"you're so NOT protecting the dolls"
On the flattening of conversations like supporting the transgender community and a meditation on the incoming great Millennial pivot.
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How did Spain’s grid collapse?
Blackout blamed on solar power
Spain's grid operator: 'Won't happen again'
At least three deaths linked
This was major! It may seem like a “them” problem but it’s certainly a canary in the coal mine, given climate related energy demands and climate related solutions. The worst part is the solar power blame game as this is a huge gift to the right: expect this to be a bargaining chip in bringing back coal. Anyway, remember to build out an emergency kit. (And here's a funny post on the matter.)
India’s Muslims Fear a Growing Backlash
Watching this as…concerning!
Liberals win pivotal Canadian election
Australia’s center-left retains power
Farage hails results, Labour & Tories digest loss
Did Canada and Australia just confirm a new trend? Perhaps — if only the UK got its shit together instead of mirroring the US.
“He had MS-13 on his knuckles”
Trump pushes journalist to accept doctored photo as real
Happy 100 days of Trump! This was psychotic, all signalling a larger respectability politics conversation that is very my-dad-in-2005, who told me I’d never get a job because I got a tattoo on my back. Good on Terry Moran for standing his ground.
US economy contracts at 0.3%
Naturally Biden was blamed. We are also in the breath before the reality of tariffs, as empty ports and empty shelves manifest “Made in America.”
Poll: massive Gen Z gender divide on Trump
“Gen Z is more anti-Trump”
The world’s top iPad kid, Steve Kornacki, making an appearance two weeks in a row! While Gen Z steals the headline, it’s Gen X’s overwhelming support of Trump that has my ears perked. I see y’all slipping!! That said, the Gen Z gender divide is real. Millennials stay winning.
Virologists raise alarm over bird flu
Killer fungi to spread as climate heats up
Not to worry you but keeping an eye on these things!!
The “Protect The Dolls” conversation is very interesting to me because it seems like a stress test of what culture in this moment can withstand — and I think we’re failing the test.
For context: “dolls” has long been a term to express trans identity, specifically female trans identity, which came from ballroom and Black culture but made its way into the Drag Race circuit and therefore popular culture. The phrase “Protect The Dolls” came from designer Conner Ives who dropped the shirt earlier this year for his AW 2025 show. The shirt floated around for some time but it was actor Pedro Pascal who held the match: at his fiftieth birthday party in early April, he wore the shirt alongside icon and DJ Honey Dijon (who is trans). This coincided with Trump’s grumbling about trans military bans, blocking gender on passports, and debates on athletics. Cut to late April, where Pedro wore the shirt again to the premiere of the new Marvel movie Thunderbolts in London — just days after the UK Supreme Court ruled that a woman is defined by “biological” sex. Now, Tilda and Troye and Haider and Addison have sported the shirt — and in less than three months has inspired a pivot to a “Shirt is bad!” conversation. “this shirt is lame,” fashion historian Rashida Renée noted on Twitter, adding that the expression is “a fun thing to say until the whiter parts of that community ran it into the ground like with everything else.” “it’s clearly liberal celebrities dog whistling,” another said. “Evil doesn’t die, it reinvents itself,” a meme riffing on the shirt said. Then the thinkpiece cycle as The New York Times and Marie Claire and WWD and W and USA Today and High Snobiety and The Cut and Them and Euro News offered explanations.
Added context here: Pedro Pascal has long been a trans ally given his sister is trans and, well, he is who he is. He is also the star of the Star Wars franchise’s The Mandalorian and is leading the upcoming summer tentpole Fantastic Four after starring in hits from The Last of Us to Gladiator II with Wonder Woman, Narcos, and Game of Thrones before. This is to say: he’s a huge star. The rest — Tilda, Troye, Haider, Addison, and beyond — are big and small in their own ways but all-of-a-kind, trafficking in creative, liberal, and generally non-mainstream spaces. But Pedro? That’s different. It’s very political to be photographed in 2025, days after a country rules out a group of people, to articulate support in ways that translates in multiple mediums at an event sponsored by Disney. That is using your platform effectively. That is the least one can do which, like Conner Ives, has resulted in raising tens of thousands of dollars to support the cause. Yes, it speaks to pretty privilege confusing bricks and dolls and, yes, more must be done than donning shirts or else we fall into black squares. Connect the dolls to their dreams! How and why is protection needed? Literally speak up for trans people. Defend them! Love them! Treat them as people! That is what the shirt aspires to but, somehow, it got caught in the modern trap of leftist infighting relating to everything from “Kamala is a cop. All politicians are bad!” to “Millennials are cringe and you should hate them.”: it cheapens intent and blunts action by focusing on purity over potential power, opting for very Democrat half-lifing of movements by over-intellectualizing plurality. “There’s room for everybody: let’s just say that,” Gia Gunn once said.
