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In 1946, after a botched spinal surgery left her bedridden for a year with chronic pain, Frida Kahlo turned herself into a stag. “The Wounded Deer” is one of the Mexican artist’s most arresting self-portraits, depicting her antlered head fixed to the body of a deer fatally wounded by nine arrows. Illuminated by forest twilight, the injured deer leaps across a broken branch as a storm throbs on violently. Painted towards the end of her life, when the severe pain she first encountered from a bus accident twenty-one years prior was at its sharpest, Kahlo imagined what it would be like to trade places with her pet deer, Granizo, and escape her sickness.

However, the fragile trees and fractured branches that shroud the deer reveal Kahlo’s inability to outrun the illness that trapped her like a cage. Out of her 143 paintings, 55 of Kahlo’s were self-portraits, the majority of which were inspired by her severe physical and emotional anguish. Kahlo was able to narrate her pain through these artistic vignettes, and with it, establish herself elsewhere. When nearly thirty-five surgeries failed her, she could confine herself to a canvas, and perhaps, have her sickness leave her body, if only for a moment. “I am not sick, I am broken,” the artist said. “But I am happy as long as I can paint.”

Despite her paintings’ surrealism, Kahlo often depicts her face with striking clarity. In “The Wounded Deer,” with her torso bloody and struck, the beauty of her face remains untouched as she gazes at the viewer with composure and confidence. This is how Kahlo wants us to see her and perhaps how she sees herself.

When an artist swaps verisimilitude for narrative, the self-portrait becomes a trick mirror that is warped in the subject’s favour. The result can be more powerful and sustaining than the lived reality. I’d reckon that the craft of memoir and autofiction is similar. Throughout the past week, I inhaled nearly everything related to ’s newly released memoir, Famesick, with highlights including her New York Times interview, her gold standard Substack book tour, her New York launch event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and, of course, the memoir itself. Under the dim lights of BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, in an auditorium of Brooklyn’s most enthusiastic Mamdani canvassers and NPR-tote bag wearers, I sat a few rows away from the author as she read through an abridged version of the seventh chapter of Famesick on a stage that had been decorated as a bedroom, equipped with the comfy-looking arm chair that Dunham sat in, a king-sized bed with floral bedsheets and more pillows than I could count that she’d later climbed into with Girls co-star Andrew Rannells for an excitable Q&A, two side tables that flanked the bed with stacks of books that were unfortunately too imperceptible for me to make out the titles, yellow slippers and spare clothes tossed about, and two night lamps that dueled across from each other with the hospitable glow of Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast.

The artist read. Despite not hearing much from Dunham in the years leading up to Famesick’s release, I found that the familiarity of her voice shot through me instantly like a lightning rod. It felt like hearing a long-lost friend’s voice note for the first time in years and immediately forgetting about the distance, the time. A superficial feeling of closeness that I’m certain has been conjured by a healthy dose of parasociality on my side and the author’s habit of oversharing over the years. Who could blame us?

Dunham’s voice, which has inspired countless millennial writers since the genesis of Girls in 2012, is as piercing and crystalline as ever. That evening it dawned on me that perhaps the reason her voice was so familiar, even after years of well-earned respite, is because her voice – or a better yet, the facsimile of it – has remained persistent even as she’s slipped away, kept alive by those inspired by her. Their own voices – found in viral personal essays on Substack or The Cut, confessional TikToks that gain engagement for perhaps the wrong reasons, or a new television shows where the lead feels like a spiritual successor to Hannah Horvath – have been forged from the same material as Dunham’s, bolstered by a media ecosystem that rewards anything that resembles her self-referential, cringey-yet-comedic tone. This has a totalizing effect, causing her voice to echo with familiarity even when she’s not there. Like a flood of parrots caught in a steel chamber, mimics of her self-narration lingered on in her absence from public life.

After the book event, I took Famesick home and immediately cracked it open, entering a cycle where, over a matter of days, I read the memoir before I fell asleep and listened to the self-narrated audiobook as I commuted to work or dropped off dry cleaning. Famesick ushers us through Dunham’s early achievement at SXSW with her debut feature film Tiny Furniture, the success and scrutiny she faced with her generation-defining HBO series Girls, the layered and thorny relationships she strained to keep with her now ex-boyfriend Jack Antonoff and her now ex-business partner Jenni Konner, and her biblically unfortunate bouts of chronic illness. It’s a sharp work of memoir because:

1. The writing is excellent, full of revelatory details and tea-spilling that further saturates one of the most overexposed artists of the past decade;

2. Lena herself is a fascinating subject who has made a career out of her own self-mythologization, creating her most compelling work when she is her own muse;

3. And, in a lot of ways, Famesick acts as a cautionary tale with a clear message about what happens when sacrifice is met with artistic ambition and the ills of celebrity.

One of the more illuminating aspects of Famesick was the moments where you could track Lena Dunham’s lived experience to that of her fictionalized protagonists, primarily across major works like Tiny Furniture, Girls, and the recent Too Much. When you trace her creative endeavours to that of what she experienced in her personal life, you gaze through a trick mirror of self-portraiture: the opportunistic fuckboy-film bro of Tiny Furniture who uses the film’s protagonist (played by Dunham) to take residence in her parents’ apartment is based on real life filmmaker Ti West; a real-life unnamed abusive, cleft-lipped lover provides dialogue that is later said by Adam Driver in Girls, which interpolates many of Dunham’s lived experiences through Hannah like when she perforated her eardrum; the problematic musician ex-boyfriend and self-immolating protagonist in Too Much who moves to London is a romantically flawed, comedic stand-in for Jack Antonoff and Dunham, who actually did accidentally set herself on fire in “The Big Smoke.”

These linkages do not make her achievements any less genius; many artists pull directly from their lives. What is considered within Famesick, and its surrounding press, is that perhaps Dunham believes that her self-narrativizing art can allow her to shed the hardships of her past and recast them into something new. Something that is her own.

In a New York Times interview with David Marchese, Dunham remarks on how her early experiences with sexual assault infiltrated her desire, and subsequent shame for BDSM sex:

“There was something about recreating a situation I had been in not by choice, with some measure of what appeared to be my own free will, that somehow made me think that if I executed it right, I could erase the thing that happened to me before. And maybe I will even be loved for my ability to perform well in this kind of dynamic.”

To sensitively extrapolate, this quote could also describe Dunham’s operating approach to artmaking, in which she lifts and reupholsters her lived experiences under her precise written and directorial control, often casting herself as a fictionalized, mirrored figure. This is a self-portrait. By revisiting situations where Dunham may have felt that she lacked control, and developing them into something beautiful or comedic or, at least, in her own image, she can canonize her artful retelling instead of the memory. While this approach has yielded some of the most important works of our generation, Famesick does not suggest that this self-excavation is cathartic. Artmaking can be therapeutic, but it isn’t a substitute for therapy, and Famesick’s chapters are littered with anecdotes of the loss it took to get there – the impact on her family, failures in romantic partnerships and friendships, and, as the title suggests, her health. “The saddest thing looking back was the idea that I thought at the other end of it, there might be something that resembled love,” Dunham told The New York Times.

When I contrast her fictional projects with the memoir, I continue to follow the cycle of self-portraiture as Dunham reinvestigates her past to pen new conclusions. The memoir is gracious to those who have hurt her, and self-critical, even if it’s impossible to be completely unbiased when centering yourself in your own story. In a later chapter, Dunham recounts a conversation with Bruce Springsteen, where he shares advice for writing a memoir: “You do not have to tell the whole truth. You just have to show them how your mind works.”

Being a reliable narrator means much less to me than being a brilliant storyteller. I suppose this is the same with Dunham; after all, this is art we are talking about. I am reminded of my favourite Girls episode, “American Bitch1,” where a disgraced writer (played by Matthew Rhys) tells Hannah that she is not a journalist; she is a writer. There is a difference, and he intends for this distinction to be a compliment. The former’s primary concern is to tell the truth, while the latter’s role is to tell their truth.

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One full year and five days after the release of Tiny Furniture, another native New Yorker mounted a self-portrait. In Lady Gaga’s “Marry The Night: The Prelude Pathétique,” the artist advocates for the prioritization of artistic portrayal over facts. In the music video interlude, Gaga states:

“When I look back on my life, it’s not that I don’t want to see things exactly as they happened, it’s just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way. And truthfully, the lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it.”

To be clear, Gaga’s artistic output is much more closely linked to fantasy and self-mythologization than Dunham’s, and I’d never characterize Dunham’s memoir as “the lie of it all,” even though it is a phrase I’d likely hiss over brunch with friends. But there is a connection to their approach to self-portraiture. The singer even goes so far as to link her retelling to the art of painting itself, the act of brushing past and erasing out the past in favour of a narrative that is uniquely her own and, therefore, beautiful:

“It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes, and make it beautiful again. It’s not that l’ve been dishonest, it’s just that I loathe reality.”

I see this fixation of beauty related to Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, how the troubling body horror that exists within her canvas rarely disrupts her alluring facecard. It is easy to surmise that Gaga has created the reality she now lives in, one that she willed into existence through a commitment to her artistic persona. The fame she parodied in her early career on projects like The Fame and The Fame Monster has now become her life; her role as Ally in A Star Is Born feels closer to memoir than cosplay. In doing so, Gaga has become the woman in the trick mirror, stepping through the canvas she has painted and trapping herself in the art piece like Dorian Gray, blurring the lines between where reality ends and fiction begins. This is true for many pop stars, their persona fusing with their private selves, and we, the audience, are unable to tell the difference.

On Lady Gaga’s latest concert tour, The Mayhem Ball – which is structured around five arias and lasts over two and a half hours – the artist fictionalizes the dark underbelly of her career as a theatrical gothic, one where two Gagas (the real one outside of the mirror and the superstar trapped within it) must battle to the finish, pirouetting through hit after hit after dance after dance. Despite the outsized production and dramatic stakes, the ball achieves a remarkable autobiographical sentiment, nodding to her real-life injuries, her romantic hardships, and her early success with subtle allusion. Much like the real singer, the dueling Gagas on the concert stage undergo rebirth and madness in pursuit of artistic success. What is lost is her sanity in the end; famesick by a different prognosis.

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When I saw Lady Gaga at Madison Square Garden a month ago, the superstar closed her set with the best song on Mayhem, “How Bad Do U Want Me,” a Swiftian-Antonoff-era inspired candy-coated-pop ballad in which a love interest must decide between two Gagas — the ‘bad’ girl or the good girl; the public, mania-inducing superstar or the private introvert. “The good girl of your dreams is mad you’re loving me.” The singer performs this as an encore, live-streaming from her backstage dressing room, de-dragging herself as she strips away her makeup and wig before returning to the stadium as a blank canvas of a woman to feast on her applause. In the end, she breaks the trick mirror, collapsing both ‘girls’ into one with the catchy refrain: “That girl in your head ain’t real, how bad do you want me for real?” As effective as this ridding of identity may be, especially at the end of a lengthy concert performance, it is ultimately still a part of the performance of Gaga and her career-long self-portrait of interrogating fame. We see her the way she has reconstituted herself: as both artist and artist statement, and, ultimately, as a lady.

When someone stays suspended in their trick mirror for too long, they lose the ability to escape their own delusions. Some of the most prevailing art depicts this. Don Draper of Mad Men is revealed to be a fraud and nearly loses everything. In Industry, when Harper Stern is exposed for fabricating her college transcript to land a job at Pierpoint, her firing spirals her into a loss of identity. Even Hannah Montana had to take off that wig before getting lost in the sauce of her own trick mirror.

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A few days ago, I suffered through the bustling bodies of Times Square to The Winter Garden Theatre and saw Death of a Salesman for the first time. In the production, which featured stellar performances from Laurie Metcalf, Christopher Abbott2, and Jack Falahee, Nathan Lane portrays the titular salesman, Willy Loman, an aging father of two wayward but gregarious sons and husband to a devoted wife – a collective stand-in of the broken American dream.

When we encounter Loman, already babbling, disgruntled, and delirious within the first act, he is bent on remaining in the warped fantasy of his successful salesman youth, “when the going was good,” and he could provide for his family. But that is no longer the reality; as the business has changed, his sales have failed to keep up, sending him into a steadfast denial that threatens the stability of everything he has worked for. We get the sense that Loman’s mental fortitude is both dependent on and destroyed by his determination to remain in this fantasy: the earned gleam of big deals and the affirmative, hearty pats on the back from other executives at the firm that he relives in a delusional fever. The crux of the play teeters between his ability to face reality and staying suspended in his self-portrait. In the end, his refusal to break free from the trick mirror leads to his demise. Everyone suffers for it.

But why is it that Loman’s investment in self-portraiture is destructive, while Kahlo’s is affirming, and Dunham’s is productive? Why is it that Loman’s reality never conforms to the vision he has for himself, while Gaga’s portrait ultimately paints a path for who she is to become?

The reflection in the trick mirror becomes starker, more interrogative when the subject stands next to it. You can pick apart the differences. It’s a jarring moment of truth when you stare at your own fabrication – whether you believe it to be one or not – and confront the portrait for gaps in the reflection. What happens when you truly look at it yourself?

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Two weeks ago, in the low Californian desert, the damp night rolled in. The dry heat of the day had long clocked out, giving way to the cold dark, marking its entry with the frigid ramble of dust storms. It was the second night of the first weekend of Coachella, and everyone was curious as to just what Justin Bieber would perform. The singer recently sold his catalogue for $200 million, with hits like “Baby” and “Beauty and a Beat” that painted him as the biggest heartthrob on the planet, and an emblem for boyhood. Would he even touch his older hits at all, or would the performance, with the estimated payout of $10 million, be geared towards his more recent, critically acclaimed projects SWAG 1 and SWAG 2?

Fourteen songs into his performance, Bieber retrieved a laptop that live-streamed his face back to the audience through an inspective fisheye lens. He clicked through YouTube and hit play, karaokeing over tracks from his youth like “Baby” and “Favorite Girl” with the crowd, some songs he had not performed since 2013. Like Dunham recounting her experiences directing Tiny Furniture and the show Industry in Famesick, here was an artist revisiting and reconstituting his past work with new memories. The framing of Bieber encountering the early YouTube videos that catapulted him to success through the reflective mirror of a MacBook was extended through the hundreds of thousands of fans who live-streamed the performance through their own device – a canvas within a canvas within a canvas. The effect was that he was leaving the frame to sit in the audience with his fans, regarding a past creation with minimal narration. To finally acknowledge his reflection was artful enough.

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Like a savvy hooker, the listening bar in Ebisu demands its yen upfront. Its feline maître d ‘, if you can call her that in Japan, firmly wedges herself in the corridor that separates me from the rest of the bar and motions my attention towards a wooden clipboard in her hand. In New York, I am used to a gatekeeper with a clipboard: the PR girlie drunk off power standing outside the club to check if “you’re on the list” before giving the bouncer a sly nod. But tonight, the gatekeeper’s objective is the opposite of publicity; it’s discretion. She holds up the clipboard for me to read the rules, which are written in both Japanese and English with helpful pictures to avoid misinterpretation: whispers only, no photography, and indoor smoking is permitted. She is polite, but firm; she is firm but also fair, and after I nod, enthusiastically consenting to the establishment’s order of operations, she guides me to a seat at the bar with a sudden warmth that dissolves the frank business of the corridor into thin air.

Tonight, the bar’s mahogany caverns are swaddled with the usual crowd: tailored grey suits hang from Japanese businessmen who swap sips of whisky with pulls from cigars in blissful solitude, sixth dates replace define-the-relationship conversations with convivial head bobs to the music, the odd white guy – Australian or Austrian or Welsh or Dutch – Shazams each track as he glugs back highballs under the bar’s amber lights, me, returning to the bar after a year of distance, and, Takeshi, a few seats over, a fifty-seven-year-old movie executive and a regular at this particular listening bar.

Takeshi hasn’t seen me yet. Next to him, in the whispers of conversation, sits a tanned woman roughly half his age. Her black curls bouquet into a messy bun that she re-arranges every now and then with her left hand. Her engagement ring winks at me, taunting the room, and I imagine that she wears the same sense of wonder in her face that I must have when I entered the bar a year ago. But this I can never truly determine, as she has turned herself to face Takeshi, and all I can see is the back of her head.

In front of her is a Guinness and a shallow bowl of chocolate-covered espresso beans, and, spread out across from Takeshi is his usual fare: a ziplock bag with three cigars, a glass bottle of Tansan, a bottle of the French liqueur Lejay Cassis next to a duet of whisky bottles – Japanese and Tennessee, respectively – a tall, bulbous drinking glass with small cubes of ice at its basin, a spray bottle of some sort, and a pale saucer fixed with wedges of lemon. Takeshi also has a small leather bag on the bar counter in front of him, which must be new – Prada, I believe – but I don’t strain, because it would be rude to stare.

Barry White’s voice on wax reminds me why I am here: the music. With the discouragement of chatter and the fear of being scorned for using my phone, my senses attune to the present. The DJ – or ‘selector’ as they are often called in listening bars (and Jamaican dancehall songs) – is behind the bar, just to the right of the three other bartenders, carefully inspecting a shelf of what must be thousands of records before carefully pulling one from its sleeve, queuing up a single song, and placing the record’s artwork under a torched spotlight for display. He does this over and over throughout the evening, this slow inspection and selection, a sonic creation that yields deep cuts from Ryo Fukui, George Benson, Björk, and plenty of others whom I have not heard before.

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Tonight’s selector, dressed in a black henley and a Kangol hat that I assume is worn without the awareness of the JFK Jr. style frenzy in the West, plays a song from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and then a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion track. It’s easy to believe that he’s just playing for himself, and perhaps he mostly is, but then he snipes a glance at a Japanese woman with a pixie cut, cloaked in white cashmere, nodding, as she ashes a dart, and I remember something that Takeshi told me that last time, that the selector – who rotates with the rest of the behind-the-bar staff to DJ one night of the week and bartend the remainder – is actively watching, reading cues, and making subtle adjustments to his selections the entire night. I didn’t believe him until that night, my first night where Takeshi acted as my sherpa, the DJ – a stoic Japanese-Pete-Wentz-type who is relegated to making drinks tonight – played Bruce Springsteen, and paused after placing the record artwork on display to smile at Takeshi, knowing Bruce was his favourite. It’s fascinating, in an environment that discourages direct forms of communication – talking, texting, and social media – that people can be read so easily. The selector obviously takes no requests, but in a way, a good DJ always is; he’s observing.

I order a mojito and dark chocolate because what the heck. I settle into a docile submission, allowing the songs to come and go. The selector and his curation begin to feel like a courtship. This is a counter to how music is experienced today, which is to say that it is: anti-algorithm. It is similar in the sense that I suppose the selector is also reading cues and serving me what I will perhaps enjoy, but he also could quite possibly not give a fuck, putting more weight into his own individual taste than what he thinks I, and the rest of the bar, will like. And he’s right for that, because what do we know? He’s the man with the wax.

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There has been significant discussion on the increased importance of taste and how it is the only thing that artificial intelligence cannot replace. If you follow this logic, it’s easy to see why ‘good taste’ is a valuable resource that people will pay tremendous amounts of money for, with companies hiring taste consultants like , writer and host of the popular How Long Gone podcast, to inform their business decisions. On his website, which displays a roster of culturally fluent clients such as J. Crew, Balenciaga, New Balance, and Thom Browne, Black notes that:

“He’s right at the heart of American culture. He’s the conduit between the worlds of luxury, the arts, entertainment, the media, and society. The bridge between the high and the low; the very high and the very low. He can tell you everything you need to know about the way we live now. He can introduce you to everyone you need to meet. He’ll help you speak to any audience you wish to.”

Some companies are even bringing these ‘taste consultants’ in-house, with Depop recently hiring fashion editor and stylist as its in-house trends spokesperson. In a press release, Depop stated that Karefa-Johnson “will collaborate with the team on identifying and predicting emerging trends through qualitative & quantitative Depop data and cultural moments before it hits the masses.”

Years ago, upstairs in an LES office building, I popped a squat next to a collection of the city’s writers and artists to hear deliver her thesis on something she called the taste economy. “For the past 10 years, taste couldn’t be monetized. Soon it will be one of the only things that can.” Alioto argued that magazines like GQ and Vogue were the original ‘containers’ of taste, where an editor would curate across the culture they deemed to be the most important, be it fashion, film, sports, or the arts, and a reader would buy a magazine, essentially opting into this cultural exchange. While in Tokyo, I visited one of my favourite bookstores and stocked up on Japanese lifestyle magazines like BRUTUS and POPEYE, still ripe with cultural potency1. But, as publishing power wanes in the West, tastemakers have become the vessels of cultural discovery – human custodians of culture. Alioto expands on her thesis in Dirt:

“AI produces a lot of stuff, but it lacks brand containers. The more stuff AI produces, the more media platforms will be necessary to curate what is worth paying attention to, whether that curation is top down (editors) or bottom up (UGC).

