⚔️ SURVIVAL OF THE MID-EST ⚔️

On this aesthetic moment of mid-ness and why LA may be more than a little literary.

Some items of note before we get going…

• This week’s 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 featured ANU as we dug into the performance of Gen X, digging into the world of Substack, and the appeal of religion to young people. Lots! Dive into the chat, with Ben Dietz and I, over on Spotify or YouTube.

• 🗣️ BARCELONA: the next Trend Report Live™ is June 8. RSVP here! It’ll be fun — and I’m planning to do a recap of the past quarter of events soon.

• 🇬🇧 LONDON: Bobby Aaron Solomon and I will be in town mid-June and are having drinks early evening June 15 in Shoreditch, if y’all are around and want to meet up. More details soon and drop a DM if you can’t make but wanna meet up ↓

Netanyahu says ‘minimal’ aid will go to Gaza
General: government 'killing babies as a pastime'
A Country That Normalizes Killing Children
“What a photograph”
This was a frustrating, depressing week as far as Israel’s literal extermination of Palestinians. Yes, the shooting in DC is a tragedy — but so is starving 14,000 babies. Actually? That’s a war crime. Unforgivable. Unconscionable! Evil acts that will define generations. At least we have St. Ms. Rachel, I guess.

Centre-right party wins Portuguese election
Europe’s Maga populists are on the rise
I been talking about this all year but: Europe is creeping so close to a MAGA sequel — and I’m not sure people are ready for it! Granted: evil everywhere is all the same, it just tends to be exoticized from wherever you are across the pond.

Winners and losers from the UK-EU agreement
Welcome start to a reconciliation
It’s to be seen if this EU-UK “reset” does anything but it definitely comes at a great time, given the post-Trump power axis realignment amidst tariffs.

Why has Elon Musk disappeared?
Elon Musk will spend a ‘lot less’ on politics
“lol he is so mad”
Bye, loser. Thankfully, there’s salt in the wound too as BYD leapfrogs Tesla in Europe — but does it matter if Starlink is the Trump II’s biggest winner?

Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ spending bill
GOP Snuck Two Devastating Health Measures
“That’s not what politics is about“
From ending green incentives to tax benefits for the rich, denying gender affirming care for all to slashing Medicaid, Trump’s bill is poised to fuck over a lot of vulnerable people. It took a lot to get it through the House — but will it pass the Senate? Likely, but stay tuned. (And, in case you were wondering about the Democrats this week, Biden has cancer and Bernie is going the wrong way on DEI street.)

Vaccines likely not available for healthy
This is stressing me out, as I was hoping to 1.) visit the US later this year where I can 2.) get my Covid boosters updated. Guess I’m going to have to fight a doctor in Spain to give me one because they keep telling me no!!

Reddit Bans Fringe Anti-Humanity Group
The Palm Springs story is a hyper-local tragedy yet it has become the site of alarming internet philosophies coming to life, which in this case it that of the “anti-human” movement, a nihilist-first thought process that is the darkest opposite of “pro-life.”

I’m sorry if you like him but everyone hates Benson Boone. It’s because the music is bad and because he represents a deep ancient evil that a lot of people are having trouble with: a strong vanilla basicness, the cultural equivalent of an uncomfortable pillow. There is no challenge, there is no intrigue, there is no novelty other than loop-de-loops of wannabe vibes. If the 2020s were to take human form, it would be good old Bennie Boonie.

Or at least that’s what is being said in the BB hate wave: he’s aggressively basic. He’s the musical equivalent of Millennial gray or, as one TikToker said, there’s “no trace of style…everything is new and curated, generically, in a very Airbnb-core kind of way, it could work for anything and anyone.” He shows no pole and is a white safety blanket, talking big game only to backflip his eccentricities with the spice of a dirty soda: the act isn’t working. It’s less that he’s an industry plant but more that he fits into a landscape of increasingly bleh creative culture, acting more as a mirror to culture than a foil. His music is as Larisha Paul of Rolling Stone calls it “The Voice audition music” alongside heartland pseudo reality slop stars like Teddy Swims and Alex Warren, musical products made in the image of Ed Sheeran looking at the image of Elton John looking at the image of Elvis: these are stars who are made to look and sound like a likeness of a likeness of a likeness which is the same of what can be said for fashion, film, tech, etc. These audition crooners are the second coming of the Shawn Mendes era, the music industry trying to squeeze out someone who straddles the digital and the real only to come out dry. No wonder the Madison Beers and the Tate McRaes and Tori Kellys are not and did not hit: they all participated in the reality show that is and isn’t digital culture. They are love letter by and for the average, in an era when everything is an eye or ear, when the uniqueness of Rebecca Black has been outdone by the Emily Roses and Julie Ragbeers and Queenzzielocthevoices and Kumika Hashimoto: times have changed, less for opportunity but more for the flood.