This flattening is by no means new but is fascinating — And frustrating. — in 2025 as it means all conversations have become a death by a thousand cuts, resulting in movements lost and progress turned back as we jab in parallel instead of above our heads. From the “Women don’t know what they’re attracted to.” debate around male muscle bodies to picking apart literally anything Chappell Roan does, this feels like the final stages of a 2010s machine breaking down, that the exhaustion of conversation and constant debate of the young will be curtailed by the audience aging, the suffocation of bloated digital chatter, and everyone being mad at the state of the world: we have a chance to finally end a Tumblr era bean soup. The slogan t-shirt, from “Protect The Dolls” to “I Told Ya” to “Career Girl,” is a fitting object of these times as it seeks simplification for impossible problems in life, in the world: when something can only be affirmed or denied in a word, it disallows for the dimensionality that comes with learning, growth, and change. As we saw with “The Future Is Female” a decade ago, we’re now on the second stage of the cycle repeating itself — but the gap between meaningful action and aftermath has flattened too: the moment that “Future Is Female” lasted roughly five years, coming before 2016 and extending beyond that (Hillary, Women’s March) moment, inspiring debates about how “woke” fashion is and if such sloganized shirts qualify as “slacktivism.” The difference between then and now, is ten years ago, such a statement was taken seriously, inspiring action or at least care. Now, in the collapse of the 2010s context where people are increasingly growing bitter and jaded, “Protect The Dolls” gets confused for a pointless trend versus understanding that this should be a cornerstone for mounting a new movement. Then, we debated if Buzzfeed was going to kill news. Now, the news has been flattened to Pop Crave. Yet again, we’ve lost the process: no more reading, no more thinking, no more processing. Just thumbs up or thumbs down. How Roman.
“We Shall Overcome” a generation once sang but, now, we live within the space of whatever quote Tweet warps around the idea. “no we dont lol,” someone says inspiring giggles and eyerolls and people scroll on, disinterested in the central subject. A tombstone rises where a movement could have started. No one notices the flat land of cemetery we stand on.
For the eighth episode of 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 we had on .
She, , I got into a lot of things: we chatted twenty years of YouTube and intergenerational relationships and the collapse of big industries. It’s a big episode!
🔊 Listen now, on Spotify or YouTube.
The group chats that changed America
"every 5 years a bunch of silicon valley guys"
I just read the very okay, not-that-surprising (but nevertheless interesting) anti-Meta Meta book Careless People where a lot of these names are thrown around. One thing that the book says quite plainly that these chats get at: we live in a nightmare of non-geographical monarchies. This story (and related post) hammers that home! Anyway, we gotta lock Zuck up.
Duolingo will replace workers with AI
Natasha Lyonne Directorial Debut, Use AI
“Actors are in serious trouble”
"The average American"
Under 18 shouldn’t use AI companion apps
All gleeful self-dehumanization, as real workers get cut and Hollywood self-sabotages and kids and adults drift further from each other. Brit Marling: harbinger of the apocalypse! Some small wins though in this muck, or signs of the time: Katy Perry swapped out her cringe AI use in her show likely after backlash. Meanwhile, a viral Tokyo Toni “You are under spells!!” expression is being used to point out how people are being conned by AI while inspiring related posts. We’re almost firmly in the pro-AI and anti-AI era, where economies and lifestyles will erect around the stance — unless that world collapses (which it will).
“I love people are talking about them”
Best part of the “1 gorilla versus 100 humans” conversation is the pivot to experts. The Internet is still good, especially as the trend shifts into gorilla-man brain rot.
Sellers of clothes prepare for tariffs
Trump's tariffs: boom for second-hand
I’ve been meaning to note this for weeks. An obvious “win,” given that people will be forced to actually take circularity seriously (or participate in these economies and ignore the possibilities).
How Germans Buy New Kidneys in Kenya
"The longer you look the worse it gets."
Nightmare story, which shows how European colonialism continues in so many ways (not to mention, um, product supply chains). This is certainly of a very specific moodboard of ickiness, alongside bio-piracy and medical tourism.
Anti-piracy campaign used pirated typeface
“YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A FONT”
A story of the year. This is real journalism!
