I saw this clip on Instagram, like hundreds of thousands of other people, and was confronted with its familiarity. Immediately I reached out to Kline– Sophie Sosa, on Instagram, a nod to musical artist Chief Keef. A few weeks later, we were meeting on a bench in Washington Square Park, bonding over our shared Sophie-hood.

She’s rushed over from a shoot in the Lower East Side and stands significantly taller than me, sporting shorts past her knees, a big t-shirt, and her long hair slung into a low bun. Since graduating back in May, she’s been interning on an indie film. Her current schedule includes checking her phone before bed every night to discover whatever egregiously early call time she’ll be expected to show up. Today it was 5:30am, and she had to travel from her family apartment in the Bronx to downtown Manhattan. Despite the minimal sleep and lack of compensation, her spirits remain high.

“I’m just trying to hustle and make sure everyone knows who I am and meet everyone on set. I just need to get paid for the next one,” she shrugs.

Strapped is unmistakably queer, but Kline has no interest in making its characters exemplary. They are insensitive, horny, occasionally ignorant, and often cruel to one another—the sort of humor that works precisely because Kline is making fun of a world she knows intimately.

For example– Olive, Kline’s character, is chastised by her friends for hooking up with other masculine women (subtext: that’s gay) and for not using dental dams (Kline goes: “those aren’t real”). When I commend Sophie on her ability to depict conversations that feel realistic, while straddling the line of offense, she’s appreciative.

“I feel like a lot of the media that I see that’s gay is written by straight people and tries to show that gay people are super woke and progressive, but gay people are the least woke and progressive people I know. And they all hate each other.”

Episode 1 depicts a party thrown by a character named Twig, a pink-haired, wide-eyed, girl in a Russian fur cap who pockets her ex-girlfriend’s retainers as a memento. The bit is that the characters don’t know if Twig uses they/them or she/her pronouns. The girls will call Twig weird to no end, but misgendering is where they draw the line. In a state of true perplexity, after being called bigoted by Olive, her straight roommate Lucy types into Chat GPT: is it offensive to ask a non-binary girl’s real name?

The second episode, titled “Dr. Heinz”, is based on a real-life experience Kline had going to the gynecologist, where she endured the timeless lesbian humiliation ritual of having to come out to your doctor with your legs hoisted in stirrups. He asks if she uses birth control and she says, “No, I don’t have sex with men.” He follows up in a toothy German accent: “Well, you use condom?” She stares back at him, befuddled.

Kline’s character in Strapped is simultaneously brash and affectionate. Her shirt in the first episode reads “I love cooter” while her face reads with a slight irritance that never seems to go away. Kline in real life has the same bite. She curses liberally and, even though we are only one year apart, makes me feel bizarrely old. While we are discussing books that inspire her, she cuts herself off and says, “I feel like I’m larping about reading, I don’t really read that much. But when I do I’m like: this shit is so good.”

The kind of reading she finds most useful is scripts: Broad City, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Girls, Little Miss Sunshine. She gravitates towards stories where the characters aren’t necessarily likeable, but you can’t help but root for them.

I asked Sophie if she feels hopeful about where queer media is going and she replies with a resounding: YES. She raises the point of Rachel Sennot’s “I Love LA”, which centers around queer characters without making their sexuality the point. For example there’s Talulua, played by Odessa A’zion, the rising social media sensation who is pursued in the series by a hot female chef.

“If I had seen something like that– someone really fucking hot dating someone else super fucking hot and they’re both women, it would have been a lot easier for me when I was younger to imagine what being gay could be like,” Sophie explains.

Strapped has been able to reach wide audiences, in many ways due to social media. It’s ironic once I learn that Kline has sworn off social media since the end of high school.

“I only got Instagram last August,” she tells me. At the peak of COVID, her screen time would climb up to 12 hours a day. With discipline, she weaned herself off, first by not going on Instagram before bed, then not until 3pm, then not at all. Four years went by, and she was known for being famously offline. In many ways, this was the most fruitful time for her creatively.

“I made a goal for myself to write a ten page script each week of the summer last summer, so I did that and ended up with 8 scripts. After I finished the last script, I decided to start writing longer scripts. That’s what “Twig” became.”

Now, she has submerged herself back in the social media void. It’s complicated– social media may encourage the type of antisocial behavior she detests, but it also allows her to promote her work. In fact, she tells me, the music for Strapped was all scored by a Tennessee-based band called Postcard Nowhere that reached out after finding her on social media.

As we talk about the scoring process, a pack of security guards descends on the park, all near our bench. In the middle of the crowd stands a boisterous guy with various cameras pointed at him.

“Yoooooo,” Sophie shouts. “That’s Speed, bro!” The man sits next to us and begins asking about our World Cup pics. A gawking crowd forms and all I can think is: please don’t put me on the internet. Too late, Sophie told me as soon as he darted away– Squirrel-like, shouting “what’s over there” before taking the crowd with him– that Speed has 55 million Instagram followers.

Later in the week she posts the video of us talking to Speed online. It’s one of her only non-film posts. These days, she’s only using social media to promote what’s next– currently a short called Lexampro that she’s going to apply to film festivals with. Like Strapped, it’s a window into Gen Z life– dating and the internet and our pervasive anxieties. I’m ready to, yet again, feel overwhelmingly seen.

At the apartment, she pulled the stove apart herself, got it working again, sped downtown to sign contracts at the office, then biked back uptown. There is no typical “day in the life” in real estate, she tells me, but it’s always some combination of zigzagging across Manhattan, juggling clients, contractors, and attorneys, and putting out whatever fires emerge.

None of this frenzy is visible whatsoever when we meet.

Before I met Ivanni, my friend Nicole always referred to her as “her Indonesian princess.” I assumed this was simply Nicole being Nicole– effusive, hyperbolic. Then Ivanni coasted radiantly into Madison Square Park, looking entirely unbothered by the ninety-degree heat.

“She is a princess,” I whispered to my Normies co-founder and photographer Maxine, as the two of us hustled, our brows laden with sweat, to meet the girl walking on air in front of us. Her hair bounced down to her waist in perfect long waves, her face set in an open smile. Somehow, in the intolerable New York heat, she was wearing jeans, a blazer, and black leather boots.

Ivanni carries herself with an almost improbable lightness, as though she expects good things to happen. Somehow, they usually do. “I believe that when we imbue a certain energy, this energy comes back to us,” she explains. It’s partly spiritual but mostly, it is a belief system rooted in a cosmic trust in goodness: treat others kindly, and that kindness will return to you. A few minutes later she smiles at me and says, “You have good energy!” It feels like I have been christened.

Three years earlier, when she graduated from university, real estate hadn’t even entered her consciousness. In college, Ivanni studied economics and environmental science, and began working for the United Nations right out of college on their Impact Investing team. After that ended, her options felt surprisingly ordinary. She was considering either becoming a barista or getting her real estate license. She opted for the license, which she completed in one week.

With her license in hand, Ivanni joined a boutique firm focused on smaller rentals downtown, that sort of thing. She tells me that most people don’t make it in real estate within the first three months if they aren’t able to get any deals done. She did everything in her power to avoid that fate, hustling to get a lead. One stuck: a loft in SoHo, what would become the biggest deal for the firm so far that year. Ivanni was twenty-three.

Immediately, she was poached by the top real estate firm Douglas Elliman. Now, she’s a rising star representing listings all over the city, for a wide variety of clients. Though her success is undeniable, Ivanni feels conflicted about the real estate path she has wound up upon. “The industry’s incentives don’t align with my values. I want to be in an environment of high trust, low ego, and high growth.”

Ivanni explains that being a real estate agent is like being a therapist. Or some type of life coach. Your role is to know the ins and outs of the transaction and present as confidently as possible, so that when people feel the frenzy of making inarguably one of the biggest purchases of their life, they can turn to you for assurance. And turn they do, straight to Ivanni for her to iron out their worries. She’s good at this. I feel it in our brief time together, a sense of peace. There’s a mellifluousness to her voice, a warmth that puts me at ease. But she’s also perceptive. There’s no other way to ascend so quickly– the job demands laser-sharp social skills.

“Life is all about communication and negotiations,” she begins. “In order to do the best for your people, you have to understand people’s true needs. You’re playing chess with emotions as well.”

In a way, it’s a form of marketing. Her job is to sell a vision, and when people buy into that vision, to help keep them sane in the home-buying process. One of her superpowers is immediately sensing what each person wants when they walk through the door, then calibrating the way she speaks to them in response.The industry certainly skews older, and when I ask how she gets people to take her seriously as a young woman, one who looks even younger than she is, she explains it’s all about groundedness. The calmer she operates, the more they trust her.

That groundedness predates real estate. She went to boarding school for high school in Hawaii, which is where she developed the perspective that carries her to this day: revere the Earth and treat people with kindness. Hawaii was a stark shift from her upbringing inJakarta where the expansive city was consumed by ceaseless pollution.

