Edition #28
Book bags and bibliotherapy, AI Barbies, why everyone wants a daughter now, the return of the Jane Austen marriage, and more....
Vox interviewed a bunch of teenagers about what’s actually going on in their much-speculated-on romantic lives (or lack thereof). Thinking back to how huge of a milestone it felt was when I finally had my first proper kiss with my first big crush after he asked me to ‘go around with him’ in the utterly memorable, personal and deeply romantic setting of just outside Granny May’s at Miranda Westfield, I can’t imagine how frustrating this must be:
Emily, 16, who lives in New Jersey, always imagined that those milestones would be a part of her high school experience. She was “not necessarily expecting a whole love story, but like High School Musical,” where you ask each other to dances, she says. “But that didn’t exactly happen.”
Unlike in the movies she grew up watching, she finds that crushes don’t develop in the cafeteria or school hallways. Instead, it all happens online, mostly on Snapchat. “The majority of my week, that’s how I’m interacting with people,” says Emily, who’ll start her senior year of high school in the fall.
Instead of a furtive note passed across class, if someone has a crush on you, they’ll send you the ultimate romantic gesture: a photo of their full face. “Not just of their ceiling or a half face,” says Emily. If you like them, too, then you’ll start sending texts back and forth on Snapchat.
This is “the talking stage,” a new — and extremely confusing — kind of milestone. It’s one version of a situationship, a type of relationship without clear boundaries, rules, or commitment. This gray area — when you both like each other, talk occasionally but don’t move toward exclusivity or more intimacy — has come to dominate Gen Z’s dating woes. “Normally, it doesn’t escalate from there, because most people don’t like to have labels or a real relationship,” Emily says. “It’s crazy because you can be in ‘talking stage,’ and you see them at school and just pass by each other. Social media is where it all happens.” Sometimes, two people in the talking stage will meet up in person, but that doesn’t last long.
Every day it feels like I speak to someone who is done with their creative or media career and knows the future is limited but is somehow stuck. This is such in interesting take from Pack Light Live Full with Carmen Van Kerckhove about why we hold on to our ideas about prestige and status careers even when they’re no longer serving us.
Right now, we're in the early stages of a massive reordering of how work functions. The jobs that once impressed people might not exist in five years. Meanwhile, new opportunities are emerging faster than our class conditioning can keep up with.
But most people are too prestige-drunk to see clearly. They're so focused on maintaining their position in a hierarchy that's actively crumbling that they miss the chance to build something different.
If it seems like every week I’m talking about a new way people are finding to have fun (from just the past couple of newsletters: board game club nights, dad clubs, sauna raves) it’s because it’s not just a series of micro-happenings, but part of a whole movement. According to The Cut’s ‘Soft Clubbing is the New Going Out’:
Nightlife isn’t dying (not yet!), but for many young millennials and Gen-Zers, it is evolving into something less chaotic, more considered. It’s what happens when a generation raised on overstimulation and burnout wants the fun without the fatigue. Gone are the nights of partying until 4 a.m.; instead, we’re spending evenings (or, just as often, afternoons) “partying” at coffee shops, cafés, and, yes, hair salons. It’s about showing up for a specific vibe, with specific intentions—catching a set with friends, maybe meeting someone new, and calling it a night by midnight.
Apparently, the same generation that gave us Euphoria makeup and naked dresses is now requesting higher necklines and longer sleeves for their big days, according to this NYT story on Gen Z wedding trends:
“I used to have brides saying they don’t want white, asking for a blue feather dress,” said Kennedy Bingham, the founder of Gown Eyed Girl, a bridal styling and consulting company. “Right now, the majority are wanting 18th-century traditional. The Basque waist is really in right now, a drop waist shaped very similarly to old-school Marie Antoinette-style dresses.”
On her Instagram account, where she has more than 160,000 followers, people have been requesting that Ms. Bingham show more styles with longer sleeves and higher necklines.
Ms. Bingham speculated that this shift into conservatism and modesty could be linked in part to online bullying. She noted that even people with smaller Instagram followings could end up on the Explore page, where random people might see their photos.
