STOP BEING POOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On the self-harm involved in the "broke man propaganda" discourse and on the great loss of lunch.

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    Perfectly Imperfect
    on September 12. It should be very cute: RSVP here! Location is TBD, but we’ll have that soon.

Trump Pulls Military Into Another Political Issue
National Guard Deploys as Crime Crackdown Starts
Trump demands homeless 'immediately' move out
Cities for more police by cutting education requirements
Homeland Security removes age limits for ICE
We get that these things are related, right? And much of this is based in racism, given that DC has long been — And still is! — one of the Blackest cities in America. This is all a dog whistle show and, while he can fantasize about doing this “everywhere,” it’s not possible on a people-power level. This is a reminder to fight back but also to keep aware of how shit like putting your license into Google, commandeering the Smithsonian, and turning the DoE into PragerU are all part of the same push. That isn’t hard to see but I have to connect the dots for some!

Supreme Court asked to overturn same-sex marriage
Welp. To the above, they told us they’d do this shit which makes this “not surprising.” The question I’ve been asked by a few people is if they should be getting married now. If you’re a lawyer, please weigh in!

Israel kills Al Jazeera crew in Gaza
"This is my will and my final message."
The murder of the Al Jazeera journalists — which contributes to the many murders of journalists — is yet another fucked up notch in the belt. As

Eatingpopos

shared on Instagram this week, the least one can do is not pay for the war with how you shop. (While we’re here: don’t miss what Pete “Dumbass” Buttigieg said on this conflict days ago. They’ve lost the plot, the Dems!)

Colombian Senator Dies at 39
The killing of Uribe could decide Colombia's election
There are many contexts to this situation (Colombia’s history of political violence, this being a young conservative leader tied to a political dynasty), but it reminds of the rise in global political assassinations story from last year. See also: the Minnesota Democrats who were murdered, whose stories were quickly swept away in the news deluge.

What to Know About Wildfires in Europe
"how is anyone in phoenix still alive"
In which no place is safe from the grasp of the “new normal” that is our season in hell.

More than half of calories from processed foods
Yummy!! Let’s put sugar in CoCola to fix it and not think about the rural/urban heart disease gap :)

Celine Song is one of the greatest romantics of our time. That was one of my main takeaways after watching Materialists earlier in the month — that, and: I wish Dakota Johnson’s character was played by a working class actor and that everyone was a bit uglier. I only say that because — Spoiler! — I saw the movie as an overcoming of financial traumas and seeking “safety” (Or overcoming one’s money “baggage.”) as it relates to embarking on and staying in a relationship beyond a few weeks or months, the sort of issues that arise years into a relationship that speak to world view differences. As I mentioned in a recent interview with

Taj

, I am constantly shadow boxing with my own unstable economics as I try to shift this newsletter into “a job” while carrying the weight of generations of financial stress, which is why so many in my family joined the military. Despite savings, despite options, the tug toward your life disappearing due to a lack of finances is real, which is to say: I related deeply to the mid-life money woes the protagonist Lucy weighs. Class shadows your life.

This may not be something people think about because they haven’t had a fight over finances in a committed relationship, that they’ve not had to share the scars of their financial history with someone else: this is why I was a bit shocked that the internet “turned” on Celine this week as she explained how capitalism kills love. She said this in response to a question about the movie promoting “broke man propaganda,” which was brought up during a dog food factory interview. “I’m very concerned about the way that we talk about people who are poor,” she started. “Poverty is not the fault of the poor…There is something about that, the classism of that, the hatred of poverty of poor people, who — again — it’s not their fault that they’re poor. That’s a very troubling result of the way that the wealthy people have gotten into our hearts about how it’s your fault if you’re poor and you’re a bad person if you’re poor. It doesn’t make me laugh. It makes me very concerned.” This inspired a mountain of thinkpieces, not to mention everyone and their sister having a “take” on this, that this wasn’t the movie she made and or that what she said is invalidated because the movie “wasn’t that” in the eye of the beholder. To that I say: tell me you’re single without telling me you’re single. Or: tell me you’ve always been financially stable (Or don’t care about your finances…) without telling me that.