Which is to say: the Internet and increasing access to entertainment means we hit the “too much stuff” problem by another name. And that name? The mid. The average. The uninteresting. The fine. That’s why “end of animated movie music” and “chicken alfredo boomerang music” and “retail store radio music” and “Reels music” have become shorthands for very specific micro-genres: they represent the fat of the land, the ever widening midsection of culture. It has the same texture of veneers, of Turkey hair transplants, of Jackson family nose jobs, which is to say the same texture of adult dorms, of all movie stars feeling the same, of the Ozempisized body. So much of culture is edgeless and soft, intended for us to astroglide through it without any friction or doubt as we half-watch in 1.5x speed, to consume as if we really are incapable of critical thoughts, all to appeal to everyone and no one at the same time: everything is now designed to be four quadrant, which is less a desire to actually appeal to multiple demos but is instead is the result of the desperation of creative industries and outlets (Movies! Music! Fashion! Beauty!) who are at a loss of how to appeal too people in an age of excess they helped craft. “Appeal to everyone!” some dumb fucking idiot billionaire CEO says as he slashes the marketing team and all creative jobs, largely in favor of AI.

When everything is “perfect,” when everyone has access, when everyone gets a medal, everything’s value is befitting of a Walmart Rollback bin: it’s all mid. We just moved the goalpost and took out any work that has to be done — and everything sucks as a result. “Every time I see a person online getting a nose job,” someone says on TikTok, “that’s a defeat…We have lost to these pixie white expectations of beauty. What the fuck is wrong with a strong nose?” Everything is entertainment while everything is art now too: that means everything slips into decline, as W. David Marx wisely mused, which is likely why critics have fallen out of favor. How can you critique my fave? Meaning: one can’t be a serious artist and “a fave.” Remove your genitals and become uncancellable — just like Benny Boy! Audiences are the problem, as Jamaal Burkmar observed, that everything has to have a purpose, has to “be good,” has to be optimized to prevent critique but a feeling of enough eh that people will pay and not ask questions.

“Everyone’s interested in looking cool but no one’s actually cool anymore,” someone explained on TikTok, ringing the bell of the internet killing culture born of living, meaning creativity has left the building and in its place are reflections of a too distant time no one can put a finger on. This is how we end up with the recent obsession with shitty 1990s and 2000s home decor makeovers as people crave uniqueness that fits into boxes, that is neither challenging nor that interesting but is “different enough.” “me at 21 buying a cozy early 2000's house instead of a modern white hospital house,” someone says on Instagram, putting a ring on 2000s era middle American aesthetics. “Things I find incredibly unchic,” a mediocre white chick says, while deep within an unchic life of non-living.

This is what the overly optimized world looks like, where the cart is well before the horse, where business is put above pleasure: a sexless, unenjoyable smoothness that does flips and vocal theatrics but has never sucked on any other nipple other than his mother’s. The people long for culture, for intrigue, but all they are given is Charli XCX and ChatGPT, commercial products by another name.

Duolingo Underscores Corporate Balancing Act
"The end of Duolingo"
AI Summer Reading List Doesn't Exist
To the above: we’re quickly entering a space where everything online, everything that you interact with in a non-physical space, isn’t real. Even knowledge! As we see with the Duolingo drama, people are bristling at the idea of language without those who “speak the language,” which reminded me that I saw an ad this week that was clearly AI, realizing that we’re getting to a place where non-human entities will be used to enable human choices which, sure, “the future” that we’ve had for some time. But also: dehumanization, much? Anyway, now Duolingo is trying to to recover their bag but fumbling after self-Target’ing. Bye bye!

Google I/O: All the news
Google’s Veo 3 Is Already Deepfaking YouTube
Darren Aronofsky Partners with Google DeepMind
Case in point to the above, which gets at how fucking weird it is that technology and culture at large thinks killing the most human parts of human existence (Creativity!) is what should be “optimized” first: more proof of survival of the mid-est. Darren Aronofsky, I hope you have really bad diarrhea as your reward for buying the sword that will disembowel the whole of an industry — and himself too. Dreadful.

The Senate Twink Was Just Bored
A fascinating feature, speaking to just how far gone politics are if someone was fucking on the Senate floor just to feel something.

How Father Bob Became Pope Leo
A nice biography of Pope Leo that…is inspiring! If you want to keep religious stories going, this New Yorker story on priests on drugs is interesting (but I wouldn’t call it good).