"first trailer for Zach Cregger’s ‘WEAPONS’"
"mind you that jordan peele fired his managers"
I’m not that hyped for Weapons but I am very intrigued, given the bidding war with Jordan Peele. That’s enough lore to get me seated. Related and not: Bobby and I saw Sinners yesterday and…sure, it’s a movie. It’s a popcorn film stuffed with ideas, too bloated to really lift off. Net-positive as far as cultural items though! Especially now!!
She walks in, standing behind a desk. A laptop, small keyboard, and a few small synthesizers are in front of her. The room is dark, only the bare glow of her screen. People talk and mingl, enjoying the space of intermission. She checks the computer, moves a wireless mouse. She looks deep into process already, a bit frustrated or trying to solve a problem. Music kick in as people quiet. It isn’t melodic but more a pattern, clicking percussion, drum machine chattering with hazy synths behind it. She hangs her head and at times appears to stretch, leaning away, arms overhead, but still holding on to the table. She takes a sip from a half-full glass of wine then sets it at the far end of the table, where nothing is around. Six orange lights rise and fall around her. Two white lights are trained at angles to meet her in the middle. These lights fade in and out but the glow of the computer screen persists. We sit and watch her work. She presses buttons, she moves her mouse, punches keys, monitors numbers. She makes music, yes, but it feels like a durational performance, an avant garde soundtrack to someone who is almost done with their double at the Fed-Ex on the lower floor of the mall off the highway. At one point the music samples the sounds of the club including people chattering and screaming, glasses clinking, cell phones ringing, music playing from a distance — and yet we are technically in the club, listening to someone manipulate the sounds of the club, the idea of leisure and free times reworked into something more esoteric, into the foundation of freeform post post-jazz.
She — Loraine James, Whatever The Weather — turns thirty at the end of the year, one of the last members of the Millennial cohort. She’s internationally known, having been featured in The Guardian and Rolling Stone and DJ Mag and i-D, which is why hundreds of people came to see her this Friday: it is a clearly sold out show, people sitting on the floor and on the stairs just to see her. It is a fitting performance for the end of a long week, a floating Friday the day after International Workers’ Day and the day before the first weekend of May. The room is smokey by design and the night is marked by ambience as opener Julietta Ferrari’s offered a slow moving soundscape of bird calls and ocean waves: it is unsurprising counter-programming to all of our labor. And yet: technically we are all there to watch someone work. The optics, intentional or not, is as if an audience gathered to gawk at a desk job worker, someone who couldn’t take a break, who is born dreaming of music but forced to work a machine. One person versus a hundred responsibilities, one hundred obligations, choices, lives: me versus the music. It’s all work, isn’t it?
“I’m ready to quit and live on a farm,” a friend says. “When do I get fuck you money so I can start a dog rescue?” another says. “All I want is my coffee shop so I can talk to people all day,” says. “I want to make this into a real, physical thing one day, an art residency where I can teach writing,” I tell people about The Trend Report™’s future. “People fantasize about being a farmer…[but] a silly decision on an afternoon in November [...] can lose thousands of dollars,” Newdawnfields says, crying, on TikTok. “I’m an elder Millennial so I’m at the halfway point of life,” she adds in a follow-up. “Elder millennial here whose heart just dropped when you said we’re halfway through,” someone comments. “It’s true but never thought about it.” We’re all not alright, as writes, as we dream of the end of work as we reach mid-life, standing higher on the hill that we all climb to see that this is it. This is the prime. No house, no vacation, a bit more money, a bit more freedom, but no more happiness with even less time. The years keep coming and they don’t stop coming. It feels like we’re The Leftovers but no one ever actually left. Somehow just like everyone else but, somehow, uniquely squished at both ends. You still have to stare at your computer and make your music. You still have to dream of doing nothing even when you have achieved your dreams of doing nothing, when you are in the place you always wanted to be, that you promised yourself would mean happiness too. But still: wouldn’t it be nice if I could just take a nap? Wouldn’t it be nice if I had no responsibilities? She took a sip of the wine and placed it far at the other end of the table. Briefly savor the reward. Then, keep working.
I chatted with earlier in the week while in Paris. We discussed the writing world and the larger creative world. Writing about writing, we bemoaned, had become such an insulated act that it hollowed out the industry from the inside out. Do artists dream of the people who will read or listen or watch or encounter their works? What’s in their mind when they share with an audience? I think the other way around, sharing this on and off for years: do artists consider that they soundtrack our lives? Their stories and songs and performances the background to our experiencing the death of loved ones, engaging in sex acts, suffering the most frustrating example of injustice: do they consider how they are accessories to life? Or does it, in a way, not matter because it moves out from a space of creation and expression and into a commercial exchange? Is it just work? Product design? The sounds click on and on, as I sit listening, trying to pinpoint where the sound sits between Julian Eastman and Autechre, Suzanne Ciani and James Ferraro, Alice Coltrane and Oneohtrix Point Never, Kraftwerk and Gigi Masin. She shakes her head again, the weight of a million thoughts. All these things to do. All these people watching.
