If you are Callum Turner, the answer’s obvious: bike across the Williamsburg Bridge on a manual Citi Bike (which, if you’re not acquainted, weighs approximately three metric tons) and not have sex. Because why deal with all the pressure?

One Night Only bravely contends with the question etched in rom-com herstory: what if the only thing hotter than having sex is not having sex? Turns out it’s not, but it’s important to ask.

I’ll set the scene: Owen (Callum Turner) has just been sort of dumped by his not lesbian girlfriend, Malika (Maya Hawke), in favor of hooking up with a sexy neighbor, and Allie (Monica Babaro) is looking for love on a night all about lust, accompanied by her not lesbian best friend Jacinta (King Princess). Everyone’s dressed like it’s 2012 and ready to get it on.

There’s a lot to hate about the movie.

As many a discerning viewer has noted, it borders on fascist propaganda. As our two reluctant lovers hurdle toward their destiny as a boring New York couple, we’re meant to believe that maybe true love is worth the wait. Maybe the government was right to force everyone to get tattoos that monitor their dopamine to stop them from engaging in premarital sex. Maybe that’s all fine. Sex is a sin, anyway.

Our protagonists end their romp in Fort Washington Park in true running-through-the-airport-to-get-the-girl form. Owen has freed himself from the clutches of harlot Maya Hawke. Allie’s found her confidence? Or something? With only minutes remaining, the pair run up the spiral staircase of a lighthouse holding hands. They start to kiss passionately. And then, they stop. Why let the mandate rule our lives? Says Owen. So they wait. A WHOLE YEAR. Because finding a real connection is worth it.

No, One Night Only is not “good” in the traditional sense. The sex purge movie is light on sex and heavy on Evangelical undertones. Ok. But it’s good to me. It’s not so much about sex, but it’s about something equally sexy: logistics.

More than once, the movie comes to a screeching halt to explain a rule that could’ve been inferred.

Owen runs into Pete Davidson and Bobby Cannavale, who are filming a buddy-cop movie because, as Davidson explains, this is the one day a year paparazzi won’t be out. Does this come up again? Maso Menos. Does it matter at all? Not so much. Before heading out, Allie’s lesbian (this is important) roommate helps her get ready for the evening. She explains that she’s not worried about the mandate because “queer people have always found a way around the hetero rules”. So that explains the gay people of it all. Please, no further questions at this time. At the beginning of the film, we’re shown international news clips to remind the audience that this is an America deal. This awakens some spooky sex tourism concerns, but that’s a problem for the sequel, 2 Nights Only: Here We Go Again.

Perhaps even more baffling and more thrilling to me is the New York City transportation of it all. It’s charmingly ludicrous. The sex purge is a 12-hour event. Owen’s night begins at his fictional pizza shop, Claremont’s, in the Upper West Side. He books it down to White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. He visits his mother’s apartment in Morningside Heights several times throughout the night. When he and Allie unite, they make their way to Bushwick and then are shuttled to Williamsburg. Both Allie and Owen take Citi Bikes over massive New York City Bridges. Naturally, the night ends in Washington Heights with Dunkin Donuts spon in hand.

I’ve totaled it up, and this amount of commuting would take me one hundred years. Like, Owen and Allie could teach Odieous something about getting a fucking move on. Maybe if he had a Citi Bike and a strong connection with a quirky girlie, he could get to Ithaca before Anne Hathaway even had to consider taking Robert Pattinson as a lover.

I live for this nonsense. One Night Only is for the noticers and the dreamers. The people who clock that the Bowery J is dressed up to look like the Jefferson L stop. The people who think it’s awesome that Glen Powell goes white Latino in a mini cameo and King Princess is a straight girl named Jacinta. The people who say, yeah, this is a little bit fascist, but in this crazy world, that’s ok.

I can’t and won’t argue that this is a good film. But I could easily churn out a thousand more words (we haven’t even scratched the surface on the Duolingo sponsorships or the music license workarounds) and have a million more conversations. I love a movie that makes me say What the hell is wrong with you to all involved. I will show this to future generations, strangers, enemies, and friends. One Night Only is deeply troubling and deeply enthralling. For all you naysayers, I want to remind you what really matters: the honestly startling Maroon 5 needle drop that defines this brand of American descent into madness.

If you’re tapped into the pop culture world, you’re at least tangentially aware of Hailey’s trials and tribulations. Once credited with the invention of Blueberry Nails (light blue) and accused, as a teenager, of ensnaring pop star Justin Bieber into a relationship, she’s become more symbolic than real.

In the latest culture cycle, the internet has decided to forgive Hailey. This is, undoubtedly, because of Justin Bieber’s surprising success as the headliner of Coachella. After years of drunken outbursts, unfinished tours, and generally treating Hailey like shit, he pulled it together and produced a competent, well-thought-out show. Thus, Hailey took her place as a good woman once again.

Hailey’s undulating reputation is indicative of the modern expectations of womanhood. A good woman should manage her partner’s moods, uplift his career, and ensure he is healthy and stable enough to function. Beyond that, a good woman should not be a victim. She should be so ethereal, so impossibly kind and light in spirit that no one would think to hurt her. And if they did, a good woman should, silently and without a word, leave.

Women who fail to meet this expectation are carted to the town square for public trial. We use the magic words Male Centered, a clever shorthand for dumb slut who had it coming.

After the festival, Hailey’s calculated risk paid off. The people dubbed her the first lady of Bieberchella. “We owe this girl an apology,” opined one commenter. This is a stark contrast from the way we’ve viewed Hailey Bieber in the past. Last year, TikTok user Julie Theis, whose bread and butter is “dark psychology breakdowns”, went viral for saying that Hailey Bieber was a “Tolerant Codependent” and a victim of Justin Bieber’s narcissistic abuse.

Theis was swiftly served with a cease and desist from Hailey’s lawyers.

“You’re not powerful, you’re fragile,” Theis said in her first response video, speaking directly to Hailey. She followed up in another video by saying that the difference between herself and Hailey was that Theis was self regulated while Hailey wasn’t. A strange response to someone whose crime was, allegedly, being an abuse victim.

Theis and the army of supporters in her comments saw abuse more as a vehicle to belittle their target rather than a problem to be dealt with. Here, being a victim is a sign of weakness, an inability to regulate. It’s because of Hailey’s failures as a woman that she’s suffered at the hands of her partner.

We see this in the real world, too.

In The Cut article I Love My Husband (Who Hates Me), writer Bindu Bansinath unpacks the cultural phenomenon of women complaining about the misdeeds of their husbands online. When met with viral outrage, these women often reflexively defend their partners–all the way from bad Christmas gifts to emotional abuse.

Bansinath references one comment that reads “You 100 percent deserve what you tolerate.”

Find any one of these videos and there are hundreds of comments demanding the woman leave or shut up. That they are uninterested in her husband she can’t train. A few more call her stupid. Most agree that she deserves whatever grievance she’s aired because of her own moral failing.

The ire is directed not at the butter dish-buying, chore-avoidant men, but the women who put up with it. To a degree, this follows. There’s no bottom to the amount of shame it would take to get a man to behave better. A certain amount of tough love might be necessary to snap a woman out of a toxic relationship. But phraseology like “you deserve what you tolerate” is more accusatory and demeaning than urgent.

It doesn’t matter to these commenters that beyond a few metropolitan hubs, it’s still widely expected that women will marry and stay married. It doesn’t matter that the internet might be an isolated woman’s first attempt at reaching the world outside of her relationship. It doesn’t matter that statistically, it takes an abuse victim 4 to 7 times to leave their abuser.

The internet delights in these women’s pain. It’s a fitting punishment to the cruel comment machine that these women’s shortcomings are met with an appropriate response from their partner. It’s less about getting women out of bad situations and more about bullying a woman, in a woke way.

The daughter of a lesser Baldwin Brother’s story is still unwritten. Will she cast a spell that makes Jbiebs dance with the vigor of his 13 year old self? Will his YouTube buffer and inevitably turn the princess into a hag once again? Only Swag will tell.

“I don’t wanna be working in ballet or opera, or you know, things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive,’ even though it’s like, no one cares about this anymore…” he said. “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there…I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”

Outrage ensued, disproportionately so.

My working theory is that people care less about the historic institutions that are, indeed, underfunded and struggling and more about the truth this told about Timmy Tim. He wants it: accolades, billionaire girlfriend, tabloid fodder, all of it. And he wants us to know it, too.

If we trace the downward trajectory (relatively, he’ll be fine) of Timothée’s public approval, the genesis is his speech at the 2025 SAG awards, which includes the following:

“The truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” Chalamet said. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight.”

https://variety.com/2025/film/awards/timothee-chalamet-sag-best-actor-1236314804/

As Timmy transitioned from Bob to Marty, our cultural appetites shifted too. The era of celebrities crying on main is over. We’re done hearing about the nuts and bolts of rehearsal. We’re troubled by the idea that they might want their fame. Instead, we crave effortlessness from our A-listers.

In the Swift-ian sense, effortlessness does not mean a lack of effort. Rather, it conjures the likes of Alicia Keys circa 2016–a woman whose no makeup routine included brow tinting, blush, and weekly facials according to her randomly mononymous makeup artist, Dotti.

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Effortlessness is a magic trick, and we’re drawn to the smoke and mirrors.

Take Lindsay Lohan’s iconic face-lift of 2025. Conveniently slated with her comeback to the public eye, people praised how well she had aged, especially given the circumstances. When Chloe Fineman (sure) asked her what she did to look so refreshed, she credited “carrot, ginger, lemon, olive oil, [and] apple juice every morning.”

