2008 cocktails at 2008 prices

The first memory I have of the economy were the words “credit crunch”. I initially thought it was a chocolate bar.

I remember watching the wrapping of that chocolate bar on TV, a news show flashing up a downwards-trending graph. We watched the news every evening at 6pm, and I remember 2007 feeling different. There was always news. Every day a new montage of people leaving their jobs, of stock markets in decline, busy trading floors and panicked people. The news always felt far away in those years, like the Boxing Day Tsunami or the 7/7 bombings. Awful, awful tragedies. The news was elsewhere.

I remember being at school when one of my friends told us her mum had lost her job. Then another when her dad had lost hers. Things were squeezing everywhere. Some people in my class left, some were moving houses. My best friend left the country.

It wasn’t long before a memory of a new Prime Minister. This time, 6pm brought us David Cameron and his wife Samantha, waving as they entered Number 10. Blue dress, baby bump. Two years of difficulty - we were told - had turned a corner. New beginnings for everyone.

But 2010 just brought more news. My dad and I used to drive past gas stations, the numbers still going up and up. Things would be difficult, we would need to “ride out the storm” Cameron told us. “We are all in this together.” But our 6pm news segment was in disagreement. It was 2011: riots in London, footage of riots rippling through the country - watching on my parents’ bed. “Opportunist thugs” Cameron called them. In 2012, the government announced they were going to raise university fees. The line divided the four of us siblings in two: those who got away with the £3000 a year fee, and those charged triple that.

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An adolescence of perpetual crisis

It took until 2016 for me to learn what a sub-prime mortgage was. My generation’s first memory of the economy: the financial crisis, we now called it. My economics A-level was taught from recent memory, no need to refer to the dot.com bubble or the Asian economic meltdown of 1997. We could remember the shocks we saw shift the demand curves on our classroom’s whiteboard, remember the feeling of those dotted lines meeting a new equilibrium, remember the resulting stagflation as the y-axis Price point pushed upwards. We remember, we were there.

My economics class found out the result of the Brexit referendum as we were going into our final exam. That was the only exam I ever got a D.

I remember when I first learned what AirBnb was. I remember the abundant voucher codes, the never-ending referral bonuses friends could send to each other. I didn’t understand the economy enough to make sense of where all this money was coming from, surely they were making a horrible loss? I came of age with platform capitalism: ordering takeout on Deliveroo, booking group trips to AirBnb houses, riding with sheer luxury we definitely shouldn’t have been able to afford as Uber plonked yet another free ride into my account. The possibilities felt endless - so much newness, so many ways of accessing the world.

In 2019, the consequences of these industries became clear. In my favorite undergraduate class, neoliberal life, we watched Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You. We watched as the lead character, working for a company that looked suspiciously like Amazon, peed in a bottle while driving. He had no time to take a break. The gig economy, in all its wonders to the consumer, came at a cost. It was the era of 0-hours contracts, where workers could be hired and dropped in equally fast measure, helping the economy to remain dynamic, to tick along, to flow.

In 2020, our schools began shutting down. COVID closed out our education: our graduations postponed indefinitely, our friendships - for those of us lucky to have made them - became weekly zooms. Some of us were stuck in abusive relationships, some of us lost the chance to date for a couple of years. I got a grad job by the skin of my teeth, but my friends weren’t so lucky. We heard rumors that offers were being rescinded. I didn’t get to see some of my friends until 2022.

Inflation arrived just as we started earning. When I left the UK in 2022, the price of a coffee was - on average - £3. When I returned, the normal was closer to £5. In just a few years, our entire consumption landscape shifted, numbers relentlessly going up. Meanwhile, entry-level salaries were frozen. Our real incomes continued to look like numbers I could relate to, while the price of just about anything had a whole new frame of reference. Things as non-monetary as love now had add-ons - buy HingeX to avoid the bottom of the swipe pile! Even my shower head has a subscription. “Businesses will always need to make ends meet,” my dad tells me.

It’s the economy, and we’re stupid

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Source: Peter Jolly / Northpix

Like seemingly every other person close enough to a cinema to succumb to another summer of Nolan madness, I saw the Odyssey last week. Or maybe we’re all just looking for three hours of air conditioning. Hard to say.