It makes sense, then, that even as Ivanni has found remarkable success in luxury real estate, she still feels pulled toward working in environmentalism. The apartments are beautiful, the clients fascinating, but she misses feeling like she’s working toward making the world better.

“The job is so social,” she tells me. “But I miss using my brain. I need to work toward something bigger, I think,” she laughs.

So when she’s not touring penthouses or negotiating contracts, she’s building something entirely different: an online marketplace for high-quality clothing. The idea is deceptively simple—a place where shoppers can find clothing that is genuinely well-made, with sustainability claims that are verifiable. It’s another attempt to build something rooted in the same values she discovered in Hawaii: trust, sustainability, and a slower way of consuming.

For now, she’ll keep doing both;. One pays the bills, the other feels closer to the life she imagined. She has faith that it will all work out. “I have this trust,” she says. “The world is going to take care of me, and I will take care of the world.”

Now, at 23, with waist-length curls and an impressive vocal fry, Lauren Kahn lands somewhere between a young Natasha Lyonne and Carrie Bradshaw. She’s been going by “Diva of West LA” for 9 years now, but has embodied the title since birth. Her cousins used to call her “brat baby” and even had a song to go along with it, which she sang for me over coffee in Williamsburg.

Lauren eventually made her way to New York City for college. Her first year was rough, governed by excess boys, substances, partying.

Her crowd was rowdy that year. They would don as little clothing as possible and make the pilgrimage to Bushwick for nights out, where they knew their favorite bouncer by name, and even though everything about them screamed “18 years old,” the seductiveness of a, “Hiiii King,” could get them in anywhere. Lauren’s signature move back then was plastering her homemade stickers that said Diva and Iconic Bitch in bar bathrooms across the city.

She reflects about this period of her life with a near maternalness, as if she has aged a decade since, rather than four years. “I made some crazy choices,” she laughed, before launching into her next story of young mayhem.

This one involved her freshman year roommate, a girl she had connected with via social media before meeting in person the summer before college. For their first hangout, the girl invited Lauren to dinner with a sugar daddy. Four girls showed up to a steakhouse in Brentwood. They ordered freely, ran up a $600 bill, and left with seventy-five dollars each. One of the girls, Lauren told me, was seventeen at the time.

“How do you think your future roommate could tell you’d be interested in something like that?” I asked her.

“I’m just a down bitch,” she replied.

That was her one and only foray into sugar-babydom. I asked her if she ever felt fear, and she said not particularly. “Maybe I should more,” she laughed.

Now the Diva of West LA lives in Hasidic Williamsburg. It’s a stark departure from the East Village, where she spent her college years as a fashion student at Parsons. And it’s certainly a departure from her titular roots, West LA. And though she and her neighbors share their Jewish heritage, the chasm between them could not be more massive. Lauren will come back from the club at 3am and be shocked to see her neighbors, women her age, taking evening walks with their sleepless babies. They live parallel lives, gliding past each other but not ever breaking the invisible seal between them.

Lauren joked that she’s just a different type of Jew.

“When I was one year old,” she told me while sipping on her oat cappuccino, “while my parents were at work, my nanny took me to her El Salvadorian Catholic church and baptized me. She didn’t tell my parents until 10 years later. Feels good, double protected!”

It turns out Lauren wasn’t the only Jewish baby living a double life. Her nanny would pick her up every day from temple preschool and go next door to the church with her nanny friends and their respective Jewish babies.

Though she is now rounding off her fifth year in New York, she knows she will never, ever be a New Yorker. She tells me this over a crumbly guava croissant. What keeps her in the city is the creative buzz. It’s what keeps a lot of people in the city, the feeling that anything can happen at any time. These days, she’s working freelance doing fashion design for various clients while also working part time at DÔEN, a bohemian women’s fashion brand where dresses go for around 500 dollars a pop. When I ask her what she’s working on, she pulls a starchy denim skirt she’s bringing to a client right after our coffee from her purse. It’s short and angular. “I like to go for texture,” she explains, gesturing to the laser-cut edges.

Denim is a major focal point of her work – her dad is a car-guy, she spent many a weekend with him growing up at car shows around Los Angeles. It’s inspired her fashion – “Grease, gasoline, jeans, I love it all,” she tells me.

I took Maxine, my normies cofounder and photographer, with me to the Diva’s lair a few weeks later. “She told me that in her last place, she hung a five-by three picture of herself over the bed,” I told Maxine right as we stepped through the doorframe.

Before she had time to register what I had said, we were in the most tranquil, stylish New York living room I’ve seen. A bouquet lay next to a lit candle on the coffee table. The couch was expansive; longer than many of my friends’ living rooms. On the massive TV played a perfect blend of Lauren’s music, Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky,” “Stupid Horse” by 100 Gecks, “Crazy in Love” by Beyonce, and “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer. She offered us homemade ginger lemonade and a plate of cookies she had baked the night before. Whatever image I’d built of Lauren—a woman permanently living in creative chaos—evaporated almost immediately.

Lauren told us about her various living situations before this one. She misses her old spot, a cozy two-bedroom in the East Village where she befriended various neighborhood characters. There was Pierre, an old gay guy who would chainsmoke on the corner while plugged into his oxygen machine. And Valerie, an older butch woman who’s lived in the building since the 70s’ that Lauren visits regularly. Lauren tells me that on her last visit, Valerie shared her list of every woman she’s slept with.

While ogling her perfect apartment, Lauren paraded around in various combinations of tulle shirts and stiff jackets and tall, tall heels, finding the perfect outfit. She slipped on moon boots per our request and we clapped in ecstasy.

She showed us her workspace, a white sewing machine with DIVA embossed across the top in rhinestones, a mannequin wearing an in-progress piece of her work, her signature laser-cut circles that create a scale-like look. Vintage porn clippings, which she tells me she’s been collecting and pasting on her walls since she was sixteen.

We wandered into her bedroom. The giant self-portrait was gone. In its place were framed prints, lace dresses hanging like artwork, and a tiny bell that read Ring for Sex.

“I made one rule when I moved in,” she told me. “No unframed art.”

This, from the woman who once slept beneath a five-foot photograph of herself. I asked her why she’d printed it in the first place. She looked at me like the answer was obvious.

“I like looking at myself,” she shrugged. “Why not? I wanted to wake up and be like, ‘Hey girl, you look good.’”

The video of him being arrested blew up. At this point, it’s garnered millions of views. Everyone from Spencer Pratt fans to local communist groups suddenly had opinions about street safety. Local news stations picked up the story.

It wasn’t his first time running into trouble with the local government. His first crosswalk was in West LA, right by Stoner Park. The neighborhood celebrated him, thrilled to have more protection on a corner with so much foot traffic. Soon after, the city power-washed the lines right off.

After the Stoner Park incident, the mayor’s office, which had been ignoring his persistent emails about pedestrian safety, agreed to meet with Jonny. He arrived armed with research and proposals for how ordinary citizens could legally make their neighborhoods safer. Then, Mayor Karen Bass walked into the room.

“I’ve been a big fan of your advocacy,” she told him.

Jonny laughs, recounting the exchange.

“It’s like—you are the fucking mayor,” he says. “You can actually do something about this.”

In the meeting, Jonny requested an official statement condemning traffic violence; he never got one.

Thus Jonny founded his organization People’s Vision Zero, a nod to Los Angeles’ failed Vision Zero program, which was created to eliminate traffic-related deaths in the city by 2025. Instead, fatalities have risen. Jonny and a handful of volunteers decided that if the city wouldn’t act, they would.

Jonny didn’t intend to blow up online, nor did he intend to become a transit advocate. His activism started for a simple reason: he was a cyclist, and he kept getting hit by cars.

Growing up in Los Altos and later attending UC Berkeley, biking was simply how he got around. Before becoming the face of Los Angeles’ street safety movement, he was a photographer. He liked being in the streets, hunting down stories, going on missions. Mainly, he liked talking to people.

When Jonny moved to Los Angeles for law school two years ago, he swore he’d never ride a bike here. Too many cars, too much risk.

“And then I started doing it,” he tells me. “And it was like a whole new world had been unlocked.”

What began as a way to commute started him down the path to his safety obsession. The more he heard about traffic-related deaths in LA, the stronger his imperative to fix the situation became.

He immersed himself in housing policy and transit advocacy, joining organizations like Streets for All and lobbying in Sacramento for bills that would allow more housing to be built near train stations. He started seeing Los Angeles not as the sprawling, traffic-clogged city everyone complained about, but as a place bursting with unrealized potential.

“I had the feeling that I was in on some secret,” he says, “at the start of a trend that people would eventually catch on to.”

He still feels that way.

When I met Jonny on the Metro six months after his arrest, he came straight from Jiu Jitsu, his bike slung over his shoulder. He seemed less like a law student and more like a tour guide for a future version of Los Angeles. I grew up in LA, yet talking to Jonny, I was stupefied by how little I knew about my own city. When I mentioned being from Santa Monica, he lit up.

“Oh, Santa Monica’s crushing it right now.”