Let’s ask the audience:

In another vein, weekend one of Bieberchella debuted to mostly positive reviews. The stripped-down performance included the child star scrolling through old videos and asking a virtual audience “What do you guys want to hear?” as he riffed over his tween hits.

I loved the performance but was most taken with the reactions. People on both sides seemed totally willing to buy the movie magic. Critics called it low effort and last-minute, and supporters were charmed that Bieber was honoring the “real fans” at home by asking what they wanted to hear.

We like this fantasy: Bieber rolling out of bed, ambling over to the Coachella stage, and asking for a plug for the big screen. Totally unrehearsed, we imagine, he either threw away or sacrificed a high-level production for the sake of intimacy. This is preferable, perhaps, to JBiebs’ less refined moments of vulnerability: his famous It’s not clocking to you soliloquy, or that time he ditched Hailey Bieber on a skateboard. Maybe we appreciate the degree of separation, we can love a persona a little more safely.

Effortlessness seemed to be the word of the weekend at Coachella. Kendall Jenner was praised for her laid-back look, while the consensus was that influencers like Alix Earle were over-accessorized, tacky, even. Alix even switched to a more casual vibe for the final day, claiming she just wanted to “be crazy and dance” with a sweatshirt and baggy pants.

“Money Talks. Wealth whispers,” philosophized a very wise commenter.

Indeed, money was talking.

Several influencers posted about an agency cancelling their Coachella brand trip days before the festival. Commenters theorized that these storytimes were a plea to other brands. Take pity on me, Pepsi Cola/Palantir Love Out Loud House. One influencer even posted a video that showed a packed suitcase with the words “this girl is going to Coachella” overlaid in white text. When a brand commented, she revealed that she didn’t have wristbands yet.

In the infancy of the influencer, this kind of messiness was currency. Kim K became American royalty after a leaked sex tape. Trisha Paytas rode her controversies all the way to Broadway. But it seems like we’ve scrapped the bottom of the barrel for degradation and desperation.

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I suspect with the unraveling of the likes of Taylor Frankie Paul, a woman known for her excruciating and compulsive vulnerability, we’ve realized there’s a limit to how much we can share. The honesty bubble popped and left us in an emotional recession. Maybe we don’t want to know these people as much as we thought we did.

We like our vulnerability wrapped in a blanket of ease. We like celebrities with acne and mild anxiety (as opposed to, like, BPD and a budding substance use disorder). Maybe it’s a remedy to a world where everything feels like you’ve got to try so hard. Let’s just pretend we’re not.

For fun, here are my effortlessness related trend predictions:

Beauty trends – Stick thin models will loveee bacon and pizza and hamburgers again. The pilates girl will move to the fringes, and the girls who get their abs from live, laugh, loving will take center stage. People will brag about never working out again. In opposition to the Ozempic craze, true status will come from not having to work for your miraculously thin build.

Blake Lively messy hair will come back around (though Blake Lively will remain cancelled). Unbrushed but perfectly bouncy curls will be everywhere this summer.

Social Media – I still believe in the rise of the private Instagram and I predict the fall of the photo dump. Instead, celebs and normies alike will begin posting a single photo to represent their chaotic, haphazard, still aesthetically pleasing lives. The caption will read “make Instagram casual again.”

Music – The Justins and the Charlis will reign supreme. Concerts will feel like nightclubs, bedrooms, and crowded bars. Big artists will play small, surprise venues. They’ll play their deep cuts (do not ask the city before you if this was really spontaneous). They release songs titled something like “iPhone Note 45”.

Timothée Chalamet– He will win an Oscar when he can prove he doesn’t need one.

He posted movie reviews and publicly flirted with Phoebe Bridgers. She thought his show, Normal People, was devastating. He was starstruck. She flew to Ireland. The world watched via their 280-character replies.

Now, Mescal tells Vanity Fair journalist Joy Press that he wants to keep his romantic life private from “vultures.” He doesn’t use social media much beyond watching basketball highlights on YouTube. Maybe he’s learned. Or, maybe, Mescal’s newfound A-List status has bought him a level of privacy he previously couldn’t afford.

In a surveillance culture where personal brand is capital, privacy is a luxury celebrities tote like a beat-up Birkin.

Mescal climbed to stardom via his role as the internet’s boyfriend. Open, honest, oozing vulnerability. He was one of the people. But now that he’s cemented as a leading man and Hollywood insider, times have changed. He’s eclipsed his need for public approval. It’s beneficial, perhaps even glamorous, to be guarded.

It seems like every celebrity has taken this approach. Out of the 12 profiles Vanity Fair ran for their 2026 Hollywood Issue, seven highlighted varying levels of digital ineptitude. Austin Butler declared that it would be easier to reach him via “carrier pigeon” than by phone. Jeremy Allen White (whose rise to fame is largely attributed to internet fandom) jokes about hardly knowing what a meme is.

This online withdrawal isn’t accidental; it’s happening en masse. Privacy is a moral signifier, representing serenity and studiousness. These men gesture at full lives with tight circles and artistic routines free from parasocial bonds. For them, visibility is an option. For most everybody else, it’s essential.

Compare this attitude to the burgeoning creatives in Rebecca Jennings’ 2024 piece for Vox, “Everyone’s a Sellout Now.” Artists become accountants, brand managers, publicists, and promoters all in one.

“The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from 9-to-5 middle managers to astronauts to housecleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand,” says Jennings.

In the publishing sphere, for example, Jennings explains that a deal with one of the Big Five publishing houses used to be a golden ticket. A writer would create, and the publisher would do the rest. Now, authors edit “Cottage Core” TikToks in pursuit of virality. It’s not enough to sell the book; it’s about selling yourself.

Vulnerability is now a key form of labor. In addition to artistic pursuits, people must perform online. Celebrities who have transcended this level of fame denounce online presence after buying their way out.

Take the Kardashians, the ultimate arbiters of celebrity trends. Once a family built on oversharing, the Kardashians have begun, albeit subtly, retreating from their voracious fan engagement rituals.

In season four of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Kourtney filmed the birth of her son, Mason. He and his younger sister, Penelope, are featured in both iterations of the reality show. Now, Kourtney blurs the face of her youngest child, Rocky, on Instagram for privacy.

While there has been a growing child safety movement online, this is more performance than preference. Kourtney proves that the spotlight’s still on her, she chooses to sidestep it. She can have it both ways: her child’s birth can be on the news, and she can cover his face on Instagram. Here, privacy is more a luxury good than a way of being. While the working creative class must put themselves (reputation and all) on the line, elites have the freedom to limit access to their personal lives.

Similarly, sister Kendall Jenner postures privacy with her second home in Wyoming. She still lives and works in LA and freely mingles with the upper-echelon. She’s out to dinner at Nobu and her situationships are documented in the press. But her public persona is a reserved, privacy obsessed introvert who’s fled the city for the mountains. It’s symbolic: a woman who can show off her cozy mountain home to an audience of 3.4 million viewers on Architectural Digest.

Privacy as performance has made its way to the masses. Chanté Joseph’s viral essay “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” reckons with the idea that being publicly partnered takes a hit on a woman’s “aura.”

“Women are obscuring their partner’s face when they post, as if they want to erase the fact they exist without actually not posting them,” says Joseph. Here, the layman attempts to recreate the paradox of celebrity privacy. They perform intimacy while still withholding true vulnerability; a shape with no outline.

But the truth is, the average person doesn’t possess the power to opt out. In an attention economy, visibility is currency. We’re rewarded for viral moments, even when (or especially when) it comes at someone else’s expense. We’re recorded on Ring Doorbells and post through psychotic breaks, all hoping it’ll be enough to afford the luxury of privacy, or at least the performance of it.

When I get the last seat on the L train, I’m eye level with dozens of puffer jackets. Most black, varying in puffiness. The train, which barrels toward Manhattan in uneven gasps and spurts sways the puffers like a screeching wind.

I imagine the coats are rolling clouds. I count them. Even when someone’s elbow collides with another person’s ribs, I find the edges. Rolling clouds. And I’m lying on my back, tracing shapes. Maybe I’m lying in tall grass. Maybe I feel the sun on my skin. Maybe it’s summertime.

It’s days before my 26th birthday and I’m listening to “Au Pays Du Cocaine” by Geese, a band of greasy haired prodigies who’ve taken their native Brooklyn by storm in the last few years. It’s their biggest hit. I never miss a party but I’m usually pretty late.

Anyway, it’s a perfect song to listen to on the train.

You can change, you can change

You can change, you can change

Warbles vocalist Cameron Winter. He’s 23, a few months older than my younger brother. It’s a severe thing to be: 23 years old. The oldest you can be in your 20s besides 29.

I can hear the faint swish of the puffer sleeves over the clanging instrumental.

You can change, you can change

You can change, you can change

The song’s a plea to a drifting partner. He begs. He makes impossible promises. But the tragedy’s that Winter, or, diplomatically, the narrator, doesn’t know they’re impossible yet. The tragedy of being 23.

You can stay with me and just pretend I’m not there

Angry and heartbroken. Screaming and small. But despite it all, it’s still a little uplifting, which I know is corny.

I’m younger than I’ve ever been at 26. I trace the shapes of clouds in puffer jackets.

I think about the things that make me old: I hate loud cars, I wrote my community board about a stop sign near my apartment, I want to garden this summer, I’m picking out $80 towels for the bathroom.

I think about the things that make me young: I have a Stitch Sonny Angel, I stayed out all night on Saturday, I have not taken up gardening because I forget you have to plant the seeds a year before they bloom.

You can change, you can change

You can change, you can change

Listening to Geese is awesome because everybody already knows them.

My esoteric friends raved about them last summer. It’s like saying you’ve discovered Greta Gerwig through her indie film Barbie. It’s too late to be cool, you might as well enjoy.