Against Leaving Trump’s America
Selling American Parents a Euro-Mom Fantasy
New York is on a tear, coming for people abandoning the states. And? Good for New York! They’re right! I field many “How do I move abroad?” questions inspire similar feelings as these stories: have you neither pride nor spine? What a privilege to live in an Instagram pic! Paired with countries rejecting immigrants from places like, um, America, it’s one thing to do nothing in your home country — it’s another thing to pretend problems aren’t real from the outside.

Final Destination Bloodlines
“Dachau” by Achy Obejas
Two things that are and aren’t related: the new Final Destination fits into a trend alongside The Monkey and Smile 2 / the Smile franchise. These films are all about unexplainable “death,” which strikes when one least expects it and is mostly about the awe of death’s random hand. The metaphor isn’t deep but interesting how they’re flexing our subconscious five years post-Covid. “Dachau” is a (somewhat obvious) short story about art and Nazis, which fits into a trend alongside literary works like Aria Aber’s Good Girl (and The Grandaughter and Darkenbloom) that muse on these relationships. Perhaps movies are about to catch up to the secret Nazi trend? Either way: both trends are about obvious, about everyday evils in plain sight.

Booker winner Banu Mushtaq
“Sarah Jessica Parker saw this video”
Proud to say I read two of the Booker translation nominees and own five. What was most interesting about this round (and seems to foretell the non-international prize) is the presence of sci-fi books (Under the Eye of the Big Bird, On The Calculation of Volume) and how anti-long they are (The longest book was 250 pages!), both trends I adore. I would also watch a reality show — or 30 minute documentary — about SJP trying to read all her Booker books. Sounds like a doozy!

“Humans are not progressing at all”
“Thinking a lot about slowness”
”we need a post-growth economy”
I love both of these brief video essays, both of which get at a need for greater humanity and slowing down. The idea that humans have not evolved feels like a bone that I will chew on for a few weeks.

It was on my 2025 to-do list to make it to the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference in LA, as it’s a guaranteed one-stop-shop for keeping up with the (American) literary community. But because of finances, because of timing, I couldn’t swing it — and it didn’t seem like I missed that much considering all my friends in writing were busy with counter-programming or generally living their already literary lives: AWP being in LA was cool — but so much of LA is literary already. They didn’t “need” the conference to bring the literary. You only need an affair like that if you’re on the outside of such a scene, as I’ve become.

While places like New York and London get a lot of attention for being English-language literary universes, LA keeps a low hum of writing amidst noisy clichés of Hollywood and celebrity and technofuturists chewing up the landscape. It’s not just the Raymond Chandler or Eve Babitz and Joan Didion or Octavia Butler connections but that it’s now home to writers like George Saunders, Maggie Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Rachel Kushner, Roxane Gay, and Percival Everett, which is notable as his 2024 book James won the most recent Pulitzer and National Book Award and received a Booker nomination. (Not to mention the first American Booker winner was Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, perhaps the definitive LA book of this century.) These writers and related culture weave in and out of institutions like the USC PhD in Creative Writing and UCI and UCR’s grad programs alongside the LA Times Festival of Books and LARB, as bookstores like Skylight and Stories and Book Soup keep a steady beat of programming. Clearly there’s a literary energy around the city — or is that just my bias? With so many celebrity book clubs and so many book-to-movie adaptations (along with #BookTok), all economic-creative worlds that feed each other given sales-to-production pipelines, I see the city as a ripe bookish opportunity as industries like television and movies struggle in a way the book world (like the larger media world) has struggled: the capital L literary world and the capital C cinema world go hand-in-hand, operating in the realm of the intellectual, the supremely tasteful. The connection is obvious to me but, as a former full time LA person and lifelong Angeleno, I wanted to get some intel from friends on-the-ground. Has LA become the new literary “it” place?

First I chatted with Rax Will, who is the person that this idea hatched from as he and I were chatting after an LA Times Festival of Books panel he hosted on gender identity and fiction — and all these connections came together in my brain. “Many people who formerly worked in writers rooms are finding alternative forms of income,” Rax shared by email. “So many comedians are touring. And some are turning to publishing. I went to a reading this weekend with several comedians on the lineup.” Rax noted that the New-York-as-center feeling is “just not true anymore,” that it’s no longer the epicenter (which I would posit has to do with almost all legacy institutions like cities themselves being eroded by tech and these times). In addition to Maggie Nelson and Percival Everett, Rax pointed out locals Miranda July and Ottessa Moshfegh as easy more proof along with local comedian Grace Freud starting a fiction Substack. I can agree!