I raised my eyebrows, betraying my skepticism.

“They built a ton of market-rate housing, which has increased the supply such that rent has gone down eight percent. It’s incredible. They’re also building a ton of protected bike infrastructure.”

Then he gestured out the window of the E Line.

“And even this train line—it only happened because people in Santa Monica were like, ‘Yes, we want this.’ So Santa Monica is a beacon.”

“A beacon!” I repeated excitedly.

While he is a fan of the E line, he had notes for the designers. As if summoned by our conversation, the train lurched to a stop.

“Check it out,” he said. “We’re stopping at a red light. It’s messed up.” One of his notes: why doesn’t the E Line just avoid the LA gridlock?

At this point in our ride, something very un-Los Angeles happened. A stranger joined our conversation.

She ran a tourism company and was trying to figure out whether she could get from Santa Monica to Chinatown on transit. Jonny walked her through the best route, drawing upon his encyclopedic knowledge of the city.

“I’ve heard the new line is nice, right? She said, referring to LA’s hottest drop, the D line.

“The D line, it’s clutch.” Jonny explained. “You can go from LACMA and all the museums around it.” That’s one thing we are working on too, there’s kinda a tension between how much security we want. People feeling unsafe is what keeps them from taking the metro, so we are for enforcing fares, I think it’s almost condescending not to.”

The ability to have conversations like this one is part of why Jonny advocates so heavily for making public transit safer and more accessible. It brings people together.

As we wandered through the Jewelry District toward Grand Central Market, a man sped past us on a fixed-gear bike.

“That’s my boy, Speedy,” Jonny hooted.

Before I could ask how he knew him, Jonny ran to the corner and began yipping at a crowd of cyclists; they howled back. It was like a pack of coyotes greeting each other in the wild.

“Those fools are all from South Central,” he explained proudly. “They’re into track cycling. They’re really fucking good. I don’t think people realize and appreciate the cycling culture that exists in LA.”

Having known him for only a few hours, it didn’t surprise me that he knew the whole entourage flying down Broadway.

As we plowed through our respective plates of pupusas and tacos, I asked Jonny if he’d ever run for office. Maybe one day, he said. But he’s skeptical.

“Every corrupt politician starts by having conversations like this one.”

He worries about becoming disconnected from the things that matter to him, being outside and involved in his community. Personally, I think he’ll be okay.

The job is new, something to support him while he tries to make music full-time. Ten years ago, Kenny went viral on Vine. Now, he’s hoping lightning might strike twice.

“I love the thought that anything can happen at any second,” he explains to me.

Kenny knows what it feels like to orbit close to fame, in the strange, diluted way that is available to almost anyone with a phone and good timing. If you say the right combination of words, on the right app, at the right time, the whole world may just watch.

For Kenny, his moment came in high school. His fifteen minutes was a six-second video, his hair swept to the side in an aggressively 2016 way, as he uttered the now-infamous line: “so I’m sitting there, barbecue sauce on my titties.”

This line immediately became synonymous with 2010s meme culture. At fifteen, Kenny had broadcast a fingernail-sized sliver of himself to the ether. This taste of fame sustained him. Off the internet, life was much harder. His home life was dysfunctional and abusive. School, once a refuge from home, became another source of fear. Being a gay kid in Detroit ten years ago was no easy feat. By high school Kenny was bullied relentlessly, so much so that he ended up dropping out at the end of junior year.

While the real world proved time and time again to be a rotten place, Vine was a slice of heaven. He made friends easily online, found ways to make people laugh by being as outrageous as possible.

“You know the Tide Pod challenge?” he asks me.

“The one where people ate detergent?”

“Yeah,” he laughs. “I started that.”

“God, Kenny,” I reply. “I hated that stuff. I thought it was so stupid.”

We both laugh in agreement. It was stupid. It was also an artifact of the time—Trump was running for his first term, people were obsessed with flipping water bottles, and the internet still felt like a place to run amok, where dumb shit prevailed.

To celebrate each 1000 new followers on Vine, Kenny would chuck raw eggs at his bathroom door, broadcasting the whole ordeal to his dutiful audience of eager teenagers. Upon hearing this, I joke that his parents must have loved his egg thing. He replies, seriously, “Yeah, my dad actually bought me my first carton of eggs.”

As we keep talking, it becomes increasingly clear that Kenny’s dad was one of the only people in his life who consistently encouraged the parts of him that others mocked. When Kenny was younger, his dad even took out a credit card just to pay for a meet and greet with Lady Gaga, Kenny’s idol.

“When we met, she hugged me for minutes,” Kenny remembers. “That was one of the greatest moments of my life.”

He pauses before adding, “My dad was really the only one that believed in me.”

I ask if going viral assuaged the bullying, but he told me it exacerbated it.

“You could sense the energy of everyone being shocked as fuck that this bullied quiet kid was getting attention on the internet,” he explains. “They thought it was so weird that I literally had people like Rebecca Black tweeting me.”

The years between Kenny dropping out of high school and eventually moving to Los Angeles were tumultuous ones. During the COVID pandemic, his dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and Kenny became his primary caretaker.

“God, how did you get through it?” I ask Kenny, incredulous.

“My friends,” he tells me. It was those same friends he met through Vine all those years prior that were calling every day to check in.

“My friend Sable was literally on the phone with me when he was in hospice.”

His dad died in 2022. After that, there wasn’t much left keeping Kenny in Michigan. He wanted a proverbial fresh start, to live somewhere where being yourself wasn’t embarrassing

The plan was to work with his best friend of a decade in music marketing. She runs social media for a record label. When he moved, though, everything went south. Their friendship, for reasons Kenny struggles to piece together, soured. She stopped texting him jobs. When he reached out, he was met by radio silence.

So where did that leave Kenny? On Craigslist, of course. It’s where he found his new job working the graveyard shift at a smoke shop in Downtown LA. He takes the bus there every night at 11 p.m. for his midnight shift, and returns home once 6 a.m. hits. “The morning is actually really nice,” he told me, “I’m usually the only one there.”

“How do you feel about working downtown?” I asked him.

“I love it, and I hate it. I love having a job, I love customer service, I love talking to people, I hate watching people on drugs because I have done that all my life.”

He goes on to tell me that the brunt of the issues at work come from the fact that the smoke shop sells whip cream canisters, and people harass him when he has to ID them. Sometimes customers threaten to fight him and call him the F-slur.

For money on the side, Kenny battles on TikTok. If that sounds like a made-up Gen-Zism, I was equally confused. TikTok has a feature where multiple creators go live simultaneously, competing for the attention—and virtual coins—of the same audience. Viewers send gifts to support their favorite battler. Kenny does it for hours at a time. He loves it: the social aspect, the competition, the extra change it puts in his pocket.

“So, six or so months in, are you glad you moved?” I’m worried that asking this seems like a mockery, given how much hasn’t gone to plan since he arrived.

“It’s literally everything I’ve ever dreamed of– minus having to pay bills and stuff. I feel inspired here. I feel like it’s not frowned upon to be happy in LA.”

When Maxine and I first called Robert, he answered from his Hollywood apartment, a grandiose grandfather clock ticking behind him — later I learned it had belonged to his late parents. He was outfitted in a boat-necked long sleeve, with the Peanuts characters dancing across it.

“Craigslist, man” we all laughed, acknowledging that the site brought us together after Maxine and I posted an advertisement there. He shook his head. “You get all sorts of stuff on there. I was the Easter Bunny last week!”

With more probing, I discovered that he had indeed dressed up as a mall Easter Bunny. “Seasonal work,” he explained to me, “It was a weird three weeks.”

Until a few months ago, Robert was working at a film archive, running his variety show, and writing on the side. Though he no longer has that job, he’s tried to maintain his morning routine: Oats, cup of coffee, some exercises, checking his emails. Even the Easter bunny has admin work to do.

Apparently, the weekend before I interviewed him, he had recounted the easter bunny story to a producer friend he ran into at a party. The producers were married couple Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch Miller, who had cast Robert as the dog character in MGMT’s 2023 music video for their track “Bubblegum Dog.” Miller jokingly apologized for what they put Robert through as the Bubblegum Dog.

“It was nothing compared to the Easter Bunny,” he told me, seriously.

I watched the video from a cafe in New York City, cackling quietly to myself. There’s Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser of MGMT, and then there’s this haunting dog-man chasing them around Los Angeles, rolling through dusty leaves in what looks like Griffith Park, past the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, onto a stage where MGMT is performing, the dog wielding a knife and a cake with the words “the truth” plastered in icing across the top.

These are hardly the strangest gigs Robert has had in his career. When I asked if there were any standout gigs he still puzzles over, he had one at the ready.

“My agent sent me out on a really bizarre project in 2020, I didn’t have to audition which was very strange. It’s a fashion type shoot, my agent said.”

Next thing he knew, Robert was in what he describes as “the bleakest neighborhood in Los Angeles,” though he can’t remember where that was. He walked into a warehouse and there was a model sitting on the couch. “Are you the guy that’s going to kill me?” she asked him.

