brat links

Plus: A play you should go see if you're in NY

Me and Steffi’s digital etiquette advice column has launched on FastCo! Enjoy!

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Dudes, I saw Job, the play, last week, and the TikTokkers are right. One of the most genuine slow boils building to a wait what the fuck twist I’ve ever experienced, and then there’s such a meal to be made out of the Boomers vs. Millennials/Gen Z divide portrayed (and embodied by the spread of the audience, too). It’s on Broadway through September, Succession heads will love Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon, it’s such a relevant send-up of therapy and also tech-world righteousness…the tide is really turning on both eh???

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My honest theory on the Kamala memes is that A) it’s just simply…refreshing??? to have a new main character for our national headspace, and it doesn’t hurt that she has like, (1) personality. Thinking back to that Bourdain memeification situation, I really do believe that the internet turns people in the public eye into little paper dolls, and memeing has just become our way of playing with them according to what we would like them to be (which is: entertaining above all else). B) As my 23-year-old brother pointed out to me, Gen Z has spent most of their conscious lives growing up in a Trump/Biden-centric (but mostly Trump) universe, so Kamala literally is their first candidate to make a fresh batch of content about. And boy are they good at that! 

Related: It was Rachel Tashjian’s analysis of Kamala’s Celine gown that made me feel truly like, oh, maybe things could actually get a little more normal. Power dressing hasn’t been remotely interesting in years! You and I were all too busy anxieting over cognitive decline and/or whether we were gonna see one or two octogenerians bite it on live camera!

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I haven’t yet read Simon Wu’s essay collection, Dancing on My Own, but his essay about a family vacation with CostCo Travel in The Paris Review is utterly fantastic: 

Here, however, in the Yucatan sun, stripped of this architecture, the Costco psychology (“Everything Is a Good Deal”) merges with the all-inclusive hotel psychology (“Everything Is Paid For”) in a sinister marriage of value and engorgement. This nexus of ensuring what you Paid For Is a Good Deal creates a relentless compulsion to feast: when the price of an experience has been prepaid, the value you derive from it is based on your ability to consume. Thus, you need to consume a lot to get your money’s worth. Sometimes consuming so much, for so little, is tiring. Sometimes constantly optimizing the best deal gets in the way of relaxing, particularly after the third or fourth all-you-can-eat meal. Or so I think. It is definitely fun the first few days 

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Don’t miss instant Bestie KyKy classic in The New Yorker about those hyperlocal niche meme accounts like Nolita Dirtbag and @northwest_mcm_wholesale, and why they just kinda always hit. (I’d also add @starterpacks to the mix there). All the good satire and social commentary is happening on these IG accounts now! 

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3 Solid Brat Links: 

• Brat summer: is the long era of clean living finally over? (The Guardian)
  
  If you can get through the rather ominous paragraph musing over when the last time party music felt this awesome (.....2008 lol), this is the authoritative piece on the whole “brat” phenomenon, placing it in conversation/reaction to the algorithmically-confirming “____-girl” trend cycle as well as earlier figures like the 90’s “ladette.” Great kicker, too.
  

• From brat summer to hot rodent men: why Gen Z love a label (The Times):
  
  “Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it with the perfect song on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Further examples include Barbiecore, cottagecore and mob wife.”
  

• Brat2Brat: On Gabriel Smith’s “Brat” (Cleveland Review of Books)
  
  This review of a novel called Brat, which came out right before the Charli XCX album, is just kind of funny because it bravely tries to address the two together; Smith himself ingeniously orchestrated a marketing stunt based on the album, which the critic further lampoons in a tweet. That’s just how hype works now! 

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Do you dream of quitting your job to move to Barcelona and meet the love of your life? Might you be rethinking your job/passions/geography/everything? Sarah Wood González's newsletter Liminal Space explores this in weekly posts spanning style, culture, and personal essays. 

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Calling all perpetually online and meme aficionados, we're looking for 10 people to test our meme maker. We'll pay you $20 for 30 minutes of your time on a call to get feedback! Email mags@trutharts.com to set up time.

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