To keep the party going, I then asked my friend and writer Lance Morgan for his take as he and I have long shared book intel — and as he always seems to be in close proximity to a buzzy debut novelist. “I think the answer to that evolves as the city and the Film and Television industry evolves,” he wrote me, noting the “pop book club” phenomena but also that books are being written for the screen. “There’s an argument to say that this is giving writers more work, especially in screenwriting or in TV writer’s rooms. The success stories prove that good writing is still wanted by audiences.” I can agree. “However,” he qualified, “the other side of the coin is that if the industry is what is shaping the literary world.” This is true too, as one starving industry eats what it can to survive. “How long till great writers like Percival Everett or Hanya Yanagihara are only writing The Bear Cinematic Universe content?” he asked. “I don’t know the answer yet, but I think we’re all going to find out pretty soon.” I guess we can point to shows like The Handmaid’s Tale as a case-in-point as items like Interior Chinatown beg to differ.

Lastly, Sarah Labrie — who I interviewed last year about her memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart — and I chatted by email, who I was particularly curious about given her work on shows like Minx and Love, Victor. “I don't really think you're right about celebrity book clubs helping authors transition to TV,” she said. “Maybe that was true a few years ago, but buyers are a lot more conservative post-WGA strike. I think it can be great for a book, publicity-wise, to get a stamp of approval from a celeb, but it's not likely to lead to an adaptation getting sold or made in the current climate.” Lest we (Or I.) forget just how bruised the industry is, which Sarah also notes that these jobs for writers don’t “just happen” unless a writer is simultaneously writing scripts.

This gets at something I think we forget about Hollywood and the book world and vice versa: they’ve always held hands. Yes, they are very different medias and are crafted in very different ways — but we wouldn’t have the film industry or a city like LA without such literary overlapping. “David Simon was a reporter and an author before he made The Wire,” Sarah said. “My first staff job was on a show called Made For Love. The person who hired me for it was Patrick Somerville, a novelist who also adapted Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. My other boss on that show was Alissa Nutting who wrote the novel Made For Love was based on and did Teenage Euthanasia for Cartoon Network. Attica Locke and Nick Antosca and Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Jonathan Tropper and I'm sure a million other people I'm forgetting wrote novels before they became showrunners.”

Things are clearly different now as it’s all bones to chew for writers of all stripes. It’s not just the AI of it all but also the David Zaslav of it all: these are businesses that don’t care about little old creatives like you or I. It cares about stuffing its face with the cash it makes off of us. All of this is a good lesson for writers and artists, which again speaks to the evolution of this creative city. “To survive as an author, you have to be good at collaboration and at handling rejection and at being persistent to the point of delusion, also crucial to success in TV,” Sarah said. “We're also used to having to keep our overhead low, which helps a lot in periods when the industry is contracting (like now). I have faith that the faction of us who entered via publishing are going to stick it out. I kind of love the idea that, if we do, we might be the ones who get to shape whatever Hollywood becomes.”

“Opportunities will continue to arise,” she added. “I get that that's a very L.A. sentiment, but that doesn't make me believe it any less.” That’s why, to me, LA is primed to enter a new era of literary power, in that it’s a city and industry powered by those in love with story, by creatives inside and outside of writing who understand the value and need for story — and wouldn’t want to live in a world without them. Hollywood, like books and like media at large, is reshaping. I’d put money on a literary boom as an outcome, as counter programming to tech eating the stars.

If only we could get more people (who aren’t young, girls, or gays) reading. Perhaps the celebrities are onto something with those book clubs, considering everyone wants to read more. Maybe books have to become cool enough to make people think again. Hmm.

“absolute nightmare”
“eat their popcorn like that”
“when he cussed out Producers”
“popcorn-goblin cult member”
Outside of Pedro Pascal’s diva walk antics and the insufferable summer claiming and everyone trying to be retro Harrison Ford and failing, Cannes biggest breakout was Tom “Popcorn” Cruise. As I said on Twitter, if this is some big Hollywood strategy to get people to go back to theaters, well…woo wee: y’all lost the plot. You need to be riding that chicken, dumbasses!

“There is a long hair”
“Bridesmaid 1”
“Cher cooked”
I have been absolutely fried by all the Cher and Future “Everyday People” videos. Fun fact: the cover is from 2017.

“my favorite poem”
All moms are poets btw

“select a new poop”
A perfect news blooper, which are the most perfect form of comedy. Speaking of poop, here’s a good (non-Ice Spice) poop rap.

“Beautiful Corporate Memphis”
Pussy to god, sucking that thang in front of all their co-workers: we should aspire to such levels of dgaf-ness.

“HELLO? BEYONCE”
A cricket painted as Beyoncé is beautiful <3

“Melodic interior”
This is what I do on my Sundays, after finishing reviewing this dispatch.

“Paul y sus amigas”
Easily cartoon of the year. As I told my friend Hannah, I want my next book to feel like this which is to say: manic and giggly.

And, finally, Bobby and I on the way to the 4PM music festival yesterday.

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