Robert was spooked, understandably. What his agent had failed to mention was that it was a crime series, a fashion crime series, to be precise, and he was the murderer.

The producer told him, “Don’t worry, it’s going to be tasteful,” then led him into an all-pink room with a bed in the middle.

“The woman I’m shooting with is only wearing panties and is ass up. They hand me a baseball bat and want me to cry and beat a pillow. And she said this was supposed to be tasteful?” he recalled incredulously.

Robert told me he took the bus home shaking. “I could’ve really used a hug.”

Fortunately, gigs like this are now few and far between for Robert. After our second conversation, Robert was heading to an audition for a commercial, the type of work he usually avoids at all costs. As an artist he’s always walking the line of making meaningful work and also trying to support himself. The word that comes up most in our conversation is “shilling.” He repeats it over and over, lamenting the celebrities, already overwhelmed with wealth, who continue to sell their souls for more profit.

“I had an ex roommate say, ‘Robert, the celebrities are taking all your work again.’ I was like yeah, I guess nobody wants to see Hollywood stars on the big screen anymore, when you can see them shill for garbage on the small screen.”

Over the course of his career he’s become staunch in the belief that talent is diametrically opposed with fame.

Robert’s path to Los Angeles was circuitous. He’s from Fort Saint John, British Columbia, not too far from the Alberta border. Canada comes up a lot in our conversation. “It’s a safe culture,” he explains to me. “Creative risks are discouraged.” He published a book with Feral House titled Cold Glitter: The Untold Story of Canadian Glam in 2025 about this subject precisely, the theatrical, freakish, and often forgotten corners of Canadian glam rock which he chronicles with near encyclopedic devotion. Recently, he launched a 100 page free bonus supplement of the book at Whammy, a VHS store in Los Angeles where he’s found a real sense of community since moving to the city.

He spent his early adulthood in Vancouver, then later got his MFA at the University of Waterloo before moving to Toronto and now Los Angeles. Throughout it all Robert has been guided by an internal mandate to create meaningful work for an audience. That’s his mantra.

Maxine and two friends went to The Birthday Experience variety show on May 2nd.

She and I had both been admittedly confused about what Robert meant in his craigslist reply where he shared the premise of his show: he celebrates people’s birthdays, even when it isn’t their birthday. “I need every detail,” I urged her on the phone. “Did you sing happy birthday? Was there cake? Did it feel like a real party?”

Maxine struggled to explain it to me. “I think I need to just share moment by moment because I don’t really know what happened,” she laughed.

She described arriving early and padding through an empty Elysian theater, Robert standing on stage testing the space’s audio with a video of a cat screeching. Soon people poured in. “Show your ID’s! Who’s birthday is it?” Robert paraded around the room. He put the two birthday-havers in chairs on stage. Next came the musical component, an ode to a Taurus who broke his heart. “Taurusssss! Taurus!” belted Robert with sincerity, besides a stony-faced Lance Piebanga on piano.

The rest of the show, Maxine said, felt like a blur. A birthday cake was cut. Robert took a nap onstage, then awoke with a sudden memory of savory pie. A tween girl beside Maxine could not stop cackling at the phrase “savory pie,” as though it were a profanity only she understood.

Later, out came a performance artist known as Rushadicus, the Infamous Cello Goblin, playing two kazoos while sawing away at his instrument in what appeared to be a marsupial costume.

Reader, if this sounds like gobbledygook to you, it does to me too. Maybe that’s because The Birthday Experience only coheres in the room itself. Or maybe describing it misses the point entirely.

When we first met, Robert asked Maxine and me why we called our project Normies. We agreed that the closer you look at normal people, the less “normal” seems to exist.

It was our title that first caught his eye.

“Hi, my name is Robert Dayton,” he wrote in his Craigslist reply. “Sometimes I think I’m normal until people tell me I’m not.”

You can find Robert’s work at : www.robertdayton.com.

The lessons were a passion project of a retiree named Warren who made it his mission to spread the joy of the ukulele. In Yellow Springs, Ohio, population just North of three thousand, everyone is known for something. That was his thing.

When he tells me about the ice cream music lessons, I reply, “Oh, so you’re from utopia.”

He smiles. “You could say that.”

Other than these group lessons as a kid, Joe was largely self-taught. He would listen to the radio and pluck out simplified versions of the pop songs he liked on his uke. He still gravitates towards this type of playing, streamlined and digestible.

We walk through Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick. It’s full spring—the park teeming with people celebrating the sun. We talk about graduating college; the strange, vertiginous feeling of finding your footing for the first time as an adult. Without the structure of school—he was in the Clive institute at NYU these past four years, studying recorded music—Joe’s been interrogating his relationship to making music. In school, he says, he got caught up in the mechanics—the quiet pressure of doing things the “right” way, whatever that means. Now, without anyone grading him, he’s trying to get back to the way it felt as a kid: intuitive, a little messy, unconcerned with whether it’s correct.

“Something I’ve been trying to live by recently,” he tells me, “is that I want to make all of my songs realistically something that could be the first song someone learns on guitar or piano.”

Joe started busking in Yellow Springs’ town center when he was around ten, playing songs he’d learned by ear from the radio. Performing always came more naturally to him than talking. I begin to probe about what he means as a skateboard comes flying at us, its owner not far behind. Joe effortlessly stops it with his foot and sends it back.

“I feel like there’s something almost exhibitionist about my lyrics that’s cathartic to me; just saying things, not directly to anybody, but leaving it out in the world.”

“Ok, so, what are you writing about these days that you find easier to sing about than talk about?” I ask.

Joe becomes bashful. “I definitely have a tendency to blow things up. At the risk of sounding obsessive, I do have muses. There are certain people I will go back to when I have to access a certain feeling.”

When I ask if he has a muse in his life right now, I am rewarded with only a sly “yes.”

It takes me a little while to see what he meant about Yellow Springs not being quite a utopia. It is small—barely two square miles, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else. You see the same people every day.

He tells me there were a few rough years when he wasn’t sure if he wanted to play music at all. He had fallen into the wrong crowd, started doing drugs, and hanging out with older kids who supplied them. He was only in middle school.

“There is a massive nature preserve on the edge of town,” he tells me, “so every day after school we would just go to the woods, and it was like an open-air drug market out there.”

The drugs subsided by high school. In fact, he attributes COVID to helping him redirect. He got scouted by a group of college students in a music production program at Ohio University after uploading some of his work on SoundCloud. Soon, he was sitting in with them.

“I was spending most of my time with my parents. It was very special. Athens, Ohio, is where the school was, and bless my parents, they would drive two hours each way, once a week so I could spend the day there and record with these college students who kinda had their shit together.”

He attributes a lot to his parents. They have always wholeheartedly supported his music. Maybe it’s because they’re artists themselves. His mom works as a freelance artist, his dad as a graphic designer for the local paper. In fact, his paternal grandfather emigrated from Nimberg, Germany, to Portland, Oregon, to conduct the city’s opera. As we walk from the park to a dive bar called Merv’s, I ask if Joe’s father is musical too.

“My dad is probably the most intense music fan I know,” he explains. He’s known in my village for biking to work [while] playing guitar; the guitar is like his fidget spinner.” As we drink our beers, he pulls up a photo for proof, his dad teetering on a bike, a tiny guitar in his arms.

After performing regularly since he was ten, Joe knew he needed a band in New York. He showed up and booked a gig before even selecting his crew. He found them immediately, pulling the best guys he could find in his program: Arthur, Joe C., and Gideon. They’ve been playing together since.

The type of music they’re making now is catchy. It has a strummy bedroom-pop texture, with Joe’s confident vocals overtop. The ukulele that hooked him as a kid remains an undercurrent throughout. I can hear Headphones, his addictive most recent track, looping in my head as I write this.

Once we sit at Merv’s he seems at ease. By drink two, we are bonding over our Spotify On-Repeat playlists, agreeing that MJ Lenderman is a genius, that The Shins know how to write a perfect song, and that Pinegrove is musically aspirational. Somehow, we start discussing the pleasure of talking to strangers, which, to an extent, is what we are doing with each other.

“Do you want to hear about the best conversation I ever had?” he asks. I sit wide-eyed.

In brief, it goes as such: Two summers ago in Rhode Island, Joe met a gorgeous Polish waitress for whom he left his number on a napkin. They ended up chatting a bit, and when he studied abroad in Berlin, she reached out and invited him to Gdansk, the northern port city she was from. He said yes, and the next thing he knew, he was on a bus going through rural Poland.

This is where the best conversation of his life happened. It was on the back of the bus, with a Bengali day laborer traveling through Poland for whatever work he could find. For months, he’d been moving between small towns where he didn’t speak the language, and no one spoke his. He mostly worked serving kebabs.

“He was the sweetest guy in the world. We had this crazy come-to-Jesus moment where he pointed out how different our lives are. He wasn’t resentful—he was excited for me. He was just stating the truth. He said something like, ‘I’m not Michael Jordan, and I don’t want to be. It’s cool that he exists. I’m just happy if I wake up and can provide for my family.’”