It’s sort of like being 26: I won’t be a prodigy and I’m unlikely to make 30 Under 301. So now I’m free to be whatever I want. Free to find the shapes in the clouds.

You can be free and still come home

It’s alright

I’m alright

In the lead-up to my 24th birthday, I kept listening to Steve Lacy’s Dark Red. The song suggests moody skies, chunky knit sweaters, fleeting eye contact with unfriendly strangers. It’s the kind of song you’d turn all the way up as you just miss your train transfer in Union Square, Lacy croons as the L rushes past you on its way to Brooklyn without you. Dark Red is deceptively cheery––upbeat with foreboding lyrics:

Something bad is bout to happen to me

I don’t know what but I feel it coming. 

Lacy proclaims over the clash of cymbals. 

Lacy wrote Dark Red when he was 17, using Garageband to whip up the Soundcloud fan favorite. It’s about a girl he suspects of cheating but still begs for her to stay in the relationship––“dark red” represents a lipstick shade that indicates new found confidence. 

Something about the song feels so distinctly 24, or at least the tail end of 23. I’ve always thought there was a connection between being 17 and your early 20s. At 17, I started to feel like I knew everything. All of us seniors had finally turned the corner on high school, there was just one long, straight stretch in front of us that led out of Olympia, Washington. We knew all the turns of our small town and had survived, one way or another, the trauma of adolescence. 

Now, at scarcely 24, I look back to that girl, unfamiliar with the person who was so confident in what the future would hold. As I look into this next year of my life, it feels like I’ve been pulling myself up by a long piece of rope, hoisting myself further and further into the abyss with a hand on a single tether to reality. Now, I feel out of rope. 

What if she’s fine?

It’s my mind that’s wrong

Lacy continues. The song both seems to predict the future and relent that Lacy knows nothing. He’s wrapped in the confines of his own mind so tightly that it becomes his reality. And that’s the life of a 17-year-old. 

I want to ask myself at 17 what I should do next. I think she would know better than I would. How do I look the last semester of my last year of school ever in the face? How do I gracefully transition into the working world? What do you think my life will look like next year?

Every year I get maniacally stressed out on my birthday. I spend the weeks leading up to the day imagining that I will be showered in love and light and then the day descends in a barrage of logistical nightmares. Everyone does everything right. They text me happy birthday, they give me gifts, and show up at the Lower East Side bar that I picked out based on vibes and available reservations. But I can’t help but spend the day waiting for something to click that never does. 

Something bad is bout to happen to me

Echos in my head as I walk to the gym. It’s unseasonably warm but the sky is still dark. It could be evening though it’s barely 10 AM. I wonder briefly if I should’ve clocked in for my morning job instead of taking the day off, too late now. 

Something bad is bout to happen to me

Plays again as we wait in line for beef pancakes from Spicy Village. I made the executive decision to decline the long line and stand outside the tiny restaurant while they make our food. Everyone behind us is seated and we are standing out in the cold for fifteen minutes. 

Something bad is bout to happen to me 

Resounds as I get dressed to pick up the kid I nanny from his ritzy school in the East Village. We scarcely had five hours of sunlight and I’m walking through brisk twilight to get to him. 

Something bad is bout to happen to me

Overpowers the house music playing at the empty bar. It’s just me and the waitress who checks in every 10 minutes to see if I need anything. I have convinced myself that everyone has forgotten and will no longer be coming to my party. 

And then a friend walks in. 

–

December birthdays are deceptively hard for adults. They come with the dressings of cheer––dropped in the middle of company parties and gingerbread house-making competitions and free candy in waiting rooms. But there’s an undercurrent of loneliness. One by one, everyone is leaving the city and returning to their places of origin. They are attending one final party before they are completely burnt out. Friends are weighing the worth of venturing into the cold to buy an overpriced tequila soda. 

On my eighteenth birthday, I knew exactly what would happen. My birthday would fall on the last week before we headed our separate ways for winter break. I knew who could come to my house for an underwhelming, completely dry party and exactly how long they would stay. 

I have to keep telling myself that I’d rather be unsure at 24 than know what I did at 17. I’d rather have to wait an hour for my friends to show up––turns out they were coming, they were just cool New Yorkers who’d never arrive exactly on time––than throw a party that is 2 hours and 15 minutes on the dot. 

Maybe I’ll spend the whole year embracing the discomfort of continuing to plunge into the abyss, and maybe that’s a good thing.

We must overthrow the culture of earliness that corrupts modern etiquette.

I come to you in my Mel Robbins era of self-helpfulness to bring you this message. I think being early is ruining our lives.

Here are my qualifications: I have an excellent sense of time and an omnipresent feeling of doom that makes me chronically early to everything. Oh, your party starts at 8:00? I’ll be there at 8:01. Just me, you, your boyfriend, and your roommate who’s on her way out, actually. Oh, you need to run out and grab a bottle of wine? No problem! I’ll hold down the fort as your boyfriend plays 2K in the other room.

Once, a friend and I arrived at the Brooklyn Mirage at 9:00 PM for a show that started at 8:30. We ate $20 chicken tenders on the floor as the first opener played to us and the security guard. The headliner came on at 2 in the morning. I still remember the feeling of cold, hard concrete against my thighs. A venue has never felt so large.

Chronic Toxic earliness became apparent to me when I started working at a gym. The program was a 50 minute high intensity workout that planned for a three minute warm up and two minute stretch at the end. People would regularly arrive half an hour early. Beyond changing clothes and filling up water bottles, the gym had two small chairs sat right next to each other for clients to sit and scroll as they waited. If I was on aux, we’d play such hits as Lady Gaga’s rendition of “Oh When the Saints” and Ben Platt’s cover of “Diet Pepsi” at a corporate approved decibel. Is that any way to spend a morning?

I used to put a lot of pressure on being early. I guess I thought preparing for the workout would unlock the unused 90% of my physical fitness, Limitless style. No such luck. What it actually did was allow my anxiety to dictate my experience. If I wasn’t ten minutes early, it was a bad workout, if I didn’t have .2 miles on the treadmill by the start of class, it was over. I found being a little late made my life easier. I could dedicate more time to relaxing at home, hanging out without stress, the real bread and butter of living. So I’d be a little rushed when it came down to it.

When I was in college, my advisor told me that I would make a good Lutheran because I liked to drink my poison in the morning. Kind of a psycho thing to say, and I think about it often, but there’s a kernel of truth: there’s no reward for prolonged suffering. Why not dump all your fears and anxieties into a few tense moments rather than let the slow drip of nervousness pervade your every waking second?

Horrifyingly enough, this applies to work too.

My new job involves watching a parade of nervous candidates agonize in the lobby of a corporate building. They show up 30, 40, even an hour before their allotted time. They pace, they scroll on their phones, mostly, they sit in place and squirm.

I concede that you shouldn’t be late to a job interview. Whatever, fine. But I think, contrary to popular belief, you also shouldn’t be all that early. The hard, cold truth of the situation is that the person interviewing you, more than likely, also has a job. They won’t be able to meet with you 20 minutes early and sometimes, they won’t even know that you’re there. For what it’s worth, most of the really important people at work roll up at least a little late.

The perfect solution is to arrive exactly 12 minutes early to anything really important and nonoffensively late to anything else. I’ve found 12 minutes is perfect. It performs early without wasting real time. It says I got here early. If you arrive, by happenstance or anxiety, more than 12 minutes early, you must entertain yourself elsewhere. Grab a snack, take a walk. You owe it to yourself to spend as much time doing something besides waiting and worrying.

If you know me, you probably haven’t picked up on my excellent internal clock. You might even say I’m someone who runs perpetually late. This isn’t because I’m “careless” or “rude” or “an hour and a half late to my shift”, it’s actually a choice as deliberate as when Jay Shetty went to three years of monk school. Running a little late is a way of being. It means choosing myself, my relationships, and the worldly pleasures we only have access to during our brief stint on earth.

We spend far too much time waiting around. In airports and the last hours of work and in line for the Best Bagel in New York City. Sometimes we wait so long we miss out on the good stuff. While we’ll never totally cut down on the capitalistic waste of waiting around, I believe our lives become fuller when we’re running late. It means we stayed too long, slept too good, stopped checking watches.

Live a little haphazardly, your life depends on it.

Art critic Dean Kissick thinks everyone’s too woke to make good art. Music historian Ted Gioia worries that all the younger generation listens to is old music. It’s dark times: uninspired and overly anxious.

This summer, I started to wonder if they were right. As great thinker, Belly Conklin once said, “Summers are what matter.” What would matter this summer?

I thought ‘Weapons’ and ‘Caught Stealing’ were alright. Still, nothing came close to the Barbenheimer cultural circus of 2023, which I associate with an East Village liquor store owner who gifted my friends and me Pink Whitney shooters to match the occasion. I felt like a Barbie; people literally shouted “Hey Barbie” in the streets. It was the kind of magic The Cut writes about.

More than a year after its inception, we’ve finally come down from 2024’s Brat summer. We’ve washed our hair, and most of the cigarette smell is rinsed from our jackets. I liked letting popular culture dictate how I lived for a little while. I’d go out in the evenings and catch an early morning bus to work, sometimes crossing paths with the creatures of the night on the way.

Now I’m listening to Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat in a HIIT class that takes place under the shadow of darkness. Charli’s got an Aperol brand deal and a second wedding to the same man in Italy to attend to.

Tell The Bees wrote about the rise of loserdom and how it’s not only expected to go nowhere and see no one, it’s encouraged. Rising temperatures have made summers an increasingly indoor affair. Maybe summers aren’t what they used to be.

I looked to the song of the summer for answers.