But here’s the thing, which I don’t have to tell you but clearly some need to hear this: Celine is right and whether Materialist sticks the landing is a bit irrelevant because her using the platform of a major international box office vehicle in 2025 to uplift the poor is more needed than ever. In case you missed it, this week Trump weaponized the military to take over DC, to “assert authority” but also to very straightforwardly wage war against poverty by clearing out the homeless from the city, offering an ultimatum of moving out immediately or go to jail, “where you belong,” extending the same compassion that has been given to immigrants, migrants, and refugees who have no other option for survival. This comes after 2024 seeing homelessness reach record highs, of trends related to people living in their cars, of cities like Los Angeles and states like Oregon conducting mass sweeps to clear out the homeless, often without clear options of what’s to happen to them. “Give us a home. How about that?” one DC resident experiencing homelessness told NBC in response to Trump’s decision. “You just want to throw us to the rats…I don’t want to be homeless. I don’t want to crowd anyone. I don’t want to use anyone. I just want to be in a place to live.” Mind you, this person became homeless due to a house fire. Like many, you can understand that options were limited and this is the path they took. Class shadows your life.

The whole of our culture has become a weapon aimed at not just the homeless but the poor at large — meaning you too. We are so quick to defend the rich as we eat poison petit fours given to us by companies like Amazon who make us “feel rich,” which we talk about in this damn newsletter every few months. How quickly we forget what Occupy Wall Street was all about! Instead, social (“free”) services like SNAP, public health, libraries, education, and media are gutted. Andrew Cuomo, a multi-millionaire born into a political dynasty and in Epstein’s address book, accuses Zohran Mamdani of being “rich” for making $140K — Yes, $140K! — in NYC, which comment after comment after comment notes is not wealthy despite it being within the “90th percentile” of locals, thus illustrating the wealth gap. (Mamdani fired back, with help from former mayor Bill de Blasio.) “How much money you have doesn’t determine what your values are,” billionaire Democrat governor J.B. Pritzker said regarding Mamdani’s vows to even out the financial landscape in New York City. This ties into another issue, that Pew studied earlier this year in polling 36 countries: economic inequality is tied to the wealthy having greater political power which is aided by problems in the education system, ultimately reinforcing class chasms. As a very viral and very British LinkedIn post espoused this week, there is an erasure of working class voices in work as more wealthy and privately educated are elevated above the rest, a group of people who have the power to go wherever and do whatever they want. Bringing it back to Hollywood, the industry — like most creative industries — is a playground for people of cushy backgrounds because you need means to survive. You’ll be hard pressed to find any meaningful media devoted to the poor too: it’s all rich people acting badly, with no bearing in real life other than for us to escape and pretend we’re “just like them.” “Everything is fine!” a new (and now banned) crypto ad from Coinbase proclaims, as the poor and working class dance around in a dirty dystopia, fighting each other to survive as the rich jet away from us. (“I had to send you this link to a charmer,”

Jesse

told me, sharing the ad in an email. He was right.) “How Do I Tell My Rich Friends to Stop Talking About Fleeing the Country?” and “Are Our Rich Friends Worthy of Empathy?” and “I am sick of seeing the rich and powerful on my screen. ” and “Thanks to Zillow, Your Friends Know How Much Your House Costs—or if You’re Secretly Rich”: it’s like we see the problem but choose only to be entertained by it, to hehe-haha as we bankroll everything from Jeff Bezos’ ticket to Hollywood for Lauren Sanchez to the private jets of the most wealthy. Elon Musk might be the most hated man in America but no one seems to care to do anything about curbing such wealth, no matter what storylines in Alien: Earth say. “Left wing academics don’t need the gym: they build their strength by pulling the ladder up from poor people,” a viral TikTok said this week. "Moral superiority is the backdoor for class hatred."

This machine must stop. How many of you have been stuck in a never ending limbo of job applications that go nowhere, where you do volunteer work for companies that end up not-hiring you? Fewer than one thousand jobs were added to the NYC private sector job market in the first half of this year, a grim reflection of these blockades as larger job slumps occur and the tech bros keep getting rewarded as they decimate the job market with lying robots. In every city I’ve been to this summer — Barcelona, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm — there are protests in support of Palestine and to end the murdering of the innocent, yet governments seem to do spinning rich wheels and make statements in response, letting us amble around our enclosures in peaceful protest so we feel as if we are affecting change when nothing much has happened in three (or three hundred) years.