Joe’s takeaway was to go into music full stride. He had to quiet the voice that told him he was less likely to go the distance than his NYU peers with generous safety nets. Despite the exhaustion of bartending to support himself while making music-full time, he felt recommitted.

If you’re around my age, you’re more likely to know him as the voice behind West LA Memes—an Instagram account built on hyper-specific Westside jokes.

The account started as an inside joke with a friend the summer of 2019 and stayed anonymous for about six months, until people inevitably figured it out. Over six years in, he’s amassed more than 40,000 followers.

When I first met Tohar in college, it was like encountering a celebrity. He’s 6’6, with an impressive mop of curls and a wall-to-wall voice. Someone whispered to me, “that’s West LA Memes.” I had an inexplicable impulse to thank him for his work. “Big fan,” I said. I probably shook his hand, who knows. I was a starstruck freshman and he was a giant.

Sure he ran an Instagram account more or less dedicated to ragging on Orange County, but during COVID, the account became a kind of uniting force for young people in Los Angeles. I would see my classmates duking it out in his comment sections all the time. The jokes were perfectly personal. There’s one from 2020 about the kids who take their driver’s test in Winnetka, where it’s notoriously easier to pass. I was one of those Westside suckers who had to go to the Valley.

Though COVID was an awful time for the world, it offered Tohar a lot of creative inspiration.

“It was a great time to be funny on the internet because you had a captive audience,” he explains.

My peers and I were that captive audience. We were the ones defending Samohi’s honor in the comment sections, poking fun at the Pali High kids who he claimed were all addicted to nicotine, the ones nostalgically lamenting the loss of the plastic fruit that kids could climb on at the now-defunct Westside Pavilion Mall.

“You clearly love LA,” I tell Tohar on a phone call last week. “Could it be that you can only make fun of it because you love it so much?” I muse.

“I love this city. This is my city!” he punches out the words emphatically.

“I think you may love LA as much as I do, which is saying a lot,” I tell him. “I hope you don’t think I’m a traitor for moving.”

Without missing a beat, he says, “I mean, listen, is a missionary leaving their church because they hate their parish? No, it’s to spread their gospel!” Well, here I am.

Since graduating from UC Berkeley, Tohar has been working at KCRW after a brief stint at a law firm, which he describes to me as profoundly unfulfilling. He recently had the privilege of covering Paul McCartney at the Fonda, which he titled, “Paul McCartney at the Fonda Reminded Me That I Live in LA.”

“What about the normal people of the world? Not all of us can see McCartney on a balcony surrounded by A-Listers,” I ask. “How would you suggest someone else feel that LA magic, without the glitz?”

He springs into action. “You don’t need anything to do with celebrities to feel the city’s magic. You want real magic in Los Angeles? You can just go to Mulholland Drive at sunset, pick a side, pull over, and watch the sunset over the city. You’ll notice it is the sunset from 100 of your favorite movies.”

At this point in the call, he launches into an impressive soliloquy, which I will include in totality below. It seemed almost as if he had prewritten it, which of course he hadn’t.

“Here’s what I recommend. Drive– because let’s not kid ourselves- to a neighborhood that you know a little bit but not super well. Maybe bring a camera. Park and walk in any direction. You can walk from the Venice canals to a golf course at Pen Mar, to Santa Monica, where there is an airport that also has art galleries. Continue up the street, and you’re in a small Japanese enclave in Sawtelle. Go up to the VA, where there are big antebellum buildings against a huge freeway, up until the hills where you have marble museums that look like they’re made of Jerusalem stone.”

At this point, I was vividly impressed with his cadence and compact mental map of the city.

He goes on: “Continue up the spine of the mountains, and you can find yourself all the way in Hollywood, where you have houses from the long goodbye that have a public elevator, or, hell, go the other way and find saltwater marshes down the coast as far as Orange County.”

Tohar appreciates LA not just comedically but anthropologically, physically. He is both a comic and a scholar of the city. In fact, he wrote his senior thesis about Pico Robertson, a Jewish enclave right by where he grew up, and the history of oil extraction there. I didn’t know prior to our conversation that there was oil extraction in Pico Robertson.

“Oh yeah,” he told me, “My neighborhood is C-rated, because of the infiltration of ‘Hebrew families’. That’s what it says on the Home Owner Loan Corporation redlining documentation from 1937.

His bookshelf is a microcosm of his personal and scholarly interests. We poke around, and he pulls out A History of the Jews of Los Angeles. Next to it are Alice Waters’ Coming to My Senses, Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, and Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

It’s worth noting that there is a post on West LA Memes depicting a decrepit monster wearing airpods and reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem, with the caption: “how LA male manipulators look ordering their matcha and performatively reading.” But as we’ve already established, to be able to make jokes as pointed as he does, you must intimately know your audience.

As he sips his mug of tea– Sadaf, cardamom– we talk about the central contradiction of his work. This is a man who loathes social media yet has made a living off of it.

“It worries me that we have young people growing up thinking that being an influencer is a category of work. An influencer should only exist in someone’s mind the way a wizard exists, in the way that you know what the job is, but you couldn’t necessarily do it.”

He tries to steer clear of social media in his own time, despite the fact that it is his job at KCRW. When I ask how he has the willpower to stay off outside of work, he says, “Well, when my grandfather quit smoking, he just quit cold turkey, and every time he wanted to smoke, he would eat raisins instead. I think that the fact we aren’t that far removed from a generation with that level of willpower means we can employ the same willpower ourselves.”

This sticks with me. My grandfather actually did the same, quitting cold turkey and never going back.

Where he’s landed with the internet is a healthy compromise. He’s trying to consume less and create more. If the algorithms are designed to keep people watching, he figures you might as well give them something they can learn from.

“I like to put my phone in the other room, I listen to CDs, I read, I do crosswords, I play music, I take walks.

Before we hang up, I ask him to shout out his favorite local spots. He rattles them off without thinking: Grand Casino Argentinian Bakery, All Seasons Brewing Co, Tacos Por Favor, Vegan Glory, Largo at the Coronet, LaSorted’s, Kebab by Faraj.

Take this list as a suggestion. As Tohar told me, “You could dedicate your life to going everywhere in Los Angeles, and you will need to live 30 lives to get anywhere close.”

Here is an unmistakable, vetted list of truths about Carly: When you look her up, it says movie star, and there’s a picture of her with Sean Hayes. She appeared on an episode of Will & Grace in 2018. She’s been a babysitter for over a decade. On her back, there are two stars drawn by the little girls she’s been watching since they were born. She loves Elliot Smith. She hates men (besides the running list of OK ones she shows me in her notes app). Her sister Olivia is her best friend. She lives in Silverlake with her mother, Debbie; her joke all of senior year of college was that her post-grad plan was “stay-at-home-daughter.” Her hatred for men, she claims, has been inherited matrilineally.

Carly’s sense of humor is something that takes time to navigate. She’s brash; you need to be ready to field an onslaught of jokes. Many will likely slip through the conversational cracks. I have known her for four years and know that nothing, and I mean nothing, is literal. We were in the same major in college– American Studies, which she describes wryly as majoring in the Kardashians. She holds her cards close but is incredibly bright. When I wrote my thesis and sent it to her, she sent it back with pages of thoughtful edits.

I call her on a bright March day. Her fiery hair is pulled up into a half-bun on her head. Behind her is a piece of birchwood, with macrame waves hanging down, giving her the illusion of a crown. I compliment the branch, and she looks appalled.

“This isn’t my room– I’m in a fourteen-year-old’s room. You can tell by the amount of Rhode beauty everywhere.” She had just dropped off her god-sister at school; she helps out and babysits them when their parents are out of town.

I tell her that I have no expectations for our conversation; I’m just excited because, knowing her, it will be sound bite after sound bite. She laughs.

“I’ll say anything to get canceled, that’s my goal in life.”

Carly is not a Normie, at least not at first glance. She is equal parts glamorous and audacious, in a way very few people I’ve met are. One very not-normie part of Carly’s life is that she worked as a child actor. Going back and forth between middle school and auditions is an uncanny way to spend one’s formative years.

In other ways, though, she is living a classically normie life; living at home, working for various families as a babysitter, and taking acting classes in her spare time. She’s having to adjust to being back home in LA and it’s complicated. The city feels different for her; none of her friends moved back after college. Her first job after graduating was as a camp counselor. Her subsequent job was nannying five days a week for a family in Studio City. She soon left after being relentlessly bullied by the twelve-year-old.

“I’d be in the car picking her up from school and playing music, and the 12-year-old would get in the car and be like, ‘Turn off this music, I hate your music. Also– don’t talk to me.’”

“Did you appreciate her attitude at all because it was funny? Or relatable?” In a way, this is how Carly talks to everyone, but she never means it.