Streaming argues that it’s Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”. If this is the case, we should sell our bodies for parts to the AI overlords. Luckily, streaming numbers aren’t everything. The song of the summer tells a story.

I think there’s a stronger case for Tate McRae’s “Sports Car”––though the VMAs would say it’s Tate McRae’s “Just Keep Watching”, which is wrong. “Sports Car” encapsulates the pull between conservative values (remember her collab with Morgan Wallen? Weird, girl) and the unbreakable spirit of a consumerist party girl. You’d find it on a “Pink Pilates” Spotify playlist, which demonstrates our love for high BPMs but departure from traditional nightlife.

Also in the running is Katsye’s “Gnarly”––a song that’s better seen than heard thanks to the girls’ magnetic performance abilities. The girl group’s retro Gap ad embodies the culture’s obsession with nostalgia, perhaps indirectly proving Gioia’s thesis. From obsessive archive pulls to recreations, Katsye perfectly encapsulates our need to return to something, even if we’re not sure what.

But when I think about it, there was a song that defined the summer––to me, at least.

When Ben Platt took the stage at the Las Culturistas Culture Awards to sing a dramatized version of Addison Rae’s “Diet Pepsi”, the audience chuckled. By the final note, they’re on their feet, applauding. You can see a woman wipe a stray tear from her cheek.

For weeks, videos of his performance circulated TikTok. People filmed their TVs, mouthed the words, cried. Then he put the full version on Spotify. I haven’t stopped listening since.

The original version of “Diet Pepsi” is light, airy; it’s a perfect pop song. It doesn’t matter that Addison says “cross gold chain” and not “Costco chain”, it just feels good. A song to blast with the windows rolled down. Just when you think it’s over, it keeps going.

Ben’s version is pure theatricality. He takes it totally seriously, belting the words like it’s “My Heart Will Go On”. When he sings “losing all my innocence in the back seat” for the first time, I can’t stop the chills from running down my spine. When you think about it, it’s sort of sad, sort of exciting at the same time: losing all your innocence in the back seat. His adlib “I like it from the fountain” is everything and nothing. It’s transcendent.

This version exists somewhere between thinking and feeling: perhaps where all music should exist. The words are so haphazard, but the movement of the melody is so intentional. Perfect for the moments you can’t quite put into words. When you laugh to stop yourself from crying. When you wake up sad but can’t say why. When the air smells like the drive from middle school to swim practice in 2013.

What’s so distinctly 2025 about the cover is Ben’s ability to make something new out of something familiar. It feels like we’re in an era of scarcity. People are less social, with less to spend and more to lose. We’re less empathetic. We’re irony-coated and unwilling to be vulnerable. Ben takes the scraps of years past and delivers a performance of total abundance. He doesn’t need a new tune to make something special; we’ve already got it. His willingness to lay his heart on the line feels like a light in the darkness, a readiness to return to emotional honesty.

This summer was a transitional one. I grew tired of my job and kept working there. I bought crystals from a market in Philadelphia but never bothered to charge them. I worked tirelessly on things that ultimately wouldn’t matter; I made flyers for my Substack. Maybe all 20-somethings feel like this. Not quite there yet.

Amidst this waiting period, there is “Diet Pepsi” frankensteined together from the corpses of past summers. While we yearn for The Big Thing, we can scrounge for joy, meaning, and community. In the article that is literally titled “Is This The Worst Era of American Pop Culture?”, writer Spencer Kornhaber ends on a surprisingly hopeful note. No, it’s not. He writes:

“When you tune in to the creativity that is still pulsing in these disorienting times, you can hear the story that most needs telling: Keep going.”

In the spring, he invited us to his home to dine on smoked salmon and watch the sunset over Lake Washington. This was a lost art, the convening of professors and their pupils. I remember tracing my fingers over a worn copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses on his bookshelf––which was grand enough to warrant the title library. Dr. Wagner regaled us with tales of his past: a charmed adolescence on the cape, a storybook picture of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in his 20s. I sipped red wine, swirling the glass the way I imagined adults did.

That summer, he took 20 of us to Paris to study modernism and impressionism. We read James Baldwin and Ernest Hemingway. I dreamt of bulls with long horns every night for a week before we left.

I was a bad traveller. Nineteen years old and lost in the Charles De Gaulle Airport. My weak command of the French language failed almost immediately. My classmates, whom I had spotted briefly in customs, had smartly cut their losses and hailed a cab. I called my parents so frantically, they must have thought Notre Dame had resurrected and burnt again.

After a wrong train and several laps around a station that could’ve been Mars, I emerged into cold sunlight. Cars sped over cobbled streets, an Elton John FINAL TOUR poster glowered from a bus stop. I resigned myself to failure, turning my suitcase on its side and plopping down on the sidewalk. I would die there, it seemed.

Just as I thought all hope was lost, I heard it: English. My heroes were southern, with anti-pickpocket phone chains slung around their necks and international SIM cards. They let me route to my hostel via Google Maps, which we discovered was two blocks away.

I arrived moments before our first cohort meeting, my peers had already congregated in the lobby. Soccer, which was not called soccer there, blared from a dinosaur television in the corner.

I felt victimized: by the transit system, by my lack of worldlyliness, by the airport staff, and by the British tourists in front of me in baggage claim. I cursed my classmates, who, by all accounts, had abandoned me. I hated Hemingway for making it seem like the biggest problem a person could have in Paris was war-related PTSD.

Dr. Wagner handed out the itineraries.

We would visit 26 museums in the span of 14 days. We would walk hundreds of miles. There would be quizzes on impressionist painters I’d never heard of. And, there was a heat wave ripping through Paris.

I was the most miserable girl in all of France.

After the meeting, I perused a selection of flaky pastries while the other students got ready for the day. Dr. Wagner approached.

“You know, this is the best time to travel, when you’re young,” he said.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Everyone sees themselves in you,” he said, biting into a croissant. “They remember being your age, feeling how you felt. Everyone wants you to enjoy yourself; they’re all rooting for you.”

“Right,” I said.

That night, a group of us went for drinks at a Green Bay Packers-themed bar in the 11th Arrondissement. Something to remind us of home, we thought. I was shaking. Another professor had warned that bartenders would respect the law of our home country. I stowed away behind a tall, tattooed senior who had brought her copy of The Sun Also Rises, a very mature thing to do in a bar, I thought.

“Can I see your IDs?” asked the bartender in near-perfect English. I was sunk.

I handed my ID. I tried to stutter out some excuse, only one drink, only beer, I thought of offering. The bartender shook her head and laughed.

“No,” she said, handing the card back, “your school ID, student discount.”

Paris began to warm.

On the way home, we encountered a group of high school students; they were tipsy, sharing a pint, stumbling in the twilight. I remembered being like them, if not a little less chic. They heard our accents and stopped.

“Americans!” one of them called, “listen to this!” He pressed a button on his phone, and Old Town Road warbled over the speaker. We paused for a minute, letting Lil Nas X transcend the language barrier in song.

Dr. Wagner’s words rule that trip. Everybody was rooting for me. I smiled at old people and they smiled back. I didn’t mind slow walkers, imagining them relishing the beauty of a slow day in Paris just like me. French deli workers made me practice my orders in French, and I took the lesson in stride. Somebody took the time to teach me the words, after all. I listened to David Bowie’s Young Americans, hearing just the one half line: “all the way from Washington.”

A city-wide party broke out in the middle of our trip. It was July, and all the students hadn’t fled south yet. Everyone was there. Paris felt like the center of the universe.

From our hostel window, we spied on a group of middle-aged women who owned a flower shop. They shuttered their doors at noon to celebrate, dragging an enormous speaker to the storefront. I watched as they arranged a rainbow of cheese, wine, and flowers. When we returned to the hostel that night, they were dancing to ABBA, taking long puffs on a single cigarette. They twirled each other like little girls.

I wondered what their lives were like: did they see their younger selves in us? Beleaguered, delirious, broke from daydrinking and gallery hopping? I imagined myself like them, with bouncy curls and off-the-shoulder tops. Maybe they had children whom they had set free to roam the city for the afternoon. Maybe they were languishing in the last days before an August excursion to Nice. Maybe they were old friends. Maybe they’d traveled to America as young people and created an unbreakable bond. Maybe this was the life they’d always imagined for themselves.

Modern advice is diametrically opposed to Dr. Wagner’s philosophy. Do whatever you want, nobody cares! Encourages the internet. I worry this is too cynical. It’s only comforting to think that nobody sees when you stumble when you assume everyone is laughing at you. But what if they’re not? What if we see ourselves in other people?

A few years ago, I posted my acceptance to the New School’s creative writing program on Instagram. I felt a little silly doing it. Some of my classmates were studying to be doctors, others were several rungs up the corporate ladder. I was surprised that I was inundated with support. Followers from my hometown, whom I had spoken to only in passing, congratulated me heartily. I felt guilty, almost, while I was busy comparing myself; I had a whole community ready to uplift me if only I asked.

Between Paris and grad school, COVID struck. It made us retreat from the social world. We learned to see each other as obstacles. The best thing we could be to other people was invisible. But a return to community is possible, inevitable, even.

On the last day in Paris, we met in Luxembourg Garden. A little boy did handstands in the grass while his father sketched the outlines of the trees on a picnic blanket. My skin was tan, my legs aching. We sipped wine and Smirnoff Ices, a cultural marriage of sorts.

I sat next to Helen, Dr. Wagner’s wife, who was 17 years his junior. A woman whose life, at 58, was just beginning. She wore big, round sunglasses and a red headscarf wrapped neatly around her bobbed hair. I hoped I would be like her one day. She told stories about being a young woman, meeting her husband’s children who were preteens while she was in her 20s. She encouraged me to see the world, to leave Seattle if I could.

