Edition #19

What's happened to my brain (and maybe yours)? Plus money stuff, tech bros disguised as cowboys, free librarian friends, Ezra Klein, dressing like Brit circa 2007, The Studio, Le Creuset superfans

I don’t know what’s wrong with me at the moment, but this week I seem to have hit new levels of dumb. And before you tell me it’s just the fault of peri menopause and we sigh in simpatico unison because literally everything is, here are two of the dumb things I’ve done this week (and these are the two I can tell you - the others are worse and cannot be shared):

1. I made a smoothie for my family without realising that the Thermomix measuring cup—which is not small—was inside the bowl before I turned it on. I didn’t realise this when the Thermomix made an unholy noise, and I didn’t realise it when I saw what looked like unmooshed bits of kale at the bottom of the bowl as I poured the smoothies out. I didn’t realise it when we all drank the smoothies. I only realised I had Thermomixed an entire plastic measuring cup and fed it to my family when my husband, who was washing the bowl later, noticed that the ‘kale’ was actually small shards of plastic covered in kale. After all my microplastics fretting last week, this week I tried to White Lotus my own family using… macroplastics? Is that what they mean by manifesting? I’ve been utterly paranoid that we’ve all been pretty much on the verge of death ever since.

2. I went to the airport to catch a flight to Singapore without my passport. It was in a drawer at my house, over an hour’s drive away, which was by then occupied by Airbnb guests. I must thank my friend Helsy, who dragged herself off the beach to pick it up; the guests, who have yet to write a review saying we’re freaks who left the house perfectly spotless and unlived in aside from a single drawer full of the most important documents they own; the Uber driver, who drove like his life depended on it to bring it to me; and the Qantas ground staff, who were delightful and helpful in every way and did everything they could to get me on the flight with seconds to spare.

This all made a recent Atlantic story, Why Am I So Tired, hit a little too close to home. It talks about how one of the first signs of what they call “Mom fatigue” and I call Wednesday is leaving weird things—like keys, coffee mugs, a pen—in the fridge. (Passport was not the fridge, so that’s something.) It also flags a survey that found that employed women—not even necessarily parents—only get about 13 minutes for ‘relaxing and thinking’ on an average weekday. (Men get 25 minutes.) ‘Relaxing and thinking’ feel like a thing that should get more play than, say, scrolling Uber Eats, but the numbers check out.

This quote spoke to me:

“Even when I’m technically resting, I’m making mental checklists, responding to texts, planning content, or wondering if my toddler’s quiet time means peace or property damage. I’m quite literally a human browser with 47 tabs open at all times.” She said her husband is tired in a “just finished a workout” way, while she’s tired in a “my soul needs to be wrung out like a sponge” way.

To combat this problem, the experts I spoke with recommended that busy mothers take a few minutes each day for “wakeful rest,” or, in layman’s terms, for mentally zoning out. Lab studies have found that “having some amount of time in which a person is mentally not focused on the here and now is beneficial to memory consolidation,” Erin Wamsley said. This is not the same as meditation, which is beneficial in other ways but involves concentrating on your breath or on a mantra. Wakeful rest means just doing nothing: letting your mind relax. “Our brains are not built to deal with this onslaught of information,” Lamp said. Letting your mind wander for a few minutes can help reset your brain, kind of like turning your computer off and on when it overheats.

Related: scientists have found that physical exercise may be better for brain health than mental workouts like sudoku or crosswords, so I guess I’ve found my prognosis.

Aside from my own stupidity, the conversation this week has been all about money. The New York Times reported on “money dysmorphia” (which, for the record, we at InStyle wrote about ages ago). It’s when the boom-boom aesthetic of Chanel bags, luxury holidays and omakase dinners on Instagram makes us feel poorer than we actually are. Then there was the much-shared Billboard stat: 60% of Coachella tickets this year were bought via buy-now, pay-later services like Afterpay. (Honestly, you couldn’t pay me to be young today When I first started going to festivals I was in my first magazine job earning $12,500 a year—probably highly illegal even then—but I felt like I had cash to burn! Now they can’t even afford the ticket without going into debt.)

Meanwhile, some very privileged women are currently walking around shook to their absolute cores that people aren’t buying the idea that their many-millions-a-minute trip to space to hear Katy Perry sing What a Wonderful World while gazing out a window and “feeling love” (which very much sounds like the closing scene of a dystopian musical written by ChatGPT) is a feminist act. We live on the same planet but in different worlds.

So surprised by Gayle’s doubling down in defence of the ‘mission’ when in every picture from the day - even the retouched one - she looks like she knows exactly what’s coming.

Apparently tech bros are dressing like cowboys now. Blame Yellowstone, plus Silicon Valley’s move to tax-friendly Texas. Can you imagine how disappointed you’d be if you thought you’d met an Adan Banuelos type but under the boots and hat, he was a Jeff Bezos? I shudder to think. Also, these outfits sound awful:

In Austin, the main techie corral, a typical tech-guy look includes brown cowboy boots, slimmish jeans and fitted snap-button shirts, said Ben LoSasso, a product manager at a big tech company who moved from Seattle in 2022 and dresses this way himself. At night, showy bros step out in ostrich boots and pink snap-button shirts with cartoon cactus prints, said LoSasso, 38.

One of these is a cowboy. One is not.