I know Christopher Nolan has a habit of telling stories that center the nuance and complexity of man’s journey to greatness, so I buckled up for the three-hour epic of one of the greatest stories of all time. Coincidence that Oppenheimer and Odysseus begin with an O? I think not.

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What if you could take an extra space you’re already paying rent on, and offer a few slices of toast, with a side of good tips on where to get a good cup of coffee? AirBnb was the first of a wave of start-ups that identified an underused asset, created a platform to commodify it, and then took a cut.

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Source: ironically, a very helpful chatbot

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In 2023, I started interviewing young men and women about their experiences in intimate relationships, a detailed look at how masculinity was being experienced. Were these headlines really being felt by my generational counterparts?

Across hundreds of hours of interviews, I found how this emotional load was often being carried by women. We both hold with care - and have been taught to hurt for - male vulnerability. To help your partner uncover truths about themselves they might feel uncomfortable with. To hold the paralysis of men seeing themselves and all their faults mirrored back to them. And in extreme cases, to hold, and suffer at the hands of, their anger, blame, paralysis of guilt. The masculinity crisis is also a crisis of how women are treated.

Source: Housewife cleaning doormat with carpet-beater [1955], Spaarnestad Photo, amended to add “emotions” in case this wasn’t clear

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For many men, an intimate partner is the first person they have been vulnerable with - and to me, the keyhole into modern masculinity.

In heterosexual intimate relationships, young women often take on a disproportionate load of invisible emotional labor. As men experience intense feelings of failure and isolation from friends, this is only picking up. Men consider this unburdening to women a “natural part” of their relationships, those same women describe it as work. Meanwhile, they feel “weird or like a waste of time” when opening up to male friends. So they reserve this vulnerability for their relationships with women.

The gender script has flipped on its head: women are now 23% less likely to want to date than men, 16% less likely to want to be married one day, 12% less likely to want to have children. Women’s economic independence has transformed what they need from partnership - but instead of adapting, the institutions of dating, marriage and family push back against this new reality. We need to reach a new gender equilibrium.

But first

We have very little data on how much time, or how much effort, emotional labor takes up. Emotional labor has the habit of compounding, of never quite being “done”.

Time use surveys are normally split into work, care labor and domestic labor. Emotional labor spans across all of these spheres - relational work takes place in every part of life (take a look at the wonderful ’s work on the mental load)

So as the softest of proxies, just look alone at the extortionate care time differences that begin in women’s 20s and continue well into their 40s. Below is the average time spent daily on caregiving by U.S. adults**

Source: Pew time use survey, March 2026

This piece focuses on emotional labor within intimate relationships, in all cases prior to marriage and having children, with research subjects aged 21-35. Of course, emotional labor also shows up across our relationships — familial, work, friendships.

**for added context, the average age for first-time mothers in the U.S. was 27.5 years in 2023, and approximately 30.9 for men (the CDC provides almost no data on fathers in their birth data)

1. Emotional

The bread-and-butter: easing or internalizing your partner’s emotions, or containing your own emotions to protect your partner’s. Women are more internally — and externally — motivated than men to practice emotional labor.

From comforting and validating their partner’s feelings to self-regulation, many women I interviewed had spent hours sitting with grieving men about the state of their lives and success. Some project these insecurities into maltreatment of their partner. “It was very well disguised,” one woman reflected, explaining how the put-downs were subtle.

Sara*, 21, recalled sitting on her bed while her boyfriend begged her to hear him out. He wasn’t remorseful for cheating, he just no longer wanted to sit with his shame.

“I was done,” she told me. And yet, he expected her to comfort him. “I had to help him find the words for his feelings, not his actions” — long silences, teasing through shame and self-hatred. “He didn’t know what he wanted to say,” she said. “And then I made him feel OK about it.” She described how she was forced to feel bad for him, as if he were entitled to her sympathy when convenient.

*Pseudonyms used throughout the piece

2. Inquisitive

Many women I spoke with struggled to know what their partner was looking for, often having to ask questions to uncover the problem before knowing the appropriate means of support.