And yet: we yell at Celine Song, making content out of her speaking up for the poor, thinkpiecing the idea to death to the point that no one remembers or cares that she was empowering all of us on the bottom. We have fallen deeply for rich people propaganda which is why the seduction of complacent complaints is more fulfilling than actual action. Yell about “broke man propaganda” instead of men being broke at all. Let them sweep us up and throw us away, as we bicker in comments sections, all as the rich legislate against us, as they make being poor illegal — which we are all much closer to than having any great wealth. Class shadows your life.

"you’ve passed David Liebe Hart "
"this is probably really controversial"
I wanted to fit these into the above essay, but they didn’t quite fit — but they feel of-a-kind as far as working class people trying to make “dreams” work as creatives. Both are inspiring but also a grim reflection of our world. (Also left out and related: how tech degrees are getting bricked, which is a reminder of the power of the humanities, as people keep pointing out.)

Paramount wins exclusive rights for UFC
A major move but, as we’ve discussed all year, it plays into Paramount's (and larger Hollywood’s) right wing, money grabbing tilt. These spineless taint lickers.

Mothers are leaving the workforce, erasing gains
A double bad, as women now have less options but also that the trad wifery has trickled into the workforce. This is what happens when we lose DEI and force people into the office: pee pee poo poo vibes for all. If you are a leader, now is the time to make your workplace more welcoming!

8 things we learned from Taylor and Travis’ podcast
"male podcast culture so parasitically dominant"
“A worse roll out”
The new Taylor Swift is all very okay but the take here is how it squarely fits into these times, given her continued silence on the state of the world. As Elijah and I talked about a few weeks back, it answers the question of “who holds power” in this economy. Will this move regain her fandom with the right? TBD!! (Fun fact: the pod appearance nearly doubled Trump’s Rogan appearance. My thing? These numbers aren’t-that-big and the whole podcast economy thing feels distracting.)

Man Follows AI Advice, Poisons Himself
“hitting people with no internal monologue”
"I’ve seen 12 people hospitalized"
“It’s not as friendly”
Feels like there are a lot of “AI is making people self-harm!” stories this week, many of which have to do with GPT-5’s tone shift. If only we could go back to the dial-up days — oh wait.

Google's AI Nighthawks painting misses the point
"This…..destroys the whole point"
Let me hold your hand when I say that stuff like this devalues art and your brain, assuming you are unequipped to imagine an environment and a state of being. Instead, you have to fucking digitally wander around a scene as if in a video game just to “get it.” Think, people!!

Niger wants answers after largest piece of Mars sold
Like the “bug” trafficking story from a few months ago, these are some “soft” ways colonialism manifests now: quietly taking something from a country, turning very high profits from it, then acting like they had no ownership. Tale as old as time!

“This is the lunch menu?” I asked

Bobby Aaron Solomon

, because the server had told us breakfast was over, that it was now lunch. It wasn’t a big deal — but the menu didn’t feel like a lunch menu as there were scrambled eggs and a crab hollandaise and a tortilla. Beyond that, there was a small sandwich and a croissant in addition to a tart, cheese and meat, and crudité. “Ask for the winelist” was at the top left, above the juices. I looked up the breakfast menu, curious to know what we were missing: the three egg dishes remained along with the sandwich and the croissant, but added in were a fruit plate, oats, a traditional “breakfast” of eggs with meat, and a swapping out of the unidefined “tart” with an “avocado tart.” The juices remained, but not the “winelist” note. I don’t know if I was having a mental breakdown or the concept of lunch had collapsed but I was struggling to fully understand the actual differences on the menus as the two of them longed to converge, to say brunch but clearly were disinterested in the unserious baggage that comes with such a title.