In business, there is this idea of the moat: the advantage that one business has over their competitors. If the blockchain and AI take hold, those moats will no longer be data and content creation. Which seems like a bad thing–but what’s left? From my perspective as a nascent entrepreneur, future moats fall into three broad categories: proprietary technology, supply chain innovations, and media that can’t be replaced by AI because it comes from a strong POV (taste).

Look around, everyone is trying to be a media company.”

While I don’t believe this particular selector in Ebisu fashions himself as ‘a media company,’ I can trace the dotted line from Alioto’s thesis back to this listening bar. When much of music consumption is governed by phantom powers that can be purchased, such as TikTok algorithms and Spotify discovery playlists, it can feel like we are not being exposed to the best music, but rather, the music that makes itself the easiest to be consumed. True discovery, informed by someone whose taste you trust, is rare. The writer and musician explores this in an explosive piece, “Fake Fans,” which investigates the marketing agency Chaotic Good, an agency behind the powerful (fake) fan pages that help musicians go viral and expand their audience. The marketing agency has developed ‘fan campaigns’ for artists such as Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes, but more surprisingly, emerging artisans of taste such as Geese, Oklou, Mk.gee, and Laufey. Hearing new music in real time from the careful hands of tonight’s curator feels refreshingly romantic. It’s the sonic equivalent of meeting a lover on a whim or via a meet-cute, rather than on an algorithm-controlled dating app.

The ephemeral nature of listening to music in a listening bar is counter to how we consume art today. Now, when I hear a song I like, there is often an ID tag that nudges me to add it to Spotify. Shazam links directly to the streaming service of your choice. The aspect of discovering a new song is immediately tied to saving it and owning it, as if we need to attach it to ourselves to love it. At the listening bar, it’s bad manners to Shazam, and even as I write down some of the songs I enjoy in my notebook, it feels like copying someone else’s work. Instead, I stay in the present, letting the song come and go, enjoying it in the moment, and moving on immediately as a new song enters, much like a summer fling. In his book The Agony of Eros, the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that the contemporary desire to ‘own’ our lover is what annihilates the potential for real love. I think of this, pop a chocolate-covered espresso bean into the wells of my mouth, and allow a song to love and leave me.

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The songs tonight are separate but somehow related. They chime together in a mangled tapestry, a quilt where its patchwork appears distinct up close, but is holistically congruent from far away. The jolt of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out2” next to Ethiopian jazz demands my attention. I cannot listen on autopilot. Even Takeshi and his excitable-tourist -of -the-night pause to listen. (At this point, I’ve accepted that she has his attention for the evening and have long found companionship with the music). So much of music today asks you to only hear it, but not actually listen. And maybe it is because some artists simply have nothing to say beyond their attractive aesthetic veneer. Harry Styles’ latest album, Disco All The Time. Kiss Occasionally, is well-produced, but is melodic Trazodone: empty in message, with a hollow enough ambiance to fill any room or, more lucratively, playlist. I enjoy the album, “Carla’s Song” and “Season 2 Weight Loss” specifically, but am left with no deeper understanding of just who Styles is as an artist. I don’t feel inhabited by his music the same way I do tonight, undistracted, in this music bar. Similarly, despite the talents of its individual members, KATSEYE continues to make AI-slop music that sounds as if the Wingdings font were dictated orally. The global girl groups’ latest songs, “Gnarly” and “PINKY UP,” are fun to listen to (and dance to) but cater more to the TikTok feed than human comprehension. When the artists of today have begun to engineer their sound to game the algorithms that distribute it, we end up with music that is so concerned with how it will be consumed – its own performance and cooperation – that it runs the risk of being passive. Streaming has changed the way television shows are designed, with shows now created with the expectation that the audience is multi-tasking, leading to a loss of nuance and repetitive, explanatory dialogue in case you missed something while texting. Modern music is approaching a similar fate; like the wildly streamed Netflix’s Emily in Paris, you can play without really listening or engaging, and somehow always have your finger on what is going on.

At certain points in the evening, the selector takes a break from the record player to turn on the projector, appealing to more senses than one, to cast a live performance. Tonight, he plays a clip of Diana Ross performing in Central Park in 1983, and the whole bar’s neck cranes upwards to catch the fiery diva sing “Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” A crowd of eight hundred thousand teemed in the park, all dancing and singing as Ross cascaded spritely across the stage, donning a bedazzled, crimson, caped catsuit. It’s a New York I have never lived in but somehow remember. Suddenly, the skies opened up, finally giving way to a summer thunderstorm, pelting the singer and her fans in a vicious frenzy of rain. The legend, whose performance has been immortalized in this clip and who has the entire listening bar in Ebisu’s attention – the bartenders no longer making beverages and their patrons no longer drinking – is unflappable, treating the harsh elements as part of her theatre, the powerful gust of winds turning her cape into angel wings. She laughs. “It took me a lifetime to get here,” Ross beams while on the stage. “I’m not going anywhere!”

It is at this moment that I look in Takeshi’s direction and realize that he is gone, leaving the tourist to herself and leaving Diana Ross to me. The room finds its balance again as the selector quiets the projector, loading up the next record, and the bartender fractures my gaze, breaking my focus, and speaks in a devastatingly crisp tone that cuts tenderly above the music, “Can I get you anything else?”

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LOOSEY is a bi-weekly newsletter about culture, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

More LOOSEY on music:

Finally, with respect to ‘the taste economy,’ and the need for cultural containers, I have prepared a list of recommendations should you ever find yourself in Tokyo. Below are my favourite spots across design, food, shopping, and books, Takeshi not included:

Design and Art

• 21_21 Design Sight - stunning museum created by the architect Tadao Ando and the designer Issey Miyake. The museum is split between two buildings, and is cut across a rolling green lawn with sculpture work. When I went, there was an exhibit on soup (yes, soup!) and Issey Miyake’s colour selection.

• National Film Archive of Japan - a film lover’s dream. There is a permanent exhibit that walks you through the early origins of Japanese filmmaking, which captured Kabuki plays all the way up to Akira Kurosawa’s filmmaking triumph, wth his Venice Film Festival Golden Lion for Rashomon. The rotating exhibit was

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First, slowly, and then with an abrupt immediacy, I became acutely conscious of the music I put into my ears. Specifically, I became skeptical of the lyrics, fearful of the recording artist’s words. With a caution that approached superstition, I built fragile boundaries, attempting to avoid ‘sad music’ or, at least, listen to it sparingly.

Most of the time, I failed. To a specific type of music listener, avoiding ‘sad music’ is synonymous with avoiding ‘good music.’ This is something I had no intention of doing; while I believe that great art can be yielded from places other than sadness or an intense blue period, when I listen to some of the best albums of the past decade, I find that many of them are wrenched from the recording artist’s depression, loneliness, grief, or anger, emotions that I have no intention of occupying, but am transported to upon listening, regardless of the circumstances of my reality: Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters; Solange’s A Seat at The Table; Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell; Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN; Bon Iver’s I, I; Kelela’s Raven. Even Bad Bunny’s much-celebrated Debí Tirar Más Fotos is ultimately an album about mourning.

In the Scorsese-directed limited series Pretend It’s A City, Fran Lebowitz suggests that music is one of the world’s safest addictions. She refers to music as a sort of happy drug:

“Music makes people happier, and it doesn’t harm them. Most things that make you feel better are harmful. It’s very unusual. It’s like a drug that doesn’t kill you.”

I agree with this. The infectious levity of Christmas music in December, the communal shimmer of a big-hearted ballad at a wedding, and the colossal synths of house music at a crowded rave all spur feelings of euphoria, plucking me from the solitude of my thoughts and into a buoyant and warm emotionality.

But if music can make you happy, can the opposite also be true? Can listening to the hyper-specific illustrations of Audrey Hobert’s debut on pathetic desperation and loneliness make you feel pathetic, desperate, and lonely, the same way listening to Beyoncé’s Renaissance makes you feel like a god?

I love listening to all kinds of music, but frequently find that the songs I feel the most moved by could be classified as ‘sad.’ But I am not a sad person, clinically or vibes-wise, which is why, when listening to this sort of music, this ‘sad music,’ I can become disturbed. It can feel as though I am reliving a depressive episode that I thought I was completely over, its scenes flashing through my brain uncontrollably. Or worse: that I am inhabiting an anger or grief that is alien to me, that isn’t mine but is of the artist, somehow transferring itself to me via sonic possession. Have you ever had a dream where you were angry at someone, and then woke up and went through the day unreasonably mad at them? Kind of like that, but with music. Please tell me that I am not the only one.

Because of this, I try to stay away. But unfortunately, I can not – it’s just too good. And so, I listen with my walls up, not letting the music truly engulf me. I do this through a variety of bizarre techniques such as skipping words, as if the repetition of certain lyrics could curse my life, like when I belted out nearly every word of SZA’s ‘Kill Bill’ at her set in Primavera Barcelona but omitted the ruinous lines ‘would rather be in jail / hell than alone,’ or skipping some songs entirely on her SOS album – ‘Nobody Gets Me’ or ‘Special’ – out of fear that it will somehow haunt and soundtrack my life.

It’s beyond not wanting to be ‘low-vibration’ or something; it’s the fear of digesting an emotion that isn’t mine. It is possible to listen to music without internalizing it, but for me, that’s always been hard with good music. But: Does not wanting to feel the emotion of the artist mean I have strong boundaries, or does it mean that I am emotionally avoidant? Does being so easily absorbed by ‘sad music’ – immediately projecting my own experiences on the blue canvas drawn by the artist – mean I harbour unprocessed sadness? Or is that perhaps just how any human should feel? My superstition to avoid internalizing sad music is very Caribbean auntie-coded, I know, but that’s where I’m at. Research tells me that I am not the only one.

The researchers behind the study ‘Exploring the Impact of Music Preferences on Depressive Symptoms and Meaning in Life: A Network Analysis Approach’ conclude that there is a scientific link between a listener’s mood and the music they listen to:

While listening to sad music can be therapeutic for some, it also poses risks for individuals with tendencies toward rumination or severe depression. Repeated engagement can intensify depressive symptoms and reinforce negative emotional cycles, leading to hopelessness and a reduced sense of purpose… In contrast, happy music typically induces positive mood changes and promotes feelings of joy and excitement. Positive music listening is associated with various beneficial outcomes, including improved mood regulation, enhanced social connections, and increased motivation. In the context of depressive mood, listening to upbeat, happy music can act as a counterbalance to negative emotions, fostering a sense of light-heartedness that can encourage individuals to engage more fully with their surroundings and potentially discover new meanings in their daily lives.

With this knowledge, it could also be derived that the emotion of the song has a similar, if not increased, effect on the person who hears the ‘sad’ song the most, sometimes over and over again in the studio, with the added responsibility of singing it night after night on tour – the musician. When developing her third album, Radical Optimism, Dua Lipa was asked why she doesn’t include any of her ‘trauma’ in her music, like her contemporaries. The singer pushed back, remarking that writing a ‘happy’ song that unites is often harder to write than an isolating ‘sad’ one. Reflective of the study’s findings, Dua Lipa states that she does not want to perform sad songs each night and feel sad herself:

“I want to bring people joy. I don’t want to go on stage and cry every night. I want to feel good, and I want my audience to feel good.”

Radical Optimism sounds like an affirming vision of the life she’s manifested for herself. I mean, look at her life: she has a hot fiancé, an extremely popular newsletter and book club, can split the G, and is a professional-level vacationeer. I’m going to have to take her advice on this one.

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But still, I’m not obsessed with the binary the research suggests – that happy music makes you happy, and sad music makes you sad. I want to listen to James Blake without thinking he’s secretly making me depressed, or to play Tori Amos without feeling full of angst. There has to be a grey area for someone who wants to listen to Phoebe Bridgers or Summer Walker or Nina Simone – a chaotic, blunt rotation, but let me cook – and not feel heartbroken and taken for granted.

Which is why this study from Cell Press makes me feel slightly better. In the study, researchers exposed treatment-resistant depressed subjects to a mix of ‘sad’ and ‘happy’ classical music. What they found is that a listener’s mood is less tied to the emotional tenor of the song, but more to how they felt about the music:

The songs were a mix of sad tunes, such as Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, and more cheerful ones, such as the third movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But the emotional context of the songs did not affect the listeners’ mood. “The improvement in depressive symptoms was not linked to the emotion of the music itself, but to the patient’s level of musical enjoyment,” explains Sun. The subjective preference for a particular song did have a significant impact. In other words, what most determined whether a patient would be cheered up by song was not if it was a happy or sad song, but whether they liked it. “People have different levels of connection with music, which can significantly affect therapeutic outcomes,” the expert adds. “This highlights the importance of personalizing music therapy.”

This tracks better for me. Listening to music I don’t like irritates me, and I guess, makes me unhappy. This ties more closely with how I enjoy and consume other art forms. I feel satisfied after reaching the sad end to a well-written book (the devastating human truths illustrated in any of Toni Morrison’s novels, the bleak interiority of Ottessa Moshfegh’s ‘unlikable’ protagonists, or, more recently, the wrenching conclusion of Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds), but feel pissed off after finishing literary fiction that is stylish but emotionally empty. I feel worse after watching a bad romance (Wuthering Heights) than I do after watching a good but depressing film (The Zone of Interest). Horror is my favourite film genre1, and despite its haunting misfortune and dread, I leave the theatre not with fear but a new thrill for life. I guess that’s true for all great art, regardless of how happy or sad it is. Great art is life-affirming, and there’s nothing that affirms your life more than being reminded of your capacity to live, an experience profoundly marked by both happiness and sadness. This is also why bad art = death.

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With respect to music, I believe that its capacity for sadness comes down to the effectiveness of the artist and the receptivity (or fortitude lol) of the listener. All the artists that I have referenced are exceptional communicators, unlocking emotions in the listener not only through their lyricism but also through their delivery, the way they use their voice as an instrument. There are artists, like Robyn, who have become pioneers in disguising life’s most heartbreaking moments into dance floor hits. Her lyrics are sad if you listen, but the delivery and production are nothing short of uproarious. When I saw her perform her generational hit, ‘Dancing On My Own,’ at Brooklyn Paramount at the beginning of the year, I didn’t really know what emotion I felt other than alive. Conversely, when I listen to Cameron Winter’s ‘Drinking Age,’ – an artist I have yet to see live but need to – I understand less about the specifics of his fragmentary lyrics and more about how he is feeling. When the song ends, I’m left to wrench myself from the feelings he’s evoked in me and put a label on them myself. Good art does that, too.

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Last weekend, I went to FKA twigs’ Body High concert at Madison Square Garden. Her music is experimental and avant-garde, but still has the accessible touchpoints of pop and R&B that make it feel both otherworldly and inhabitable. She headed towards the end of her performance with her most popular song to date, ‘Cellophane,’ a hauntingly fragile and somber portrait of the hardships of her two-year engagement to the actor Robert Pattinson, a relationship that fell victim to vicious, racist attacks from Pattinson’s superfans who were angry that their “Twilight prince” would be in love with a black woman.

That night, over nineteen thousand people watched in the stadium as she laced through the song’s refrain – “They want to see us, want to see us alone. They want to see us, want to us apart” – and trailed up into the climactic chorus of: “And didn’t I do it for you? Why won’t you do it for me? When all I do is for you?” At the song’s final inflection, with her shoes kicked off and her dress stripped to the side in a symbolic shedding of the self, twigs began to cry, beautifully whimpering and piercing the arena with emotion as she skillfully wailed through the remainder of the ballad. Her tears could have been a temporary flash of harboured resentment, or joyful tears of survival that, seven years after the song’s initial release, she has been able to convert a period of sadness into a breakaway hit that made her dreams come true. I gazed out at the crowd, all bound together by her sonic spellwork, and chose to believe the latter.

“They’re hating. They’re waiting, and hoping I’m not enough,” she concluded, mic to lips. I recognized the broken tension in her voice and felt my own throat grow thick, but I could not tell if the emotion was coming or going. And then the song changed, and the lights came on.

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In the end, the game was not so hard to work out. Each player took turns constructing their own version of the future, and the vision that was the most irrefutable won. Not because it was the most honest, or the most commonly understood, or the most accurate, but because it was simply the most convincing. The most enduring. Painting an indestructible future was the game, and those who played pointed in opposite directions, expressively pushing a narrative, a mandate, and a promise that was predicated on the deflation and devaluation of the other. Crooked fingers punctured holes in some futures to point towards another. Such is the game of capital markets, short selling, and new ventures, and such is the game that Harper Stern is skilled at winning.

Within the first few moments of the season four finale of HBO’s Industry, we find Harper at the end of another hard-won game. She comes to us as an established short seller, having spent the entirety of the season constructing a narrative to devalue Tender – a nefarious, government-backed payments provider with its sights set on becoming a multinational bank.

Even though her prediction scores her multi-million dollar earnings, her prediction isn’t entirely based on facts. Though Tender’s balance sheet is revealed to be a fabrication, the timing of Harper’s success feels like a fluke. She committed to the short long before uncovering proof of duplicitous audits, and instead, she has relied on her usual toolkit: government lobbying, witness tampering, insider trading (Harper’s favourite!), and planting stories in the media. She spun the right story, rolled the dice, and won big. What started as a hunch, an idea – mere fiction! – turned into fact.

But the philosophy of betting on a business to fail, on exploiting the holes in its validity, is a cypher for the series. The characters of Industry are all constructions, desperate tryers who use fabrications to signal their potential, while others, and the market, place bets on them. Money is made that way. Paying for a promise. The show asks: can we invest in the potential of people, trade and short them like stocks, even if their parts are false?

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From the first season, we catch wind of Harper’s own fictions: the phony university transcript she uses to score a job at Pierpont, the fictionalized British investment bank where much of the show’s earlier seasons take place; her corporate persona that she learns to harden then soften depending on the audience or deal; her reptilian ability to shed whoever is no longer useful to her – who poses the biggest threat to her vision of the future. Over the seasons, we witness the degradation of the entire cast as they descend into shells to play the game, a hardening that is most apparent in Harper Stern, played by Myha’la, and Yasmin Kara-Hanani, played by Marisa Abela. While many of the characters of Industry fade away across seasons like America’s Next Top Model credit portraits, the two women remain, outlasting their counterparts through a mix of deception, self-destruction, and perseverance. They want to win the most, even if it often looks like they are losing.

When the show is operating at its best, Harper’s coldness feels explained — a trauma response to abandonment and an exterior molded from imposter syndrome. This all folds into her insatiable desire to win, whether it be executing a big trade before the stock market closes or hoodwinking investors on a short. But there are times when her characterization feels shallow. We never really get to witness the fruits of Harper’s labour. This season, we see that her wealth has upgraded her wardrobe with iconic caped suit skirts and black ostrich-feathered cocktail dresses. But we never get to see her really luxuriate or take pleasure in the riches she accrues. I don’t even know if she has hobbies. I’m unclear as to why she is playing so hard, and, a few episodes into the latest season, I want more interiority to understand what is guiding her aggressive propulsion. As the rest of the series became more colourful, with complicated new villains like Whitney Halberstram and Henry Muck, continued expansion into politics, and cross-continental investigations, it was odd to see Harper, the show’s protagonist, feel so secondary. At first glance, her ambition felt empty. But, at the season’s completion, I began to understand that perhaps empty ambition is the point.

How many people have you worked with for whom work is simply their whole life? Where their focus was simply on the next win, rather than what the win provided them? How many of those people are us? As I zoom out to compare Harper’s burned-out single-mindedness with real-life figures, her hollowness feels common. And in a well-dramatized season in which the showrunners have pushed the stakes fiercely across all metrics of storytelling – my favourite of the series so far – Harper’s empty ambition might be a characterization that is closer to fact than fiction, beyond anything else in the season.

When I interviewed the creators of Industry, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, in 2024, I left the conversation believing that the next season would move to New York to focus on the tech industry. I was wrong about the location, but, as it turns out, I was warm about the industry. Over 8,000 kilometres from London, across the sapphire waves of the Atlantic and the gridded vineyards of Napa, lies Silicon Valley. Named in the early 1970s for its dense concentration of silicon chip manufacturers that led to the technological booms of the global hardware and software industries, it’s also a wry metaphor for the area’s game of betting on plastic promises. The writer explores these fabrications and those who play the game in an essay for Harper’s (lol) called ‘Child’s Play.’