Traditional masculinity might explain this: young men believe it’s unfair to burden others with their emotions. “I worry about not meeting my partner’s emotional needs, so I dull my own,” one man told me. Meanwhile, other women reported coercive and controlling behaviour, with partners meeting them with rage to regain a sense of control over the insecurities of this uncertain time for young men.

Both men and women explained that young men tend to overwork to distract from their emotions. “Grinding seemed easier than leaning into my grief,” Yan, 31, shared with me after breaking off his engagement.

3. Communicative

While many men are communicative, some struggle more with initiating hard conversations to meet their emotional and social needs. Women’s labor often involves bridging silence and helping men understand what they want to say.

“I had to cross over to his side of the line with communication,” one woman told me. Many of the men I spoke to described learning emotional fluency “mostly from women.” For Jack, 28, until his current relationship, “love was about solving,” not knowing how to provide what his partner needed: to “be comforted, listened to and seen.”

One young man described that being in a relationship with a woman felt like the only “normal and safe” space to “ask dumb questions and fail.” This highlights how consciously men recognize gendered differences in environments for vulnerability. I heard a few stories of men making emotions about gender: asking women to “leave it” by blaming their inquisitiveness on their femininity.

4. Strategy

In some relationships, where “men are viscerally scared of intimacy as connected to vulnerability,” failing can be costly for the women trying to help.

Alina, 29, described how her partner would say “stop asking me questions,” making her risk assess whether pressing her offer would cause harm. While many women felt they were offering “an exploration in a non-judgemental space,” multiple described that holding up a mirror to their partner often unwillingly exposed things that made them feel worse.

5. Logistical

The material burden of supporting men through tougher times. This involves shifts in responsibility and the absorption of household, domestic - or even work-related tasks - to ease a partner’s emotional burden.

Some have gone further: writing partner’s college essays, preparing scholarship presentations, coaching them on job interviews. In some cases, their partners actively diminished their career success. “When he heard where I worked, he looked at me predatorily,” one woman said. He later pressured her to refer him to her company, convincing her it would be best for their relationship.

This dynamic reflects a gender burden that Gen Z women are actively trying to resist. Despite claiming to be gender-equal, some men subtly reinstate traditional gender roles by shirking responsibility. There’s also a collective sense that women’s behavior is scrutinized more harshly than men’s. Despite Gen Z’s evolving attitudes, women feel they can’t slip up across multiple areas: tending to their upkeep and emotional neutrality to make their partners feel good.

What happens next

So perhaps that 13% less likely to want to be married one day (12th graders, ages 17-18) is starting to make more sense. Quite the shift in the last 30 years:

Source: Pew Research Center

The more women are left to shoulder the burden of the masculinity crisis, the more likely they are to withdraw. But the more they do, the more boys feel rejected.

The implications of lower coupling rates are far reaching. If we want to interrupt this spiral, we must stop asking women to keep absorbing the damage. We need to offer boys a healthier model of masculinity that speaks to their needs — but doesn’t come at girls’ expense. That means listening to why women are pulling away and creating pathways for boys to grow without leaning on women.

Those who took on this homework — who shared their burdens with friends, practiced self-awareness and showed up with emotional fluency — weren’t just more attractive to the women they dated. They also became better partners. If we are to love each other, masculinity has to evolve to hold that vulnerability, for everyone’s sake.

A version of this reporting first appeared in HuffPost.

Source: MediaPunch, of Jacob Elordi (four of him, in case that wasn’t clear), Jan 2026

Femininity is expansive. Wear an oversized blazer, become more effeminate. Crop your hair short, become more effeminate. Hell, anything that brings us closer to the masculine, ironically, is enough to make us more effeminate. What a fun patriarchal paradox.

Masculinity, on the other hand, doesn’t get the same luxury. Policed and narrow, its shape is confined to specific haircuts, specific muscle loading, specific clothes, colors, t-shirt prints - you name it.

Which is why mullets and mustaches are so important.

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My friend and I (not pictured above) are loyal subjects of the thought economy. It’s about obnoxious as it sounds: a read-and-send cycle, churning through articles just to partake in their circulation.

A few weeks ago, we came across a piece that we had diverging views on. It’s a topic that comes in and out of public interest, and had been simmering back into the fray of public debate when it suddenly ignited. A major publication had posted a new hypothesis. Internet explodes.