“Not at all, she was literally the biggest bitch I’ve ever met. I have a lot of empathy for 12-year-old girls. I think they’re one of the most oppressed groups in the world. That being said, I had no empathy for her. I had to ask my mom, was I this terrible at 12? My mom was like, no not at all.”

The one grounding routine in her life since moving home has been her weekly acting class in North Hollywood. I stare blankly as she tells me this.

“She trains all the stars– Margot Robbie, Emma Stone,” Carly explains. I am not enmeshed in the acting world, evidently. Carly claims to be the most “normie” of her classmates, though I remind her that Google says she is a movie star. She corrects me, “I’m more of a TV star if anything.” The cast is comical: an A-list nepo baby, a Victoria’s Secret Angel, and 2020 Hype House TikTokkers trying to regain relevance.

The class is taught by Daniel Travis, Carly’s “fourth favorite man”. This is when I learn that the list is real, and make her recite it. It goes as such: her sister’s boyfriend, her old roommate Keya’s boyfriend, the gay dad she nannies for, her acting teacher (Daniel Travis), and Michael Mark Cohen, a professor we shared at Berkeley.

In response to the limited list, I ask her if she is feeling bisexual these days. It’s not a question I would normally ask, even to an out bisexual like her, but with Carly’s temperament, it feels appropriate. She has a proclivity for calling me a lesbian at every available opportunity. She holds up a palm. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She pulls out a vape while reciting the list. I ask her the flavor, and she holds it up like a beauty guru, placing her other hand behind it so the camera can focus. The brand is FLOAT. The flavor: Hello Miami Mint.

“Do you realize how ‘I Love LA’ you are?” I ask her.

“I hated that show,” Carly chides. I laugh.

“Hit too close to home?” I ask. She doesn’t like that one. Her take on the TV show is that it’s obviously written by transplants about the transplant experience. I don’t disagree, but her character would be in good company among the cast.

When I ask her about making friends in acting class, she notes an older guy.

“He’s so cool, love him.” The line comes out fast, a continuous string of words.

Carly is infatuated with this man. “His career advice,” she tells me, “is to become an addict and then get sober so I can make money being a sober monitor for famous people.”

She goes on. “So I asked him, what kind of drugs do I have to get into. Would coke be sufficient?” Apparently, yes.

Is she kidding? Again, the jury’s still out.

“What’s your dream day in LA?” I ask her, trying to get past the substance abuse section of our conversation. She doesn’t let me.

“Wake up, do a line, see where the day takes me.” I give her a look.

With coercion, she reveals a more accurate picture. She works at North Ray Yoga 3 hours a week in their “energy exchange” program, where you get a membership in exchange for labor. A quintessential day for her includes some combination of hot yoga, babysitting, acting class, and time in her beautiful bedroom in her mom’s Silverlake home. When she wants a special meal, she goes to Bacari. For breakfast, Spoke Bicycle Cafe. For clothes, the Los Angeles Apparel factory store downtown.

“Tell them they can find me at Urth Cafe,” she says as we are ending our call. “You’re joking, right?” I reply. It’s very 2016 Los Angeles, in an Instagram way. “No,” she says, “I’m going there right now.”

Who’s to say if it is true.

There’s a kind of alchemy that happens once you wind up the mountain roads and enter the canyon—Los Angeles proper slips away. What emerges is what Tara refers to as a sanctuary: a small mountain town for artists, hippies, and people trying to escape the city. Tara was surrounded by people chasing that feeling her whole life; her mom leads yoga retreats and sound baths at their house.

I called Tara from New York. She was in Santa Barbara, where she spends many of her weekends visiting her girlfriend, Delaney. Immediately, I was swept with homesickness. Tara is effortlessly Californian, almost the state embodied. When I asked what the rest of their Sunday looked like, I had to rein in my jealousy. The plan was to grab some fruit, go to the beach, play cards—maybe collect rocks. Delaney recently got Tara a rock tumbler, and she plans to start making jewelry with it soon. The evening would likely end at their favorite Indian restaurant, Apna, where they religiously order the lamb korma.

We had only met a handful of times before our conversation, but there was an immediate familiarity that comes from growing up near each other. When I asked what her ideal Los Angeles day was, she recited mine: going to a tiny omusubi shop in Santa Monica called Sunny Blue and bringing it to the beach. It’s a growing-up-in-West-LA classic.

The turnoff for Topanga Canyon itself is easy to miss. Before the fires at the beginning of 2025, the corner was anchored by a few local institutions: The Reel Inn, a surf shack known for fish tacos and grilled seafood; Cholada, a teal-painted Thai restaurant that, if you squinted, could pass for a beachside place in Phuket. Tara used to get takeout from there and bring it to the beach across the road. Now, the road is marked by trucks still putting the pieces of the city back together.

“When we first moved to Topanga, there was a bunch of wildlife that would come into the house and around it,” she explained. She wasn’t talking about crickets, or bunnies, or something cute. She was talking about rattlesnakes.

Her mom is a pacifist, vehemently opposed to hurting animals. Their gardener would sometimes kill the rattlesnakes on the property, so she began capturing them and relocating them instead. One time, Tara tells me, he killed a massive one.

“My mom was upset about it. She was like, ‘we’re not letting this go to waste,’ so we skinned it and ate it.”

That is one surefire way to honor a life. And if you’re wondering about the poisonous aspect, I was too. Apparently, if you chop off the head, the body is fair game.

Tara feels mixed about moving back to Topanga after spending the past four years in Santa Barbara for college. At UCSB, she lived each year with seven to ten people in a house within walking distance of the beach. Everyone commuted by bike.

“Are the stereotypes about going to school in Santa Barbara true?” I asked.

She laughed. “You definitely have a lot of people that gravitate toward a laid-back lifestyle. People go to the beach between classes. I’ve seen people go to lecture in swim trunks and flip-flops. It’s very work-hard-play-hard.”

Topanga, on the other hand, is remote. One road snakes through the canyon, connecting the Westside and the Valley. When all is well, it feels like a sanctuary. But when natural disaster strikes—and it often does—the land is not equipped.

Growing up, Tara told me, the roads would flood after a rainy day, and they wouldn’t be able to make it to school. As a kid, it was a cause for celebration; as an adult, not so much.

In some ways, that sense of distance extended beyond geography. Tara’s family is Iranian. Both of her parents were born there but have spent most of their lives in Los Angeles.

“I didn’t really grow up with a Persian community,” she explained. “The most exposure I had—in terms of food and language and culture—was through my grandparents. I didn’t really have a lot of Persian friends.” The culture is very important to her, though. Farsi was her first language, and she hopes that her kids will one day speak it even better than she does.

What brought her back home after college was grad school—she’s studying supply chain management at USC. After taking a global trade class in undergrad, she realized she was interested in the intersection of politics and trade policy. It’s a discipline that’s never stagnant; the system is always adjusting, responding, and reconfiguring as global politics shift.

The area of supply chain management that excites her most is food. Her real dream, if everything worked out just right, would be to open a restaurant.

“What would your signature dish be?” I asked.

She knew immediately. “I love to make people this dish with white beans and kale in a broth. It’s really cozy and warm. And some charred sausage, chili crisp, and buttered toast.” She laughed. “I almost forgot the leeks—I had to check my notes for that one. My girlfriend reminded me.”

Cooking, for Tara, is its own kind of meditation. She likes tactile work; recently, she’s gotten into gardening for the same reasons.

Referring to her plants, she explained, “They take care of me in the way I take care of them. I can think of nothing when I’m gardening and just focus on repotting a plant. It’s numbing, but it also forces me to be present.”

Delaney chimed in throughout our call, helping Tara out. When I asked what the two of them like to do on a Sunday in Santa Barbara, Delaney wrote out some highlights for Tara to recite.

“Oh yeah, we love to journal and smell perfumes.” A current favorite of theirs is Diptyque Fleur de Peau.

“Also, Delaney has gotten into film photography, so there’s been a lot of photo-war type stuff. I also like to bring my little film camera around. At this point, all of my pictures are of Delaney,” she said. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I’m hanging up,” I joked.

While I stewed in New York, questioning why I ever left the magical land of Los Angeles that Tara talks about so glowingly, Maxine made the pilgrimage up the canyon to photograph her. She called me on the way, and the line went static within minutes—I immediately knew she had made it. There’s no service in the canyon. Finding the house was no easy feat. Maxine accidentally found herself in a neighbor’s backyard, traipsing through tall grasses, startled by an older woman on a Zoom call she saw through the window. Wrong house.

She finally stumbled into Tara’s family driveway, large and shaded, cresting the lush Santa Monica Mountains. When we spoke again after, all Maxine could say was, “It doesn’t feel like LA.” Which is, of course, true.

Maxine was lucky enough to experience a Tara meal: a shallot tart, roasted carrots, a beet salad with slivers of basil and goat cheese. Right now, the garden is still in its early stages, but she dreams of the day when her two passions can merge into one home-grown meal. She has five varieties of tomatoes on the way. I made her promise over the phone that we’d cook together the next time we’re in the same city. Summer, we agreed, would be sweet.