“You could have 10,000 people saying your dress is ugly,” Ms. Bingham said. “I think that’s affected Gen Z. They’re not trying to dress for their eye or their family’s eye, but for the internet’s eye.”
Ms. Bingham believes that the requests for “timeless” or “classic” dresses reflect a desire for safety, with looks that have stood the test of time because they’re bland and modest enough to be palatable to a wide range of people.
Speaking of Gen Z and marriage… a wide-ranging Newsweek piece on Dr. Eliza Filby—author of 2024’s Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad—is full of insights about the generational shift in values. But one idea stands out: young people may not be marrying for love or lust, but for liquidity.
The phenomenon is not about gold-digging, Filby said. It is about Gen Z reacting realistically to a broken economic promise. Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, were told to follow their passions, get a degree, and build a stable life.
"But they eventually found that, even with a degree, you could end up back at home, unable to buy a house," Filby said, "And so Gen Z took note."
She added: "Gen Z sees work more transactionally as a result; they do not buy into the same narrative that work equals fulfillment and they are looking for multiple streams of revenue. They are also looking for a partner who brings them that stability."
In that sense, dating has taken on a more-practical tone, with financial status moving closer to the forefront.
This shift echoes a return to a Jane Austen-style marriage market, Filby said, one where wealth—especially inherited wealth—is central. The family home, once symbolic of independence, is now a collaborative venture between romantic partners and their respective parents.
"We are seeing something akin to a Jane Austen scenario," Filby said. "Parents are more involved in their adult children's relationships than at any time since the 19th century—because they are stakeholders.
"They have helped with the house deposit, the wedding, sometimes even the child care," the expert added.
She also notes—depressingly and with a heavy glaze of ick—that given the world’s move towards being an "inheritocracy" rather than a meritocracy, (where inherited family wealth drives more opportunity and prospects than individual achievement can) means "It is not about marrying a guy in finance; it is about marrying the guy whose dad is in finance.”
From Politico, more on the international sperm doner crisis that made me learn a new term against my will: accidental incest. And related: a co-founder of Telegram (who was last year arrested in France for enabling crimes ranging from child sex abuse material and drug trafficking to occur on the platform) announced this week that he’s leaving his estimated US$17 billion dollar fortune equally to all 106 of his children - six that he has fathered ‘officially’ and another 100 through, yep, sperm donation. Why is it always the morally-bankrupt Elons that want to father the world, and not, like, the sweet and charming (and woke) Pedro Pascals of the world?
Open AI has signed it’s first deal with a toymaker—Mattel—which means an AI-powered Barbie could be coming very soon. There’s a lot to make us uneasy about putting conversational AI in the hands of six-year-olds (as if new generations need one more reason to opt out of real-life human connection). And yet—as a former Barbie-obsessive — I cannot lie: if Peaches ‘n’ Cream had spoken back to me as a kid (or argued for herself during a breakup scene with Ken), my entire soul would have lit up like a Dreamhouse at dusk.
From the Atlantic, which is one of the few media outlets apparently in growth and spending lots of money on writers, I loved this critical love letter to teen movies (my favourite genre) and how they meant that teen culture used to be projected 20 feet high and soundtracked by The Cure so everyone could understand it. Now it lives in their pockets, and we’re not invited.
Teens, once Hollywood’s lucrative market, no longer flock to theaters. And the place where their adventures are playing out isn’t as readily accessible as it once was, even to hyper-hovering adults. If teens are still showing up at parties, they’re on their phones there; if they still venture out to whatever malls they can find, they’re on their phones there. When they’re at school, they’re mostly on their phones there, too.
And what they are consuming is content produced by other teens—stories and TikToks and straight-to-camera diatribes more real to them than any film written by adults and shot through their anxious, or nostalgic, lens. The cohort that took over mass culture more than half a century ago has now built a sprawling culture for itself, by itself. In 2025, the most potent media produced about teenagers will likely emerge on those pocket-size life changers, and most grown-ups will never get wind of what’s on display. How’s that for something to worry about?
Also, for my fellow word games nerds: the Atlantic just announced a new Games platform, with my favourite Bracket City, along with a new original game called Fluxis.