Kriss visits San Francisco to meet with a handful of startup founders. One of his subjects is Roy Lee, the 23-year-old founder of Cluely, which, at the time of Kriss’s reporting, was an ‘undetectable’ AI assistant that promises to give you real-time responses to questions, whether you’re in a meeting or on a date. It does this in over twelve languages. It has raised over $20 million as of June 2025, even though reports indicate that Roy has earned over $120 million during his short career. The only issue, as Kriss discovers, is that it doesn’t really work. When Kriss suggested that he use Cluely to help him interview Lee, the machine spat out the same circular loop of conversations:

I started to worry that I would be trapped in this conversation forever, constantly repeating the machine’s words back to it as it pretended to be me. I told Roy that I wasn’t sure this was particularly useful. This seemed to confuse him. He asked, “I mean, what would you have wanted it to say?”

I found it strange that Roy couldn’t see the glaring contradiction in his own project. Here was someone who reacted very violently to anyone who tried to tell him what to do. At the same time, his grand contribution to the world was a piece of software that told people what to do.

It’s hard to finish the essay and not feel pity for Lee. Kriss’s characterizations of him aren’t unkind, but they’re not generous either. Here is a founder who, like Harper, sleeps at his office, doesn’t have much of a social life, and has seemingly put everything into a business in which its operations are… unclear. Lee says that 80% of the people who meet him don’t like him, and his social interactions, as captured in the essay, appear mechanical and hollow. Kriss describes this Silicon Valley personality trait as ‘agentic.’

An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it.

There is something human about using your free will. About taking action. It’s a quality that Harper, Yasmin, Whitney, and Roy Lee all have. You probably have it, too. But what good is will when it’s not connected to purpose? What good is ambition if its genesis is not authentic? When that will is put behind something fabricated, the output isn’t human at all – it’s robotic. These ‘agentic’ people have been able to will something into existence from nothing. Or at least, something worth a pretty penny. There is perhaps nothing more human than creation, but why is it that in cases like these, it feels the opposite?

I am fascinated by stories of ambition. People who had the will to bet on something big that no one else could see. I watch old interviews of Lady Gaga, how she knew she was going to be famous before anyone knew her name, and draw a line to Timothée Chalamet’s speech at last year’s SAG awards in which he declared he was in pursuit of greatness. Ambition with purpose is better than mere agency because there’s a destination in sight. The pursuit of endless wins signifies a lack, and lack can only produce more lack. Harper and the rest of her peers have the deadly mix of high confidence and low self-worth, a treacherous bind that keeps them playing the game, adjusting the score no matter how many rounds they win. How many times have you gotten something you’ve wanted, only to be thinking about what’s next shortly after? Ambition is great, but anything that pursues exponential growth at all costs is something else; it’s cancer.

In an earlier season of Industry, Harper has a conversation with another peer on the trading floor, one that further reveals the tenor of her empty ambition. Her peer says:

“Part of me always feels like I deserve the world. Part of me always feels kind of –”

“Less than?” Harper answers. She rolls the dice again, remaining in the game. At least for one final season. Lucky us.

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Thank you, HBO, for the advanced screeners of this season of Industry, and congratulations to Mickey and Konrad on the best season yet. The first sentence of this essay is from Cathy Horyn’s review of the most recent Prada show in The Cut. I loved it so much that I had to use it for LOOSEY.

LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing.

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At the 9:12 mark of last week’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, Bad Bunny steps through a cluster of sugarcane and into a family’s living room. He comes bearing gifts, handing his gold-plated Album of the Year trophy to the youngest member of the family — a boy. The boy grins in delight as the camera lurches in for a close-up, all but eclipsing the family’s television screen in the background, which is playing the actual footage of Bad Bunny accepting the award just a week prior at the Grammys. I learned later that the awarded child was a five-year-old actor and model named Lincoln Fox, cast as a young Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio before he became the prolific Bad Bunny, watching the award show as a hopeful child. Within the multi-layered theatre of his Super Bowl performance, this scene was meant to symbolically nod to a “dream big” moment fit for the Marty Supreme press run. But those who are familiar with the way the Super Bowl and public spectacles like it function are aware that there are often two narratives at play. The first is what actually happened and the artist’s intention, while the second is how the spectacle is interpreted, synthesized, and discussed within culture. How the two converge, through accuracy and analysis, largely amounts to a wider discourse, no longer owned by the artist and, instead, shepherded by the public. Or whoever has the largest platform.

For a few minutes, after Bad Bunny’s historic performance wrapped, the prevailing narrative was not that he had handed the trophy to an actor playing his younger self, but that he instead gifted it to Liam Ramos, the five-year-old boy savagely detained by ICE in Minneapolis. This short-lived theory was plausible: the boys are the same age, look similar, and the angle of the Super Bowl close-up strangely mirrored the angle of the widely shared image of Ramos at the time of his detainment. But how fast the theory proliferated, at a scale and velocity that outpaced some of the more substantive and artistically impressive elements of Bad Bunny’s performance, is reflective of a larger cultural expectation at hand. Today, in a time where trust in the government and legacy media institutions is at a historic low, audiences are hungry for the largest vehicles in entertainment to platform a political narrative, even when there might not actually be one.

Americans who say they have a “great deal” of trust in traditional media – think legacy newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post – have fallen to an all-time low of 28%. This lack of trust is experienced across all voting demographics, with Gallup reporting that “Republicans’ trust plummeted to 8%, Democrats’ trust declined to 51%, and independents’ trust remains at 27%, showing widespread media skepticism.” From a capacity perspective, these organizations are resource-constrained, some no longer having the infrastructure needed to report and bring geopolitical news to the public. Just last week, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post cut over 300 journalism jobs. Among the 30% of the local and international news teams axed, a war journalist in the middle of a war zone was fired. With these legacy institutions losing their audience’s trust but also their operating infrastructure, they are being eaten alive from both the inside and out. The research indicates that the American population is more likely to trust individual opinion leaders or journalists than legacy institutions, which explains why a Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper, or Joe Budden presidential endorsement is more powerful than one from The New York Times. Public figures like these engage audiences with a perceived authenticity foreign to the accredited media because of their social media platforms, which simultaneously increases scale without sacrificing intimacy. It also translates to why public figures like Bad Bunny, who shape culture and entertainment, are looked to for a perspective on today’s politics. Still, is the frenzied dissection of every entertainer’s actions for political commentary, be it symbolic or direct, necessary? And moreover, is it even effective?

Regarding Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, I do believe the Liam Ramos misattribution comes from a well-intentioned place. At a time when families are being torn apart by ICE agents, and the immigrant community, and those brave enough to support them, are being murdered, there was a lot of curiosity as to how Bad Bunny, the only entertainer to perform at the Super Bowl entirely in Spanish, would handle it. Bad Bunny has gone to great lengths to protect his fans from ICE, including hosting a music residency in Puerto Rico and not having any other concert stops in America to prevent a potential ICE raid. Throughout his performance, in a way that was artful yet direct, Bad Bunny threaded a narrative on the importance of community and migration in one of the most powerful Halftime Show finishes ever, a love letter to the immigrants of America, and a message of hope for all. He delivered.

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Several winners in music’s biggest night, otherwise known as the Grammys, spoke out in defense of immigrants when accepting their awards, from Kehlani to Olivia Dean to Billie Eilish. These messages were clear, rather than shrouded in aesthetic veneer, with the artists addressing the political climate effectively and, in some cases, through personal narrative.

Still, there were moments when the message was lost amid artistic symbolism. Within the field of celebrity and entertainment, an endorsement can, at times, feel hollow. That evening at the Grammys, the frontman of The Bleachers and music producer juggernaut Jack Antonoff became the fourth person in history to be awarded in all of the Big Four categories, completing this achievement with a Record of the Year win for Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s ‘Luther.’ Like many celebrities who took to the red carpet that evening, Antonoff was wearing an “ICE OUT” pin to symbolize his opposition to the violent anti-immigration enforcement seen across the United States. Stars such as Joni Mitchell, Justin Bieber, and Bon Iver also donned the pin. Yet, when asked about his pin, Antonoff embarrassingly had nothing to say. I do not know Antonoff personally. I am an admirer of his achievements in developing a generational sound and have held a positive impression of his public appearances thus far, so I’m willing to chalk up his silence to nerves or, perhaps, too good a hit of that California kush, but this brief red carpet blunder is an example of how artistic expression can fail. How can symbols like the “ICE OUT” pin speak for us when the wearer has no teeth? Maybe that is the magic of art and entertainment, that it can speak when we can’t. More generously, when words fail, art steps in. But in times like these, we should expect more. And maybe it’s okay if that ‘more’ doesn’t only come from the world of entertainment.

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I was parsing through the Epstein emails, searching for the names of my opps as one does, when I came across this 2014 exchange from Jes Staley, the former CEO of Barclays:

The ‘São Paulo’ incident Staley refers to in his email concerns the “Não vai ter Copa” protests in reaction to the Brazilian government investing billions into hosting the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The civilians of São Paulo were infuriated by the lack of investment in schools and hospitals, while the government was pouring money into entertainment. Subway workers went on strike two days before the games, freezing transportation in the city, and riots broke out in the streets with violence and tear gas. To quell the unrest, the government conceded, enacting an emergency medical program and hiring thousands of doctors to help staff local clinics. They also reduced a previously increased subway fare by 20 cents. The contrast Staley draws is still relevant over a decade later. In the West, we can become so preoccupied with the culture war and satisfied with symbolic representation that we are losing the actual war on the home front. The foresight of Staley to specifically name Jay-Z, who is now in charge of producing the Apple Music Half Time show, speaks to how we can sometimes see entertainment as the sole war to be won, rather than just a mini battle, working in conjunction with a bigger offense, for what needs to be upheld.

The developing reaction to the release of the Epstein files is important to watch. Its muted outrage and headlines so far confirm the relationship between politics and entertainment. The neural network between the two factions – the entertainers and the audience – is blunted on both ends. On one end, some of today’s most vocal public figures have not mentioned the horrific findings within the released emails, materials that point to an alleged system of childhood sexual assault and the suggestion that the U.S. Department of Justice is complicit in its attempts to cover it up. I am not of the camp that believes we need a celebrity spokesperson for every single issue, but it is odd that a universally bad thing, like sex trafficking underage girls, with some of the emails alluding to activity with babies young enough to need pacifiers, has gotten little response from the prevailing celebrity class. A class that is so acutely aware of the modern expectation to ‘speak out.’ Platforming this should be an easy lay-up for any public figure seeking goodwill. On the opposite end, it’s even more disturbing that a significant amount of the public does not know about the details of the files, or the fact that the President of the United States is the most named person in the files. There could be many reasons for this, one being that it requires actual reading, but Clinton had an affair, and it was global news. What is being suggested in the emails is inarguably worse, and yet the coverage and subsequent outrage have been on the quiet side. Why is that?

I did some scratch analysis and looked at the Google Trends search terms to compare Bad Bunny’s search history to the Epstein files, as his Super Bowl performance coincided with the time of the files’ release, and found that Bad Bunny’s search interest spiked while the Epstein files did not. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as Bad Bunny is a global superstar who just performed at the Super Bowl, and Jeffrey Epstein is only just becoming a household name. Interestingly enough, three of the top search queries for Bad Bunny were questions asking if he burned the American flag.

Still, this points to a more worrisome conclusion that I have about entertainment’s ability to serve as a container for politics, which is that we have been groomed to only digest information when it is clipped, polished, and presented to us as a form of entertainment. I think about how people are making connections to Ghislaine Maxwell through Yasmin Kara-Hanani’s narrative arc on HBO’s Industry, or Ukraine’s skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych, earning headlines for being disqualified for wearing a helmet featuring the Ukrainian athletes who died in the war. Will people only care about the Epstein files once it’s inevitably adapted into a Ryan Murphy limited series? If that’s the case, I already have my pick on who to play Pam Bondi, and I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.

While some of our favourite artists have been silent on the ICE raids, Bruce Springsteen has not. In his new song “The Streets of Minneapolis,” the singer offers solidarity with the city, scorns the ICE agents, and memorializes those who have died by name. For Springsteen, an artist whose catalogue is synonymous with American values, this feels important. It’s a deliberate fusion of modern-day progressive ideals with “American tradition,” two things that don’t need to sit on opposite ends but have often been weaponized against each other.

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Part of the wonderful aspects of art and culture is its ability to capture and express ideas. Through it, we build empathy, discuss political ideology, and platform thinking that legacy institutions are not equipped or incentivized to speak on. I think about great works like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a book that is frequently banned in the United States, and its capacity to educate a diverse body of readers on the longstanding impacts of racism through its symbolism and prose. Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos is also powerful in its ability to weave a story about migration, gentrification, and the loss of cultural identity and still make that ass shake. I grew up very differently from both artists, and yet found so much that resonates in each of their individual works. I’m sure you do, too.

But Morrison is the best-selling and most awarded Black female novelist on the planet, and Bad Bunny is the world’s biggest pop star. We can’t hold all artists and entertainers to this standard. The efficacy of the political message relies on the talent of the artist and, unfortunately, not everyone has the range. As a public, we cannot be conditioned to think that all of those who create entertainment and art have the ability to heal the world. We must demand more from elsewhere.

The novelist Kurt Vonnegut has a quote that I think about every time I try to assess the role of art and entertainment in politics. His view is one of pessimism and defeat:

“During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

Although he may rightfully believe that the efforts of artists weren’t enough to stop the Vietnam War, I do think we have to fight hatred with whatever tools we’ve got. For some, that’s a song; for others, that’s a vote. For some, that’s legislation or a strike; for others, that’s a paintbrush or a Super Bowl halftime show performance. For me, today, it’s an essay.

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Thank you for reading. If it’s within your ability, please consider supporting the organizations below:

• Stand with Minnesota to support families impacted by ICE.

• Amica Center provides legal services for individuals to help navigate the immigration system in the U.S.

• International Rescue helps rebuild Gaza by providing aid to families in need.

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Happy Valentine’s Day! I am writing this newsletter on the longest commercial flight in the world – eighteen hours! – from Singapore to New York. When I told my friends that I was going to Singapore for work, they asked me what I was most excited about, and I told them that I was most looking forward to the flight. It’s not that I don’t love Singapore – I do, I lived there in 2019 on a long-term assignment, and believe that the taste of chili crab could heal the world – but there is something about a long-haul flight that feels ripe for reflection, writing, and reading. Oh, and sleep, too.

I am an only child, so keeping myself occupied has never been a challenge. I’m listening to Charli xcx’s new Wuthering Heights album while I write this, and have Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby for later. I have downloaded the first episode of The Pitt, but I probably won’t watch it. I’ve always been interested. Because time is fluid as I course through the sky, I am incapable of maintaining a schedule; the ‘optimize every day’ button in my head turns off. I lose track of time and submit completely to my interests.

Last year, two years into my newsletter journey, I announced that LOOSEY was a newsletter for interested people. Because interested people live interesting lives. In the past year, I have taken you and this newsletter on many long trips, to places like São Paulo and Seoul, to New York Fashion Week and Miami Art Basel. I’m curious where you take it. As LOOSEY turns three, on this day of love, I wanted to recap the highlights we’ve had together and cheers to what’s ahead ❤

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This Year’s Most Popular LOOSEYs – RANKED

1. 2026 Ins, Outs, and Predictions – The anticipation for this list grows every year, and it’s worth the hype because it’s incredibly fun to write, and even more hilarious to hear your responses. As a snobbish rule, I rarely publish lists on LOOSEY, but when I do, I try to pull different levers than my essays. It’s a different skill, one that is more voice-driven and, as a result, more comedic and dry. It’s evidently more accessible. I’m not surprised to see this one at the top. Oh, we love a laugh, chile.

2. Has Fan Theory Replaced Plot? ‘The White Lotus,’ ‘Severance’ and the Conspiracy Economy – I remember being nervous to publish this because it does offer some sharp critiques of beloved shows, shows that I love, too! I do think it’s important for audiences to clock how lazy television writing has become now that studios can rely on social media to fill in the gap. When shows are seemingly produced to be clipped and dumped on Instagram, I have to call it out.

3. Dressing the Surveillance Era: The American Promise of Palantir’s Sold Out Merch – I know that tech bros love wearing Yeezy and Patagonia, so this was a fascinating dive into the surveillance giant Palantir’s efforts to enter the lifestyle brand category with ‘streetwear’ that, surprisingly, seems to be working.

4. The MET’s Superfine, ‘Sinners’, and the Cost of Living Forever – I was lucky enough to be invited to the MET’s press preview of ‘Superfine’ with LOOSEY, the exhibit coinciding with the MET Gala’s theme of Black Dandyism. It was an honour to be invited, but I honestly did not feel any imposter syndrome when entering a room stacked with star journalists from legacy publications like Vogue and GQ. I remember not knowing where to sit, and then, in a split second, deciding that I was to be seated right up front in one of the ‘reserved’ seats because if not me, then who? Don’t answer that question. I sat next to a gentleman who designed Prince’s blouse on the cover of Purple Rain and . I wrote about what I saw in the exhibit, the 2025 MET Gala, and legacy institutions’ vampiric tendency to feast on Black talent, with the help of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. I am tremendously grateful to the MET’s press team for the invite, and believe it’s a recognition of the growing influence of independent writers using platforms like Substack.

5. Are Influencers Ready For The Warfare Economy? – Crazy that I just published this and it’s already in the Top Five of the year. This year, I became fascinated with how our frayed geopolitical landscape would impact how we present ourselves online, and the results were rather dystopian. Gas masks on TikTok Shop? Get ready with me for the Civil War!

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My Favourite LOOSEYs of the Past Year – UNRANKED because I love all my babies

• Tyler Mitchell Wants To Haunt You – I don’t like to say that I have a favourite essay of the year, but this is my favourite essay, perhaps tied with the above ‘MET Gala x Sinners’ essay, where I felt like I was writing at the height of my power, across a subject I care deeply about. In early 2020, right before the pandemic and a year before I moved to New York, I travelled from Toronto and saw Tyler Mitchell’s photography at the Aperture Foundation. Later that day, I saw him at the Essex Market and introduced myself. When I eventually moved to New York, I was given his photography book as a surprise by a close friend for my first birthday in the new city. Having the ability to interview him for LOOSEY about his show at Gagosian felt destined. Tyler was a generous interviewer, and I am proud of the form of the essay, how it blends art analysis with his candid responses.

• Do Dream Jobs Even Exist Anymore? – a meditation on whether you should ever make your passions your primary source of income. “Things I once enjoyed… just keep me employed” teas with a review of AppleTV’s The Studio.

• Would you be happier if you were a bit more stupid? – The Perks of Being Stupid and in Love, featuring analysis of Love Island, The Materialists, and Bonjour Tristesse. The perfect read for Valentine’s Day, I think!

• “This Isn’t Sex and the City” – my version of ‘party reporting,’ a dynamic Day in The Life during New York Fashion Week, featuring the always excellent Eckhaus Latta show, a surprise Audrey Hobert concert at the Cherry Lane Theater, and partying with Usher at a Ralph Lauren private event. Oh, and I wore a kilt.

• Hot Girls Don’t Geotag – the hottest thing someone can do is disappear. Take it from the baddies who are always overseas: Onijah Robinson, Solange, and Dua Lipa, all referenced in this essay.

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Fiction became more central to LOOSEY this year. This came to fruition, largely, through my serialized novella Come If You Want, a four-part comedic thriller about Palmer, an avoidant yet hopeful romantic who meets his match, Hank, a ventriloquist sock puppeteer, after being cosmically linked through a TikTok tarot card reader. It’s exciting to test the genre of fiction in the format of a newsletter and introduce new types of writing to LOOSEY. I am so grateful that you read along, and I am really thankful for , , , Amelia Dimoldenberg, , and for covering the novella and sharing the work with your audiences. It means a lot. More soon 🙂

In addition to the novella, I also wrote about the books I read this year and couldn’t stop thinking about. After being tapped by Service95 to write a companion essay to Dua Lipa’s September Book Club Pick, Percival Everett’s The Trees, I wrote about Everett, Toni Morrison, and the Black imagination for LOOSEY. Finally, to cap off the year, I channeled my inner #BookTok influencer (or is it #BookStack on here?) and reviewed the best books I read this year. If you’re looking for something good to read, consult this roundup.