“I think you’ll have a great adventure,” she said.

The best part of Dr. Wagner’s prophecy is that it didn’t have to be true. The people of France might have been snickering behind our backs, calling us silly Americans. It was enough to speak it out loud. Besides, I like my version better anyway. Everyone is rooting for me. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

When I was a high school sophomore, I fell for a flat-earth mockumentary.

It featured the story of a woman hellbent on proving that the earth was top-shaped by seeking out The Edge.

“On December the 3rd, 1961, a 63-year-old woman by the name of Andrea Barnes set off single-handedly across this barrier of ice,” began the British narrator over eerie music. “On December the 18th, the weather turned against her. A week later, on Christmas Day, all radio contact was lost. Miss Barnes was never seen again.”

The 90s grain obscured the journey into sinister shadow. It ended simply with a note found in Andrea’s abandoned snowmobile, found some 30 years later by a researcher:

“I have been there, the debate finally comes to an end,” - Andrea B, it read.

I didn’t believe the earth was flat, but I was captivated by the idea of The Edge and disturbed to my bones by the note and its finality. I imagined myself as an unruly scientist, trekking into the elements. Suddenly and without warning, I would be confronted with a precipice, a black hole of something I’d always known and something I’d been trying to avoid: the truth, the nothingness.

When the lights flicked on in Ms. Kirk’s biology class, a student raised his hand. Dr. Leo Ferrari? He asked about one of the quoted sources.

Exactly, Ms. Kirk chuckled, do we think Dr. Ferrari is a reputable source? The bell rang.

In the years since, I felt like I had stumbled toward The Edge several times.

Before I knew anybody in the city, I used to walk around Seattle alone and admire the sun glistening off the buildings on autumn afternoons. Sometimes, I would be overcome by a rush of gratitude. How lucky was I to be in a city? Alone in a crowd of people? Feeling so small and so free and so untethered?

On the last day of my freshman year of college, I ate sandwiches with two of my then-best friends in Cal Anderson Park. We sat on a rock like seals and reminisced about late nights and lost loves (or the lack thereof). As my mom’s Honda Civic pulled up to take me home for the summer, my life split in two: what had happened so far and the dreadful nothing of what was to come.

Maybe I could foresee that both of these friendships would dissolve into memory: one would fade away, the other would burn. I’ve moved to larger and more glamorous cities than Seattle, but haven’t felt that same sense of gratitude or smallness since. The buildings have never quite glittered in the sun the same way.

Before I moved away from the city for good, I cut ties with my best friend. It followed a three-hour whispered conversation about her transgressions on the carpeted floor of another friend’s apartment. As criminal justice students, they compiled a list of evidence: a suspicious termination from her retail job, her obsession with sharing and tracking our locations.

The friendship ended without ceremony. She called me at the tail end of a road trip as I sat between packed boxes in a friend’s East Coast townhouse, a few day siesta before I jetted of.f to Miami for the year. She was upset: why wasn’t she invited on the trip? She asked. I answered cagily and felt justified. We had determined that she was toxic, unworthy of a clean split.

I was my same, old self who didn’t have the words to tell her I chose my other friends and that her rage was too intense for me. Or even that I just couldn’t bear the idea of multi-hour Facetimes while I was trying to start my new life at the beach.

I decided on a desolate Virginia highway that my new life had begun, and she would not be a part of it. John Denver played mournfully over the truck’s speakers. For the first week in Miami, I was completely alone. Nobody called me, and I rarely went out. I imagined Ms. Andrea Barnes, so staunch in her convictions, that she wandered off the edge of the earth. I dangled my feet above a swimming pool and looked at my reflection. The cool, deep blue water mirrored my distorted features.

I thought about Andrea in the snow, how it must have been so white, the world just seemed to go blank. How The Edge might have been comforting after miles and miles of oppressive sameness. Maybe I had found the other side of The Edge.

I rewatched the documentary for old time’s sake. I wanted to feel the familiar dread, a horror film wrapped in an educational flick from the 1990s. The truth is, it was melodramatic and unsubtle. The experts talked in platitudes, and Andrea Barnes’ (obviously fictional) story occupied less than 4 minutes of the runtime. It was cheesy, designed to teach kids about misinformation.

So maybe The Edge isn’t real. Maybe I’m supposed to take that step into the dark and know the earth is round and something will be waiting for me on the other side. But I can’t help thinking. “I have been there.”

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT6JsFLG4/

Osaka’s interview is a familiar story: an athlete puts everything on the line and comes up short. The heartbreak is etched into her brow.

Beyond her achievements on the court, Osaka is recognized for her candid discussions about mental health. She took a step back from tennis in September 2022, citing depression. Some fans worry about her well-being now that she’s back in the throes of her sport. Others took it a step further.

“We’re literally seeing in real time the consequences of young women with bright futures putting family building over their goals and the regret that comes with it,” tweeted (X’d?) user @slimgirlsupreme.

https://x.com/slimgirlsupreme/status/1941490324121268684?s=42

I rewatched the clip several times. Did Osaka express regret about motherhood? The interview read like a suitable reaction to a professional setback. If tennis is a mental game, sometimes you lose.

Leave the misread of the situation alone; the post is exceptionally cruel. It undermines Osaka’s choices as an athlete and a mother. Though it carries some nondescript feminist ethos, it posits a question that haunts rom-coms of the '90s and aughts: can women have it all? The poster thinks not.

I suspect this genre of post isn’t about Osaka. Instead, it responds to tradwife culture and the cultural return to normative gender roles. We see stay-at-home girlfriends and “high value” women become mothers and equate motherhood to their conservative talking points. By choosing motherhood, Osaka becomes an unwilling stand-in for hetero-optimist women who opt out of their careers and choose family, and men, first.

I’m starting to wonder if we hate each other too much to talk politics.

Mothers are a marginalized class. A 2022 study found that 7% of housing discrimination complaints came from families. Murder is still the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the US. A good leftist recognizes when they’re punching down.

All of that aside, a good leftist knows how to be social.

On the other side of the internet, Love Island cast member Cierra Ortega was pulled from the show midseason for her use of anti-Asian slurs on social media. In response, fans called ICE on her family. All in the name of accountability.

While her departure spawned an important conversation about the pervasiveness of anti-Asian racism, it also revealed that many self-proclaimed activists can’t engage with social justice beyond seeking retribution. Deportation, even as discipline, is not a pillar of liberation.

While both instances demonstrate varying degrees of political justification, they’re profoundly anti-social. The internet has spawned an insidious kind of advocacy that fails to recognize our collective humanity. Online, our activism has become more about doling out punishments than reaffirming our love and wish for self-determination for the oppressed.

Unfortunately, like many problems the internet breeds, the solution is simple: log off.

Last month, I attended District 4’s community board meeting. Hosted on the ground floor of a multi-use community space in Bushwick, the committee decorated circular tables with balloons for the intergenerational crowd. I sat next to a man who wished they’d “do something” about the rats.

The meeting was unglamorous. Most of the two-hour gathering consisted of older residents asking for tree-trimming assistance or a new mailbox. Near the end, an elementary school principal asked residents to cheer at an end-of-year race. It was politics at its finest––an exercise in socializing, in not hating each other.

At their core, these topics are bound in the heady identity politics we want to discuss online. Poor neighborhoods have to advocate twice as hard for simple services, and low-income schools must lean on their community when the government abandons them. It’s all politics with less of the vitriol.

As a Brooklyn transplant, I think about my role in the New York community a lot. When you move here, other transplants will tell you that advocating for policies is the best remedy for gentrification. But what does that mean when you’re not a politician or even particularly politically savvy? Usually it’s the kind of activism that starts and ends online.

Maybe this is a start. Maybe, in the age of the internet, there’s a way to engage politically without committing psychological torture. While many great activists and thinkers are capable of intellectual online discussion, most of us need to get back to basics. We need to plant our roots in our neighborhoods and communities, see our political causes as real people, and learn to stop hating each other.

Watching the show is the closest we’ll come to a return to infancy. In a place that feels pre-language, we understand the world in moving bodies and bright colors.

So why is everybody discoursing?

Even if you’re not following, you’ve heard the name Huda. The 24-year-old single mother has adopted the role of main character this season. Gorgeous, dramatic, and ever indecisive about her romance with fellow islander Jeremiah, Huda is great television. A few knockdown, dragout fights later, Huda and Jeremiah were all people could talk about.

Soon, Huda left the reality TV sphere and became public enemy number one.

Fans called her annoying and overly clingy. Then, they accused her of manipulating her partner by waiting until day four to tell him she had a daughter. Finally, they said her antics were problematic because she was ruining the other women’s experience on the show by refusing to let go of her ex.

The hate comments got so bad, the father of Huda’s daughter stepped in.

Huda’s only crime, I would argue, is doing her job. Is it mature to call your boyfriend a bitch? Not really. Would I want a friend who obsessively talks about said boyfriend? Again, I’m good. But that’s showbiz, baby.

The idea that someone on Love Island would expect a good experience is, as Lisa Rinna once put it, whackadoodle time. In a pressure cooker where producers are merciless gods, everything from the time the lights turn off to who the contestants kiss is decided for them. Huda really ruined my experience being charged and convicted of three counts of wire fraud and thrown in federal prison.

@bravotvWe love a trending sound origin story. 📺 This one comes from #RHOBH Season 5 Episode 10!

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I don’t even care about redemption arcs––I think Huda should be more evil for the sake of good TV.