According to Fortune, there’s a growing trend—in the US, but give it a minute—of people buying homes with their siblings to get a foot on the property ladder. It’s sort of sweet, if you ignore how dystopian it is to need your brother to be your life partner just to afford a a north facing aspect.
“Despite financial hurdles, the dream of homeownership remains a powerful motivator for Gen Z and Millennials, who are making sacrifices in the present to prioritize the long-term financial security a home can provide,” BofA’s annual Homebuyer Insights Report said.
It found that 30% of Gen Z homeowners paid for their down payment by taking on an extra job, up from 28% in 2024 and 24% in 2023.
The survey also revealed a sharp increase in another financial resource: 22% of Gen Z homeowners bought their home with siblings, surging from 12% in 2024 and just 4% in 2023.
That tracks similar data about co-ownership. According to a 2024 survey by JW Surety Bonds, nearly 15% of all Americans have co-purchased a home with a person other than their romantic partner.
We’re all familiar with being recommended a self-help book when you’re going through a thing, but well-chosen fiction? The BBC says it’s a trend - called creative bibliotherapy - and on the rise. (In support of this, I do have a lot of women contemplating divorce message to say how much my book helped them, which generally scares the shit out of me.)
In the summer of 2017, Elizabeth Russell was going through a rough patch. It was during a difficult divorce, involving her two young teenagers, while she was still in the throes of a long-term depression. "It was just a really, really stressful time," recalls Russell, a teacher and librarian at an elementary school in Connecticut, US.
But then on the internet she came across something called "creative bibliotherapy", where a tailored recommendation of fiction is offered with the aim of improving mental health. The name Ella Berthoud, a bibliotherapist based in Sussex, UK, who co-wrote the book The Novel Cure about such literary remedies, kept popping up. Russell – an avid reader – immediately wanted to try it out.
After quizzing Russell on her reading habits and interviewing her about her challenges, Berthoud sent her a list of book recommendations relevant to her life, many featuring characters navigating tough marital decisions, like George and Lizzie by Nancy Pearl. "I just was blown away," Russell recalls. Learning from the lessons and mistakes of fictional characters helped her process what she was going through and made her feel less alone. "It opened up something in me that needed to be opened and needed to heal," she says.
Vox also reports on what they call a ‘reversal of humanity’s oldest bias’ - a preference for sons over daughters. (As someone who tried every old wives’ tale in the book to have a daughter, I find this so foreign. Also, never speak to me of yoghurt douches.)
Female infanticide has been distressingly common in many societies — and its practice is not just ancient history. In 1990, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen looked at birth ratios in Asia, North Africa, and China and calculated that more than 100 million women were essentially “missing” — meaning that, based on the normal ratio of boys to girls at birth and the longevity of both genders, there was a huge missing number of girls who should have been born, but weren’t.
Sen’s estimate came before the truly widespread adoption of ultrasound tests that could determine the sex of a fetus in utero — which actually made the problem worse, leading to a wave of sex-selective abortions. These were especially common in countries like India and China; the latter’s one-child policy and old biases made families desperate for their one child to be a boy. The Economist has estimated that since 1980 alone, there have been approximately 50 million fewer girls born worldwide than would naturally be expected, which almost certainly means that roughly that nearly all of those girls were aborted for no other reason than their sex. The preference for boys was a bias that killed in mass numbers.
But in one of the most important social shifts of our time, that bias is changing. In a great cover story earlier this month, The Economist reported that the number of annual excess male births has fallen from a peak of 1.7 million in 2000 to around 200,000, which puts it back within the biologically standard birth ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls. Countries that once had highly skewed sex ratios — like South Korea, which saw almost 116 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990 — now have normal or near-normal ratios.
