paper
Corporations are bad, but this is good.
Water in Venice's Grand Canal goes bright green
Why canal turned fluorescent green
This was wild and was from a chemical called “fluorescein,” which is assumed to have been not-an-accident.
A catatonic woman awakened after 20 years
One of the most fascinating stories from this week, about the relationship between schizophrenia and autoimmune diseases – and how this finding is helping people.
Chatbot advises to lose weight
Remember how the AI chatbots were replacing humans for an eating disorder hotline? The AI already lost their job, after telling people to lose weight and that losing weight is healthy. (Related and not: the AI thought experiment where the AI “killed” a person and trying to use AI to clean the ocean.)
French minister threatens to ban Twitter
European Commission: Don’t use AI
Time to ban TikTok, EU lawmakers tell governments
A quick temperature check of how Europe is looking at the latest in technology.
Twitter Is Worth One-Third Of What Musk Paid
lmao
US retailers: cost of surging shopping crime
People are stealing and that’s affecting businesses? Good. But also: no shit? People have no fucking money. Raise pay, people!! (I also don’t believe that Target is losing $50M from petty theft. Be for real.)
How every senator voted on the debt ceiling bill
How student debt relief got the short end
How Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene helped debt deal
Matt Gaetz and his far-right suffer rude awakening
With the debt ceiling items passed us (For now…), some interesting stories about what went down.
Joe Biden 'fine' after fall on stage in Colorado
"Y’all wouldn’t see me as President for the rest of the year."
Come on, Joe. Why’d you give this gift to the right? In any event, did I giggle? Yes. Someone falls, I laugh. I’m sorry! (Also I do find Joe’s “falls” relatable. Is there anything more human than literally falling and accepting help from others? I don’t think so.)
Millennials Moved to the Right.
Millennials Will Not Age Into Voting Like Boomers
Yes, Millennials are getting “more conservative.” But they are not “conservative” like other generations. There’s a difference!
Casey DeSantis' to bring suburban women to the GOP
The Strategic Fashioning of Casey DeSantis
Casey DeSantis’ is such a deranged wannabe Disney princess. She’s going to be a terror this election season! And she’s already styling herself as a dictator’s wife!!
In the era of fucking around and finding out, Pride has proven to be the greatest stress test for corporations and community. But the biggest issue? Our state of queer confusion.
Unless you’re dead or without access to technology in a remote part of the world, you’ve heard about all the boycotts and fuckups and “GOTCHAS!!” that brands are doing this rainbow season: there’s Target, who dumped and pilloried the community; Bud Light supporting then no commenting then donating to the community; Walmart (??) kinda-sorta doubled down on Pride; the Dodgers are in an ongoing Pride war, turning local news into national news; historically anti-gay Chick-Fil-A is getting complaints about their diversity efforts; brands like North Face and Adidas have gone agro, subverting gender to fire up TERFs; all this is set against years of comical expressions of corporate Pride, from Pfizer to Lockheed Martin to Donald Trump. Win or lose for brands, this makes direct the complaints the community has had for years: corporate Pride is performative allyship. You can’t attempt to profit from a group without getting uncomfortable. Cue the woe-is-brand stories, all to speculate how the brands will fare by supporting or not supporting diversity.
While rainbow-washing enters a final act, the masses are melting down too. Once quaint “bathroom bills” in a specific part of the country have exploded into a national (if not international) restroom whodunit of people being hunted to see if they are the wrong gender, while welcoming further confusion of the bathroom body politic. Separately and unrelatedly, a delightful confusion: gay men dressing like straight men and straight men dressing like gay men. If you follow Derek Guy on Twitter, you’ve seen his ongoing logging of how anti-queer persons are wearing historically queer outfits. The concept turned direct this week with creator Joe Hegyes (correctly) proclaiming that: straight women want to date gay men, gay men want to date straight men, so straight men have started dressing like 2012 Insta gays and gay men have started dressing like construction workers. This idea is very on point, which has sparked a rising trend in this flip-foppy, criss-cross-y economy of queerness gone wild.
Which is all to say what? Queerness has made the world a confusing political mess – and that’s the point! The Q always stood for questioning of yourself and the world around you!! Just ask creator Kelly Cadigan, whose schtick was being an aspiring Candace Owens-style anti-trans trans person who recently realized that, shit, the right is actually bad. (Cue the necessary I-told-you-so posts.) The reality to remember is this community is very small: only 9% of adults identify as LGBTQ+ with only .8% identifying as trans one recent, global estimation. America echoes this recent research, with Pew sharing in 2022 that “1.6% of U.S. adults are transgender or nonbinary” and Gallup sharing in 2023 that 7.2% of U.S. adults identify as LGBT. Unsurprisingly, support is steady on subjects like gay marriage and larger queer rights, with trans rights narrowly holding majority despite slimming. Shit, most Americans even support corporate Pride!!
So why is this dominating everything? You know why: it’s a right-wing 2024 election plot, building on post-Roe efforts to distract people that they are stealing and exploiting constituents. It’s the same shit, rainbow-washed for a new year.
Happy Pride!! Don’t go too crazy out there.
British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful promoted
This seems like a big deal!! If anyone can take down Anna, it’s Edward. I believe in you!!
Little Mermaid Review-Bombed So Hard IMDb Changes System
It’s wild how hateful people are about the stupidest shit.
"Are black people just not allowed fantasy"
“bruh”
"see her on a sugar plantation or???"
While well-intentioned, the “Ariel should have been a slave.” narrative is a wild, liberal-try-too-hard reach of the week representing a contemporary variety of brain infection and killjoyness. (A salve to this: this great non-AI impression of Trump’s Little Mermaid reaction.)