He’s wearing a faded Camp Geronimo T-shirt with a wolf’s face stretched across the front, and his distinctive glasses—thin wire frames, narrow ovals that sit neatly over his eyes. They’re his uniform. I compliment them immediately and he bristles.

“I hate them,” he says. “I hate them more than anything.”

“Then why not switch it up?”

“Basically because of my disposition and my absolute hatred for change, I’ve never been able to part from them.”

From where I’m sitting, they feel deliberate; they’re too specific not to be. But to him, they’re just something he hasn’t figured out how to stop wearing. Changing them would cause too much attention. Too many questions.

“I’d rather just be invisible,” he jokes.

Perhaps it’s the writer in him. Atticus has spent the past four years studying film at USC. When I ask him what films have changed his life, he shrugs.

“None.”

Not exactly the answer you expect. It’s a low-ball question, too– my intention was to hand the man a bone. As an attractive 23-year-old guy in Los Angeles with long hair and wiry glasses, Atticus plays the part of film bro naturally. But given the opportunity to nerd out, he doesn’t take it.

“There’s really no film that’s changed the way you see the world?”

“If a film really hits for me it doesn’t change my perspective, it captures my perspective, like it captures a truth.”

I spend our whole conversation trying to piece him together. “He’s confusing,” I said to Maxine after our interview. They’ve been best friends since middle school. “Oh yeah, Atticus is famously mysterious. I only learned a few months ago after twelve years of friendship that he’s a die-hard Denver Nuggets fan. I didn’t even know he liked basketball.”

When I later push on why he became a diehard Nuggets fan, the answer feels adequately random.

“In 2020 I was watching the Nuggets and was like, ‘Wow. I love that team. That’s some team basketball.’”

That’s all it took.

Later, he clarifies: he likes the way they play for each other, instead of being self-serving. There’s a narrative to it. He’s invested.

We plow through his baguette while Atticus catches me up on recent life. For many 2025 graduates, the job market has been a rude awakening. Atticus is unperturbed— he never expected it to be easy. He works on films when he can and tutors part-time at an elementary school in Glassell Park, a job that’s exceeded expectations.

When I ask about his students, Atticus lights up. “It’s funny,” he tells me, “When I got the job everyone was like– but you hate kids. Well, it’s like, yeah, I said I hated kids once when I was a kid myself. I mean, what, when I was like 13.”

Ten years later he has fully ingratiated himself into the fourth grade social scene. The kids have a daily “supper time” which is what LAUSD schools call the after school snack break. This is gossip hour. All of the kids, even the ones who aren’t in his group this semester, flock to Atticus, who they call Mister– to have supper together.

Lola is a repeat student. When he first started working with her, she disagreed intensely on everything. Before class she would walk up to him and say, “Just so you know, I’m not reading today.” Bold stance for a reading group.

He doesn’t push her, not exactly. He watches. Tries to figure out what the resistance is doing for her. “She likes to be bad,” he explains, “it’s her way of protecting herself.”

At some point, the two of them start talking about bikes. Lola likes to ride hers around the neighborhood for fun after school. Atticus, who is 23 years old, tells her he doesn’t know how to ride one. Not only that—he’s afraid of them. She laughs at him. There are very few things more destabilizing than being mocked by a nine-year-old, but he seems to take it in stride.

“So I told her, you know, it’s ok to be bad at things.” Atticus laughs. “I didn’t mean to coin a phrase this semester but it sort of stuck. Now when the kids get tripped up over words in reading they all say together ‘just get it wrong.”

And then there’s Nayeli. She recently revealed to the class that she reads the note that Mister wrote her every morning before school. It reads: “If you believe in yourself the way I believe in you, you can do anything.”

“How did that feel to hear?” I asked. It’s almost too sweet to imagine.

“I was more shocked than anything. I really didn’t believe her. I don’t know if I still do. I don’t think it’s true. I don’t know, I wasn’t trying to make a moment, but it’s nice that it resonated.”

Atticus didn’t mean to establish a regular correspondence with his 9-year-olds, but it happened naturally. At the end of last semester, a kid named Damian asked if he could write about Atticus as his writing practice exercise they do at the end of every lesson. Atticus begrudgingly said yes, afraid of what was to come. Damian’s note read: “Mr. Atticus is my friend. I love him like a brother. Best teacher of all time, best friend, best 2 time tutoring teacher of all time.”

“It’s interesting about Damian because it didn’t feel like a random comment,” Atticus explained, “I really do feel the same way.”

And yet, when I ask him if he misses his first group of kids, he pauses.

“I don’t really experience missing,” he says.

“What about the Palisades?” I ask.

Atticus’s family moved to an apartment on the border of Hollywood and Hancock Park after the Palisades fire. It’s vastly different from where he grew up in the Palisades Highlands, a mountainous community tucked high above the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s also the canyon where the Palisades Fire began in January 2025 before climbing down the mountain and engulfing the entire neighborhood. His family evacuated immediately. Their house, along with a few others, were jumped over by the fire. Most of the neighborhood is gone. Atticus is almost unemotional about it. The way he sees it; that was then, this is now.

We ask Atticus where he wants to take a photo for Normies. He replies, “Either LA Fitness or the grocery store, I don’t go anywhere else.” We book it to the closest Ralphs and perform a humiliation ritual that is making a behind-the-camera type guy pose with a shopping cart. He hates every second of it.

The grocery store has been especially relevant for Atticus this past year. He made a film back in January called Checkout and just recently sent it out to film festivals. The premise: an 18 year old kid runs into his friend’s mom at the grocery store on his birthday and she ends up seducing him. He points out the irony that he wrote the script with his mother. They went to the grocery store together in the writing days, testing details. At one point, he had her fondle watermelons to see if it worked for the scene in mind. Turns out, it did.

“Is there something specifically about age-gap dynamics that intrigue you?” I ask Atticus.

He had also just recommended a book to me called The Go Between, where a young boy fosters an intense infatuation with his friends’ older sister while acting as a messenger between her and her summer fling.

It’s not the age-gap, he tells me. It’s the forbiddenness of it all. “When there’s a reason that two people should not, or aren’t allowed to, share affection, it makes the person want it so much more. Everything would be easier for you if you didn’t love that person, and you have to do so much more and feel so much more to make it happen.”

He’s been doing this for as long as he can remember—watching people closely, trying to figure out how they move through the world, how to move with them.

A week after we met at République, Atticus agrees to meet Maxine to take some new pictures, this time on his terms. He sends her a pin in Larchmont. It is 100 degrees by 11am.

This time, Atticus is ready to creative-direct the whole thing.

“I could take the garbage out? Stars, they’re just like us,” he jokes. “We just have to go until we make magic.”

He says it like a joke. But watching him—whether it’s with a camera, or a fourth grader struggling through a sentence—he has a way of finding something worth paying attention to, and staying there long enough for it to matter.

He wouldn’t call that magic. But it’s hard to think of a better word for it.

This is the reality for employees of businesses on the Strip; unless they want to shell out half of an hour’s wages to park in a lot on Sunset, they find themselves high in the hills, dodging coyotes and speeding cars on their pilgrimage up in the wee hours of the morning. And the journey is steep. I write this with sore calves and a bruised ego.

Claudia doesn’t seem to mind. When you’ve been pining after a job since you were fifteen years old, like she has, all the little inconveniences stack up to nothing.

For Claudia, that dream job– waiting tables at the Comedy Store– is now hers.

Most people would assume the desirable job at a comedy club is the headliner.

Not for Claudia.

In fact, after working there for seven months, she feels affirmed in not being a comic. Keeping the comedy club ecosystem running is where her talents lie.

As we make her commute down to the Strip, we get distracted by a bizarre mansion teeming with wooden wildlife sculptures. There is a life-sized Elk statue which Claudia explains had to be bolted down recently after crushing a car. Parked in the driveway is a neon blue Bentley and beside rests a pole with signs pointing to various cities; Phuket, Anchorage, Reykjavik.

“Would you ever live in the Hollywood Hills?” I ask her.

“Oh, totally,” she replies.

We redirect from the Elk and back to our original conversation: the job at the Store. Originally after graduating from college, her plan was to take a gap year, travel, and go to grad school for architecture in the fall. When I ask if she was excited about those tentative plans, she pauses. In retrospect, she thinks the gap year wasn’t really about preparing for grad school. It was about giving herself a real shot at the Comedy Store.

“The only thing I have ever really loved is comedy, and I wanted to find a way to work in it. That’s why I wanted to work in the kitchen, I just wanted to get in the building and see what happens.”

She patiently fields my barrage of questions. So it’s really the one job you wanted? Would any other comedy club cut it? Do you want to be a comedian yourself? The answers: yes, no, and no.

We finally descend from the hills and onto Sunset Boulevard. A Cartier billboard with a tiger prowling over the Strip looms large above us. As we cross, a convertible swerves toward the curb and Claudia jumps back. The driver — a blonde woman wearing oversized sunglasses — barely notices.

“That would be quite a way to go,” I say.

