trying to be happy in an ENRAGED world

On rage bait as the mood of this decade and meditating on the limitedness of cigarettes (and what they've come to symbolize).

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• Antonia Bentel
  was on the podcast this week, where she,
  Ben Dietz
  , and I talked about what Anna Wintour’s stepping down means, the issue of Hollywood offering confusing advertising, and how the conversation around Emma Stone’s “new face” represents these confusing times 😵‍💫 Listen on Spotify or YouTube now!

• Are you in Copenhagen? Or Stockholm? I’m headed there for the month of August! I may host a few “office hours,” in case you want to pop by, grab a drink, and chat as I’ll be in the cities for two weeks, for work and for vacation. Drop a line if you want to meet up!

• Trend Report Live™ is going online for August and September! Since February, I’ve been hosting a monthly “live” version of the newsletter in my apartment, which is a fun social event that is part game show and part this-month-in-news. I’m going to do it online for August and September — and curious about timing. Thoughts on doing it on a Sunday, at 7PM CEST / 1PM EST / 10AM PST?

Trump’s big bill inches toward passage
How tech’s bold bid to curb AI laws fell apart
A Big, Bad, Very Ugly Bill
Senate: Who voted how?
How every House member voted
This is…catastrophic. There’s nothing else to say. I do wonder, as the Catholic church weighed in, if and when Pope Leo will step in to throw the weight of the church against Trump. Also, be sure not to miss the anti-semitic highlights from Trump’s speech this week.

Abandoned airport turned into 'Alligator Alcatraz'
“self-contained facility”
Kilmar Abrego Garcia says he was beaten
Also bad! It’s to be seen if this prison will become Alligator Auschwitz but, given Kilmar’s treatment, we can only imagine. As if people posing as ICE agents weren’t bad enough!

"Trump says he may arrest Zohran"
Zohran is wrong. Billionaires should exist
Alpha Males Want White America to Fear Zohran
“identified as Asian and African American”
Debunking All the B.S. About Zohran
It’s that time, when the right and other weird richies try to defame a promising young liberal leader. Going to be a long stretch to the election — and plays into rage bait! More in a sec.

Texas flash floods kill 51
This is tragic and I include it here as, paired with the purging of national weather monitor NOAA and of disaster relief FEMA, we’re witnessing a repeat of last year’s Valencia disaster in real time — and due to similar circumstances.

Inquiry: British genocide on Indigenous Australians
Australia repeatedly continues to impress me with their progress on things like Indigenous rights and restitution. The country isn’t perfect but it’s really shaping up to be a giant lone liberal island given the state of things!

China's Clean Energy Could Win Race to Future
As many of us in the northern hemisphere boiled this week, reading this story made me both very frustrated and very hopeful.

U.S. Sends Plastic Overseas. Malaysia Said No Thanks.
How the next financial crisis starts
“ten times the impact of asking Google”
I feel like we’re reaching a lot of fafo conclusions now, as it ties to our waste and the planet.

Ancient 'Pharaoh’s Curse' Might Be Cancer Treatment
This is real clickbait-y — but it’s real! And kept popping up all week.

There was a viral TikTok this week explaining how to make egg salad. The recipe calls for at least 18 hard boiled eggs, a hearty slathering of mayo, and a squirt or two of dijon — then mix! The creator gives the recipe a 12 out of 10. Oh! By the way: she made the meal within the center console of her car, eating the dish out of the center console too. “im fucking frowning. my smile is gone,” goes one comment. “is this normal content for you,” another added. “This should have to be included on a CarFax report,” someone said. “I'm so serious” The post has more than a quarter million likes and nearly four million views.

If it wasn’t the #vegan that gave it away or the fact that this is a bit the creator does, the post in question is a classic example of rage bait, a post designed to elicit a strong reaction, ideally anger or confusion, all to inspire you to comment, share, and engage. The sour evolution of clickbait, rage bait coalesces “the point” of algorithms, propelling conversations and subjects forward by playing with and preying on Meta’s system for prioritizing rage and misinformation and YouTube’s using distortion as a tool for the irresistible. Rage bait first had its moment in the late 2010s, when right-wing figures used the tactic to boost their image and ideologies by profiting from leftist anger. “Each one of these stories is meant to make viewers feel as though their freedoms and traditions are under attack,” Parker Molloy wrote for Media Matters in 2019, of right wing media — on social media and in traditional media — adopting this model, which was starting to take over all of media. “They’re designed to make viewers angry…Now that this has all been ramped up, it’s almost impossible to dial back down.”