"the Schofield drama"
Chika Faces Backlash For Rant About Infants
This week’s other top controversies: ITV’s morning show blowup and rapper Chika complaining about kids on a plane…who were related to rapper T.I.!!
3 Teens Killed and Ate a Beloved Swan
Then there’s this. Are kids…alright? This is serial killer behavior!!
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Score New TMNT
Oh, I will be listening to the new Ninja Turtle soundtrack.
Maryland Plates Now Advertising Online Casino
An adventure in government not knowing how the internet works. Great job!
"seemingly worse at technology than Millennials"
This is a great take/explainer, of why Gen Z and Gen Alpha are “bad at technology”: they didn’t grow up with the diversity of tech that Millennials did. Everything’s just iPhone now!
"no one understood the virus"
Related great take/explainer: the reason why gale male body image is so skewed is probably because “looking buff” was an ableist reaction to HIV, to “prove” that you are well. Fascinating and fucked up.
The Joke’s on the Brooklyn Museum
Hannah Gadsby’s Disastrous ‘It’s Pablo-matic’
I am obsessed with how bad Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso show reviews are.
Their Summer Camp-Themed Wedding
Seeing coverage of Beanie Feldstein and Bonnie-Chance Roberts’ camp-themed made me realize something I’ve noticed for a lot of my adult life: there is a certain brand of Millennials obsessed with summer camps, which is a very clear “I grew up with money”-ism. The adoration of the experience, the location, and general “lifestyle” is a rich kid dog whistle! Who’s suprised? Beanie is in the nepo universe.
"hyper-realistic flowers"
Japanese Chrysanthemum Earrings
Star Magnolia Earrings
I will do anything for these beautiful clay, hyper-realistic flower earrings. They’re breathtaking! Can someone buy them for me? The Trend Report™ is free, so I’m always accepting donations.
Have you seen this painting of Marie Antoinette’s dog? It recently sold for a quarter of a million dollars, after being estimated to sell for $5K.
The high-price is and isn’t a shock, mostly because I thought this was something happening in a vacuum as my friend Kate texted me a few weeks ago that she was being hounded by ads to buy the painting on Facebook. We texted about it, joking about buying it, only to find that many other people had the same experience: lots and lots and lots and lots of people shared the same idea, including a few art historians too. It’s a wild painting and, yes, I too wish it was mine.
Here’s the thing, which is a larger subject I want to do a deeper dive on in a (Maybe forthcoming??) single-subject, literal Trend Report™: the culture of dog love is turning direct, where every industry will bow to these cuties. This isn’t some frivolous little observation as the global pet industry is set to grow from $320B to $500B by 2030. Those are huge numbers, which reflect how 65M households out of 124M total households in America have dogs. That’s major.
This painting’s occurrence within dog world dominance captures an art phenomena that’s been documented: they do a very poor job of capturing the interest of real people, misconnecting due to their snobbery and gatekeeping. Dogs can help them reach greater relevance! London’s The Wallace Collection are finding this out with their current Portraits of Dogs show has captured international interest, along with collector Pamela Hornik’s recent some dogs in San Francisco, which featured works by Jordan Casteel, Ricardo Passaporte, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, and more. There have been other big dog art happenings – SCAD’s 2022 The Dog Show, The Met’s 2018 Celebrating the Year of the Dog, the opening of The Museum of the Dog in New York – which show how seriously the dog is being taken, moving away from being seen as unserious and unimportant and into something deeply important.
I have said this for years and will say this until I die: if you want to connect with people, bring in a dog. If any politician or brand wants to feel relevant, just add some really fucking cute, interesting looking dogs into your effort and you will automatically find success. Just ask Sothebys! It pays to be dog-friendly.
"Happy Pride Month!"
"Companies on May 31st”
"Happy Pride"
"Happy Pride, Bratz Pack!"
"Why do you hate love?"
“DAMN SHAWTY”
“totally agree”
"Bert and Ernie aren’t holding hands"
"Kicking off #pridemonth with this shortfilm"
"HAPPY PRIDE TO MY PRIDE THREAD"
Best Pride posts of the month so far. (Hanna Phifer’s final thread is one of the best curation of top, wildest Pride posts ever. I look at it every year!!)
"PRIDEMONTH"
"Pridemonth"
"wait a minute…"
"BAREBACK"
"🙏🏼"
The Pride/demon saga this week was an early June standout, which was born from an attempted conservative “gotcha” that was adopted by the queer community.
"Felt my soul leave my body"
This week in adults-are-children: dancing out the words to songs.
“mass shooter’s last selfie"
Make billionaires not-buff again.
"i cant get into it lol"
This is me trying to understand the appeal of most musicians like Taylor Swift. (Speaking of Swifties, they’re wearing diapers to concerts so they don’t miss any songs.)
"karma remix (duppe)"
"boys a liar do multiverso"
I found the Brasilian Ice Spice on TikTok and their videos are the best dupes of the moment.
"Minnie et Mickey se marient !"
Also following up from last weekend, the TikTok Mickey and Minnie got married. And, if you want to meet the series’ Goofy, he’s hideous.
“baby watching Azealia”
This baby feels so me.
"look at this edit with a state farm ad"
The ad in the middle is too long, but I hope (I don’t hope.) this becomes a thing.
"Keep those five phone numbers with you!"
The power of a white woman who can rescue an owl. Very sage advice!!
"he sound like Caroline Polachek"
The Wal-Mart yodeler does sound like Caroline.
"most unhinged terri joe"
While, yes, this is the most unhinged it is also the best, since Elmo shows hole.
And, finally, a special message from Joe Biden.
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