Thanks a lot for reading along this year. I maintain that interested people live interesting lives, and LOOSEY is a newsletter for interested people. For people who are curious about how culture, art, politics, and technology are connected, and believe that a thoughtful read of these intersections can not only tell us about ourselves but also where we are going.

Happy Valentine’s Day. LOOSEY loves you. If I wrote something you enjoyed this year, please share my newsletter with someone you love. I have another banger lined up for you tomorrow, so stay tuned.

With love,

Brendon

LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

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How should a person be in 2026? My social media feed is telling me that I should be prepared. Between the onslaught of fancams featuring Hudson and Connor of the rapidly developing Heated Rivalry fame, I am being served something different amoung my usual cocktail of TikTok Shop pull-up bars and ring lights: warfare consumerism.

“Do you have a gas mask?” one online merchant asks me through the screen as she tries on a double-filtered face mask. An electronic police siren blares in the background as someone simulates a stabbing motion with a sharp spike, and then a closed pair of scissors for good measure, into the mask, their piercing stabs bouncing off the visor with dramatic effect. Impervious, the whole ordeal suggests.

“I actually use this for woodworking so things don’t fall in my eyes,” the merchant surgically adds, to establish a plausible deniability for why a regular civilian would need such a mask. “It’s also good for emergencies, though,” she adds after testifying to the mask’s proficiency in filtering out paint fumes. Paint fumes. Oh, I’m sure. The mask’s intended purpose – for defense in the event of civil unrest, tear gassing, police brutality – is betrayed by its headline, which is SEO-maxxxed to the gawds, rendered to reach anyone within a few key strokes of the contemporary affairs of today. It reads: Reusable Anti-Fog Toxic Face Mask, Full Face Respirator with Filter, Gas Dust Poison Protection. Cute, does it come in a matte black finish?

I toggle to the reviews and see that over 2,800 units have already been sold, with the majority of the ratings scoring five stars. One reviewer remarks, “I bought 2 for a ‘just in case’ situation. Having them gives me peace of mind.”

Other ads are less subtle. I swipe and see another placement for a similar gas mask, but this time the influencer-merchant voice-over is forthcoming enough to use the words ‘civil war’ without fear of TikTok algorithmic suppression. Another swipe and my final influencer-merchant, who seems cast from a Bama Rush pledge, sits in her car, orating her sales pitch in a perfect ‘Problem → Solution’ narrative arc to her front-facing camera. Her ring light winks at me through the reflection of her irises:

“As we all know, the world is in chaos right now, and it’s only going to get worse. So if China, Russia, North Korea finally decide to attack the United States, they are going to take one big thing from us: the U.S. Power Grid. We are going to be getting hit with EMPs that will take out electricity, our internet, wifi for months… and you will not be able to use your phone as that will eventually die out.”

An illustrative setup of The Problem that cues images of the post-apocalyptic isolation of the latest 28 Days Later film. The saleswoman reaches somewhere out of frame and returns with The Solution: a black plastic brick that she claims is the ‘strongest solar-powered powerbank on the market,’ equipped with a compass, wireless charging, LED lights, and a USB-C adapter. It’s waterproof and shockproof, offering peace of mind at $39.98, already reduced by 60%, and available with four interest-free payments via Klarna. I try to think of its application practically, and envision myself charging the solar powerbank in the middle of a sunny park in Brooklyn, holding my phone to the sky like I’m taking a selfie so I can boot up to send a text to a group chat or post on Substack in the middle of a civil war. And yet, predatory as this influencer’s talk track is, she’s not completely wrong. What she is describing has happened before. An electricity blockade is effectively what the Israel Electric Corporation enacted when it cut power to Gaza’s only power plant, blocking cellphone activity and preventing The Palestine Red Crescent from maintaining contact with Gazans in need of care.

It’s only January. A TikTok influencer, who also promotes knock-off Ugg boots and baby pink polyester workout sets, telling me to Get Ready With Them For Civil War seems a bit ridiculous and fear-mongering vibes. But, as I look down the barrel of the remaining eleven months of the year, calculating America’s unknown odds, I’m unwilling to rule anything out. In the past twelve months, the news cycle has ventured from a Veep-like absurdity to absolute horror, recently peaking with the killing of Renee Good at the hands of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis. The rest of 2026 has cut open; the future thrashing and vulnerable like a curtain fighting against the wind. It seems as though just about anything can happen. And, suddenly, a troupe of influencers promoting warfare consumer goods makes complete sense. The influencer economy has shifted from promoting unattainable aspirations to zeroing in on our greatest fears. It’s always our insecurities that are the most bankable.

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The U.S. government has also leveraged the influencer economy to service its defense agenda, most pointedly within the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s recruitment efforts. The Department of Homeland Security has reported that ICE has increased its ‘manpower’ by 120% in just four months. It now counts more than double the number of ICE agents, from 10,000 to 22,000, since its budget increased after the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Much of the recruitment campaign’s success is attributed to the agency’s online efforts, through advertisements placed on Spotify, Snapchat, and YouTube, as well as pre-roll ads on streamers like HBO Max and Hulu. As of early January, Spotify announced that it no longer allows ICE to run ads on its platform. The writer Brady Brickner-Wood details more in The New Yorker:

According to the internal document obtained by the Post, ICE hopes to target prospective hires through location-based marketing tactics like geofencing, a technology that allows the agency to send ads to the phones of people in specific locations, such as college campuses, gun and trade shows, military bases, and Nascar races. ICE has also allotted funds for right-wing influencers and streamers to promote hiring efforts, and flooded official Department of Homeland Security and ICE social-media feeds with memes. “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” one graphic posted to X and Instagram reads; another image shows a classic car parked on a beach with the header “America After 100 Million Deportations.”

Humour me and imagine how the agenda’s impact could scale if ICE focused beyond micro-influencers and shifted to celebrity talent. Suppose ICE begins to invest in the production of media and entertainment to add ‘patriotic’ deportation narratives to films and video games.

We’ve already seen the memes from the White House Instagram page that have generated high engagement. Similar to the surge in popularity for Palantir merchandise, there is a brand to be made out of nationalism. The industry of defense and warfare “exists to sell paranoia and a promise to fix it.” There is a thin line between posting social media assets and being a government asset. If the bag is big enough, your fave, too, might be seated next to Erika Kirk at Turning Point USA.

Where there’s smoke, there’s McKinsey, the consulting superpower that advises the U.S. government across the Department of Defense, Immigration Services (ICE), and Health. Rachel Goldstein, a New York-based strategy analyst, pointed out that McKinsey has hired their first-ever creator economy advisor. This senior company leader will focus on “creator strategy, and organizing events for the creator community in the Bay Area and beyond.” For now, it appears that this senior advisor’s focus will be on helping Fortune 500 companies design their long-term influencer strategy, but it’s not hard to see how these insights can scale back to the government’s defense agenda, already a multi-million dollar client for the consulting firm.

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Influencers create some of the most engaged content on the internet, earning a high degree of trust from their audience. When the mouths of influencers can be bought by political lobbyists, what happens to the feeds we watch every day? Maggie Severns expands on the influencer profile that has already received funding from political groups and how these tactics skirt disclosure agreements in The Wall Street Journal:

A camera-ready pack of Gen-Z social-media natives—many of whom were too young to vote when Trump announced his first run for office—are reaping the rewards. They don’t work for traditional news outlets and are thus unshackled from newsroom ethics rules, such as the typical ban on accepting gifts worth more than $25. They don’t have to follow the disclosure laws that apply to big-money super PACs or lobbyists. And they have large followings eager to hear pro-Trump views, a gold mine for those looking to sway both Washington and the public.

I wonder how long until we start seeing affiliate links and ShopMy lists stacked with civil war survival kits. Similar to beauty products and apparel, where influencers must disclose paid partnerships through the hashtags #ad or #paid, I believe that political content should be equipped with the appropriate disclosures if funding or incentives are provided. If I’m being generous, maybe it’s not a bad thing that influencers are being encouraged to discuss geopolitical issues. As the thought leaders for the new generation and the stars on the most-watched platforms today, there is an argument that this investment can bring attention and relevancy to politics, igniting interest beyond an influencer’s contracted talking points for supplemental research. But that’s just the optimist in me, proof that my New Year’s resolution of being ‘more positive’ has been kept. The 2025 cynic that still lives somewhere in me believes that this is something to pay attention to. Prepared. This year, that’s just how a person should be.

LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing.

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INS 🫡

• Turbulence, it is good to be reminded of your own mortality every now and again, preferably in upgraded seats. Turbulence is just the universe tugging on your wig; pay her no mind. Also, if this song came out now, the world would heal faster.

• Classical arts, Rosalia’s orchestral ‘Berghain’ was just the beginning. Opera, live theatre, sculpture works, literature, public architecture, oil paintings, and frescos. This will be the year that we return to craft and technique.

• Privacy, think private profiles, low follower counts, not being too accessible. Being a public figure, at the scale and speed one can become today, is an experience humans have not developed the anatomy for, and usually results in a lower quality of life. We now know this. More people are clocking that fame does not guarantee protection or capital. Going viral kind of sucks. Too much of ourselves is freely given without actually knowing what the exchange is. Soon, the greatest currency one can have is the coveting of oneself. Also, the concept of having a private profile is so chic because it’s like... ‘yes, introduce yourself and request access to me.’ Isn’t that just common courtesy?

• Using your calculator app to calculate the tip, because tipping well and with accuracy is sexy. ‘Showing your work’ in math class was a scam anyway; we should have been learning how to do our taxes (or at the club).

• Ranunculus, gorgeous flowers that are also poisonous. Give them to someone you love in an obsessive Phantom Thread kind of way, and I promise they’ll never ever leave you.

• Dictating to text, I still am a voice note household for the chosen few, but dictating to text is lowkey faster for the recipient to digest and makes me feel like Rita Skeeter.

• Antwerp, Dakar, and the Albanian Riviera for a holiday.

• Getting a new cellphone case or living room rug instead of changing your hair when you want a rebrand. I swear it has the same effect without the risk of looking chopped.

• Nala Sinephro’s The Smashing Machine soundtrack.

• John Steinbeck, I love The Grapes of Wrath, but East of Eden will be huge in 2026. What classic literature will you be reading?

• Art Basel Paris.

• “Doing It Tired,” a mindset that merges the grind of hustle/girl boss culture with the quiet acceptance of ‘locking in.’ Labour and hard work will continue to be valourized, but invisible labour that comes at the expense of rest will be what is exalted. In response to the question of “How do you do it all?” one will answer, “I did it tired.”

• The Ghanaian-British designer Palmwine IceCREAM.

• Horseback riding, it’s the Year of the Horse. Everyone should feel the tendons of a powerful beast between their legs one way or another.

  

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OUTS 🤨

• Partiful, listen, I love being invited to places – please keep inviting me to places – but I don’t like that on Partiful I have to lie and hit ‘attending’ to find out who else is invited and where the event is. Every Partiful notification feels like a threat, and I don’t want to have documented evidence that I was in the same room as some people, because I’ve seen what happened with the Epstein files. Seriously, look at your Partiful “mutuals” – I have never met half of these people! As an alternative, send a text message with a picture of hotel stationery where you have handwritten event details. This is both chic and personal and less likely to be sold to Palantir.

• The White Lotus casting announcements that aren’t Isaac Cole Powell and Alfre Woodard cast as his rich grandmother. In fact, where is The White Lotus with Black people? I need one that takes place in Jamaica post-hurricane. Actually, more on this in the PREDICTIONS section…

• That one Heirloom Tomato Leaf scented candles that y’all love to burn, I love the LOEWE and Flamingo Estate variety, but it’s run through now 🙁 and yes, Santal 26 is still out.

• Arugula, can we stop pretending? The bitter salad of The Discerning is red cabbage and endive. Fennel, too, if you’re feeling nasty.

• CGI animated films, we will see more animated films moving towards puppetry, traditional illustration, and even painted works in an effort to appear ‘human-made’ and not AI. Miyazaki is rubbing his hands together somewhere, grinning, scheming, plotting.

• Stanley cups, because the way some of you be acting with that mug in your hand… you’d swear there was lean up in that bitch.

• Shuttle buses at airports that take you to designated ride-share locations, rather than being able to have Uber/Lyft pull up where it’s most convenient. So, there’s this thing called entrapment….

  

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PREDICTIONS 🫨

• Epstein Island to be converted into a buzzy tourist attraction and offer overnight stays, promoted via a massive influencer brand trip.

• Japan to institute a travel cap on Caucasian men traveling alone between the ages of thirty and fifty-five, causing the tourism economy to plummet for the subsequent quarter, but the deer in Nara will have never experienced such peace.

• Muskoka, Ontario to experience unprecedented travel boom due to Cottage Core 2.0 resurgence driven by global Heated Rivalry psychosis.

• Chase Infiniti to star as Nikki – Vernita Green’s daughter – in Kill Bill 3, and avenge her mother’s death at the hands of Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman).

• Olivier Rousteing to be named new creative director at Versace and dress Beyoncé at the upcoming MET Gala.

• Donald Trump to launch a Substack.

• Mike White to license The White Lotus franchise to Issa Rae and Quinta Brunson to co-create The Black Lotus, a spin-off that will take place at Jamaica’s GoldenEye resort with a primarily Black cast. Ayo Edebiri, Jada Pinkett Smith, Ashton Sanders, Chanel Iman, David Jonsson, Morris Chestnut, Zack Fox, Ruth Negga, Natasha Rothwell (cross-over talent), Omar Epps, Winston Duke, Sasha Lane, Omarosa, Marshawn Lynch, Katt Williams, and Mo’Nique to all be in conversation, in addition to the aforementioned Isaac Cole Powell and Alfre Woodard (locked as lead). I will be in the writer’s room.

• Van Leeuwen Peanut Butter Brownie Honeycomb recall.

• Berlin to become the epicenter for theatre in Europe, overthrowing the London West End.

  

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• Dauan Jacari to dress Rama Duwaji for MLK Day event in Harlem, New York.

• Taylor Swift x Travis Kelce wedding American Vogue cover, Bezos buys the publication shortly after.

• Hangover supplement market boom. People want to have their martinis and still make their 7 AM pilates classes.

• A mine of rare gemstones to be found off the shores of Tunisia, sparking conflict between the North African country and Malta.

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When I think about the art I have encountered this year – be it a film in the movie theatre or a new song – I remember not only the virginal thrill of experiencing something for the first time, but also the place and mindset I was in. When I think about hearing FKA twigs’s ‘Sticky’ on the day of its release, I remember my rain-soaked socks in London; how the movie theatres in Covent Garden were showing films of the late David Lynch as the sky shed tears; how I found my face again and again in the glossy oil paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at the Corvi-Mora; how at dinner I coincidentally met the gratefully stunned Brady Corbet and Daniel Blumberg at Brat restaurant on the night of their respective Oscar nominations; and how finally, I sprawled in the hotel bed later that night, bare belly to a crisp white duvet, cradling a voice note from someone who had travelled to Los Angeles at the tail end of the California fires. Overheated from the wall adapter, my cellphone burned hot in my hand. If I sniffed hard, I could convince myself that I could smell the smoke from California all the way in London.

All these memories are linked. Their sights connected to sounds, smells, and touches. Narratives within narratives. Stories wrapped with stories.

Reading is no different for me. As I scan through the list of books read, I remember the version of me who read each book, and how he changed with each page. I remember what I believed at the time, and what I didn’t know yet. I finished one book and began another, my own story still wet ink on the page.

I read thirty-nine books this year1. I am not the fastest reader, so I have to be picky about what I read next. What I read comes from the non-scientific calculus of bookseller recommendations, literary reviews, and word of mouth from trusted voices. Because of this discernment, most of what I read this year has been exceptional. I wanted to share the list with you.

You’ll find the list is tilted towards contemporary literary fiction, as that was what was on my mind as I worked across fiction projects (one of them being my novella, which you can start reading here). Still, the range is vast, featuring a mix of translated works, buzzy debuts from promising authors, and classics from literary juggernauts from around the world. From the list of thirty-nine, I have to say only two or three were terrible, but you’ll have to guess which ones.

In retrospect, I think I read too much contemporary fiction. Next year, I want to read more classics and straight-up bangers that have stood the test of time. Let me know if you have any suggestions. The eighteen that left a mark on me, and therefore the best, I have expanded into a mini review below the list. Be warned, there’s a lot of glazing, and this post is long, so you might have to read it in a browser if it gets cut off in your inbox. Without any further ado, the Books of the Year, aka the books from any year that I read this year, in order of date read:

• Speedboat by Renata Adler (USA)

• Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna (Ireland)

• Trust by Domenico Starnone (Italy, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)

• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (England)

• Good Girl by Aria Aber (Germany)

• Universality by Natasha Brown (England)

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

• Stag Dance by Torrey Peters (USA)

• Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal (Germany, translated by Elisabeth Lauffer)

• Audition by Katie Kitamura (USA)

• Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp (USA)

• Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat (USA)

• McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh (USA)

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (Italy, translated by Sophie Hughes)

• Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin (USA)

• Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh (USA)

• Metzengerstein by Edgar Allan Poe (USA)

• Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (Argentina, translated by Sarah Moses)

• Mean Boys: A Personal History by Geoffrey Mak (USA)

• Flesh by David Szalay (Canada/Hungary)

• Herculine by Grace Byron (USA)

• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (USA)

• The Trees by Percival Everett (USA)

• Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson (USA)

• The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Palestine)

• The Women by Hilton Als (USA)

• The Vegetarian by Han Kang (South Korea, translated by Deborah Smith)

• Dominion by Addie E. Kitchens (USA)

• Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados (Canada)

• The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers (USA)

• Useful Not True: whatever works for you by Derek Sivers (USA)

• Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (USA)

• Fantasian by Larissa Pham (USA)

• Palaver by Bryan Washington (USA)

• Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harol Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton (Canada)

• Blackouts by Justin Torres (USA)

• Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (USA)

• Submission by Michel Houellebecq (France, translated by Lorin Stein)

• Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid (Canada)

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📚 Universality by Natasha Brown

Can words ever be neutral? Universality investigates the hidden power of words; their merit, and their biases; whose life is established by them, and whose future is simultaneously undone.

In a work of innovative form, the novel begins with a published article detailing the events that preceded and followed an illegal rave in COVID-era Britain, where one of the partygoers is viciously pummeled with a brick of gold by another attendee.

What comes next is a sequence of meticulously interwoven interstitials, shifting perspectives to bring to life those involved and impacted by the published piece. Each new section reveals varying degrees of information asymmetry, characterizing the novel’s cast beyond the initial article to leave the reader with their own understanding of events.

Early in the inciting article, the crime is introduced as ‘a modern parable’ that exposes ‘the fraying fabric of British society, worn thin by late capitalism’s relentless abrasion.’ This may as well be a logline for the novel as a whole as its narrative cuts across the maddening discourse of the contemporary – the class vs. race debate, the decline of legacy media, and the rise of rage-bait free-thought extremists, the right’s obsession with eugenics, and dismissal of systemic racism, the credit crunch and, ultimately, the great universal unifier, Love Island.

Brown is an expert at developing characters with agility, only to re-characterize them again with a new set of words and an altered perspective that the reader will measure them by. Although her characters’ motivations all point in the same direction – north, towards power – the thorny systems they navigate are unique.

Universality is a follow-up to Brown’s Assembly, an outstanding debut that inspects that relationship between colonial legacy, British identity, and capitalism in a thrilling novella. It reminds me of Industry, and that makes sense; Brown spent ten years in financial services before pursuing writing full-time. I read Universality at my friend Mikey Friedman’s reading retreat (where we were able to interview Brown!), and I had the opportunity to review it for THE WHITNEY REVIEW OF NEW WRITING (shoutout !).

📚 Stag Dance by Torrey Peters

Stag Dance is not only one of the best written books of the year, but also the most unique. Consisting of a novella and three short stories, Peters, the author of the critically acclaimed Detransition, Baby, migrates across genres to distort and interrogate the boundaries of gender and sexuality in her latest work. As I moved from story to story, I found myself in awe at the range in voice and style achieved by Peters. It felt as though each story (which I believe were collectively written over the span of ten years) was penned by a different person.

In one of my favourites, “The Chaser,” we encounter a first-person dark academia thriller where a boarding student wrestles with his desire for a feminine student that results in violence and brutality. In “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” Peters delivers a dystopian sci-fi where a bio-engineered virus wipes out all of humanity’s ability to produce estrogen and testosterone, effectively making everyone dependent on gender affirming hormones.