Cut to now and rage bait is the way of seeing the world and each other. Much of this is by and for the digital (a la: creators like Winta Zesu turning rage bait into a business) but it’s increasingly why we are always at each other’s throats, why political division is at an all time high, madness begetting more madness, screaming to coax out more screams. Sabrina Carpenter’s divisive new album art? Classic rage bait. Benson Boone’s whole musical identity? Beige rage bait. The Norwegian tourist denied entry to the US because of memes? Left and right rage bait. All the “bad” things that Zohran Mamdani has done? Rage bait by billionaires. The “ICE is dropping bodies in the sea” stories? Leftist fearmongering rage bait. The Gen Z entrepreneur launching an AI layoff bot? Rage bait as advertising, as I discovered. Certain public figures have come to embody the gesture — Jojo Siwa, Justin Bieber, Nara Smith, Lilly Tino — while others have used rage bait as a means to propel themselves forward, from the 24K Labubu lady to the Robot in Austin to most things Mr. Beast does to brat’s constant, never ending “end” to Drake’s fake ass abs (and reading list) to a new wave of shocking sports graphics. Many things in our world look like rage bait but aren’t actually rage bait — Gracie Abrams covering The Cure, Tiny Chef’s cancellation, the gray couch crash out woman — because some things in life actually are confusing and maddening and bad, as poor decisions happen every day inspiring distrust in institutions and reality (David Hogg at the DNC and AOC’s getting boxed out, for example).

You and I both know why everything in life “is rage bait” and why, increasingly, everything from entertainment to advertising “is rage bait”: it’s the operating system of a certain reality star turned president, a person who has mastered this craft of daily mass torture, inspiring a culture of “owning the libs,” a group who would rather fight each other on the ground instead of getting up and knocking out the demon that hovers above them. Rage bait isn’t a tactic anymore but a world view, a mood that we are all in. This is how something like diversity and queerness was euthanized by the right: MAGA mouth breathers took things like Kelly Marie Tran in Star Wars and female-forward MCU items like The Marvels as personal attacks, “oppression” inflicted upon them by the liberal media. Instead of digging in and defending oneself, progressive entities crumbled under the pressure by “going high” — which is exactly why rage bait is now “owned” by the right: the left never fought back. “I always find that Republican and conservative politics have a much easier time at rage baiting because they drill down on identity, culture, and society while the left focuses on economics and class,” pollster and data analyst

Curtis Fric

explained a few weeks back of this phenomena. “It’s easier for a right wing account to go out there and post a racist post that goes viral — and it spreads the message they want to spread.”

Like it or not, these are the times of rage bait. It is a disappointingly winning formula that more than half of America voted for — and the world is worse off for it, as everything in the 2020s feels like a troll, a prank, as if every day were cursed by April Fool’s and we, without help, are left to figure out what’s true and what’s false, getting more and more furious in the process, digging deeper and deeper holes online as we exhaust ourselves in the process. The zone is flooded, that’s for sure, and we’re all drowning in our outrage. (None of this is to mention the AI hall of mirrors, which is its own rage bait machine.) Everything is bad and very stupid now and, unsurprisingly, the only answer will be fighting fire with fire, offering furious truth and kicking our feet instead of trying to “pretend” that hate is now the world’s love language. Hold onto your joy, even if the dreams in which you’re dying are the best you’ve ever had.

Feeders have caused evolution of hummingbirds
A fascinating story about how hummingbird feeders have caused California birds to evolve their beaks to suit the contraptions.