The article in question was by an author who had spent years covering the issue. Her piece, perhaps to the surprise of her readers, mostly glossed over this other publication’s hypothesis, and instead seemed to focus more on her exasperation with covering the issue at all.

Source: Photo taken by David Gahr, Janis Joplin outside the Hotel Chelsea, 1969

Issue politic, body politic

“She’s just telling a story she likes.” My friend was not a fan of this approach. It was already a short piece, but within it, our columnist had chosen to indulge the facts of the debate for no longer than paragraph. She decided a quick summary of the state of play would suffice: the explanations she’d reported on over the years, and to what extent we should believe each of them.

The rest of the piece was spent asking what might happen if we were to flip the narrative on its head: why is this an issue we care about so much? And who does that caring serve?

I’m being deliberately vague about the topic because, reader, you’ve likely already made your assumptions on what the article was about. It could be about anything, really - just pick from an overstuffed menu of topics, lightly seasoned with political contentiousness.

We have become an increasingly issue-forward body politic: moving as one, like a biological organism, in waves that flare up whenever an issue becomes the hot topic of the moment. A whole language has emerged around us - the issue voter, single-issue politics; the identity politics that might keep us wedded to such an issue.

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What is the point of writers, of thinkers?

Writing is a slower art form, asking our words to cling onto the flow of our thoughts during the process of deliberation. Her opponent: an ever-compressing media cycle, busying our eyes round and around in circles as the wheel spins, landing its point on the next issue of the moment. Writing might have met her match.

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Slowness

It’s remarkable, really, that when our pen touches paper, or our pencil touches notebook, we write no faster than monks might have done as they sat in scriptoriums, hand-copying texts. No faster than Confucius’s scribes, or Tiro keeping up with Cicero’s letters. The typewriter came, sure, then the keyboard, but the physical speed of thinking, of teasing through what we might want to say, has remained just as slow, just as deliberate.

Writing is a function that society has long paid people to perform. Some are sense-makers. Some record or replicate, so that future sense-makers may interpret. To slow something down is to chew it over - to let your teeth sink in, to question the texture. To let the texture break down, to let the flavors release. To ask what the flavors mean, how they came together: the techniques of the chef, the science, the farmer. Each bite could be infinite - its own investigation, slowed down to notice not just the new details emerging, but your own reaction changing as you taste them.

To slow something down is to attempt to describe it accurately. Or to extrapolate outward from a single moment, until you see the systems of power operating within it. Good writing helps readers to see their own lives in context - living inside a sentence, peering out its windows at the other sentences around it, making sense of itself.

But our slowness has become suspect, something to be taken advantage of. The media cycle tells us to eat quickly, we have to move. Outlets tell us one bite is enough, as long as it’s an interesting one. Click me, click me, click me. So, you give in: you take a bite of the title.

Source: TIMEAI takes on my own article - just in case I’d forgotten what I wrote. Impatiently itching to interpret and summarize to readers that can’t make it through the paywall.

Truth

What do we owe the reader once we’ve started writing? Is it our responsibility to change the narrative?

For much of history, the function of a writer - at least, a paid writer, by profession - has been to observe, yes, but also to bear witness. To state what happened, the facts laid out bare on a table for just the next visitor to observe.

Like any critical mineral, truth is becoming harder to find. When the ground has been so extracted, so mined, we no longer know what it is that we’re looking for. So we turn to reputable outlets to locate it for us: if it’s going to be anywhere, the real, single, the most unmediated version of the truth must be in here somewhere. The Guardian prides itself on their freedom to “hold power to account without interference.” The Atlantic, on “fact-checked reporting from journalists who believe the truth matters.” The New York Times, on making “each reader’s life richer…and all of society stronger and more just.”

When everything feels so unclear - truths so misguided and so multiple, misinformation so believable and contagious - it’s no wonder that some of us have a renewed obsession with a singular truth. A newly rare site, she’s being driven to extinction.

Perhaps it’s because she was always so undemanding. She never once asked the reader do anything with her facts.

Change minds

“My test for an article is: could the other side write the same post,” my friend tells me. I agree - but when so many of us strongly believe in wrong versions of the truth, by believing utterly that it is the truth, what can a writer do? Is it still our responsibility to be truth’s greatest advocates, knowing that may bring us no closer to resolution?