But it is in the novella, “Stag Dance,” where the author’s prose and creativity truly transcend. Written in an authentic lumberjack dialect, the story follows the strong, burly, and brutishly ugly Babe Bunyan, an axeman for a logging operation in the 19th-century American West. Despite his masculine figure and his reputation for felling the largest trees, Babe harbors a desire to be seen as soft and meek. Tradwife teas. Because these men are starved for social interaction in the woods without women, the camp boss, Daglish, decides to hold a “stag dance,” in which a man can wear a burlap triangle over his groin to signal that he wants to be courted like a lady and danced with for the night. Tension rises, and chaos ensues while Peters holds firm to a transportive lumberjack diction that feels both otherworldly and hilarious. The novella dares to ask: if your DL trade wanted to be treated like a demon twink for a night, would you indulge? Torrey Peters, come get your baddie chain!

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📚 Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal

Afghan-German visual artist and writer Moshtari Hilal examines the political scaffolding that constructs our contemporary understanding of “ugliness” in her outstanding hybrid creative nonfiction project, Ugliness (Hässlichkeit). Hilal begins with herself as a foundation before going outwards; she uses her dark skin, the hair on her arms and upper lip, her long nose, and other features natural to Afghan women to investigate the violence of beauty ideals and how these “standards” have been used to justify hatred. With lyrical prose, Hilal cycles through eugenics, the history of rhinoplasty, Kim Kardashian and “Instagram face,” AI surveillance, body fascism, digital performance, and the impacts of colonialism to conclude that “ugliness” is not a neutral observation, but an inherited system of hatred based on centuries of white supremacy. Although her conclusion isn’t shocking, the story she weaves is extraordinary.

On a rainy Wednesday in March, I went to The New School in Manhattan to witness Hilal in conversation with New York Times columnist and Hofstra University literature professor about the forces of ugliness. Hilal spoke with surgical distance about confronting the “project of ugliness” through her self-portraits and her experience as a teenager in Germany. She spoke of how the project of beauty is really just assimilation – a negotiation and erosion of the self to get closer to a “standard.” Her art, as well as her personal history, is well-paced throughout the book, splicing her essays and lyrical verses with confronting visual vignettes.

I had not heard of Moshtari Hilal prior to encountering this book, but after hearing her speak, I left with the feeling that she is going to be one of the most important artists of our generation. Upon finishing the book, I found myself questioning the idea of a physical “type,” and whether interest in a romantic partner is something that can be molded, or if that, too, is inherited from decades of propaganda. How much of this, for those who are willing, can be deprogrammed? Can attraction be an acquired taste, earned like an appreciation for great art? And does knowing all of this – that from the moment you were born you were taught who to love and who to hate – make you more empathetic, or more angry?

I don’t know, but I hope will tell.

📚 The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde once described The Importance of Being Earnest as “exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy: that we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” This is the energy I wish to be taking with me into 2026. Riddled with clever wordplay and the absurd convergence of comically tense situations that feel ripe for a Safdie film, Wilde’s final stage project still reads refreshingly contemporary. I saw the new play production in London’s West End with Ncuti Gatwa, and I’m praying they bring it to New York.

📚 Audition by Katie Kitamura

Utterly beguiling with a stylish yet economic use of language, Audition was one of the books I thought of the most this year. Kitamura is a master, a chief architect of sentences, but simultaneously apt at curating a ‘vibe’ beyond the novel’s words and narration.

Without giving away too much, Audition is split between two acts, both of which a woman – an actress – sits across from a younger man. On Page 38 of the hardcover, Kitamura’s narrator says, “There are always two stores taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think.” Not only is this relatable to this newsletter’s thesis at large, but it is also useful for interpreting the novel, because yes, this is a novel that leaves the reader to come to their own conclusions.

I finished the novel in my hotel room in São Paulo and immediately felt the need to discuss its special ending. I am curious to see how it will be adapted, but excited nonetheless. Special thanks to for getting me on the Kitamura train with Intimacies. I must read A Separation next.

📚 Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

Earlier this year, I wrote about my imaginary move to Los Angeles, breakfast at the Chateau Marmont, the discourse around New York’s ‘West Village Girl,’ the SKIMS nipple piercing push up bra, and Miu Miu’s Spring Summer Collection in a popular essay called “Sugar Looks Like Salt,” all tying back to the constructed identity and it’s relaton to place. At the heart of this essay was a review of the now much-celebrated book Perfection.

Within its pages, we follow Tom and Anna, a twenty-something-year-old expat couple who live in Berlin. The novel’s subjects are familiar but opaque, rendered in such a way that we understand that they are people as much as they are symbols for the ‘millennial creative professional.’ Their hollow characterization – unsupported by dialogue, as there is none in the novel – allows us to project ourselves, and those we know, onto them. We understand that Tom and Anna come from a specific part of Europe, but the novel’s stencilization of them lets us know that they could have come from anywhere. They are skeletons, and we are the flesh. Even though the novel occurs in the mid-2010s, part of its success is that it feels applicable to the post-pandemic remote work and ‘digital nomads’ of today.

Throughout the novel, the couple’s life and career persist through images on social media – the creative assets they design for clients that exaggerate the appeal of the brands that pay them, but also the performance of their own identity and expat lifestyle on their personal Instagram pages. The main character of their digital portraiture is not just them, but specifically them in Berlin, as they absorb the local culture as their own. Throughout the novel, Latronico is sure to emphasize the contrast between the reality of their life and the images they post.

📚 Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

As a longtime admirer of ’s novels, I have always been intrigued by the fact that her preferred medium is the short story. Because of this, I picked up Homesick for Another World – published between her debut novel, Eileen, and her most popular work, My Year of Rest and Relaxation – to see if it “hits different” in her preferred literary form. It is always a fruitful voyage to venture back to an artist’s earlier work, especially a writer like Moshfegh who, since the immense success of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, has ushered in a generation of mimics whose contributions have canonized her style into a distinct genre, widening the tent for her followers to publish fiction in a category that is both commercially successful and critically acclaimed. Lowkey what Nicki did for ‘female rap,’ or what Lana did for ‘sad girl pop,’ but that’s for another essay.

I was delighted to find, when reading this “OG” Ottessa, that her themes of alienation, repulsion, and humanity at its most depraved (which is to say, its most human) are still potent. I found the collection similar to my “problematic fave” Flannery O’Connor’s story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in its display of flawed, misguided characters in search of fulfillment while exposing the ugliness of the human soul. I love me some Flannery, even though I don’t think she would have loved herself some me.

In aggregate, the collection points to the spiritual and moral rot of society while remaining stylish and crude on an individual level. My favorite stories were “Slumming,” in which a member of the liberal elite participates in class tourism, summering in a rural, opiate-addicted town to experience something “raw” while looking down on the inhabitants; and “Beach Boy,” where a recently widowed man travels to an island resort to find the “beach boy” with whom his late wife had an affair. These stories feel like a perfect fit for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, which makes sense given that he holds the production rights to My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I’m seated for whatever comes next, but will probably read Death In Her Hands next year, the only Moshfegh I’ve never read.

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📚 Mean Boys: A Personal History by Geoffrey Mak

In a striking blend of criticism and memoir, ’s Mean Boys examines the culture wars of the 2010s and the art scene of New York and Berlin against the author’s own sexual and religious reckoning. Mak’s ‘mean boy’ is the archetype of a trendy hypebeast, known for his proximity to subcultures and his uncanny ability to link the underground to commercialization through participation in clout wars and exposure. Chances are that Mak’s ‘mean boy’ would have read LOOSEY.

I much preferred Mak’s cultural writing over some of the other essay collections that try to dissect this era because you can tell that he was, as Lil’ Kim once said, actually “in the cut like a Bandaid.” Mak’s active participation in the era made his observations more powerful, and their impact, both good and bad, as the memoir reveals, more realized. Reading this debut reminded me of one of my favourite books from last year, Mercury Retrograde by Emily Segal of the K-HOLE trend forecasting collective. It’s a golden era for New York that is already becoming nostalgic bait for Gen Z. I suggest you read them in duet.

📚 Flesh by David Szalay

To frame this masterpiece as the “detached male, but daddy maybe I CAN’T fix him” novel of the decade would be reductive but true. The Dua Lipa-anointed, Booker Prize-winning Flesh follows the life of István from adolescence to adulthood as he attempts to make sense of his role in society. Strangled under the terse boot of masculinity and simultaneously exploited and empowered by his role in the patriarchy, Flesh interrogates the double-bind of manhood.

I found myself intrigued by the novel’s exploration of geography: how István’s Hungarian heritage and humble housing estate beginnings became more erased as he assimilated into London to become a part of the British elite. As he descends into Western Europe, he continues to trade on his masculinity until he is completely spent. Although Szalay maintains distance from his emotionally detached protagonist, the space in between – the restraint shown by the author – allows the reader to fill in the cracks with empathy. This is an extremely hard thing for a novelist to master: to trust the reader to fill in the gaps rather than telling them yourself.

📚 Herculine by Grace Byron

I had the pleasure of reviewing ’s debut for THE WHITNEY REVIEW OF NEW WRITING and engulfed the proof her publicist provided to me on the rocky beaches of Marseille late this summer.

In Herculine, the unnamed narrator finds herself out of a job in New York and lured to a trans commune in Indiana by her ex-girlfriend, Ash. The commune, named Herculine after French memoirist Herculine Barbin, is pitched as an idyllic refuge from the nihilistic, hetero-capitalistic New York, but this turns out to be a mirage; things never look as good as the postcard, do they? In a delightful fusion of literary fiction and gothic horror, Byron’s debut examines how the past continues to creep up and interfere with the present, through the narrator’s reveries of psychological trauma from conversion therapy to the spiritual malady stemming from the literal satanic demons that stalk and follow her.

Although a work of fiction, Byron’s expansive literary talents are on display, specifically her acute knack for cultural criticism in her observations of New York, the bleak state of modern writing, and the power dynamics within the trans community. Often, her commentary is delicious snark, like the titles of the articles “Hot Freelance Girls” write – I Know My Sister Is Ugly, and Ernest Hemingway Was a Trans Woman, Prove Me Wrong. What this establishes is a horror story with two haunted houses: the hopeless New York that the protagonist flees from, but also the eerie commune that functions more like a cult. Soon, you start to wonder if the narrator can truly outrun herself, and if so, where will she go?

📚 The Trees by Percival Everett

Earlier this year, when I was in Paris, I received a text asking me if I was available to write an essay on The Trees and Emmett Till for Dua Lipa’s book club. I had ten days to read the book, to conduct extra research on Till’s murder, and interview folks from the American South, as well as an eight-hour flight home, before the draft was due. I’m glad I accepted.

The Trees takes the brutal lynching of Emmett Till and situates it in an investigative satire, where two state detectives collaborate with local sheriffs to unpack a mysterious series of deaths in Money, Mississippi, where the brutalized body of a boy – who resembles Till – momentarily appears next to the bodies found. It’s dark, surreal, and cheeky.

The longest chapter of The Trees is perhaps the most harrowing. In it, a historian archives the names of over six thousand Americans who have died from being lynched. He writes out each name by hand, saying, “When I write the names, they become real again. It’s almost like they get a few more seconds.” I wrote about this archiving, amoung other things, in this newsletter.

You can read my essay on The Trees and Emmett Till for Dua Lipa’s book club here.

📚 Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson

Do you ever just yearn? Anyone’s Ghost is a coming-of-age story divided by three car crashes that spans rural New Hampshire and New York City, telling the tender story of blossoming friendship, strained love, and, ultimately, loss. The relationship between the narrator, Theron David Alden, and his friend Jake is so well articulated by Thompson – with such beautiful prose – that it feels like a sucker punch. It’s devastating but familiar, wrought with the meek hope of doomed love. My paperback is full of tagged pages and underlined sentences, but the passage below shows you just how effective Thompson is at evoking the dizzying haze of romantic validation from a long-awaited crush.

Every hundred feet, we stopped, and one of us would pull the other in, sometimes kind, and kiss again. I like to think we radiated, that the few strangers walking past were moved by our excitement. That they also knew we were getting away with something each of us once thought was impossible… The reality was that we probably looked swaying and unkempt and even a little crass. Pawing at each other, testing the other’s limit. But mainly, I think we looked boring. Another set of drunken boys on their way to a run-down, cliche apartment. An average Manhattan tussle that felt, from the inside looking out, like the only true thing ever created.

This debut is a certified banger. Shoutout to for recommending it. Pair this with Xavier Dolan’s Matthias & Maxime for a good time.

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📚 The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

On a flight to California, I finished reading The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, a debut novel that follows a Palestinian woman who moves to New York and becomes an elementary school teacher for underprivileged boys. Throughout the novel, she unravels. She cleans herself obsessively for hours a day, becomes involved in an international Birken-selling scam with her (maybe) homeless (maybe) boyfriend, and maintains a bizarre teaching method with her students.

The novel is told through short, first-person splices that cut between her past and present. Early on, we learn that she is haunted by a childhood memory of accidentally swallowing a coin on the day of her parents’ death. She then inherits a great deal of wealth from their will. However, upon moving to New York, she feels as though that coin, still lodged inside her, has begun to spin.

This book made me think a lot about generational inheritance, colonialism, and the stain of capitalism. How our ancestors pass down their suffering to us. It’s very “I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” coded. I wrote about it here. Shoutout to Leah Abrams for recommending this to me. The following passage is my favourite from the novel:

I thought about metal then, and the landscape of my childhood, how it was saturated with coins. Roman coins, gold Abbasid coins, ancient Judean coins. There were shekels, mils, and drachmas. Emperors, gods, and queens. They didn’t decompose. They just stayed there, in the ground. And the coin in my body, it was going to stay there until I died, and long after.

📚 The Vegetarian by Han Kang

With the sublime perversion and violence of a Michael Haneke film, The Vegetarian is a work of high literary art – a triptych of perspectives that shows the dismantling of a woman’s life (a wife, a sister, a muse) due to her abrupt decision to stop eating meat. The novel, which takes place in South Korea, investigates the relationship between sanity, conformity, and patriarchal oppression. Beyond the narrative, which at times feels surreal, what will remain with me are the dreamlike images rendered by Kang, the vivid implications, and the exploits of the titular vegetarian. Huge thank you to who moved me to read this book from his “Year With Han Kang” series.

📚 Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

Reading this book made me really happy and optimistic about life. I don’t know why it took me so long to pick it up, but I am glad I saved it for this particular moment. Happy Hour is resident literary showgirl Marlowe Granados’s buoyant debut, a story told in diary entries that illustrate the romp of two women in their early twenties who take on New York under suspicious immigrant statuses and get into all the trouble but have all the fun. Although Isa’s confident narration is rich coming from a twenty-one-year-old, I found her remarks and observations not only moving but sharp and applicable. Here is one, for example, that appears early on in the novel:

“If I were to describe typical New York conversation, it would be two people waiting for their turn to talk.”

But one of my favourite passages that I read all year lies on page 152 of the Verso Fiction paperback edition. Here lies the magic of Happy Hour, the overlooked resilience of a party girl who must marry her pursuit of fantasy with the realities of what is before her. On this page, Isa has come to terms with the fact that her lover has not lived up to her expectations of him in her head:

He said, “What do you want?” All I could think of was peeling the skin of a Valencia orange in bed on a bright morning with someone pulling me into the cover because they want to spend two or three minutes nestling before starting the day. So I said, “ Not much.”

I quickly concluded that I was sick of being there. “I’m leaving. I like to leave first… You’re a stranger to me. I can’t even remember your face.” People forget that I can be cruel sometimes. I can devastate just about anyone.

A party girl’s best trick is knowing just when to leave. and I have not met yet, but, as a fellow Canadian, I am certain our paths will cross sooner or later. Our vesper martini glasses are fated to clink. Her much-awaited follow-up, Petty Intrigues, was announced earlier this year.

📚 Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor

When I was in São Paulo, I was invited to the São Paulo Museum of Art for a tour and dinner. On one of the floors, there was a room with hundreds of artworks, and instead of being attached to a wall, they were displayed on freestanding poles that let you see the front and back of each canvas. This setup allowed you to first focus on the art itself, then mosey around to see who made it and where they were from, as the information was withheld on the back. It was a powerful way to evaluate the work without the bias of the artist’s biography.

In Minor Black Figures, we meet Wyeth, a painter frustrated by the art world’s tendency to link the race of Black artists with their work, often misrepresenting their focus. At the core of the novel is a romance between Wyeth and an ex-priest, with really hot sex scenes, and lush descriptions of New York and the people who live in it. What I found striking was how Taylor, much like the museum in São Paulo, withheld the race of certain characters, sometimes revealing it and othertimes not, which challenged my own biases as a reader. I kept thinking, “Well, what is the race of this person?” and then questioned that impulse and how it related to the book’s overall message. It isn’t until much later in the book that the specifics of Wyeth’s origin are revealed, in a detail so subtle I had to read it multiple times. I was gagged and thought it was brilliant, and when I called a friend who was reading it, he told me he missed it and was gagged, too. That shifted how I interpreted the character’s behavior, but should it have? I guess that’s part of the genius of this novel. I will learn more when I read Taylor’s interview with .

I have read all of Brandon Taylor’s novels, and this is my favourite. He also has a great newsletter, .

📚 Fantasian by Larissa Pham

I have been a fan of Larissa Pham’s writing since her debut essay collection, Pop Song. I had always known that she wrote an erotic novella, Fantasian, but, after trying to buy it years ago, I discovered that it was no longer in print. In a way, there’s something really chic and sacred about this, especially for erotic fiction. The power of print is that there are limited copies, which, as a writer, would make me feel a lot freer than writing on the internet, where the scale is infinite, and words can be copied and pasted outside of their context.

But this summer, I came across Fantasian in a used book store and pounced on it, completely forgetting it was erotica. The novella takes place at Yale, where an Asian student encounters her doppelganger, and the two develop an obsessive fascination with each other. It’s a fever dream at the fork of self-love and all-consuming narcissism. Rich with raunchy motifs of desire, envy, and self-pleasure, I am seated for Pham’s debut novel, Discipline, which is slated for release in a few weeks.

📚 Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton

It’s giving “picture book, but make it arthouse.” In this book, Shapton presents the spark, the duration, and the demise of a fictional couple’s romantic relationship through staged images of their belongings in an auction house. Throughout the pages of the book are editorialized items from the couple: Polaroids from Halloween, receipts from restaurants, gifted pajama sets, movie theater stubs, love notes on hotel notepads, and dog-eared books. Each image is accompanied by a small caption to give context to the item – written in the tone of an auction info sheet – but at times, I preferred to just look at the images and try to make sense of the storyline from those alone.

Although the relationship ends, this creative novel is a delightful reminder that you can get to know someone (and their most important relationships by default) through their possessions. Finally, Sheila Heti poses as the titular Lenore Doolan in the book, which is super cool.

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Have you read anything on the list? If so, what did you think? If not, what should I read that you loved?

LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

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On the ground floor of Art Basel Miami’s convention center, Elon Musk is on all fours, pooping. Next to him is Jeff Bezos, prancing about on his hind legs while Mark Zuckerberg, paws to the floor and ass to the sky in a deranged Child’s Pose, peers into the crowd with his signature slack gaze. Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol are there, too, completing the sausage fest with Mike Winklemann, also known as Beeple, the creator of the art installation.

The installation, named “Regular Animals,” features freakishly fleshy replicas of the men’s heads affixed to the bodies of beige robot dogs that jitter and tweak in a square, short fence. Beeps putter out from the litter as the pups step over an array of discarded photos they have ejected out of their robotic anuses. Pictorial excrement. The porous details of their faces earn an impressive verisimilitude, which, in turn, achieves the desired spectacle.

When I saw the installation on Thursday, the last day before the Art Basel convention became open to the public, there was already a mob of spectators and collectors with phones snapping up the mockery of the most powerful men on the planet, mouths smirking at the canine fuckery as if their snarls could somehow adjust the imbalance of power held by the figures. A few spectators — all men — stepped into the dog ring to pick up the sheets the DOGE-coded doggies were shitting out. The bums of each “Regular Animal” produced sheets of paper, a photo of the crowd, because, of course, these dogs were also surveilling and recording us as we were surveilling and recording them. Each photograph was rendered to the artistic viewpoint of the personified puppy: for Picasso, the photos were abstracted with the geometrical edges of Cubism; for Warhol, it was tinged with the vibrant hues of Pop Art; and for Musk, it was bleak, black, and white.