I recently learned that, in the days before Google, the NY Public Library had a Telephone Reference Division you could call up to ask a librarian literally anything you needed to know. How quaint! Then I dug a little further and found out that the Australian Library still has this service! They’ll spend ten minutes on the phone with you helping with “research,” which is a dangerously vague brief. Is this the answer to the loneliness epidemic? I love the idea of a ten-minute gasbag with a friendly librarian. I don’t know enough of them in my real life. (“We are not able to give advice on legal, financial or health matters and we can't provide answers to assignments and quizzes,” so don’t try phoning one while you do Bracket City, note to self.)

Porn is often discussed in relation to how it rewires boys’ brains and preferences (yet another story on the normalisation of choking during sex came out on Vice this week), but The Atlantic’s What Porn Taught a Generation of Women explores how porn has influenced everyone in ways we don’t even realise.

Porn has undeniably changed how people have sex, as researchers and anyone who has even fleeting experience with dating apps can attest. But it has also changed our culture and, in doing so, has filtered into our subconscious minds, beyond the reach of rationality and reason. We are all living in the world porn made.

“Porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate,” Amia Srinivasan wrote in her 2021 book, The Right to Sex. “Porn trains.” For the past few decades, it has trained men to see women as objects—as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize. But it has trained women, too. In 2013, the social psychologist Rachel M. Calogero found that the more women were prone to self‐objectification—the defining message of porn and aughts mass media—the less inclined they were toward gender-based activism and the pursuit of social justice. This, to me, goes a long way toward explaining what happened to women and power in the early 21st century. For decades, male supremacy was being coded into our culture, in ways that were both outlandish and so subtle, they were hard to question.

My boyfriend (just on the commute) Ezra Klein released a corker this week. I refresh my news apps all day and had caught snippets of the Abrego Garcia/El Salvador jail deportation story, but not all the details laid out in this reporting. I’m not going to paraphrase it here because I encourage everyone—and by everyone, I mostly mean the two beloved family members of mine who I assume are still you-know-who supporters, even though we’ve reached a silent truce where we just don’t talk about it despite everything in my body being desperate to—to listen or watch. It’s very harrowing and very real. The inhumanity of it goes so far beyond politics, it’s unfathomable. (Also: the fact that I questioned whether I should write about this publicly because I’ll probably have to travel to the US for work some time soon is just... insane.)

The Wall Street Journal has dubbed the derelict-y style championed by Justin Bieber and Addison Rae “Trashcore”. Think 2007-era Britney as the inspiration.

“The style—also called ‘slacker core’ and ‘idiot core’—is trickling down to the masses.”

“For someone who’s trying to emulate the hodgepodge, effortless, intentionally disheveled look, it’s convenient,” said Tollefsen. Young people, she said, could throw the style together by pulling pieces from resale sites and thrift stores and buying new items from brands like Balenciaga.

“I think people dress louder when there’s potentially a recession,” said Kathleen Sorbara, the owner of Sorbara’s vintage store in Brooklyn. Around the 2008 recession, she noted, flashy brand logos appeared alongside denim shorts and Uggs. Now she notices a similar over-the-top sleaziness popping up again.

Do it now, kids. Over-the-top sleaziness is an aesthetic you can only dream about in your 40s, no matter how bad the recession-doom gets.

New York Mag’s Dinner Party newsletter ran a short interview with one of their editors, Emily Gould, about friendship and parenting. This is good, simple advice (that she is probably not using with Lena Dunham):

“It sucks that sometimes something like a dog or a baby or a job can make it hard to keep people you genuinely like in your life, but them's the breaks. The key is to prioritize the friendships that matter the most and to make sure you're seeing everyone often enough to get their gossip and not hurt their feelings. Set a calendar reminder if you have to! In this confusing and fast-paced and rapidly crumbling society, we don't do enough to acknowledge that our friendships are important and that they do take work (not too much work but a little!). And if all else fails and you're really slammed at work/busy at the child-care mill/embroiled in an endless orgy of gay sex and cultural consumption, just text your friend a link or meme that lets them know you're thinking of them. A little can go a long way when the goal is to just keep the lines of communication open.”

If you’re not watching The Studio on Apple TV (it’s OK, you’re only three episodes behind), you’re missing out. It’s very funny, beautifully shot, and packed with the best celebrity cameos imaginable. I adore Seth Rogen. (Apparently he was a judge on a ceramics version of The Great British Bake Off called The Great Canadian Pottery Throw Down, and I honestly can’t think of more things in one show that would bring me so much joy. Seth! Canada! Ceramics! Throwing stuff down! If anyone knows how I can watch it, I will love you forevermore.)

Lastly, this story about the Le Creuset superfan sale is enlightening:

• In some circles, fans are affectionately called Pot Heads

• Three times a year, rare and discounted Le Creuset pieces are shipped to a location in the US and sold for up to 60% off to said Pot Heads who pay $15 for the privilege of attending. The waitlist is tens of thousands long.

• If you spend $150 USD, you get to buy a $50 mystery box that contains at least $350 worth of cookware—but often more. You will only get one of these if you snag a VIP one-day-early ticket for $30.

• A side event called Le Creuchella is held in a nearby car park where people trade mystery box contents like they’re rare Pokémon cards.

All of this sounds completely deranged and entirely unnecessary (how many gorgeously-hued Dutch ovens does one human need? Don’t answer that) and I would very much like to go.

See you next week xxx