Our writer had been so bold as to write a piece for people who already agreed with her. But when that’s true of almost everything we find ourselves reading now, baby steps further and further into our algorithmic corner, isn’t it more likely that what we read just consolidates the opinions we already hold?

Is the notion of winning someone over now somewhat absurd? Writing was long a tool to move public opinion for moral or political ends. The business of changing minds always involved skill - an art of words molded in exactly the shape it took to change your mind. Still, just a guess: changing your mind likely won’t look the same as what it takes to change mine.

But when the market is shut, not even the brightest talent can try their luck. The attention economy did to debate what the Industrial Revolution did to our factories, leaving devastation in its wake. The economics of changing someone’s mind have become so much harder as we root ourselves deeper into our belief systems. When you don’t give your mind the permission to play, to be malleable, there is nothing to be done.

So if not any of the above - what is writing is for?

If writing is no longer allowed to be slow, no longer obsessed with the truth, no longer required to change minds - what’s left? Our columnist’s unwillingness to engage in the various truths was the whole point. She was, just this once, relinquishing her responsibility to advance debate.

And this exasperation is what made her writing so delicious. Laying down her weapons, her piece was its own fight. Is a piece that says “we are so tired of this fight” as powerful as the fight itself? Or, if your armor is still on, do you still have a responsibility as someone that’s still in the fight?

Are writers allowed to be exasperated? Are we allowed to take off our armor, drop our weapons? Even just once?

I’m no stranger to booing at commencement. My only American ceremony was for grad school in 2024, where booing speakers during speeches was the norm. Even my family, flown in from the UK, were partaking. So when I watched this year’s commencement speakers booed mid-sentence as they proclaimed AI to be the future, it needed no explanation.

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“How many men are there between your legs?” I asked my friend.

We were both in down dog for park yoga, counting the men that were staring over at us. “Three,” she counts, small bobbing figures upside down in our peripheral.

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Males gaze at us

It’s abnormally humid, and London doesn’t wear sweaty well. The heavy air meets us inevitably with anticipation, as every summer, ready to reduce us into objects for male consumption. Foucault called this¹ massifying, or universalizing, the act of turning women into sexualized objects. At its most extreme, it runs through a ‘conscious process of intimidation’² - the glimpses that got caught on my dress as I walked down the street on Saturday night. No, the advent of the male gaze is, thankfully, rarely that crude. It’s much more subtle, much more effective.

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Part of my series: The Economics of Writing

I was at a New York garden party at around this time last year when my friend’s uncle stopped me mid-sentence. I could pick up on the fact that his brows were burrowing deeper into the lines on his face as I spoke - not unfamiliar enough a feeling for me to stop, but light enough an observation to note. “You don’t seem like a policy person.” I almost made it to the end of describing myself.

Oh, I love it when I am perceived. “You seem like a writer,” he surmised.

Okay, now I really love it when I am perceived. By that point, I had been writing a little and I was befuddled and flushed that my internal self had made its way into my outer world. Something inextricable about this parallel state of being, the gentlest of identity shifts barely perceivable to the naked eye - marked this differently.

Writing’s mid-life crisis is all of ours now

To be a writer means to see the world. In Old English, writan - taken from its proto-germanic root - asked writers to delicately trace the undulating contours of their worldly observations to unravel a piece of paper bejeweled with cuts. In Old Saxon, writan can also be translated to scratching; rizan, in Old High German, to tearing. The act of writing appears animalistic, as if to etch or to claw the earth enough times to mark it, or perhaps, to get closer its core - where little do we know we’re barely scathing its surface. It also marks the pre-form of knowing, as if, through writing, we might make slight sense of the omnipotent wonder our world presented us with. She was watching us, and we could barely make sense of watching her. Writing was the closest thing we had to a portal.

By the time of the renaissance, writere, as it had now become, translated instead to clerking or copyist. The definition of observability had now shifted - perhaps not all writing was now about the act of knowing, but about the translation of what it means to know. As soon as writing folded replicability into its definitional halls, the reproduction of knowledge could use writing as the medium to create observable, objective truths. Writing was now knowledge’s servant, an accomplice to history.