According to Beeple, the alignment of these wealthy men with Warhol and Picasso is meant to represent a shift in cultural custodians, moving from agents of artistry to agents of algorithms and AI. The work posits that technology has become the dominant canvas of culture today, and, as a result, Mark, Jeff, and Elon are meant to be viewed in tandem with some of the art world's legacy acts. I suppose the work is meant to confront, to be urgent, to subvert, but the installation’s positioning at Art Basel Miami, which is estimated to generate hundreds of millions in art sales and over half a million dollars for Ron DeSantis’ Florida, tips its hat to another theme — that the art world, and popular culture, has not only become completely interlocked with capital and corporate funding, but that money has perhaps become the art world’s most prevalent muse.

By relegating the richest men in the world to tweaked-out beasts, Beeple’s “Regular Animals” reaches with strained fingers at subversion, attempting to make the men victims of their own technology through didactic allegory. But all abstraction is lost when the fixture is placed within the Art Basel convention center, only a five-minute escalator from the Chubb Insurance Collectors Lounge, navigated through the UBS-powered Art Basel mobile app, and the surrounding beach parties funded by Chase Bank. And this isn’t a knock on Art Basel; the goal of the convention is to sell and get artists paid. No one walks into the convention center unaware of its reliance on patrons. Yellow stickers that indicate the sale of a piece are proudly placed next to a work, “just to let ya know” it has been taken off the market in a private sale days before the convention’s public opening, and you’ve, unfortunately, missed out — rats! “Regular Animals’” unhooding of the power men who fund the circus doesn’t do anything to disempower them; the artists, the gallerists, and the surrounding partygoers are acutely aware of who is picking up the check. Positioning their heads on animals is as effective as a double underlined sentence: excessive, loud, rudimentary, and in poor taste.

Centering money in the world’s biggest art mall isn’t the “gotcha” Beeple believes it to be. Despite the aesthetic success of the installation’s surrealism and its captivating images of body horror, the piece’s effect is that of realism. It just feels like we are saying the loud part, well, out loud.

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Still, throughout the week, various artists, art dealers, critics, and curators discussed the role of art and its relationship to capital. The bloating of Miami Art Week, the swell of sponsored parties, and the corresponding hell of traffic became an introductory discussion point to many of my conversations. “Are you going to be at Art Basel Qatar? The Qataris are funding everything,” a curator asked me over chocolate cake one night. I kept hearing that more art was being displayed and sold than in previous years. Newer conventions outside of the hallmark Art Basel, such as Untitled Art, Scope Miami Beach, and NADA, have established a name for themselves and the artists they represent, equipped with their own masthead of strategic sponsors. The first-ever Art Basel Awards happened on Thursday evening with speeches from music producer and art collector Swizz Beatz and a dazzling performance by avant-garde pop artist Kelsey Lu. The inaugural awards were presented by Hugo Boss, and the brand dressed a medley of the artists, curators, and critics in attendance, putting a few of them in the Ritz, too. Many of the industry folk who I spoke to were excited, mentioning that the awards, the uptick in events that showcase concerts, and talks signals other avenues for art to be celebrated outside the commercial walls of the convention center, as well as an opportunity to highlight performance, an art form that, due to its corporeal elements, cannot be as easily monetized and auctioned off by a savvy dealer. Now, I don’t subscribe to the thinking that “Art isn’t art until it’s sold,” but I do love the mantra “But twenty dollars is twenty dollars!” It is too soon to know if the increased investment is a universally good thing — money rarely is — but I maintain a sense of optimism. It’s good when artists get paid.

There is a noticeable shift in the receptivity of artists who engage in strategic partnerships with corporations, one that forfeits ‘selling out’ in favour of celebration. Instagram comments are now littered with “get the bag, sis” when a new artist gets their first brand deal. As an audience, we have become too literate in the intricacies of star-making and marketing, the way streams have devalued how artists are paid to give our favourite talent shit for operating with both artist and careerist mindsets. We see the headlines of new deals being proposed with company mergers, and have no faith that artists who produce the work will see a fraction of the gains from the transaction. And so, artists can seek their own deals to support their work and make a living. No, I don’t subscribe to the belief that “Art isn’t art until it’s sold,” but I do wonder if we are moving to a world where “Art isn’t made until it is first sponsored.”

On a recent episode of Middlebrow, the podcast hosts draw a parallel across HBO’s Entourage, Girls, and the new show I Love LA. While Vince of Entourage and Hannah of Girls had more creative pursuits like filmmaking and literature, Maia of I Love LA is in the service of not art, but corporate clients. She is an influencer talent agent and to her, as well as the Gen Z cohort she represents, the highest order someone can achieve is commodifying themselves to attract corporate sponsorships. This progression, across shows that each seek to speak to a particular generation, is fascinating. I assemble a fictional doggy pen of HBO showrunners in my mind, where one can view the creators of these beloved programs all barking in alignment like the pups of “Regular Animals.” In the litter, Lena Dunham is closer to Warhol, one of the last great custodians of pop culture of a particular era, while Sennott is closer to the Zuck, tweaked out with algorithm-brain. But, I’m inclined to believe that if Warhol were alive today, he’d love influencers and TikTok.

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The water is cold in Miami. A shrapnel of seaweed laces my Achilles like a house-arrest ankle bracelet as I stride back to my beach chair. I grope my tote bag for sunscreen and realize I forgot it and, instead, steady my gaze back on the shore. The waves are bruised with teal welts, canvassing Royal Caribbean cruise ships, and Coca-Cola billboards buoyed beyond the coastline. Ribbons of ads attached to planes streak the sky, spelling out the best party to go to for the night, and subsequently, what personal injury lawyers to dial. Grey Goose logos crest beach umbrellas somewhere in the distance. I guess it’s always been like this. There’s no selling out; there are only good deals and bad deals. Good artists and bad ones, too.

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I wanted to share the art that I loved over the week from Art Basel Miami and Untitled Art Miami Beach. I’ve listed each artist with their respective work. This marks my third year of covering Miami Art Week for LOOSEY with a mix of criticism and photo diary. You can read/look at the two previous years here and here. If you like what you’ve read and saw, please share with a friend and subscribe.

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My serialized novella ‘Come If You Want’ has arrived. Read the first chapter here:

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LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

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The t-shirt is a garment that is distinctly American, its mass production first hailing from the U.S. Navy in 1913 as a shirt to be worn underneath official uniforms. The patriotic and protective genes threaded from the primitive shirts of the Navy can be traced to Palantir Technologies, an American pattern recognition company most known for its powerful yet controversial use of surveillance technology. Palantir’s intelligence tools have been credited in the U.S. government’s capture of Osama Bin Laden, the tracking and containment of the coronavirus, providing the Israeli Defense Force with cellphone and social media data to aid in ‘targeted killings’ that included Gazan civilians and Palestinian journalists, and, on the U.S. homefront, equipping the U.S. government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division with ImmigrationOS, a ‘migrant tracking tool’ that aggregates information from private and government databases to identify, track and capture immigrants in America. Now, the $415b company is interested in selling t-shirts.

Since opening its ‘merch store’ in 2024, Palantir has released five ‘drops’ and a ‘core capsule,’ borrowing the lexicon and limited-release cycle of American streetwear to edge and engage prospective shoppers. On its mostly sold-out online store, powered by Canadian e-commerce superpower Shopify, Palantir sells a blue and black cushioned nylon shoulder bag. The bag looks like a tote bag — a company merch staple — but fails to mention the word ‘tote,’ an obvious equivalent, in its detailed product description. This omission feels pointed, as if to deny resemblance and value alignment with the popular tote bags of America — the liberal The New Yorker tote bag, or the accessible quirk of the Trader Joe’s tote, as examples. No, the Palantir tote bag wishes to say something different about its shopper. The bag’s product description unfurls in my mind in the exaggerated machismo of Brad Pitt’s American accent in Inglorious Basterds: “Highly functional design with two interior patch pockets for small good storage… Includes Palantir chevron patch affixed to modular velcro surface on bag exterior. Cut, sewn and finished in the USA.” Even an Oxford comma was too un-American for Palantir’s merch store copywriter. The Palantir bag retails for $119 USD.

The online shop’s sold-out $65 hats and sold-out $99 shorts are also described with a military-like precision, all in on technical performance yet designed for ‘everyday pursuits.’ It’s Outdoor Voices’ Doing Things for the surveillance era. But it’s the company’s t-shirts that are the clearest billboard for Palantir’s promise to America. On the back of a now sold-out navy blue shirt are the words “SOFTWARE THAT DOMINATES.” The word “DOMINATE” appears again on another shirt, this time below the illustrated face of Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, in sunglasses and grey watercolour.

At first, I was confused. Unclear just who would buy this stuff and how it was sold out. But, after a quick scrub on Reddit and Twitter/X, I found its shopper nestled under various inscrutable user names, all hooked to the patriotic ambition the company posited. It turns out there are Palantir bros everywhere for those with eyes to see.

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Palantir Technologies was founded by German-American venture capitalist and political advisor Peter Thiel in response to New York City’s September 11th terrorist attacks under the mission of becoming an essential technology arm for the U.S. to protect against future threats. Today, CEO Karp, who first met Thiel at Stanford Law School, says that Palantir exists to defend the West. It is estimated that the U.S. military has spent $10 billion on a 10-year enterprise contract with the company. For the past year and a half, the company has allocated a portion of its revenue to brand building through merchandising, with its sights set on becoming a beloved consumer-facing lifestyle brand, rather than just an engine for the government’s most lethal military operations. To the latter, the company has taken the tired stance of an arms dealer, more preoccupied with finishing first in an arms race than its moral implications — ‘guns don’t kill people; people kill people.’ Palantir has punted the responsibility for how its technology is deployed to its customers; Netanyahu is responsible for how Palantir’s technology is used, not Palantir, it hopes you believe. But, for a public that is becoming increasingly aware of Palantir’s operations, this is not a satisfying response. This deflection wasn’t satisfying when Facebook was revealed to have provided private user data that aided in Donald Trump's 2016 U.S. election victory, a crisis so severe that the company had to change its name to Meta. Palantir is smart enough to know that even if its investors expect a return on shareholder value, the public expects, at minimum, values. And, to this, Palantir would describe its values as American. By initiating communication with a set of people who share its vision through merchandise, Palantir can limit future reputational damage and build a base of passionate stans rather than a secretive cult. With the U.S. government as an ally and a growing population of supporters, selling Palantir t-shirts feels less of a surprise-and-delight for hardcore fans and more of a proactive PR strategy. To be an American superhero, you must not only protect but also be loved. Perhaps Karp hopes that the Palantir chevron will become synonymous with the Man of Steel’s S, worn proudly on the chests of Americans. But, maybe not. Although he was functionally a government asset, Superman was never American.

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Palantir’s investment in streetwear is coming at an opportune time. The company trades on pattern recognition, but I can recognize a pattern, too. When apparel brands like American Eagle are propagating white supremacist ideals through advertisements with Sydney Sweeney, and Silicon Valley juggernauts like Mark Zuckerberg are donning streetwear, the intersection of Palantir’s nationalist agenda and superior technology feels uniquely positioned for a new set of consumers. The audience for this — whether a patriotic believer of the company’s mission, an awestruck tech-nerd, or an army brat — is likely much bigger than a typical corporate merch brand, and I suspect, regardless of their political associations, growing in size. If Palantir can unite this buying group, first with merchandise, but then under their shared vision for the West, the company might have a real shot at being seen, in the eyes of a select few, as an American superhero. For what it’s worth, Karp, who is biracial of Jewish and African American parents, identifies as a socialist. I wonder if he’s a fan of Drake. His team sure is:

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With the release of lifestyle apparel, Palantir might just be the most American brand out there today. What is more American than being watched? Than being stalked? America — the home of surveillance, celebrity culture, and Hollywood, prying Karens and nosy neighbours peering over the white picket fence, the constant threat of a foreign attack, the most funded military on earth, the police’s Drone as First Responder program, the fear of being recorded, the TikTok flip the camera trend, the extraction of a phone from a pocket almost as threatening as someone pulling out a gun, WorldstarHipHop fight videos and “Twitter do your thing” doxing, GRWM, the ‘privacy as a luxury’ discourse, a damn reality TV star in the White House with an insurrection, Black death and assassinations livestreamed to our phones. A land of theatre, performance, and spectacle. Never ever ever has there been a nation so sure of its audience as America. This is what Palantir knows to be true.

Palantir might exist to defend the West, but it also exists to sell paranoia and a promise to fix it. For Americans, paranoia is split across two vulnerable populations: those who believe they need Palantir to protect them from foreign threats, and those, as seen in the vicious ICE raids, who believe they need to be protected from Palantir. The repeated word of ‘dominate’ that appears so triumphantly across its merchandise is not just a pithy marketing slogan like Nike’s Just Do It, but a considered promise to all that stands in its way. A promise to its customer, be they a t-shirt buyer or a military.

In an earnings call, Karp addressed shareholders with the following statement, ripe for a merch drop: “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them, too.” In other words, dominate. Palantir only functions in a world of threat, a prisoner’s dilemma where everyone presumably has their finger on a nuke. A world that is perhaps much like our own. In February, in a letter to investors, Karp quoted The Clash of Civilizations, saying that “the rise of the West was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion... but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” Karp continued: “Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

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Thank you for reading. If it’s within your ability, please consider supporting the organizations below:

• Amica Center provides legal services for individuals to help navigate the immigration system in the U.S.

• International Rescue helps rebuild Gaza by providing aid to families in need.

My serialized novella ‘Come If You Want’ has arrived. Read the first chapter here:

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LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

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The actress Rose Byrne looks up into a pillar of blinding white light. The hole of light, stemming from her apartment’s ruptured ceiling, coats her in a violating glow. She, and we the audience, squint, our pupils unfit to capture the immediate glory emanating from above. Trumpets sound out from the ceiling’s wound, tilting our curiosity to what lies up there while we are down here, trapped and floor-bound. Still, we strain — our eyes, her palms — curious to grasp at the white light, so clearly visible yet so distinctly out of reach.

Such is one of the many arresting scenes in Mary Bronstein’s film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, where Byrne’s Linda is flattened by numerous crises at once — managing a sick daughter’s unwavering medical schedule and treatment goals while her husband is away, balancing her absorbing career as a psychotherapist with clients at various levels of need, overseeing the repair of a mysterious hole in her apartment ceiling caused by an unfortunate pipe burst, and navigating the subsequent displacement it causes her and her daughter, spending unforeseen weeks in a motel while her apartment contractor ghosts her frenzied calls. The terror of being a parent, specifically a mother, is on display in the psychological drama, set through a series of anxiety-wrenching ordeals that rest squarely on Linda’s shoulders. The hole, gaping until the very end once her husband finally becomes involved — a subtle wink from Bronstein on a father’s capacity to swoop in and ‘save the day’ after an exhausted mother has already expended every aspect of herself to hold a home together — represents both the decay of her sphere of control, crushed under the foot of the burdens of her life, but also an escape. She becomes fascinated with the hole, visiting it as her contractors miss deadlines, causing her to yield and unravel psychologically over the course of the film. Linda asks for help countless times and is denied it at each moment; her husband, her therapist, the medical system, and the curt motel concierge1 all fail to aid her. Even her daughter resists her pleas for support. The sound design adds to the weight of her terror; her daughter’s feeding tube continues to beep, her cellphone continues to ring, and Linda is not in control. In an effort to cope, she turns to substances (a Pinot-griot-and-ganja-mother like the best of them) to supplement the agony of the weight of life, but also the responsibility that is solely hers to own, which feels heavier by the minute. It persists.

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Sometimes life can feel like this: a continuous climb of crises that are determined to gas you out as you drudge onwards. Hopefully, the direction you’re going is up, but sometimes the view, no matter how far you climb, is the same or worse. You are stuck. Like a stairmaster, there is no final destination, only the next step, and with each additional heel — a sinking sand of steps — you feel further exhausted, simultaneously in the same place. “There’s always going to be another mountain,” Miley Cyrus once said on her poetic ballad ‘The Climb.’ Don’t we know it?

What was most striking to me was how mundane the terrors of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You are. To be demonstratively reductive, what is haunting the protagonist is a job, her home, and her child — important things that a lot of people expect to have and excel at. We are told these are needs. We are taught that to feel ‘actualized,’ we must ascend all five levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. When we don’t, we feel incomplete, and stay on the StairMaster to actualization. In the case of Linda, the structure of needs, centered around the demands of motherhood and maintaining a family unit, is failing her. It seems like a sham. The gap in fulfillment expands, the chasm in her sanity broadens, and the hole in her ceiling persists. Actualization is a StairMaster and, with every crisis, the steps only become wider.

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In Urchin, Harris Dickinson’s directorial debut, the weight of life is also heavy on the protagonist, Mike, albeit for different reasons than Linda. In the first scene, Mike wakes on the streets of London to the sound of a God-fearing woman preaching loudly, beckoning to those hustling on the street in the midst of a harried commute, “Have you heard about the Lord?” These are the first words of the film, an offer addressed to whoever will listen, and Mike, homeless and dishevelled, woken up by the call, brushes the woman off and asks her to quiet down. He does not have time for the actualization of the Lord when his physiological needs are barely being met. The exchange renders itself as satire, equipped with biting humour and critique.

Over the next ninety-nine minutes, we watch Mike struggle to climb his way out, wading through the thick waters of addiction and odd jobs, social worker check-ins, and petty crime. When Mike questions a social worker about how to maintain his temporary housing after he has confirmed work, his inquiry is interrupted by the beeping of the worker’s lunch in a microwave, her bloated working hours causing her to eat during their session. Later, during a probation check-in, we notice Mike dissociating during a moderated discussion with a civilian he has harmed. The slippage in the effectiveness of the city’s social systems is apparent, but no one is really paying attention. No one is aware that they aren’t moving. This is a sharp juxtaposition to Linda’s psyche, where she is acutely aware of her immobility and the fact that she is falling behind. She is at a higher tier on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs than Mike, which allows her to advocate for herself, but still, her environment prevents her from moving. They are all crabs in the bucket.

In Urchin, the environment of London is harsh and exhausting, a cacophony of concrete and noise. Dickinson expertly captures the tough atmosphere through the layered distractions of street walkers, addicts, and trash, but never fails to depict its community – the uncles playing dominoes, the lovers sharing a drunk kiss on the curb. There’s a sublime romance to it, the Jamaicans, Slovaks, and Arabs all together. London is a thorny wilderness, yes, but Dickinson’s gaze renders a home, too. It’s a vibrant vision of London’s homeless crisis that does not strip its subjects of humanity or sensationalize its terrors.

As Mike attempts to climb upwards, we are greeted with moments of surrealism that feel closer to nirvana than a daydream. These lapses in reality allow us to explore Mike’s interiority, ranging from voids in the cosmos to microscopic organism mutations to silent scenes in caves and grottos. The contrast between his lived reality is stunning, as these settings offer a bit of reprieve from his chaotic environment. In a way, it feels like he is offered the dignity to make a home in his mind when all else fails him.

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Rather than solely criticizing the failure of the government’s ability to mend the housing crisis, we also see how Mike exacerbates his dire circumstances with his own poor decision-making. Early on, he purchases a CD of positive affirmations to help him get in the mindset of ascending, but over the course of the film, we watch him become tainted by the soils of London and turn to vice. Like Linda, he is a victim of his environment but also a creator of his misfortune. His agency humanizes him but forces the audience to question how much of this is an actual choice rather than a set of shitty options he was given. Mike, frustrated by his inability to manifest his way out of a burdened reality, eventually destroys the CD player. His surreal vignettes remain.

How can one keep their head above water when the tide continues to rise? I learned that an urchin is British slang for a raggedly dressed child of the slum, but also that sea urchins can’t swim. They are bound to the ocean floor, never climbing past their environment, never ascending beyond their base set of needs.

Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light is a spiritual predecessor to Urchin, one that Dickinson gladly draws a connection to. I first heard the filmmaker mention the film to Letterboxd on a red carpet, and so, when he curated a series of films that influenced Urchin at the Roxy Cinema, I jumped at the opportunity to see this film in particular.

Claws is a Filipino neo-noir masterpiece about the descent of a young man named Julio. He arrives in Manila from the province of Marinduque, in search of the woman he loves. Throughout the film, we witness the toll of the environment of Manila on Julio. As he struggles to find his footing in the vicious Manila, he encounters dangerous work on the construction site, prostitution, crime, and homelessness.

It parallels Urchin in its ability to showcase setting as an antagonist; in Brocka’s film, it’s Manila and its corruption that leads to the spiritual rot of the protagonist, while in Dickinson’s feature, it’s the streets of London that keep our lead entangled, unable to ascend. When contrasted with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, it offers another axis of comparison, the idea of chasing a family unit — the love and belonging tier of Maslow’s ladder — causing great emotional turmoil. In all, the challenge of building and maintaining a home is at the heart of all the protagonists’ tension, while their setting — familial or urban — constricts them in place.