Ace––a 22-year-old with his own name tattooed across his chest––is another essential worker. At 5’5, he’s the alpha wolf pup of the pack. He’s somewhere between a merry prankster and a Polly Pocket. Ace loves a scheme, long con, or ruse. He’s berated Jeremiah for being closed off, spent the majority of the first two weeks sleeping solo in a sex den, and has been accused of a Love Island scam with his castmate Chelley. Iconically, his strongest connection in the house is his mutual hatred with fan favorite Amaya.

My first instinct was to hate him. But he’s doing community service. Inserting yourself in business that isn’t yours is an art, and Ace is Picasso. Trouble brewing in the villa? Ace is there to stir the pot. I believe he could lead this country to unity, but chooses not to. I believe his YouTube shorts should be playing in Times Square. I believe he should be named Pope and unveiled as Minnow on The Masked Singer.

At its best, Love Island is a show about acting insane. I want to see 20-25 year olds blown up with botox, delirious from heat exhaustion, nibbling a single piece of avocado toast. I want to see two supermodels duke it out over a medical device salesman. I want to see a challenge so inconceivably horny that a 13-year-old boy would tell producers to clean up their acts.

I’m here to win, I’m not here to make friends.

It’s why my favorite housewife is Monica from RHOSLC, and I’ll never truly hate Tom Sandoval. Sometimes, villains are just industrious self-starters.

When I first moved to the city, I was incensed. My New York was not the New York I’d been promised.

Instead, my New York centered above a live poultry plant in East Williamsburg––this was important, East Williamsburg. Every morning, a shipment of live chickens would arrive via truck. They beat the sunrise. They would spend their day in hot cages and leave bloodless, dangling by their skinny feet. We’d count the hours by their short life cycles: arrival, imprisonment, sweet, sweet slaughter.

No, my New York was a railroad apartment whose living room saw no natural light. When friends visited, they’d shove their suitcases against my bedroom door, and I’d wonder if I’d been taken hostage. There’s nothing worth taking! I tried to scream. The place boiled in the summers and froze in the winters. I became well acquainted with 311––our first point of contact when something leaked or clogged.

It wasn't until my second year that I understood the simmering charm of the city. It wasn’t about the glamour; it was about the lack thereof.

Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 embodies this de-glammed New Yorker. Peter Parker is Spider-Man. It’s the second movie: his powers are out of their infancy. Still, though, Peter’s at constant war with the logistical nightmare of defending the city from crime and trying to pay rent. In the first 30 minutes, we don’t meet Doc Oc; instead, Peter battles gridlock and a Polish landlord. It doesn’t matter that he’s a freak mutant; he’s running late to work. Peter eventually loses his job at the iconic Joe’s Pizza and skulks around the alleys of Queens. The city can pull one over on anyone, even a superhero.

The third Spider-Man movie loses its charm. In conjunction with Raimi’s departure, the film forgets what it’s about: being a loser in New York. It’s too plot-heavy. Too many punches, not nearly enough digging for change and wallowing in self-pity.

In the first two films, Peter Parker is a welcome reprieve from the standard hero. He’s not an alien, not a Nazi fighting hunk, not even a tech mogul. Peter is proof that anyone can be a hero. But more than that, he’s proof that even if you are a hero, you’re not immune to the immovable powers of New York City.

On the way back from Coney Island, Enrique and I came to a screeching halt on the F train. We shouldn’t have been on the F train to begin with, and with each passing second, it became less likely that we would see home that evening. The train was deserted, except for a lone teenager whose foot tap, tap, tapped against an electric scooter. We shot each other knowing glances as the conductor announced that trains were delayed in both directions, without further comment.

Two hours passed, and the train became a portal. It reminded me of the elevator game, where a player presses buttons in a certain order to arrive in a new dimension. The lights flashed red, and the devil appeared, and finally, we departed the car, robbed of our time and much of our sanity.

It spit us out between a construction site and a row of mansions––bigger than any house I’d ever seen in the city. We listened to the grind of the neighborhood as the clock marched forward. The city had won, and everything was beautiful.

Another scumbag New Yorker classic is the 1985 Scorsese picture After Hours. The film posits: What if a man tried to get home from SoHo? If you’ve ever found yourself out past 10 PM in the wrong borough, you know this question is deceptively simple. In a spiral of desire and desperation, Paul Hackett unwittingly gallivants around the city, running from an angry mob and his fiery past.

Maybe this is right. When the air is perfectly temperate and the city hums softly with vim, I find myself wandering down deserted blocks, searching for Mohawk Night. It’s an urban call of the wild. The spirit of the city sends shivers down my spine.

A perfect New York night is one fraught with conflict. Scuffed up shoes and an earring sacrificed between the train and the platform. I love New York because of its industrial, haggard spirit. A city that takes relentlessly, a place that makes you happy to give. Where an office worker can be run off the roads by a rogue ice cream truck driver. Where a superhero can lose his pizza delivery job. New York, New York, New York.

Maybe we don’t plan revolutions in smoky coffee houses anymore, but they’re still cultural centers. Rent is rising and apartments are inconceivably smaller, so we live our lives in public spaces.

I collect morsels of gossip. Last week, I was regaled, secondhand, with a fable of the “one true gentleman” posted heroically behind the domino table in a Borinquen nightclub. I’ve witnessed the demise of many of a queer collective. Once, I watched a high-stakes chess match devolve into a puddle of tears.

Across the pond (lower Manhattan), many coffee shops tell a different story. Under fluorescent lights, people substitute cubicles for long, wooden benches and morning cold brews. Finance bros conduct meetings, the words “circle back” ring through the air. They dare to ask the question: what if everywhere were a WeWork?

If Brooklyn is hell, this is purgatory.

Take Kona Coffee in Chelsea: a husk of a cafe. Long, communal tables host subdued patrons as they serve $7 croissants and Hawaiian ambiance (the word Kona, hello?). Founded in 2017, a Seattle white man resolved to bring “European coffee culture” to Hawaii before franchising, a sentence that speaks for itself. Here’s their answer to the laptop crisis in an Instagram post:

“At Kona Coffee, we want to bring our customers a taste of Hawaii, which includes a gentle reminder to relax and unplug amidst NYC's hustle. We hope to become your regular place of gathering & community, so we are intentionally setting aside days (& space) for people to connect over a cup of coffee and have conversations.”

In short: no wifi on weekends.

I am utterly uncharmed by this approach. We’re holding people hostage in this bank in case they want to be our friend.

Here’s the situation as I see it: people have correctly identified the usefulness of Kona and cafes like it. There are empty seats, outlets, functioning wifi, and pretty good coffee. You can sit there for hours without being bothered; it’s quiet enough to take a phone call. The wifi is as much the product as the coffee; in essence, you’re paying for the seat.

It turns out: community is quite trendy these days. Every influencer has a Discord server, a Facebook group, a monthly meet-up for fans, and a book club. Run clubs stalk the city like the gangs in The Warriors. “Matcha raves” haunt Dubai rooftops.

Amidst the male loneliness epidemic, the regular loneliness epidemic, and a post-pandemic society, connection is capital––demand’s never been so high. But companies are unwilling to put meaningful effort into understanding and creating connections. The customers will do it, they assure themselves.

It manifests in policies like the no wifi rule. The cafe takes away a useful service and rebrands it as a principled stand. Sure, somebody could break the social contract, lean over to the person next to them, and start a conversation, but will they? More likely, nothing changes, and the business gets to cash in on the community-builder label. And we’re just as isolated as ever.

My favorite cafes in the city are a labor of love. On any given night, Nook in Bushwick hosts a variety of arts and culture programming. I’ve attended biweekly women’s writing nights and jazz concerts within the same week. There’s a silent reading event on Saturday mornings and trivia on Wednesdays. People scrap for tables and gossip boisterously with friends. Local painters drape the walls in murals. There’s no wifi policy because there’s no need for one. If you can work through the chaos of a bustling mid-morning, you’re more than welcome.

I was more taken with the sentiment of the instructor; a petite, blonde woman––one of the lobby weepers. As we reach the peak of our last imaginary hill, she hit us with this nugget of wisdom: “We can’t control what’s going on in the world. We can’t even control our bodies. But we can control how hard we work in this room. So let’s sweat it out.”

Maybe that’s all you can say in the face of all this. Society’s rapid decay can only be met with 50 minutes of adrenaline under the strobe lights. But I keep returning to 2016, Trump’s first term. There were similar tears, similar emotions, but the next day, my classmates and I went out and marched in the streets. I won’t claim a police sanctified “protest” is an act of revolution, but it was a gesture at community. When times got tough, we turned to each other. This time, we turned inward.

This wasn’t just a Chelsea phenomenon either. The Cut reported that nationwide, people used exercise as a political coping mechanism in 2024. One woman signed up for a half marathon because she “couldn’t handle another four years of feeling like the world was ending.” Does the world stop ending if you run from it?

I worry that this is a step beyond coping.

There will always be activists begging us to invest in our communities and focus on local action, but culturally, something has shifted. At least last time, the general public pretended to care. Now, instead of artfully crafted “orange cheeto” signs, we’ve devolved into anti-social levels of self-improvement and told ourselves it’s a counter-protest.

“Hey, this is Paige Desorbo…when women move, they create change for themselves and the world around them” chirps a snippet from a recent Athleta ad campaign. I’m obsessed with it. I love the heavy lifting the word move is doing here. Who did the first pushup at Stonewall? They were marching at Selma, weren’t they? Athleta asserts that somehow, women exercising is a political action. It’s a movement.

This is where choice feminism gets us. We dialogue on Twitter about whether it’s feminist for a woman to shave or not. Whether it might be revolutionary to have pilates-toned arms. But what if it’s her choice? Sure, let women shave, let women have a tight ass and lean arms, let women be stay-at-home moms, let bitches keep shopping.