Ghana’s Gentrification: Black Americans Have Come
Kyoto: World’s Loveliest Tourist-Trap
Both proving the point of last week’s GHC story (as does this viral Tweet of a flyer seen in Mexico). Also: what’s New York’s deal with calling out American colonizers? I, frankly, love it as it reinforces a “fight for what we have” narrative that is lost now. Regardless, these are the third and fourth stories of this kind by the mag (first, second).

Combs Found Not Guilty of Sex Trafficking
"Depp / Heard case was the beginning of whatever"
This is bad, less because Diddy is a “free man” but more that these trials weaponize the courts in the name of misogyny, which then plays into the very House Inhabit (Ew.) world of alt right pipelining. There’s a larger story about the 2020s being the decade the courts didn’t just die but they became entertainment spaces used to advance conservative ideology. Like rage bait, Trump has mastered this form!

The Naked Gun: Most Important Movie of the Summer
Natasha Lyonne's big AI problem
Two stories that really capture the state of movies now, that genres like comedy “aren’t profitable” and that AI is “the future.” Can you hear me groan from where you are in the world?

Gen Z drinks as cost of living eases
Do you believe this? I don’t! Less that young people are “drinking more” and more that it’s happening because costs of living are going down: people are drinking because things are bad, y’all!

The Birth-Rate Crisis Is Worse Than You've Heard
Is this a win for the 4B movement? Unsure, but I’m sure we’re gonna witness the pronatal losers rear their balding, mouthbreathing heads suggesting we fuck our way into the future. Losers. And to that: consider the bill that passed this week. Why would anyone have a baby now? At least until things like dwindling resources (and opportunities) on a dying planet are solved.

I was an American (Blue) Spirit smoker, all because a guy I dated in college smoked them. We would have cigarettes and have sex, sometimes incorporating paint into the act as we were both creatives longing to make something more of ourselves. We joked about starting a performance art business, where we’d paint each other whilst naked as rich people watched, paying us huge sums, subsidizing our careers as young queer artists. That didn’t happen — but we smoked and we smoked and we smoked: outside his house, on my great aunt’s porch, at the end of rehearsals for a play we were both in, at the end of bike rides through the city, before, after, and during sexual encounters. We broke up and I smoked less — but I still smoked — and would find myself taking drags whenever life needed to feel more cinematic. Visiting New York and hooking up with a former boyfriend whose parents owned an apartment across from Gramercy Park. Fucking up a travel schedule for my first boss, in my first job as an assistant at a television production company. With a friend from high school at my hometown gay bar, after scoring some coke from a deflated drag queen. With my aunt, on a terrace overlooking the city, on a Sunday night, in secret from everyone else in our lives. In all this, I smoked.

Cigarettes are a time capsule, which I feel most Millennials and others in the hipster runoff can corroborate similar experiences to. My commitment to smoking was only three years of my life, discluding any and all loosies I indulged before and after this period, which goes beyond “my time as a smoker” and instead is a gray area I spent between cardboard and leaves: this was a time when smoking was smoking, when that was the option for the act. There were nicotine patches and gum, there was tobacco to chew and spit, there were fabled European “e-cigarettes,” and various joints and spliffs that were illegal but nevertheless hung around Los Angeles, an olfactory chorus sung by specific neighborhoods — but cigarettes? There was nothing else like them, few things like the dizzying buzz upon first sip of the stick. Parliaments and that funny empty space before the filter, Marlboro Lights with their airy chemical flavor, the minty fresh zip of a Newport, the delightful flavor “burst” of the choose-your-own-adventure Camel Crush: there were so many cigarettes to try. I never smoked more than two or three a day, rarely feeling called to light up but certainly fulfilling pre-social media jitters of needing a hit, the itch to do something relieved by holding something on fire, sucking in clouds, exhaling them through the nostrils. Few experiences match it, no matter how many wines I try, no matter how many cleanses I go on, no matter how many tinctures of whatever I have tried and will try: there is nothing else like a cigarette.