It should be a surprise to no one that contemporary society tells us that the solution to this is to ‘work harder.’ Not only is this mirrored in the three aforementioned films where the protagonists are told to dig deeper and anchor their commitment in labour to ascend their circumstances, but this is also reflected in the culture today. The final few months of the year have been popularly coined as “The Great Lock In of 2025,” a trend heavily bolstered by TikTok prophets, where one must isolate and grind their way to a better life for 2026. It marries the stark focus of “cuffing season” with the capitalist drive of “the girl boss” era. It’s relentless, if not offensive. It’s robotic, if not inhumane. To suggest that you can grind your way out of your circumstances is maybe a positive thing, something that I would like to believe in, but it’s useful to inspect the source of these beliefs. Where do these values that prioritize output over our humanity come from? What does it mean to be telling each other to ‘work harder’ in times like today, when faith in the government is at a low and institutions fail us? When our tax dollars fund a Palestinian genocide, and close to twenty billion dollars a year is used to fund ICE to tear families apart. The system isn’t working for us, so we have become engines in the system, locked in, ready to operate, with the hopes of ascending. We have no faith in the systems, so we put faith in ourselves, and at this moment, I don’t know if that is powerful or tragic. What I admired about Urchin and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was their ability to critique a failing system while allowing their characters to at least try and not solely be victims of it. That feels a bit like the times we find ourselves in today. I do believe we have the power to ascend our circumstances, and some of us are better equipped than others, but that doesn’t come without an acknowledgement of the realities of our environment. I’ll let you watch both films to see if any of the protagonists climb their way out.

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In the final twenty minutes of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, there was a disturbance in the theatre I watched it in. A woman behind me began to scream, pulling at my seat for support as she launched herself upwards to tell me that she needed to get out of the screening room before ‘something bad happened.’ The woman, who seemed well adjusted prior to the film, began to hiss to me in a thick New York accent that she was finding the film ‘psychologically damaging’ and ‘triggering.’ In that moment, I sort of glared at her stupidly, rattled that she was disturbing such a key part of the film. In my mind, I was like, “Yeah, it’s a psychological thriller, so… it’s going to be psychologically thrilling, mama,” but something in her eyes told me to keep my mouth shut. At times, the world works this way, where you are made to believe that the best way to acknowledge someone’s humanity is through silence. She exited the movie, and I stayed, watching as the film became even more thrilling in its entirety. I don’t regret it.

At the end of the movie, I chucked the remainder of my popcorn in the trash and went to the bathroom. When I returned to the lobby, the woman was waiting for me, her words fumbling out of her mouth about how ‘wrong’ it was for the theatre to screen such a movie without the appropriate warning. She clearly just wanted to be heard. In that moment, what she needed was someone to validate what she thought was an intrusion of psychological safety. Instead, I nodded politely and took a picture of the poster. I posted that the movie was like “uncut gems for moms,” and ascended the movie theatre stairs, climbing upwards step by step, leaving the babbling woman to deal with her fit of terror alone. This I do regret.

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Thank you for reading. If it’s within your ability, please consider supporting the organizations below:

• Amica Center provides legal services for individuals to help navigate the immigration system in the U.S.

• International Rescue helps rebuild Gaza by providing aid to families in need.

• And, if you’re reading this from New York, please remember to register to vote and consider supporting Zohran Mamdani. You can read about his platform here.

My serialized novella ‘Come If You Want’ has arrived. Read the first chapter here:

Read More LOOSEY

LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

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The implication was that as the warm summer months of muscle shirts and crop tops ended, a person could no longer rely on a conventionally attractive body to gain the attention they desired; instead, they had to rely on their face. The tweet sparked like flint, chewing through the feeds of the internet with every repost, surfacing in group chats and spawning a frenzy of takes on whether it was legitimate or false, problematic or not.

Although I don’t know the Twitter user personally, I detected something moralistic in their demarcation of the two “fates,” superimposed against the seasons: the “body card” of the summer representing earthily gluttony, corporeal lust, and hedonism, while in contrast, the “face card” of the fall representing divine seduction, natural splendor, and a cozied beauty. The Whore-vs.-Madonna complex at the core of this binary, a continual paradox in the project of evaluating humanity on the basis of attention. Luckily, not all of us need to choose1.

For several years, the value of a body card and a face card has been laboured, mostly in jest, as we attempt to translate the worth of our physical selves online. Even the intangible aspects of the human experience that can be encountered only in person have been transacted into “vibe cards,” perhaps best exemplified by digital ‘aurafarming’ or the Instagram photo dump. The irony of “cards” being the currency of desire is striking. What is beauty if it can’t be bought?

But what this Twitter user misses is that seasons are suspended online. The summer vacation rich with beach thirst traps is just as eternal on the feeds as the selfies of the fall. Our online avatars’ capacity to evade the limits of the actual world presents the opportunity for perennial desire and engagement. Face card, body card, vibe card are now always, simultaneously, expected to “eat,” and the viewer of the content, frozen across seasons, is trapped in a perpetual hunger, one where the most idealized render of a person is accessible online but perhaps not in real life.

Nearly three years ago, I forecasted this change in an essay called “A Body Online” that argued, for better or worse, that how we present ourselves online is increasingly more critical than how we show up in person:

We live in a world where our online selves are becoming increasingly difficult to separate from our physical reality. The videos we share online and the photos we “dump” become digital appendages, pixelated limbs, just as dexterous as our real life organs. As such, it is only natural that we feel ownership over the digital selves we author as we wield them to source capital and clout.

Gone are the days of solely relying on a resumé; the online avatar has superseded in becoming the billboard for future opportunity and financial gain. Instagram baddies earn dividends by dropping their CashApp link on IG Live, Twitter users achieve book deals and lucrative writing gigs for their clever online quips, and OnlyFans angels score big through online collabs that keep a steady roster of subscribers engaged. With this momentum, the online self has become cocooned to the risks of the offline world.

Originally, I was interested in the question of: Does being hot online matter more than being hot in real life? But, over the process of writing the essay, I became interested in the benefits of an online self, and how it can function as an entity tied to but separate from the actual self, how it can be more financially lucrative and present (and yield by presenting) a Better Life™ than what the physical self could embody. I was curious if we would eventually shift our attention and prioritize our artificial selves and the artificial worlds that govern them over our natural environment. At the time, and in my essay, this was more of a provocation, but three years later, with the advancement of artificial intelligence, it seems like we’ve reached an answer quicker than I anticipated. Yes.

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However, what I could not anticipate was the merging of the online and offline self, how the two could exist in the same environment. No longer a suspension of seasonal markers but a collapse. This collapse came to me the way most of life’s daily confrontations do: on the subway.

If you have been on the subway in New York over the past week, you have likely witnessed the largest out-of-home billboard campaign the city has ever seen. The campaign is said to have over 1,000 subway platform posters across all five boroughs.

From a marketing perspective, the actual creative is incredibly effective for the ‘out of home’ environment. Straight to the point, building intrigue. The objective of OOH placement is to drive top-of-funnel awareness and spark interest. So, I bit and went on the Friend.com website, a domain the company spent $1.8 million of its $2.5 million seed funding to acquire.

I learned that Friend is a wearable AI pendant that acts as your attentive companion, seemingly taking in your environment, listening to your conversations, and texting you reassuring things, like a good friend. Over time, the technology develops a unique personality, encrypting your memories as its own. From chiming in while watching a movie, positively reinforcing you during a workout, or comforting you in times of loneliness, Friend hopes to be your best friend. All for the price of $129.

When Friend first launched its “Friend reveal” trailer last summer, many of its YouTube viewers assumed that the technology was a spoof. Some even confused the video campaign for an A24 horror movie. But, between the surveillance technology ushered in by fitness apps like Oura rings (or as cleverly refers to them as “a cop you wear around your finger”) and the growing cases of psychosis catalyzed by users developing relationships with their AI chatbots, it makes complete sense how we ended up here. The first wave of intelligence systems offered optimization; the new wave will offer actualization, moving from the corporeal to the divine.

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“Productivity is over, no one cares,” Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old CEO of Friend. “No one is going to beat Apple or OpenAI or all these companies that are building Jarvis2. The most important things in your life really are people.” Finally, a Disney princess CEO who cares about altruism.

When I flip through Schiffmann’s tweets, his responses read like a student of Kanye West – someone who is skilled at converting rage into attention, equal parts troll and genius. If it wasn’t for Schiffmann’s previous virtue in building technology to help refugees fleeing a Russian-invaded Ukraine find shelter, I would have shrugged this whole thing as a stunt, similar to the Enron rebrand that seemingly went nowhere. But Schiffmann is forrealies; seed funding type shit.

In a world where youth have been reported to be partying considerably less and where people are lonelier than ever, it’s easy to imagine Friend’s tight PowerPoint deck for investors – the ‘white space opportunity’ that only Friend could fill. Still, the idea of spending our ever-fractioned time with a device seems counterintuitive to Schiffmann’s consumer-facing mission of companionship for all. But maybe that’s where his genius lies. Somewhere wedged between the chasm of financial opportunity of loneliness and the consumer promise of belonging lies the lush fields of capital. The best way to stay in business is to sell a solution to a long-term problem that you can’t actually fix. If you never intend to connect the problem to the solution, you can make plenty from pretending to be a bridge.

I became interested in the ‘starter pack’ personalities that you pick to onboard your Friend pendant, avatars that I think of as wet clay before slowly molding to your environment. A YouTube reviewer named ThePrimeTime pointed out the strange consistency that most of the personalities initially introduce themselves as someone in need of emotional rescue to the user. See some rather odd examples below:

In a way, this fuels a savior complex for the user. For those who like when their friends are doing shittier than them, this must spark some sort of dependency dopamine. But to me, this feels like the sword that the company will eventually fall on. The device becomes less like a companion and more like a pet. A digital golden retriever of reassurance that you can quickly get bored with. I think about the Furby my aunt turned off within thirty minutes of it yapping loud gibberish, or the dead Tamagotchi that’s somewhere in my parents’ house. The Poo-chis by Sega. Plastic pets end up in the garage.

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My skepticism around the long-term viability of the Friend device does not mean that I do not believe in the intent of the technology. If this pendant fails, I believe the insights gleaned from this venture will inevitably fuel a more successful innovation in a similar space. Schiffmann’s insight, no matter how terrifying you may believe it to be, is only at fault for being too early rather than being incorrect. We are journeying towards an era where bodies online are interconnected with the offline, the internet, and its intelligence systems, ever more carnal. If you need further proof of where we are going, just look at the internet’s past.

Last Saturday night, I sat on a foldout chair with a hundred or so others scattered about in the cavernous stained glass atrium in Brooklyn’s art and science center, Pioneer Works. The tickets were in high demand, selling out in weeks in advance, with all of us there to see — a researcher, technologist, model for JW Anderson, creator of the Cyberfeminism Index project, and a tenured faculty member in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts. Despite her expansive list of accomplishments, I cannot think of a more singular voice that fuses research and internet theory into artifacts that feel more like performance than lecture. We were all there to watch her unveil her latest project: A Sexual History of The Internet, a lecture series and book that connects the internet’s rapid innovation to sex work and desire. In other words, Seu is giving a lecture on how the bodies online built the internet that we use today.

In the darkened atrium, Seu waded through with a handheld microphone in one hand and a cellphone in the other, elegantly striding between our chairs as she guided us through a ‘finstagram’ she made, IG Stories as lecture slides that detailed events like how the first JPEG was of a model in Playboy and how early Blockchain currencies were used by sex workers who had been frozen out of big banks. We followed along, at times called to read out loud while the glow of our phones torched into us like little sickos watching porn in the dark. The effect was extraordinary. The final chapter, titled Pussy Capital, zooms into the present landscape of AI romantic companions, offering a bit more than Friend’s texts. The influx of AI girlfriends allows sex workers to create avatars of themselves to cater to their clients’ needs in a way that is consensual and profitable. Sex educator Tina Horn is cited in Seu’s project, saying:

“As sex workers, we understood intuitively from the beginning of social media – maybe even from the beginning of the internet – that the reason to be online is to sell something.”

To be online is to sell something. A friendship, a face card, desirability. Even with this newsletter, I am selling you something. Sometimes, like today, it is an idea, but other times, it is an argument. But ultimately, my words, much like the requested limbs of the AI sex worker, are digital representations of the real thing.

As bodies migrate more frequently between the offline and online world, our clarity between the two blurs, collapsing like seasons into one even plane. There are times when what we are buying is clear. Where the exchange for your attention and resources is transacted with a visible ledger. But there are times when the trade-offs are less transparent, when, like with Friend, its promise cannot be achieved by what it’s offering. In these cases, it’s important to remember that the pendant that clenches your neck is not a friendship bracelet or a companion, but actually a sales tag. You are the product. You are the one who is for sale.

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My serialized novella ‘Come If You Want’ has arrived. Read the first chapter here:

Read More LOOSEY…

LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

When Rome burned in the Great Fire of 64 AD, it is said that Emperor Nero calmly gazed out of his palatial window and played the violin, but here in New York, the boys play Clairo and are called performative for it.

I don’t see any flames, but on the C train, it’s already hot, and when I find my seat at the Eckhaus Latta fashion show, I am grateful for the tiny black fan waiting for me on my chair. Mike Eckhaus and (who pens the excellent ) always write poetry on their show notes, and the stanza for Spring Summer 2026 sings out like a siren:

GOD HAS A PLAN

WE ARE ALL WAITRESSES

IN HIS SICK LITTLE RESTAURANT

The words feel apt as I oscillate the fan from my face to my body and then back to my face again. Odd times like these will have you thinking that everything is a sign; will have you accept a tarot card reading from your flower lady at the farmer’s market on a whim; will have you train across Brooklyn for a two-hour reiki cleanse because a Zoom psychic recommended to you by someone at a barbeque told you that your heart chakra is blocked until fall; will have you trade conspiracy theories back and forth in hushed voice notes to friends and the FBI agent living in your phone; will have you read the poem at the top of a fashion week show note over and over and over again, wondering what possibly could come next and how there is no use preparing for it.

But the Eckhaus Latta show is wonderful as always, and we are all excited about the duo’s recent CFDA Menswear Designer of the Year nomination. Across from me, there are newborn babies and new SNL cast members in attendance, as a saucy shirt saunters down the runway that I may have the chest for next summer if I work at it. I’ve always admired how distinct Eckhaus Latta’s designs are, how you can tell by the cut of a shirt or the print of a pant that it’s theirs. Their garments have a shared sculptural approach, and I love that every new piece I acquire from them builds on the last. Halfway through the presentation, the air starts to burn as a model sparks a joint on the runway, and I grin, forgetting the heat. Martine Syms walks out a few looks later, and I’m delighted. I think about her film, The African Desperate, when her artist protagonist quotes Sadiya Hartman to say that she is “staking her claim to opacity.” Her right not to commodify her identity in her art. I let the thought pass like a plate, knowing it will return.

A few hours after the show, a friend asks if I can make it to the West Village in an hour to see do a special concert. I say ‘yes’ even though I’m two stops away from my apartment in Brooklyn, have just ordered Thai that isn’t arriving for another fourty minutes, and need to change into ‘cocktail attire’ for a party later that evening. Somehow, I make the concert, only ten minutes late, and at the end of ‘Bowling alley.’ I guess God had a plan.

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At the Cherry Lane Theatre, Audrey is a star. She’s the kind of quirked-up white girl from homeroom that I would have befriended. Lately, I have resisted listening to music with depressing elements, but what I admire most about Audrey’s songwriting is her ability to allow her protagonist to change. Very rarely does her speaker stay in the same place. Instead, they ‘realize things,’ slowly building confidence, whether it’s finding beauty in their ‘fucked up face,’ or happily leaving lame parties at the Chateau. Her songs read like a script, her screenwriting abilities on full display, and within a three-minute track, you get something similar to an episode arc. Her debut album is like a season of Sex and the City, which is the name of a song she performed last night with her acoustic guitar to the sixty of us in the room. Whenever she sings “This isn’t Sex and the City, nobody sees me and knows of my column,” I always think about LOOSEY and admittedly change the lyrics to something else in my head. Before she sings it for us, she speaks in detail about the song’s genesis and how she wrote it over the course of a week alone in her brother’s apartment in New York, labouring over the words from sunrise to sunset.

As an entertainer, she is generous, pausing between each song to share with us the micromoment that inspired it – her deliberate selection of words or production choices. As a fan, I lap it up greedily, but as a writer, I become jealous. I can never puncture or articulate the motivations of my fiction. My catalysts remain amorphous or uninteresting, usually starting as an image (i.e., a rhyming sock ventriloquist on a date) before shifting into something else. It starts slippery before becoming sturdy, and separate from my own experience. If this was intentional, I’d say I’m staking my claim to opacity, but I’m not. My motivations remain veiled from myself until the work is done.

Audrey finishes the set with two consecutive performances of ‘Sue me,’ and makes us all put our phones away for the final one so she, and we, can truly let loose. We exit the theatre with the stealth of inside traders, wrapped with the feeling that we’ve bought stock that’s about to skyrocket.

I leave the West Village and walk towards Union Square to meet up for the final event of the day. No one knows how to Saturday like me; I mean, the day started with a tarot reading and blush gladiolus, and is ending at a Ralph Lauren soirée with Usher. As I walk under the Washington Square Arch, I raise a phone to my ear and listen to my voice memo-ed version of ‘Sex and the city,’ my lyrics to Audrey’s melody. As the memo comes to a close, I hear a woman shout “Wait! Wait! Wait!” but I keep walking north, trying to suspend myself in my own voice, trying to make it through the marble arch without distractions. But alas, she catches up, and it’s clear she’s talking to me. She flags me down, I turn off the song, and receive her harried compliments and praise. It feels like a sign, out there under the arch of all places. I wait for the feeling to pass, but this morning, I still can trace the contours of it. Spinning in me like a coin.

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During a flight to California last week, I finished reading The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, a debut novel that follows a Palestinian woman who moves to New York and becomes an elementary school teacher for underprivileged boys. Throughout the novel, she unravels. She cleans herself obsessively for hours a day, becomes involved in an international Birken-selling scam with her (maybe) homeless (maybe) boyfriend, and maintains a bizarre teaching method with her students. The novel is told through short, first-person splices that cut between her past and present. Early on, we learn that she is haunted by a childhood memory of accidentally swallowing a coin on the day of her parents' death. She then inherits a great deal of wealth from their will. However, upon moving to New York, she feels as though that coin, still lodged inside her, has begun to spin.

The novel is part of a lineage of contemporary literary fiction where a distressed woman distracts herself with a project, the metaphor being that she is also the project that needs to be worked on – think Miranda July’s All Fours or ’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The plot appears aimless when you assess its individual fragments, but in aggregate, as a full work, you are left with a feeling, a theme, that haunts you after you complete it. I suppose life is like this, aimless as individual days but meaningful across the years. GOD HAS A PLAN WE ARE ALL WAITRESSES IN HIS SICK LITTLE RESTAURANT type shit. The themes of The Coin followed me to Palo Alto that week, and back to New York – motifs of excess, colonization, impurity, and materialism. The inability to expunge and disinfect an inherited need for more, compounded over generations. In Yaher’s novel, I underlined the following on the plane:

“I thought about metal then, and the landscape of my childhood, how it was saturated with coins. Roman coins, gold Abbasid coins, ancient Judean coins. There were shekels, mils, and drachmas. Emperors, gods, and queens. They didn’t decompose. They just stayed there, in the ground. And the coin in my body, it was going to stay there until I died, and long after.”

Later, in my hotel room in California, I woke from a dream of a tidal wave colliding into New York, doing away with all the junk, and by proxy, me. Maybe it was putting out a fire.

At the Ralph Lauren party, no one talks about the state of the world. No one talks about anything really, and I enjoy this – the confident glide of mingling when you know everyone is game to skim across the perimeter of conversation. There’s something intimate about this, knowing that for some, on occasions like this, it’s never going to get that deep. No one is going to mention the burning or the smell of smoke, and instead would rather talk about how sweet the violin sounds, how good your life looks on Instagram, the ‘forward you wrote for Dua Lipa,’ and what you’re wearing. It’s table tennis, really. Volleying soft balls back and forth, treading lightly, none of us willing to get our hair wet. But when Usher takes the stage, he isn’t playing the violin. He isn’t playing any of his music, for that matter. Paid to appear but not to perform. Instead, he, too, skims along the perimeter, sharing a few words but keeping it light, dashingly dressed like Jiminy Cricket without the hat. It’s tough to take the stage in times like these.