Maybe there’s an easy solution to all of this. Maybe we reinvest in our communities and build from the ground up. Maybe we talk to our run clubs about voting for Zohran Mamdani in the upcoming New York primary. Maybe we get our steps in at a protest. Or, I don’t know, maybe we give and buy something from Athleta’s Power of She Collective.

On one side of the ring, Eric Kulas, also known as “Mass Transit.” At 350 pounds, Kulas is a hulking 17-year-old. He’s wearing a blue button-down shirt that hugs his chest and simple black pants; he looks, fittingly, like a bus driver. Kulas lied his way into the ring that morning––convincing promoter and executive Paul Heyman that he is 19, a professional trained under Killer Kowalski. Opposite Kulas is Jerome “New Jack” Young, one half of a tag team nicknamed "The Gangstas.” A man who would go down in wrestling infamy, New Jack in many ways defined the pre-regulation era of hardcore wrestling.

Kulas approaches the older man and makes a request that will change his life––he asks New Jack to blade him.

If you know anything about New Jack, you know about blading. The controversial wrestler’s forehead is a spider web of angry scars. They are so magnificently puffy it looks like his brain is clawing at the walls of his skull, threatening to emerge into the daylight. Although these wounds are occupational hazards, they didn’t come from being slammed into the mat or a chair to the head, rather, New Jack has taken a tiny blade and sliced himself. It’s a gory magic trick wrestlers use to up the carnage of a match. The forehead is a favorite, more blood vessels.

According to New Jack, he tells Kulas that isn’t a good idea, but Kulas insists. After all, New Jack is a violence expert. They go ahead with the plan.

I’ve been thinking about professional wrestling because I’ve been watching a lot of reality television. The art forms are cut from the same cloth. Both, as Susan Sontag once put “see everything in quotation marks.” The housewives, for instance, are “glamorous”, wrestling is “violent”. It’s perverted performance art. Drag with plausible deniability. They tug at our perception of real and unreal, blurring the borders.

Some reality starts and ends with the performance of professional wrestling. Buddy and his Cake Boss team drop a marshmallow fondant recreation of Central Park down a flight of stairs. Italian American antics ensue. It’s a choreographed fight, one that will end within it’s 22-minute allotment with a happy customer and a bemused baker shaking his head and saying what can you do? It's family!

On other sets, it’s the producers setting elaborate mousetraps for the unsuspecting 1%. Housewives spends several seasons selling us on the idea that this is aspirational content. Rich women kicking ass and taking names. Ramona Singer pitches us her self-made business. Countess Luann takes us to charm school and languishes in her New York City mansion. It makes it all the sweeter when, ten seasons later, we witness the ultimate rug pull with the Countess’ DUI charge and failed engagement. Someone’s reputation, their self-image destroyed on camera––better than any scripted television.

It’s harder to trick people these days. Thus, for most modern reality stars, blading has become a necessity. Ric Flair’s infamous “red means green” slogan applies here, too. While we won’t admit to watching a show whose logline reads a histrionic woman pushed beyond her brink severs every meaningful relationship she’s ever had, audiences aren’t satisfied with a staged catfight. We need to see you bleed.

Perhaps one of the best examples of this is The Valley. A spin off of a spin off, The Valley ushers in a new era of meta reality television that examines life after fame in the suburbs of LA. Vets Brittany and Jax spend the first season nursing the tailend of their doomed marriage and the second battling Jax’s substance abuse issues and narcissistic rage. Kristen Doute is back from beyond the cancel culture grave, excited to pass her neurotic genes down to the next generation. But none are better versed in the art of blading than newcomers Jesse and Michelle.

Luxury real estate agents and frequent friend-ofs, Jesse and Michelle are ready for their moment in the hot seat. It’s clear from the jump that these two are clandestine for divorce. Watching the unraveling of their union is sort of like the movie Marriage Story if there’s no underlying understanding that these two people have ever loved or cared for one another. The central tension in the second season is the couple’s nasty split and their inability to co parent peacefully. At one point, Jesse accuses Michelle of being a “hooker” who sleeps with famous directors and actors for $1500 a night. I am the mother of your child! goes Michelle's frequent refrain.

Indeed she is the mother of Jesse’s child. Toddler aged Isabella is somehow an exact ringer for her mother and father. We see the child experiment with eyeshadow, cry for her mother, exacerbate the tension between her dueling parents. It’s horrible that there’s a child in the middle of this, but maybe there has to be. Maybe that’s the point.

Lesser reality stars might have opted out of the second season––ironed out a custody schedule, agreed to keep their daughter’s name out of the press. But Jesse and Michelle know that red means green. Jesse is sleazy, an alpha male wanna-be. He’s somehow the less charming version of Jax––who has spent the season rotting in an off camera “mental health” facility. Jesse’s famous for his $20,000 men’s networking lunch and his Rookie of the Year award in the “boys chat”––take a wild guess at what that could mean. Michelle, while ultimately the victim of Jesse’s manipulation and emotional abuse, is a charisma black hole. She makes second string star of Vanderpump Rules Scheana Shay look like Lady Gaga. The two clearly have an implicit understanding that they don’t have the star power to achieve their Hollywood dreams, so it’s off to the Valley they go.

Jesse, for example, can’t lead a cult of red-pilled men toward woman-hating liberation because who would listen to him? He can’t even be the kind of reality star that used to exist, a younger Jax Taylor or a Mike The Situation from Jersey Shore. These men, these drug fueled, morally questionable men were able to create a persona that obscure their true nature, their crocodile teeth gleaming white in the moonlight, their grimaces mistaken for smiles. It’s a skill really, to craft a character of yourself.

The Situation offered up a hard partying asshole whose lousy temper got him into trouble. The truth? Mike Sorrentino is a hardcore addict whose drug use regularly endangered the people around him and brought production to a screeching halt more than once. His natural charisma and his ability to fit a niche of a Jersey stereotype smooths this. He’s a harmless guy from Jersey! He Parties! So what?

But Jesse can’t overcome the mountain of charisma it would take to sever his professional life from his personal. So he takes a knife against his forehead and cuts. The millions of dollars in debt. Slice. The messy custody battle. Slice. The hooker allegations. Slice, slice, slice. And we’re happy to watch him bleed out in the ring.

Here’s how the Eric Kulas story ends: after pummeling the teenager with punches, chairs, and a pair of crutches, New Jack takes an X-acto knife and cuts into his forehead, bursting an artery. It’s not a particularly sneaky cut, you can see New Jack cradling Kulas’ head as he prepares the blade for execution. It’s a violent affair, even for a house show. Kulas stays down. The screaming from the crowd intensifies. Soon the ref is in the middle of the ring, hunched over the teenager. Then appears his father, also screaming. There’s blood everywhere.

Kulas would retreat into himself. His family tries, unsuccessfully, to sue New Jack for emotional distress and physical assault. They say he’s never the same after the incident. A few years later, at 22, he dies from complications of an unrelated surgery. New Jack dies at 58 in 2021.

I keep waiting for this moment on reality TV. The moment the knife cuts too deep. There’s been a few attempts at bandaging old wounds; contestants on dating shows are usually only allowed one drink per night. But largely we’ve yet to find a rock bottom. One day, I imagine, we will remember in horror the days when people used to slice themselves open for our entertainment. Until then, they’ll keep blading and we’ll laugh in delight at the blood pooling in the ring.

The interview takes us on a twisted path to rehabilitation. What do these men do after they’re discarded by their Hollywood peers? Journalist Seth Abramovitch dutifully mentions LaBeouf’s sexual assault allegations and his upcoming abuse trial. He also interrogates Mamet about his fondness for Donald Trump and Louis CK’s essential role in his filmmaking and production choices. Yet, somehow, we meander toward the “God Talks” between Mamet and LaBeouf; the two even attend church together. The title of the piece reads “Shia LaBeouf and David Mamet Might Just Save Each Other.”

LaBeouf seems almost baffled by his fall from grace:

“We’re not supposed to be here….Because we’re on some kind of lists. For instance, I was going to do Jimmy Kimmel, right? To promote this project. And so Jimmy Kimmel’s show is owned by ABC. And ABC said, “No, you can’t interview Shia.” So Jimmy had to call me and say, ‘Hey, you can’t come on the show.’”

The actor implies a sentiment I’ve seen a lot online when it comes to these fucked-up “genius” types. Can’t people change? Don’t I deserve a second chance? In the age of abolition and restorative justice, even the most privileged among us wants a piece of the action.

Maybe there’s a simple answer: yes, people can change. Yes, people do deserve a second chance. I hope for the sake of his wife that Shia LaBeouf’s history of sexual assault and battery don’t bleed into his new relationship. I hope for the sake of his daughter that his well-documented rage issues are just a strange blip on a struggling child star’s reputation. But whenever these men come out as bad people, promise to do better, get sober, I find myself wondering: why is this my problem?

I took a Liberation Theology class in college where our professor pulled heaven out of the sky and wondered if we could achieve it here on earth through cultivating just relationships with one another. If that was heaven, men like Shia LaBeouf are working their way out of hell. While I like to imagine an abolitionist future where LaBeouf is housed and entitled to self-determination, I don’t think radical rehabilitation happens on a cushy coach in the Hollywood Hills, chopping it up with right-wingers and podcasters. And I definitely don’t think I should have to hear about it.

It’s not just LaBeouf that feels this entitlement to public recovery. Jonathan Majors has hit the road with a half-promotional, half-redemption tour after being convicted of strangling an ex-girlfriend. Headlines about Brad Pitt repairing his relationships serendipitously appeared after his nasty divorce and an alleged plane assault hit the press.