The smoke in the room is suffocating not because it’s hard to breathe but because it feels like we’re surrounded by ghosts, the materializing of the industrial rot of now. Little me and my little screen, all alone but everyone watching. Little me and the human rights violations and natural disasters and doing more with less and less. Little me and the pandemics and coups and wildfires and wars, the protein popcorns and Italian brain rots and snoafers and billionaires launched into orbit. Did you hear about the star of your favorite childhood movie? Well, she died from diabetes complications. You should have a doctor poke around your asshole to make sure you don’t have bowel cancer. Are you checking your foods for plastics? That’s bad for your brain. Is the air quality in your city killing you? Is your dad a Republican? Why are all your friends hanging out without you? Are you having enough sex? Is your drinking becoming problematic? That friend you used to know posted something cryptic: is it about you? Your boss sent an email at 10PM on a Friday. Should you reply? Has every decision in your life been the correct decision? Actually, don’t think about that because you have to go to work or you will die, forced onto the street, everyone ignoring you as you die of exhaustion. She takes a final sip of her wine and hides the glass behind the desk before returning to the job. People are watching.
A great Millennial pivot is coming. If anyone is going to quit it all, it will be them. Dreaming for change in scenarios and circumstances that we did not make, trying to craft solutions as knives are thrust into our ankles and the hydraulic press of history pushes upon us. So many things we want to do and we want to be! But the only thing we will become is complacent in our ordinariness, in our inability to actually make any change: such is mid-life. Maybe we will riot. Maybe we will leave. Like the music, everything feels improvised from the inside and the outside but, clearly, it all involves so much planning, so much care. “Why aren’t you happy?” someone asks. “You have it all.” It’s not that it isn’t enough, you think, but that so little seems to be better. How can one enjoy their happiness when all of life is now Sunday scaries? Death of a Salesman for a generation of social media managers, for people who have been staring at content calendars that they have to reinvent for the twentieth year in a row, as if they themselves discovered the concept of time.
Then, with one shrill buzzing rip in the middle of a song, it all ends. “Thank you,” she says, words swallowed, running off the stage before the audience can process it’s all over.
“My name is Darshen”
“My name is Darshen”
“The reason you have no money”
“Where do you see yourself”
“Your plans after finishing”
“A relationship should be”
TikTok’s Darshen is having a mega moment for his relatable elegance and, yes, I am a Darshen but also a Samuel and I love that he’s a totally good person too. Sadly, he and Samuel are not in a relationship. They’re just best friends! But talk about ship of the year.
“lowk very funny”
“Italian brainrot but ballet”
“Italian Brainrot Speed Test”
“The History of Brain Rot”
Someone else will write this but a fascinating globalist trend in a politically anti-globalist times is the rise of international brain rot. This is hot on the heels of France, while incorporating Indonesia too — and could inspire a global Skibidi Toilet universe. Unrelated but don’t get me started on the fucking Swedish taco thing.
“the rizzler is now only four degrees”
You’ll never guess to who, despite Julia Louis-Dreyfus not knowing who he is. Also: I do agree that The Rizzler and Blue Ivy are our Shirley Temple and Liza Minelli. I mean that seriously!
“The lion”
“I’m the ML Buch”
“speaking my truth”
I have no one to share these ML Buch memes with so, if you’re into that, please enjoy as much as I did. (Here’s a Björk post for the rest of you.)
“Gritaron”
“#TrainExplorer”
“coquette”
Each coquette train video sends me into orbit.
“I regret everything”
“one of the most disgusting things”
Fellas…is it gay to eat cum tree ice cream?
“Campari eggs”
As he says, “What y’all know about Campari eggs?” Apparently nothing!
“remember?”
“remember please remember”
“remember the items”
These videos about remembering things from the 1990s got me through the week. As someone said in the comments of one, “Am I in hospice?”
And, finally, what I watch when I can’t go to sleep.
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Well said about Pedro Pascal and all the nonsense.
The writing about The Midlife show (I assume it was an actual show?) is hypnotic and beautiful and true. Speaking as an elder millennial, I felt all of this and so appreciate your perspective and incredible ability to merge the individual with the collective experience and distill it all down with links that exemplify these bigger cultural shifts happening.