TR.BIZ: 3.3.2026
From Jim Carrey's new face to South American dog people, this is your early-mid-week check-in ✨
Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re covering the ongoing Tourette’s drama, a Gen X aging trend, South American dog people, a trendy Fruit of the Loom suit from Japan, and Jim Carrey’s crazy new face.
🩹 Branded: Gap’s all seeing eyes
Did you hear Gap is introducing eye verification in stores? As Gizmodo recently shared, the store will be adding Worldcoin “orbs” at check outs in San Francisco, all so your eyes can offer “universal proof of human.” So many questions. Why the Gap? How will this help (Or hurt!) shopping? What does Zac Posen think of this? How will identity be manipulated by looking into these things? There are many red flags here — from Sam Altman’s tie-in to how this creates surveillance states — which are reiterated by countries like Indonesia and Spain blocking the tech along with Kenya getting in a legal battle with them. Mind the Gap indeed!
👁️🗨️ Listen In: Why is the Tourette’s drama continuing?
If you thought the Tourette’s BAFTA drama was over, think again, as two bad items emerged in the past few days: at the NAACP Image Awards, there was a joke made about beating up someone with Tourette’s, while SNL did a sketch about the situation that very clearly is mocking the condition. To be clear: everything about the BAFTA Tourette situation is bad, which this rehashing is only exaggerating the worst parts. It is raw racism amplified, ableism expanded and exploded, wars of words — both in the literal room and in the metaphorical room — tearing us apart: everyone loses, an awful situation that coalesces centuries of cross-country traumas while collapsing a decade of trying to undo them. Mount one mountain only to discover you’ve been descending into a pit the whole time. This was a test of compassion and progressive thinking that people are failing again and again. It’s very sad and a reminder of how far we have to go to actually be the forward-thinking people we say we are. Read more about this situation in a special essay.
👀 Trend Watchers, I: Gen X’s brand of aging
Something is happening as far as aging and Gen X that I think we’re missing in all the talk of the visual aesthetics, of being forever 35 and deep plane facelifts, the loss of hair loss and the loss of weight loss: there’s an increased vulnerability — or honesty — about what it means to age that seeks to document the process from within it versus giving a post mortem at the end. But who exactly is this for? Miranda July’s All Fours may have been first out the gate in 2024, as 2026 is takes many of the concepts direct: there’s the upcoming Melissa Auf der Maur memoir processing her time in Hole (and the Smashing Pumpkins) along with Robyn’s new marathon of aging sexuality and Peaches life affirming — and confronting — No Lube So Rude (“‘I’m older than you, looking so cunt’...We’re talking about aging bodies and we’re talking about owning it.”). Men are doing similar things, juggling the letting go of key parts of their experience like the male ability to live forever (Johnny Knoxville’s literal crying to Rolling Stone: “I’m trying not to indulge in those thoughts.”) and confronting mortality in real time (The late Eric Dane’s last words for Netflix, for example: “Live now, right now, in the present…Out of pure survival, I am forced in the present.”). Clearly, a discussion is happening — and I wanted to better understand the thinking here from the cohort. So, I asked two very Gen X people in my life: Ben Dietz along with a(n anonymous) relative and thinker in their fifties. Here’s what Ben thinks —
I feel like it’s less a Gen X media moment and more a never-ending pre social media simulacra trip. I’ll be the first to say that the new Peaches record cover made me cringe (good), the whole Robyn rollout made me cringe (bad) and like PJ (Johnny Knoxville), rewatching skate videos from the late 90s / early aughts gets me misty every time — which incidentally is how I found all those things the first time (Robyn didn’t get a pass from me til later). To me it’s not new, it’s just who they’ve always been refracted differently through 50 year old eyes. No dismissals of any of it, especially not Eric Dane’s last words, but it feels more remixed than new. I do love All Fours though. Miranda July, come on the pad.
That specific fifty-ish vibe is important though, which my relative had a similar response to, dissecting the age a bit further: their take is more about the Millennial gaze than the Gen X gaze. It’s a fascinating observation —
The wave that we are seeing is decidedly second wave Gen X and I would argue that the folks most affected by this are the upper Millennial demo. For example, I was shocked that Robyn was Gen X. When I read your text I thought…hmmm… is that right? All her fans and her popularity and timeline live squarely in the Millennial world so what folks are reacting to is the transition of their Gen X idols (??) moving into their new era which signals to the upper millennials (UPS) that they are getting old and things are changing.