Perhaps no one is better at public healing than Mark Wahlberg. In two separate instances in his teen years, Wahlberg was convicted of devastating hate crimes. In the first, he chased a group of Black children on a field trip, hurling rocks and racial epithets at the fourth graders. In the second, he beat two Vietnamese men so badly one permanently lost his sight. Still, though, the public cried, he was a teenager. He was on drugs. He’s learned and grown. He posted a picture of George Floyd in 2020.

I do think that after years of socialization that Mark Wahlberg is probably less racist than he was as a wayward Bostonian teen in the 1980s. Still, though, the kind of cultural sickness it takes to look at a man capable of that and say, yeah he should be a star is troubling. Somehow forgiving, forgetting, and letting this man resume filming of Ted 3 doesn’t feel like enough. Even if he said he was sorry.

I sort of gave up the idea that admitting you have a problem is the hardest part after this. It seems like these guys are so good at admitting they have a problem. Hi, I’m Shia LaBeouf, I’m a drug addict. They make movies about their fucked up childhoods, their fucked-up dads. They mentor younger screw-ups (thank you to Mel Gibson for keeping me sober). They play “complicated” men and dare to see their humanity. But it’s not as if their public healing have no culture consequences.

Perhaps in the footsteps of elder abuser Johnny Depp, Shia LaBeouf is counter suing his ex, FKA Twigs, for defamation. While he admits to “abusive” elements of their relationship, he denies the specific claims listed in the suit. Twigs will be left not only with the psychical and mental scars of his abuse, but also the stain on her reputation. Somehow, it makes her a liar and him a gritty “rebel” ready to shake things up in Hollywood.

When I think about what true healing looks like for these men I keep coming to the same conclusion: they need to go away. Regardless of their intentions, the public apology, even with sobriety, does nothing but render them sympathetic and their victim cold and calculating. These apologies always come with strings, anyway: look, I’m sober, don’t I deserve a job, a profile that underscores the fullness of my personhood, and a chat with Joe Rogan? It’s not only that we must forgive these bad men but forget their transgressions altogether in the name of restorative justice.

But I don’t buy that. I want them to slink into the woods (or, at least the proverbial woods, Connecticut or Fresno, maybe) and grow out their beards. I want the world to forget their names. They could walk freely into grocery stores. They drop their coffee in public and make dinner reservations without anyone batting an eye. I want them to slip into obscurity and make peace with their actions far away from the public eye. I want them to work their way out of hell.

But I’ve found myself at an impasse with the genre as a new trend takes center stage. In a post-COVID, post-ironic, post-post world, the horror film du jour takes a painfully self-aware approach in the form of the horror comedy.

Bodies Bodies Bodies, M3gan, Freaky, The X Trilogy, Heart Eyes, Fresh, Y2K, One Hell of a Summer, and The Menu are just a sample of the post-COVID horror flicks that take the genre-bending route. Ironic, rolling their eyes at the trends they’re entrenched in, at the genre itself, the horror comedy represents a strange moment of culture folding in on itself. It feels like these films are clamoring to reassure us, we’re in on the joke, we get it. An insecure school kid rushing to the self-depricating punchline before the bully can say it, God I’m so stupid, right guys, aren’t I just soo stupid? Stand up and have a little confidence, man. In the new age, we’re afraid of facing ourselves.

The horror comedy has its place in culture. Ghostface is one of the most recognizable characters in film, period. Jennifer’s Body is a cult classic that took 15 years to receive its flowers. The difference, I think, is that these films demonstrate an earnest creative curiosity about the world around them. The opening scene in Scream is genuinely unnerving. While it pokes fun at the genre, it’s also directed by horror legend Wes Craven. There’s a horror sensibility that makes the film twisty and terrifying. Jennifer’s Body plunges headfirst into lowbrow goodness before people wrote dissertations on the subversive nature of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. It was sort of a creative risk that banked on (and, initially, flopped) the back of its female antagonist. There’s just something to be said about trying.

I won’t say that all modern horror comedies are bad. Bodies Bodies Bodies was the first breath of fun in a world that wasn’t sure movies would ever be the same. It was nice to see something together. Nice, even, to laugh at ourselves a little bit. But, in 2025, the sarcasm is starting to wear on me. I returned recently to Pearl, the second installment in the X trilogy, which I remember liking upon first watch. There was Mia Goth, with her sinister eyebrowlessness. There was that famous “I’m a STAR!” line. And still, I wondered, was there any there there? The film felt far more invested in the recently repopularized, rarely understood “camp” aesthetic than it was in interrogating its subject matter with any vigor. A film about the lengths people will go to get famous? Florals for spring?

The biggest consequence of the horror comedy is that none of these movies are all that scary. Bodies Bodies Bodies was an Among Us parody. The Menu ends with Anya Taylor-Joy unconvincingly chomping a cheeseburger. M3gan (which does slay, in its own right) is about a dancing robot. The killer is likelier to turn to deliver a Marvel-esque one-liner straight to camera than present a shocking execution. The killing’s part of the joke. It’s like it’s too hard or maybe too risky to craft something that functions as it's supposed to. I’m just kidding…unless you’re not says the filmmaker. I say it’s time to start killing in earnest again.

This must be the consequence of staring at our faces for too long. Zoom meetings and TikTok and thinkpieces have made us too self-conscious to move. To breathe. To make a good slasher. Trust me, I know trying’s embarrassing, I write a blog. But, at some point, it’s time to drop the seven layers of irony and create something genuine. Occasionally, it’s worth it.

There’s another trend emerging in the horror world: the duplicate. From Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17 to Lupito N’yongo in Us, we’ve been contending with the horrifying concept of somebody who looks just like us for the last few years. While this is mainly attributed to the rising fear of AI (rightfully so), I can’t help but wonder if there’s a small part of us that fears our own reflection as well. Staring back at us, no jokes, no shield, no irony, just us.

I think about this competition nearly every day. I imagine walking through the doors of IMG or Wilhelmina, headshot in hand, announcing that I was Miss Fiercely Real circa 2009. That would play, right? That’s the kind of title that modeling agencies respect. Fiercely Real is sort of the antithesis of a supermodel. Segregated from the glam, untouchable, straight-sized models, these girls were Just Like Us. Intensely Normal. Strikingly Average. Divaliously Regular. Fiercely Real.

These days, we laugh at Tyra’s political incorrectness. Her assertion that “plus-sized” was dated and the subsequent rebranding felt egomaniacal, back-handed. Aren’t these girls so brave for being on TV? Even though they’re portly and normal looking? And yet Tyra’s Fiercely Real compliment methodology feels more present than ever in our discourse-driven society.

“Everyone has been looking weird and super super skinny lately except Addison Rae, she looks amazing” reads a Tweet from user @highendhomo. Forty thousand people agreed.

https://x.com/highendhomo/status/1857418356267049330

I guess, in context, this is a compliment. As recession looms, the word on the street is that heroin chic is back. Influencers are skinnier than ever, and the Kardashians have traded their BBLs for stick-thin physiques. Maybe it’s sort of counter culture to hang on to your chubby cheeks and “curves”. Sort of revolutionary. Does this make the “Diet Pepsi” singer a guerrilla warrior for justice?

Somehow, I doubt Addison Rae wants this brand of body positivity thrust upon her. As a slim, conventionally attractive woman who made a name for herself via TikTok dance, she’s not the typical face of the fat acceptance movement. The Tweet’s pulling a miraculous sleight of hand: it gestures vaguely at the evils of thinness while still doling out a pretty standard aunt-at-Thanksgiving passive aggression about a woman’s weight. Sometimes, we get so tangled in our wokeness, we accidentally call a size 2 a chubby queen.

The latest victim of the Fiercely Real mentality is White Lotus breakout star Aimee Lou Wood. While Wood reveals herself as a charming and tragic figure in the White Lotus universe, it’s her teeth that first captured viewers’ attention. And, like, yeah, they’re noticeable.

It’s pointless to declare her teeth off-limits. They’re her strongest feature, an ally in her White Lotus performance. She’s spoken at length about them. But I draw the line at the inspiring comments. There’s something so dreadfully unchic about labeling someone inspiring. It’s a word out of a Daily Mail article about a bullied kid who writes his favorite football team for backup. Or a movie about an old sick dog who returns home despite the odds. Pathetic, bedraggled.

Vanity Fair wrote an entire think piece on imperfect smiles entitled “White Lotus Star Aimee Lou Wood’s Teeth Aren’t Just Charming—They’re Inspiring.” Yuck. I suppose there’s nothing inherently problematic with the verbiage, it’s just saccrine and uncouth. Aimee Lou Wood Serves Fiercely Real as She Refuses to Look Normal in Major TV Show, reads the headline in my head.

It’s time to pay Aimee Lou her real dues. She’s not an inspiration, she’s not a rebel (her words), she’s just cool. People like her because she’s cool. Her White Lotus character, Chelsea, in lesser hands would’ve been a pathetic, plus-one to Rick’s (Walton Goggins, another story) manic descent into self-obsession. Instead, Wood presents a shabby-chic, somewhat redeemable influencer type. She’s magnetic. She’s fun to watch. She’s beautiful.

We’ve lost the plot on how to give compliments in a major way. We’re all Tyra Banksing ourselves into a world of backhanded comments that reinforce the societal norms we were trying to break down in the first place. In the Addison Rae case, the word this Tweeter might have been looking for is pretty. Addison Rae is pretty.

I think I’ve had it with Role Models and Inspirations in the entertainment sphere––at least in the way these terms currently stand. These women are It Girls and cultural centerpieces, not revolutionaries. They can still change beauty standards, hell, they can even make progress for the rest of us, but it doesn’t have to be a feminist text every time a woman looks normal pretty instead of robot pretty in public. It’s time to put down the dictionaries, kill the inner passive-aggressive relative, and give a woman a regular compliment for once.