There’s not much to say that hasn’t already been ranted about the heinous version of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy shown in the promotional images for Ryan Murphy’s mini-series American Love Story. The thin coat, the empty bag, the absolute failure to even attempt the best blonde highlights the world has ever seen. Of all the chest-clutching, I particularly enjoyed Liana Satenstein’s take:
Bessette-Kennedy is considered a fashion icon whose entire quiet look is based on quality and fit, so it feels bizarre for that part of her life to be neglected in the mini-series. But we’ve seen these CBK images before, more or less. We’ve been perverting Bessette-Kennedy for eons. We’ve commodified a dead woman’s essence, endlessly attempting to extract her soul from moodboards that shill cashmere turtlenecks, sunglasses, and hairbrushes. The same goes for Jane Birkin. Imagine your whole existence distilled into a moodboard. Oy!
According to ELLE, mini totes - just the right size and shape to hold a single book and not much else - are the bag of the moment. (If LNS were to do merch, I’d be all over this.) Kaia Gerber’s sold out Library Science version wasn’t the first to kick off the trend, but it definitely sealed its cool-girl fate.
The tote’s style isn’t its only appeal, though. “From a practical standpoint,” Frazier adds, “I think it’s a really charming idea to be able to just carry with you the book you’re reading, your wallet and maybe one other thing, and go out for the day to the park.”
I didn’t think I could ever read a profile on US Supreme Court justice Amy Coney-Barrett that wouldn’t have me humming the Handmaid’s Tale theme in my head, but this one (admittedly from the NYT whose coverage of anything political produces big sighs from me all too often these days) added some layers to my perception her. Still… big Serena vibes though.
She has become the Republican-appointed justice most likely to be in the majority in decisions that reach a liberal outcome, according to a new analysis of her record prepared for The New York Times. Her influence — measured by how often she is on the winning side — is rising. Along with the chief justice, a frequent voting partner, Justice Barrett could be one of the few people in the country to check the actions of the president.
Overall, her assumption of the seat once held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has moved the court’s outcomes dramatically to the right and locked in conservative victories on gun rights, affirmative action and the power of federal agencies. But in Trump-related disputes, she is the member of the supermajority who has sided with him the least.
That position is making her the focus of animus, hope and debate.
In interviews, some liberals who considered the court lost when she was appointed have used phrases like, “It’s all on Amy.” When Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan agreed on nonunanimous decisions this term, Justice Barrett joined them 82 percent of the time — up from 39 percent of the time in her first term.
Some of Mr. Trump’s allies have turned on her, accusing the justice of being a turncoat and calling her — a mother of seven, with two Black children adopted from Haiti — a “D.E.I. hire.” Her young son asked why she had a bulletproof vest, she said in a speech last year, and her extended family has been threatened, including with pizza deliveries that convey a warning: We know where you live.
The Louvre unexpectedly shut down last Monday when staff walked out mid-shift.
The Louvre’s spontaneous strike erupted during a routine internal meeting, as gallery attendants, ticket agents and security personnel refused to take up their posts in protest over unmanageable crowds, chronic understaffing and what one union called “untenable” working conditions.
It’s rare for the Louvre to close its doors. It has happened during war, during the pandemic, and in a handful of strikes — including spontaneous walkouts over overcrowding in 2019 and safety fears in 2013. But seldom has it happened so suddenly, without warning, and in full view of the crowds.
——
The Louvre welcomed 8.7 million visitors last year — more than double what its infrastructure was designed to accommodate. Even with a daily cap of 30,000, staff say the experience has become a daily test of endurance, with too few rest areas, limited bathrooms, and summer heat magnified by the pyramid’s greenhouse effect.
In a leaked memo, Louvre President Laurence des Cars warned that parts of the building are “no longer watertight,” that temperature fluctuations endanger priceless art, and that even basic visitor needs — food, restrooms, signage — fall far below international standards. She described the experience simply as “a physical ordeal.”
(As an aside, if you’re taking a child to the Louvre, Iggy and I did the Louvre on his twelvies trip — 10/10 recommend going on a Friday night when it’s open late and almost empty, and doing this treasure hunt so the experience feels more ‘Indiana Jones’ than ‘meltdown by the Mona Lisa.’)
An oped in the Guardian on why searching for authenticity in the modern age is futile:
To understand why authenticity is impossible, first we need to understand what social media has done to us. It’s turned personal identity into performance art – and in doing so, has transformed us all into brands (I should know, I’m a brand consultant).