Our relationship to knowledge, and to the world it seeks to capture, has only continued to expand ever-further beyond humanity’s limits. As the world we’re supposed to observe becomes more complex, writing has become ever more subservient. Her words have been worn out, some parts of her long lost, intermediating patiently between the machine her master - knowledge - has become. Her meaning has been squeezed by the industrial complex that the introduction of profit complicated her into. In journalism, when we take a scoop of the world, we serve it as a perfectly rounded globe atop our waffled publishers. Thank goodness for writing: dulling herself into ever-more simple words, overworked to convey sense to us all, when nothing else can.

A new empire arose before knowledge could defend her borders. Writing has a new master now - Artificial Intelligence.

And who really is she, if not the emissary of knowledge? After millennia, writing is having her own identity crisis. And we must let her. We must let her return to her roots: scratching, this time with ever-more force. This time, we have to keep scratching, as if our humanhood depended on it.

This all leads us to a new question: what is a writer, really?

Around the time that AI seemed to take her from us, there’s been an unlikely resurgence in the habit of writing in her rawest form - taking matters of knowledge and observation into our own hands. Our scoops aren’t such clean observations as they used to be, melting into our hands to derive new meaning. There are too many knowable, simultaneous, inextricably bound truths bouncing like particles around the world. Writing might no longer have to be about finding, digging with our bare hands into the rough earth to find and scramble for that singular truth. Perhaps she’s been returned to each of us, our own personal act of sense-making, our own set of warm clothes to comfort our identity against the blistering cold outside.

The new economics of writing

I struggle to identify as a writer, because I’m not one. I struggle to hear compliments about my writing, because what I write isn’t lyrical or eloquent.

But our writing is one thing, amongst all the complexity - it is ours. We don’t own her, but we do become her, just as she becomes us. How we make sense of the world can all be found in what she gives us. So when we show her to others, or when others somehow find out about her, of course we are flushed.

If economics has anything to say about this, it’s in the slow way she is fed into the world. When I started putting out my pieces, when someone first called me a writer, I suddenly found myself part of a market. My observations now the observed.

Which is why writing is just like dating. I’ve taken woven parts of me, threaded through words that belong to us all, and shown you my hand. “This is what I see,” she says. We’re crouched down together, and I’m letting you uncurl my fingers to see what I believe, what I see, things I have previously been grasping onto. There, it’s yours now too.

Being a “good” writer doesn’t functionally mean anything. Being a “good” writer won’t embolden your search to find your writing a match. But when getting things placed, when finding a new home for your writing, “good”, for me, has now come to mean something very different.

So for those looking to break into writing, those brave enough to take on the challenge of her new iteration, there are some simple economic rules to follow.

1. Timing - most of being a “good” writer, or really, being a good vendor in the market of writing, comes down to timing. For your piece to find a publication, there needs to be a spark. Of course, there’s no formula for how this might appear to you and when. Perhaps you and your future editor went to bed with the same idea and you woke up to put it in her inbox. Matching is magic. I’ve pitched pieces that I’ve seen written by staff writers a few months, even a year later. Last summer, a friend and I shopped around our piece - thematically right (masculinity) but angularly wrong. The rise and fall of the masculinity writing moment hadn’t matured enough, leaving our piece untouched, just before her time. These undulations are incredibly hard to observe, so acute diligence of your beat is a necessity.

2. Ideas - as if designing a new item of clothing, you could either ride a wave or create one. Here, being a “good” writer is a matter of observation. Ideas come when we don’t expect them, when our lens of the world slightly slips from its normal position in our eye; uncomfortable at first but accidentally sharpening, or blurring, for a moment just long enough to let something else in. This is the part of the market that, like dating, means putting yourself out there - maximise the pathways to meeting new groups of people from beautiful new places, and keep your heart open. We just have to poke our ears where they aren’t used to being, and let the newness in. When combined back again with our own lens, we have something uniquely new - your perspective with a dash of otherness. And in this way, writing becomes the gift - the mode that forms our new idea, just as the idea forms us in return. To write is to give ourselves to the process of evolving, trusting we’ll be guided towards ourselves.