Claudia laughs. “Killed on the Sunset Strip. Very on brand.”

A typical shift at the Comedy Store lasts about six hours. For the first two, Claudia runs food, weaving between packed tables of tourists and comedy fans clutching overpriced cocktails. After eight o’clock, the orders mostly stop.

“People don’t come for the food,” she says, laughing.

Which means Claudia spends most of her shift watching stand-up. The ultimate perk. I ask her some of the recent highlights at the Store, and she rattles off A-listers: Dave Chappelle, Nikki Glaser, Robby Hoffman. One of her favorite comics is Asif Ali, star of Hulu’s Deli Boys.

The Sunset Strip is not necessarily ideal for an interview. It’s more a place for people to show off their cars and ogle at Oscar nomination billboards with their windows down. However, we happen to be here at 2 pm and have to make do.

Our options are: TikTok transplant haven Saddle Ranch, Doughbricks (the pizza place founded by David Dobrik, a YouTube sensation who took a break after being cancelled, which has recently attempted to re-enter the zeitgeist), and Carneys.

We settle for Carneys, a kitschy diner in a streetcar that’s been around since 1975 and is just down the block. We mourn what would have been the highlight at Saddle Ranch, the electric bull, which I dared Claudia to ride. And if they had been open, she certainly would have. She’s not the kind of person to turn down a good time.

Last week, she went to Guatemala with a girl she’d never hung out with one-on-one. They met in her college street percussion group and had discussed scaling the Volcán de Fuego offhand once during a beer mile. She drops this sentence on me like it’s no big deal.

“You’re going to have to elaborate. You did street percussion in college?”

“Yeah, I took drum lessons for one semester and then was like fuck it, let’s get into street percussion.” The natural chain of events, of course.

The beer mile, it turns out, is exactly what it sounds like. One beer each 400-meter lap around a track. Only one person in the group finished.

Usually, this kind of conversation ends as a fun idea, but with Claudia, there is always follow-through. She’s famously down.

At this point, she’s built a reputation around it. Just a month ago, her buddy from college needed to get his car from Napa to Boston and knew she was the friend to call. Two days later, she hopped on a plane to San Francisco and drove for six days straight across the country with no time for tourism. She was unbothered. This was her fourth time traversing the country– she’s a pro.

“You had a break from LA these past four years. How does it feel to be back home?”

“Oh, I hate LA,” she chirps.

I’m shocked.

“You hate LA?”

It’s hard to picture– her dream job is essentially in LA’s Times Square.

“I think there’s a lot to do in LA, but you have to drive everywhere, and it’s so fucking annoying. But I would never give up this job, if they keep having me, I will keep coming.”

She speaks like a true Angelino who has left and seen other cities with public transportation. Home never looks the same again. There’s also the social dimension. Nightlife in LA, in her experience, is pretty insular. People keep to their friend groups and don’t branch out.

We leave our scalding table in the sun to hike back to the cars. It’s 3 pm, and Claudia has a tutoring session before she waits tables later tonight on the Strip. As we begin our ascent, I’m regretting my choice to wear ballet flats and a thin white skirt, the outfit of a sorely underprepared journalist. Claudia charges up the hill as I puff behind her.

“Now imagine this, but it’s 2 a.m., she jokes.” I’m glad I only have to imagine it.

I’m immediately reminded of her singularity: chunky-heeled Dansko sandals, capris that flare out at the mid-calf, a patterned shirt looping around her midriff. We haven’t seen each other in a few months, and last fall’s buzz cut has grown out into a wavy, barrette-adorned shag. “Helloooooo!” she cries in her unmistakably bright voice. She sounds like a Valley girl- and that’s because she is, born and raised. When I ask her if she has Valley girl pride she says, “Of course, I mean… first of all, I have the voice. Also, I love to shop.” I smirk and make eye-contact with Maxine, our mutual friend and Normies cofounder. The two of them lived together for three years in college, and Mia’s shopping proclivity spilled out of her closet and into their common spaces, a rack of eclectic vintage clothes teetering in the doorway.

The habit started early. Mia and her mom used to go thrifting together at a neighborhood Goodwill that held “three-dollar Sundays.” And even though her mom isn’t much of a shopper herself, a big part of their dynamic is the fashion show of it all– Mia trying on combinations of her new treasures for her mom to appreciate.

When I tell her that she’s one of the most stylish girls I know, Mia shrugs it off. To her, it’s somewhat of an affliction. She has been sifting through thrift stores since ninth grade, grabbing every piece of exciting fabric within reach with the hopes to transform it into something glorious.

“As you know, I have a lot of clothes and I am trying to recover from my addiction to collecting colorful and shiny things.”

After slowly accumulating more clothes than a girl could ever wear (all thrifted, by the way, she hasn’t bought something first-hand in over four years) it’s time to pare things down.

“Now I’m trying to form a relationship with every item I own — mend things, take care of them, actually use them to their fullest.”

We drive down Sherman Way and she points out her spots. The street is pure LA: Mexican grocery stores, Viet markets, a Cuban cafe that has the best cafecitos, according to Mia. Jacaranda trees dot the concrete with their purple bounty.

We are in the deep Valley, Canoga Park, and even though it is allegedly winter, we blast the AC on the toasty drive from her house to her favorite vegan restaurant, Follow Your Heart. I immediately see why Mia took us here – the restaurant is her personified. Funky, vintage, colorful, and, of course, vegan. Before deleting her Instagram in college, Mia went by @stinkyvegan, a title she wore proudly.

The restaurant has been open since 1970 and is a time capsule of a hippy Los Angeles past. Joni Mitchell plays over the soundsystem. Wheatgrass shots are made to order. The walls are covered with posters of rocks and birds and plants, the kinds you can buy for a few bucks at a book store. And the lighting is copious: tiffany-esque lamps, lava lamps, floor lamps.

We order a rootbeer float to share per Mia’s recommendation. I opt for a tempeh taco salad, Mia goes for a broccoli soup and breadsticks. On the specials there is a vegetable soup that features “No salt, no oil”. We all question what could possibly taste good there.

I go in with a spoon to the float and she hands me a straw. “You’re going to need this,” she laughs. “This is kind of like a podcast Mukbang,” Mia giggles, pointing to my phone recording.

Mia’s the kind of vegan who always opts for the most fried, processed version of her plant-based food of choice. Turns out, that proclivity translates to her YouTube viewing too. She loves a Mukbang.

“I love crispy fried food so when I can see other people eat it I’m like oh my gosh…This is how we start the revolution. First Maxine, then Sophie you’re next!” She waves her breadstick in my direction.

Mia graduated from Berkeley in the Spring and ever since she’s been living a luxuriously slow life– a pace that feels almost rebellious for someone fresh out of college. Long mornings filled with reading and crafting, climbing a few times a week with her dad and the group of parent- aged friends she has adopted at the gym. Without a car, Mia bikes everywhere. In high school she took buses across the Valley, sometimes two hours each way, just to get out of the house.

“Everyday I feel so lucky to live like this but also I feel like I am doing nothing. My friend was telling me that my life sounds like everything he fantasizes about doing during finals. That’s sort of my life this year. It’s a year to have peace and do everything I wanted to do during college but was too busy to do.”

Unlike many of the recent postgrads that seem frantic in the face of the job market, Mia is cheery. She’s been planning on taking this gap year at home for a while. The objective: spend time with family, travel, and get her bearings before the lifelong grind towards retirement.

“I have been stressed about my future since middle school. It’’s like– that’s enough. I am ready to kind of go with the flow a bit.”

For work these days, Mia has become a chauffeur — ironic for someone who doesn’t own a car, hates driving, and until recently refused to get on the freeway. Her client is Ethel, a deadpan, spunky 80-year-old who Ubers around Los Angeles with Mia, going to the grocery store and doctor’s appointments together.

“My job is really to keep her company.” Mia pauses hesitantly, “But I’m not sure she realizes that”. She lets out a nervous chuckle. “She seems pretty sure I’m just there for a ride”.

Suddenly, Maxine inhales sharply. “You guys, that’s my childhood celebrity crush.”

Mia and I glance at the sun-kissed, tattooed, irritatingly handsome man walking into the restaurant. Next to him is a woman wearing a leopard-print tank top and red-carpet–level glam. A real Hollywood couple, if I’d ever seen one. He’s a former child star from the Disney XD show “Kickin’ It,” who, we discover after Googling under the table and tempting our fate, is now a woodworking YouTuber.

“What are they doing in Canoga Park?” Mia jokes. I know what she means. There’s something sweet and slow about her neighborhood that feels detached from city life. But of course, that illusion can only last so long. We are in Los Angeles after all.

Mia represents a new kind of Valley girl. She has the spunk and fashion sense of someone straight out of Clueless, but instead of mall sprees she scours Goodwill bins, sewing patches onto old clothes to make them new again. She beads little ornaments for her walls and rides her trusty chariot around the Valley instead of a Jeep Wrangler.

The voice is Valley girl. Everything else is just Mia.