There are contexts here that are and aren’t important (This was a hotel restaurant in Copenhagen, on a Sunday at 12PM.) but lunch feels like it has long been experiencing an identity crisis. There is a long late 2010s and 2020s conversation about the death of the power lunch and whether Millennials or Boomers killed it, when the reality is lunch became less about eating together and more a corporatized eat-at-your-desk or in-the-alley-behind-your-work experience. Lunch has become optional, as I know from my years working in media and Hollywood: at best, you’re granted a scant out-and-back twenty minutes to go somewhere, grab a salad or some other picky-choosy item, to eat at your standing desk before going into a meeting. At worst? You graze craft services all day and call it “lunch.” At home, “remotely,” this is all made worse by a constant push of the meal because of back to back to back calls, lunch eventually caving in on you around 4P, when you eat handfuls of nuts over the sink before walking into another meeting late. We have lost lunch to work, which means we’ve lost a very key time to stop down and decompress and connect with others. File this too under another thing we lost in the squeezing of our time.

“Lunch” technically requires nothing: as Merriam-Webster defines, lunch is “a usually light meal” taken during the middle of the day. As I sat in that restaurant, I thought about its history over the past eighty years or so: spaghetti and steak was on the increasingly diverse mid-century menu as lunchrooms had their moment, via automats, diners, and delicatessens in NYC, cafeterias in LA, diners (and coffee bars) in London, and bouillons in Paris; the latter twentieth century became the domaine of “working” fancy fusions, pre-made oddities, and health consciousness, which reshaped the plate as persons like chefs like Alice Waters (and Paul Newman) rewired culture to consider “organic” ingredients and fresh produce as an art; which brings us to today, where everything that came before is expressed as the idea of nourishment hijacked by corporate food concepts that put everything into a bowl, so you can eat a branded meal by Cava or Chipotle or Sweetgreen (or whatever poke or açai place) like a dog waiting to be adopted out of wage slavery. Then there’s the brunch of it all, which took a quaint late 19th century plea further confuses the issue by becoming so tied to culture that meals outside of the bowl is a playtime of eggs and avocados and pancakes and fried chicken: the boozy work lunch died so people can drown in cauldrons of mimosas for hours during the weekend, numbing life away if they don’t happen to also be working then. I think about Carol and Therese eating lunch in the 1950s, two martinis and creamed spinach with eggs. I think about Frank Cross and his boss eating lunch in the 1980s, full of high balls, health plates, a rack of lamb, and baked Alaska. I do my daily Chopped challenge then sit in front of my computer.

As culture reshapes itself, things get left behind, vestigial tails dropping off as not-needed: lunch is becoming that. Yes, there should be mid-day meals for us to survive but what was once the long boozy lunch is becoming a passing snack time, unimportant in our days and deeply sad in the larger landscape of humanity where companies might pay for snacks but definitely not a full meal with booze for multiple people. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that we are losing lunch, that eggs are no longer the domain of the early birds, but this feels like losing a simple human luxury. The suggestion I was given by something like that little “lunch” menu days ago is that you have to be doing something with the middle of your day, that your being here so late eating eggs is your fault for not getting up early, for not being on-the-go with your bowl. But whose failure is this? Not mine, as I didn’t design the system that is becoming increasingly more dehumanized, as we descend into a world of slop.

“Woman Who Left Room”
“Suburban Mom”
“Teen On Birthright”
“Missle Rushed”
“School Bully Not So Tough”
“Who Is Our Favorite”
“Four Homeless People Dead”
Posts of people sharing their favorite Onion headlines have littered my feed all week and each of them cracks my shit up. This is my all time fave.

“I didn’t fucking die”
“the fuck did I do”
Sorry Lana and Ethel, but Bob The Builder’s Atlanta era is my favorite internet drama of the week.

"people are thinking of things"
"i could never leave this app"
A reminder to return to Twitter. To all of the items above, this is where the sauce is.

"There is a man trapped"
Move over “Birds aren’t real!,” hello “Anish Kapoor: let the man out of the Chicago Bean!”

“a film account with real standards”
Any book or movie that says its title always makes me go “Did anyone else catch that?”

“HEY THERE Y’ALL”
“HI YALL”
“LIVE OFF THE LAND”
As the top comment on the first one says, YouTube Poops returning is a recession indicator.

“We live on a mountain”
“Cut scene before a final boss” is exactly right. Another one to add to the canon, Miss Ma’am She!

“A paint and sip”
This week’s requisite very dirty pee pee poo poo joke.

And, finally, me at myself, rereading anything that I write.

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