The modern experience is one of constantly being perceived. We view ourselves in the third person, as an entity to be managed. How will this action make me look? How can my lived experience be something I can capture?
This isn’t limited to chronic social media users. Panoptic surveillance, whether state or private, makes us intensely conscious that every public action is potentially recorded, screenshotted and data-harvested. All the world’s a stage – and we’re all method actors who never break character.
Authenticity simply can’t survive this environment of constant performance – we become alienated from our own actions when every moment is filtered through the question of how it will be received. Social media accelerates this process of negation.
Food52 has called the Paper Plane the cocktail of the year. It’s made by shaking equal parts bourbon, Amaro Nonino, Aperol and freshly squeezed lemon juice with ice until the shaker is frosty, then pouring into a coupe glass.
Microsoft released a report last week that dove into what they’re calling the ‘infinite workday.” From Axios:
It's difficult to stay focused during formal business hours. Knowledge workers are interrupted by a ping from an app — such as email, calendar or messaging — every 1.75 minutes, or 275 times, during the official eight-hour work day, finds the analysis, which looked at data from 12-month period ending February 2025.
* Meanwhile, as workers are more distributed around the country and world, thanks to the rise of remote work, 1 in 5 meetings are now happening outside "regular" work hours.
* Meetings after 8pm are up 16% from last year, and the average employee now sends or receives 50-plus messages outside of core business hours.
* These folks aren't sleeping in come the morning, either. A "broad base" of workers are up at 6am working, says Colette Stallbaumer, cofounder of Microsoft WorkLab and the general manager for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Zoom in: A lot of work happens on the fly, according to the authors. 57% of meetings are ad hoc calls without a calendar invite and 1 in 10 scheduled meetings are booked at the last minute.
"For many, the workday now feels like navigating chaos — reacting to others' priorities and losing focus on what matters most," they write.
Cute idea to buy tweens a landline and convince their friends’ parents to get them too.
When Caron Morse’s 9-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: “A hard ‘Hell no.’” Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students’ attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. “I was so sick,” she said, “of being the middle person in any correspondence.”
So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline.
For that gift to provide all the benefits she wanted, Morse had to lay some groundwork. It would be annoying if her daughters—she also has an 8-year-old—were to start calling their friends’ parents’ smartphones all the time, so she told her neighbors about her plan and suggested that they consider getting landlines too. Several bought in immediately, excited for the opportunity to placate their own smartphone-eager kids. And over the next couple of months, Morse kept nudging people. She appealed to their sense of nostalgia by sharing photos of her older daughter sitting on the floor and twirling the landline’s cord around her fingers. She wrote messages: “Guys, this is adorable and working and important.”
The peer pressure paid off. Now about 15 to 20 families in their South Portland neighborhood have installed a landline. They’ve created a retro bubble in which their children can easily call their friends without bugging a parent to borrow their phone—and in which the parents, for now, can live blissfully free of anxieties about the downsides of smartphones.
Time interviewed Pulitzer-winning author Caroline Fraser about her new book, Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, where she explores a theory - called the “lead-crime hypothesis” - of why so many serial killers in the 70s and 80s (known as the ‘Golden Age’ of serial killers, ugh) came from the US Pacific Northwest.
“During the post-war period, an enormous amount of lead was in the air from mainly two sources: Leaded gas, which everybody used for decades, and heavy industry like smelting. People are still debating the numbers, but it is pretty well accepted now that between 20 and 50% of the sharp rise in crime in the 1980s and ‘90s is attributable to lead. We know lead causes aggression. We know lead damages the brain in developing children. I don't think anybody thinks lead isn’t at least a factor anymore, as there’s a clear association between the withdrawal of leaded gas in the ‘90s and the drop-off of crime. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, geochemist Clair Patterson proved that lead exposure had caused what he called “a loss of mental acuity.” But the effects of lead are all over the map; besides intelligence, it can affect personality. Many studies connect lead exposure to a particular kind of frontal cortex damage that leads to heightened aggression. This is observed largely in males. The higher the lead exposure, the greater the brain volume mass, and reduced brain volume has been linked to higher levels of psychopathy.”
See you next week xxx