But: I never vaped. I always thought I would, that the appeal of a technologically enabled cigarette that “wasn’t a cigarette” would be for me, to please oral fixations and the need for a “grown up” fidget toy. There was always something so disorienting about them, that they aspired to be cigarettes but were always too bulky and inelegant, like sucking on a remote control or chewing on a jump drive. I admit I don’t mind walking through a cloud of someone’s Blue Cotton Candy Raspberry Swirl smoke but I recognize that the act is so far from “natural” that it seems more akin to fellating a robot than smoking anything. (And was, lest we forget, vaping was propaganda for non-smoking, all by big tobacco.) Despite sipping a few of these “new age” smokes, I never committed. It felt like too silly an imitation of the real thing and, with witnessing the evolution of baby bottle and lil bevvy and chewing gum inspired forms, that instinct was correct. Why do something PG-13 when you could be adult and go for something rated R?

Cut to fifteen years post-vaping's crossover, ten after JUUL rose and fell, and the skeleton beneath the smoke is rising, which we all knew would happen: some disposable e-cigarettes can release “more lead during a day’s use than nearly 20 packs of traditional cigarettes,” a recent UC Davis study found. “This is kind of beautiful,” someone said of the news on TikTok. “The great American tradition of lead poisoning.” I have no desire to take up smoking again but I do wonder if, in ways, the battle of cigarettes versus vapes represents a way out or proving that we’ve “gone too far” with certain aspects of life, that something as simple as a cigarette is “the best option” if one is called to smoke. The big difference is that a cigarette — like a bottle of wine, like a book, like a DVD, like a roll of film, like a hard drive — is finite, as we are. You know a smoke is ending because you’ve burned through it. But a vape? It’s never ending, or at least has an indefinite continuation that means one puff turns to ten turns to a hundred: there’s the feeling of bottomlessness, of unending indulgence, that you can vape between bites at dinner or sneak a vape in the bathroom of an airplane. To vape is to embrace limitlessness, to feel as if you are an infallible god when in fact you are just a little person in a big world who likely won’t live past 75.

There is a joy (and even relief) in finishing a bottle of wine, closing a book, ejecting a DVD, rewinding a roll of film, filling up a hard drive: like a cigarette, this is a lesson in control, of finality, of needing to move on. Are these not lessons in understanding fullness — or when you should stop — instead of needlessly sipping and sipping, scrolling and scrolling? We stopped using our water bubbler less because we didn’t like sparkling water but perhaps that the joy of the sparkling water was lost in its constant availability, that you could have some fizz at any time, in a snap. I didn’t stop smoking because it was “bad for me” but because the era of my smoking life ended in part because I evolved and because my relationships evolved too (a la: I met Bobby). Vapes are the perfect metaphor for these times: they’re a crass technical expression of something humans and nature collaborated to make, resulting in something problematic but great, worthy of painted pictures, of written texts. It was limited, it was super normal, and it lasted so long because it was timeless. Vapes — like AI, like social media, like streaming services, like so much of life now — are so time full, gluttonous ideas of endlessness that are designed to eat more of you than you eat of it: they are the growth economy personified.

Should we be smoking? No. We know it’s bad for us — and yet some of us do it anyway. Despite the occasional longing for a cigarette, I know I’ll never go back to it. And if I did? I at least will find comfort in its finality, that it’s a contained and deeply human act, something that is becoming increasingly rare in times like these.

“very cool”
I, for one, feel this shape is perfect for turning carbon into animal feed.

“go to hell is boring”
This is a great burn that I will probably forget to use.

“I love to laugh”
A thesis on exactly why this section exists :)

“check out the sites”
Both an accurate experience of Europe and a representation of overtourism.

“the sound your cat makes”
Yes, this guitar solo is bad and, yes, it does sound like the noise a cat makes before vomiting. (The song is real, is as bad as you think, and is by the woman who sang the 1990s song “Bitch.”) (Want another bad song? Welcome to “Sneakernight.”)

“Me being a bison”
Incredible thing for an animal to do in front of a family.

“ain’t y’all two boys”
Let dogs be gay!!!!

“Ready or not!”
“satisfying switches”
Perhaps “disorienting vibes at the Sam’s Club” is becoming a trend? Or is that a constant state of being?

"a video of burgers"
A belated happy fourth of July!

And, finally, a look at what typically is happening in my head.

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