3. Beautiful writing - like painting, going over and ensuring the strokes feel dark enough to complement the new shape emerging across the other side of the page, writing is a matter of composition, balance. There might be some objectively beautiful writing - just as in love, a market that tells us what attraction means, all bound up in the systems that created them. Similes, alliteration - watercolours that try to bind complication and nuance as best they can. Simplicity can win. But so can abstraction and eloquence. We will never know who will match the patchwork you’re presenting them with, each of us seeing writing slightly differently - monogamy entrenches your style, your flair, while polyamory keeps you adaptable and open. Your choice becomes perhaps not what is good, but what meaning you want to convey, and who you want to hear it.

And this is the part that tells me I will never be a good writer. This is the part that tells me that writing, like love, is a part of us all - changing us, just as we change our definition of what it comes to mean to us. We just have to let it.

This is the beginning of a new series - The Economics of…

So, let’s start with The Economics of Flavor.

Source: Blank Street’s website, Spring 2026

When the notion of flavoring first engulfed the market, products tapped into cravings and simplicity - creating tested and popular products that succeeded because they tasted good. Because this newness is so fleeting, satisfaction in our food consumption is no longer driven by loyalty, products no longer having to endure repeat purchase. New flavor expansions not only create novelty, but create opportunities for collabs and partnerships: McDonald’s played on K-Pop Demon Hunters to season their fries with spicy soy sesame ramen. These concoctions aren’t designed to become new favorites or even to taste good. They’re meant to maximize novelty, to be tried once for a premium and then replaced weeks later by the next thing.

Flavor, once a proxy for pleasure, has become a proxy for the market itself.

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A multi-person thread below the line. An award for under-30s had landed in one of their inboxes - a gift from individualizing gods of capitalism, bestowing a few lucky young people with the blessing of being among the better ones. “We have to nominate [insert friend] - she’d be perfect for this!” Super flattering, my friend told me. All except that she was firmly into her 30s.

She had been juniorized.

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Source: CNN

I’ve been in a state of disbelief about CNN’s report that an online “rape academy”, educating users to drug and assault their wives, attracted 62 million users in February.

I started writing about masculinity to stop the spillover this crisis of identity was having on every woman I knew - all of us victims of harassment, abuse and/or assault. I’d believed, deep down, that most assault was a temporary lapse in judgement - one potentially motivated by an entrenched view on their right to women’s bodies - but not one that most men would execute so brazenly.

Then I read a study released this month where 95% of men reported intentional coercion to get a woman to have sex with them who had previously not consented. In the 2,689 men aged 18-34 surveyed, physical pressure and verbal coercion were the most common techniques they’d reported using.

90% of assault happens from someone known to you. 1/3 by an intimate partner.

Most disconcerting, there are currently countless victims of this “rape academy” who don’t know. Being raped while you are asleep feels like an extreme form of gaslighting: you wake up feeling like something happened, a button out of place, feeling cramps. But you don’t know why. You assume the person next to you is safe. You assume that getting into bed sober, in your pyjamas, is safe. You are in your own bed, after all.

It feels like the person that raped you owns another version of you that you can never meet: reduced to a limp body, no agency, no evidence, no self. How are you supposed to view your whole self, your identity as a mom or creative or business owner, when this “other” version is supposed to be part of the same person?

The men who do this to their partners aren’t seeking pleasure. They’re seeking to reduce their partner to a commodity, devoid of consciousness or personality, some with the intention to sell these videos on. I can’t help but see this as a symptom of the “masculinity crisis”, the most violent of last-gasp attempts to reclaim their sense of manhood, defined to them as dominance.

I also work on men’s issues, so let me make this clear: there are so many ways of being a man that doesn’t involve hurting other people.

There are whole Reddit threads calling this “another excuse for men bashing”, that the 62 million stat is “the newest way to demonize men”. I urge nuance: gender identity wars instilled the same hierarchical logic that brought us this heinous website.

Discourse on the “academy” website has one close parallel with the looksmaxxing community: approval from other men. As long as the sphere of sexuality and male attractiveness remain systems of male dominance, over each other as much as over women, we are all beholden to systems that tell us what we can/can’t be.

This logic continues to damage all of us.

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