At the height of his speech, the ceiling erupts with its own silver flames. The confetti is blinding, mucking up the air, blocking everyone’s cellphone cameras, caking my soda water, and it’s funny, glinting as it sputters down to lace the floor like leaked lava. We all take turns, passing our phones back and forth to snap photos in the shiny ruins, confetti tossed like sparkly coins. I briefly wonder how they are going to clean up the mess, but that thought passes on like a plate and never returns. I flip a coin and carry on against the night.

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My serialized novella ‘Come If You Want’ has arrived. Read the first chapter here:

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LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

Dua Lipa’s Service95 team commissioned me to write an essay on Emmett Till to run alongside her book club selection, The Trees by Percival Everett. You can read my piece here. Up until this point, I had never written a profile for a dead person, let alone an American teenager who was lynched on the false claims of whistling at a white woman. But the facts of his story were seared into my consciousness from a young age. I could recite his story with the acuity of the more recent Trayvon Martin; their fatalities mirror – a Black boy walks into a convenience store and ends up dead. I imagine this is similar for many Black people who grow up in the West, Till’s death serving as a perennial warning of how youthful innocence knows no protection from hatred. Facts that haunt like vicious folklore.

Still, the assignment unnerved me. I was anxious, not that I would get the facts of the story incorrect, as there were numerous artifacts for me to dive into – books, articles, films – but that the gruesome details of the story would shine greater than Till’s humanity. Sure, I could put together a laundry list of events, but a list doesn’t make a human. Facts alone do not make a child.

When Emmett Till’s mother decided to have an open casket funeral for her son, she sparked the beginnings of the American Civil Rights Movement. Till’s death became a national spectacle, surfacing as a topic of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches and mentioned by Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. With the details of his murder acting as lightning rods of attention in their own right – the barbed wire around his throat, the Tallahatchie River his corpse was dumped in, the open casket funeral for the world to witness his bludgeoned face – how could I draw remembrance to the child that was in the casket? How could I honour Till’s humanity beyond the howls of his horror story?

The world has a strange way of answering questions if you’re paying attention. Between being commissioned to write the story and it being published, a friend asked me to participate in a group reading of Toni Morrison’s The Site of Memory at the Museum of Modern Art. The city was wet that evening, the clouds splitting open in a sweaty downpour as we careened from a rushed dinner of larb and roti on 46th Street to the museum on 53rd. Later, on TikTok, I would see videos of subways and side alleys being flooded. I had been out all day, at the movies, out to lunch, and so you are correct to assume that I did not review the text in advance, telling myself that I wanted to save it for the session so I could be ‘surprised.’ Thankfully, no prior reading was necessary, and the session, led by curator Gee Wesley, focused on critical excerpts from Morrison’s essay that we discussed aloud. Almost immediately, I found the topic pertinent to the profile of Emmett Till.

In her text, Morrison argues that there is a difference between fact and truth by establishing a link across successful biographies and fiction. To her, both must honour the human experience beyond its sterile facts:

“The crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot. So if I'm looking to find and expose a truth about the interior life of people who didn't write it… Then the approach that's most productive and most trustworthy for me is the recollection that moves from the image to the text. Not from the text to the image.”

Much of Morrison’s work involved ingesting the cold facts of the Black experience and threading them into compelling portraits of life beyond their hardships and horrors. For her, this was especially relevant for slave narratives, where the details were sparse and likely not recorded by the subject themselves, and therefore were devoid of the visceral emotion of those who lived that experience. As a result, the facts could omit key truths or misrepresent the humanity of the lives it seeks to catalogue. To remedy this, Morrison brought her pen to the page and wrote. In the essay, she continues:

“If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. I suppose I could dispense with the last four if I were not so deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which I write and in which my ancestors actually lived. Infidelity to that milieu - the absence of the interior life, the deliberate excising of it from the records that the slaves themselves told - is precisely the problem in the discourse that proceeded without us. How I gain access to that interior life is what drives me and is the part of this talk which both distinguishes my fiction from autobiographical strategies and which also embraces certain autobiographical strategies. It's a kind of literary archeology: On the basis of some information and a little bit of guess-work you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image - on the remains - in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth. By ‘image,’ of course, I don't mean ‘symbol’; I simply mean ‘picture’ and the feelings that accompany the picture.”

When I returned to this, my anxiety around the piece molded into something more concrete, more useful: a duty. The apprehension I felt was precisely what Morrison described: her balance of selection and order with reverence and mystery. How do you move someone beyond the facts to provide them with an image of the truth? With Till, I knew I was not writing fiction. To ‘make up’ something about his life would have been inappropriate and not what I was commissioned to do. Yet Morrison’s perspective on ‘reconstructing the world’ as an imaginative act when writing a biography was useful in helping me build beyond the facts to provide readers with an image of a story that is, at the end of the day, about one of the most famous images in American history.

In his interview with Dua Lipa, Everett specifies that the history of lynching is not one of Black history, but one of white America. The Trees is an astounding work of literary fiction and satire that is as challenging as it is clever, unearthing and remolding muddy American history into the unsettling contemporary with a fast-paced, detective mystery. Dua Lipa's introduction to The Trees came in 2022, the year the novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She was a special keynote speaker at the award ceremony that year and was immediately captivated by the book's prose. Dua describes the narrative like this:

“The scene: a white man in Money, Mississippi, is brutally killed, and the battered corpse of a long-dead but familiar young Black man is also left at the murder scene. Before long, a second white man is found beaten and mutilated, with the same Black figure by his side. As more and more men wind up killed, each with these eerily similar dead bodies beside them, local cops are left baffled – and mayhem ensues.”

Pretty quickly, the plot flips to subvert TV-show tropes as detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are sent down from ‘the big city’ to aid the local cops in their investigation. Soon, they discover that the recurring Black corpse resembles Emmett Till. As someone who loved True Detective season one, this immediately hit for me. The story is haunted by the spirit of racial reparations, but is equal parts humour and horror. By situating the novel in the familiar landscape of the detective story, Everett disarms us with his satire, the witty dialogue of his ensemble, and the hard truth of America. He evokes precisely what Toni Morrison calls writers to do in The Site of Memory, applying magic to reveal human truths in the space between facts.

The longest chapter of The Trees is perhaps the most harrowing. In it, a historian archives the names of over six thousand Americans who have died from being lynched. He writes out each name by hand, saying, “When I write the names, they become real again. It’s almost like they get a few more seconds.” An excerpt of the names is provided in the book in the form of a list:

In his interview with Dua Lipa, Everett explains that he wrote the names by hand, too, but as I read the chapter, I realized that the names Everett included were not fictional. The collection of names was of real people, leading into the present with mentions of Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, but also names of Asian and Native Americans who were also murdered. The most chilling mentions on the list were the ones without names, which simply survived as nouns like unknown female or 16 adult men. Cold facts on a brute page. But this is where the magic that Morrison writes about comes in: by writing them down and putting them in fiction, the world provided an answer. During the first printing of The Trees, a reader from Tennessee reached out to Everett to provide him names of a lynched family – originally listed as David Walker, David Walker’s wife, and David Walker’s four children. With the reader’s help, Everett updated the respective unknown names to the actual names for future editions, moving the mere facts to something more human: a truth. “Now, when I do the reading, I say David Walker, Annie Walker, David and Annie Walker’s four children,” says Everett. “I would never have learned that, it would never have meant anything to me, if I hadn’t written about it. And that changed my life.” By writing the names, they become real again, is what Everett’s character said, but perhaps that was a prophecy for himself, for writers. Earlier this year, Everett went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for James, 37 years after Toni Morrison.

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I read the names with interest until I was held by a name that looked familiar: George Holden. The surname was eerily similar to mine, and so naturally, I looked the name up. The reports indicate that his lineage hopscotched back and forth between the names Holder to Holden interchangeably, but most of his family tree maintains the latter. The prospect of being related to him went against everything I knew about my family history. My family hails from the Caribbean, and as far as I know, I am the first from my family tree to immigrate to America. Still, I studied the facts of George Holden’s life, mystified by the chance of a bizarre relation. I studied hospital reports and government documents, but the details were sparse. What I know is that George Holden was lynched by a mob of white men in 1919 on the claim of writing a note to a white woman in Louisiana. This was the mob’s third attempt to lynch him, following an attempt at a hospital in Monroe, Louisiana, where the nurses successfully protected him. Eventually, the mob found him on a train the next day and lynched him in the baggage car. I don’t know how old George was. I don’t know the contents of the letter. All I have is this report that suggests that, like Emmett, George was falsely accused; that he could not even write. And so, for him, I must.

I began my profile of Emmett Till with a vision of the Mississippi River. I researched tributaries to understand the waterways of America and interviewed folks from the South who grew up along the rivers it splits into. The river is a constant motif in my essay, representing where Emmett’s corpse is found but also the legacy of violence that pulses through this country like a vein:

“The Tallahatchie River runs brown like skin, bending in the basin of a horseshoe, picking up sediments of silt and clay before draining into the Yalobusha River. The north pigtail of the Yalobusha slices across Money Road before meeting the south tail, imprisoning the southern town of Greenwood in the bird’s-eye view of its noose. There you’ll find the usual things you’d expect to find in a town: a Walgreens, a Bed, Bath & Beyond, and a church that overlooks the Tallahatchie, 13 miles from Money, Mississippi. The Yalobusha River continues on, meandering southwest and eventually bleeding into the Yazoo River, carrying more soil to muddy its complexion before eventually flowing into the Mississippi River, the second-longest river in the United States of America.

In 1955, when Emmett Till’s body – five foot four and bludgeoned beyond recognition – was dumped into the Tallahatchie, he never made it to the Mississippi. Instead, he sank, his lifeless body weighed down by a 75-pound fan looped around his throat with barbed wire, plummeting him into the river’s mahogany streams. Silently, he drifted there, camouflaged for three days while his family and the local authorities searched for him. On the third day, his body began to float to the surface, naked and mutilated, soon to be discovered by two teenage boys who had stuck their rods in the river to fish. When he was retrieved from the water, he was unrecognisable; so pummelled beyond comprehension that only his mother could identify him.”

I was surprised to see that Morrison had written about the Mississippi, too, in her essay. For her, the motif of flooding represents the process of invention that moves fact closer to the truth. Here she writes:

“Because, no matter how ‘fictional’ the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally, the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact, it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there, and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory – what the nerves and the skin remember, as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding.’"

It's uncanny, these bizarre linkages across texts and time that ultimately stretch towards the same truth. The story of Till, of Holden, of Martin, of everyone on that long, long list. As I edit this, a storm rolls through New York, and the flooding is what my mind returns to. The rain fills in the gaps. The overwhelming rush of emotion that licks an arid landscape. And then, the water — the tears — remembering what it still is.

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My serialized novella ‘Come If You Want’ has arrived. Read the first chapter here:

Read more LOOSEY…

LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

I love Paris the way that only someone who doesn’t live there can: with the rose-tinted glaze of a vacation fling that you never commit to, unbothered by its impracticalities.

After a vacation in Marseille, pretending to be an extra in Bonjour Tristesse, I returned to Paris. I wanted to maintain the leisurely pace of the south of France, and other than the Wolfgang Tillmans’ exhibit and an extensive facial, I didn’t plan much of anything. I ate the Nigerian shrimp creole at Waly-Fay, I had the perfect steak frites and foie gras at Bistrot Des Tournelles; I really didn’t need much more.

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On my last day, I popped into a vintage store that I saw on TikTok1 and ended up chatting to the store owner – a suave Parisian man roughly my age. We connected over our Caribbean parents, his from Haiti and mine from Jamaica and Barbados respectively, and then I went to try on the single item that caught my eye: a t-shirt.

Longtime LOOSEY subscribers know how much I love a good t-shirt. I am a fierce defender of merch culture, regardless of whatever nonsense GQ propagates, and am always keen to scan the merch counter for a t-shirt at a concert after the opener wraps up. This next sentence is going to sound cringe, but: I love a t-shirt that feels like a shortcut to a story – be it merchandise from a restaurant that I loved2, a top from a show I enjoyed3, or just an old shirt from before I was born. There are a couple of Brooklyn dads – I don’t think they have kids, but that’s their energy – that I buy vintage t-shirts from religiously, and it's just become a bit of a uniform when I’m trying to cosplay as a chill Brooklynite. An old t-shirt and trousers. You can’t go wrong.

I was initially drawn to this particular t-shirt because of its ‘Chevy Performance’ logo, and thought it would pair nicely with my other vehicle-themed tops. Like Charli xcx, I have a special affinity for vehicles, with a shirt collection ranging from Harley-Davidson to Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, a Burger King x NASCAR Racing collaboration, and another Chevrolet t-shirt promoting some legion in the middle of America. The ten-minute Lana Del Rey ‘Ride’ music video did unthinkable damage to me. Most of my shirts have a story, either found at some vintage shop or ‘borrowed’ off the back of another boy, and when I put them on, I take a vacation to those times. But under the unforgiving lights of the fitting room, shrouded by a très petit curtain, I was immediately turned off by the shirt that I picked up.

What I had mistaken for holes, well-earned from years of wear and tear, were, upon closer inspection, cuts made by scissors, fashioned to look like holes. The precise incisions, all too alike to be natural, betrayed their origins. I looked closer. The frayed bottom of the shirt curled in a perfect edge, signalling it was likely cropped by a machine and not, as I had imagined, ripped by the brute, callused hands of a strong man. It was a shortcut, but to a falsified story. This discovery turned me off. I returned the t-shirt to the rack where I found it, thanked the shop owner, and promptly exited the store, making my way north in search of an almond croissant.

Slowly, Paris rendered itself differently to me. Suddenly, every clothing store I walked into seemed charmless. Like the t-shirt, the stores’ aesthetic, which was compromised by the garments its buyers curated and the ambience of the store, felt outsourced and manufactured. Every clothing store I went into had the same black and blue Salomon sneakers and the same issue of Popeye magazine. The overhead speakers all wafted a comforting mix of Clairo and Aphex Twin, with the impartial J. Cole slipping in for good measure. Their atriums were well-lit like a content production studio, beams of light ricocheting against the mirrors that doubled as walls. Design-wise, they were all furnished in beige and olive, with Donald Judd and Wolfgang Tillmans ‘readers’ splayed on top of leather ottomans that no one opened but everyone photographed with the steady shot of their iPhone Pro. As if all men get hungry when they shop4, there was often a gimmick involving food: a ‘New York-style slice’ for ten euros, or a collab with a smash burger joint, whose imagery looked like it was shot by Terry Richardson. No shade to that smash burger joint; I tried it and it slapped. There was nothing special about the clothes either.

What these stores presented was a shortcut to taste. The taste was not tethered to a specific geography other than the internet of streetwear culture. Sure, I was in Paris, but I had been to these stores before – in Sao Paulo, in Seoul, in Toronto, in Tokyo. I could have been anywhere. Their curation approach was born on the feeds, but before that, the forums, rinsed with a Millennial Boy filter legible to anyone who perused JJJJound in their youth or was mesmerized by My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy when it first came out. I have wondered why the early 2000s Y2K boy aesthetic didn’t survive like the Y2K girl did, but it turns out the late 2010s boy aesthetic still reigns Supreme.

I’m not knocking these stores’ curatorial choices, as they mirror my early experiences with defining my own taste. I lived it, spending weekends in high school lining up outside of Goodfoot in Toronto for the latest Nike SB Dunks. I remember those storefronts and that era vividly, spending the money I earned from Tim Hortons and Old Navy on Nike Dinosaur Jr’s that barely fit while early members of OVO walked out with all the good sizes. I remember ringing up at the register with the guy who would go on to be Drake’s creative director5, listening to early mixtapes produced by Boi 1Da, who lived in the next town over. I remember shouldering my way through concerts to see M.I.A., Little Dragon, Le1f, and Beach House. I remember a girl named Claire from Montreal opening up for Lykke Li and years later clocking that she was Grimes after listening to ‘Oblivion’ for, like, the millionth time. I’d wear my best clothes – the now disgraced Phat Farm and Sean Jean – zooming up on the train from the suburbs to catch the show, and leave with merch as proof that there was culture beyond the town I grew up in. I have never resold a pair of Nike SBs from that time, but when I’m at my parents' house, I slip my feet into an old pair as I step out to run errands. None of those concert venues or stores exist anymore, and the artists that used to rule them have nearly all been cancelled, but in Paris, the shops are still alive.

I think back to the idea of shortcuts to interrogate my taste, weighing the pros and cons. Aren’t my t-shirt-selling “Brooklyn Dads” offering a shortcut to a time that I’ve never lived through? And TikTok, serving me restaurant and store recommendations – that must be a shortcut, yes? Heck, ’ Marseille advice was a (great) shortcut, too.

Maybe shortcuts aren’t so bad if they take you back to a place you've been, a heritage you've lived. And if you haven’t been there before, maybe that’s fine, too. It’s just a vacation, like a Paris jaunt that you don’t need to commit to. You can try it on and take it off again, much like an old t-shirt.

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LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

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We’ve been here long enough to know that being ‘cancelled’ is temporary. The typical cancellation cycle yields a surge of attention, bolstered by press and social media take-downs, and, at its apex, results in a loss of work that is almost always superficial while never bordering on true financial risk. The cancelled individual’s missteps are made into memes that divorce them from their harm for the sake of good humour, and the pain they caused is quickly replaced by laughter. Sooner rather than later, the cancelled is deemed ‘brand safe’ again, emerging back on the world stage more or less unscathed, but somehow humanized by their public flagellation. Their critics develop a strange kinship brought forth by the collective justice of TikTok reposts and late-night talk show mockery; we feel satisfied with ourselves for Daviding the Goliath, and SNL becomes good again, if only for a week.

The cancelled who are good at this – because, yes, there is a skill to being cancelled, just ask Olivia Pope – consult a PR agency to help them navigate their predicament rather than hastily address the outcry through a front-facing apology video. The fast-acting post a Notes App statement, plastered on their Instagram and linked in their bio to be dissected by the public. But there is another, perhaps better, strategy. The wise often say nothing, knowing that it will blow over. Knowing that next week the public will find a new target to condemn and crucify, they silently get on with their lives. Moving forward, less is expected of them, and so they are more free than ever.

In the past several months, we’ve witnessed how public rage can be commodified into attention, the most valuable currency in today’s culture. The news that reaches us is unsurprisingly more composed of what people are angry about than what is actually newsworthy. Moral panic over Sabrina Carpenter’s album cover – which is nothing if you lived through Britney’s 2000s – was served to me on my feed more than her single on Spotify. Depending on what side of Love Island TikTok you are on, either Huda, Chelly, or Cierra is getting flamed for something they did or did not do. I am a fan of Ethel Cain’s recent apology, as administered via a Google Doc, which was thorough and honest, precise on what she is willing and not willing to take responsibility for. Soon after, she was profiled in The Cut and The New York Times in advance of her album release. It seems as though today it’s easier for legacy media to reach a consensus on when a woman is behaving badly than when a country is committing genocide.

But I am interested in the other side of cancellation. Not the side that does the cancelling, but the side that reshapes and builds the cancelled individual’s image after public outrage. What is worth introspection is how the cancelled can be molded into a symbol for those unaffected and unoffended by their actions, regardless of whether the cancelled has spoken on the matter themselves. Sydney Sweeney has (wisely) yet to issue a statement on the controversy surrounding her ‘good genes / jeans’ American Eagle campaign, but the Far Right, including the White House, has been quick to come to her defense, using her likeness for their own cause, in this instance, white nationalism. In such cases, the cancelled becomes taxidermy, their publicly pummelled body contorted and stuffed to fit an agenda, not of their making but to their advantage and rescue. By not speaking, they become ventriloquized, not quite dead but rather resurrected to serve the cause of those galvanized by their plight.

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The cancelled also becomes a tool for the media, commodified into products to drive clicks and advertising revenue. Getting cancelled can land you on The Joe Rogan Experience or Call Her Daddy – some of the most-watched shows today – quicker than an outreach email from your average publicist. Hate drives attention, which is why it shouldn’t be a surprise to see disgraced businessmen hosting late-night talk shows or disgraced businessmen’s weddings getting covered by fashion magazines. The company Astronomer was able to smartly parlay their CEO’s cheating scandal into an ad campaign with Gwyneth Paltrow that refocused attention on their main value proposition. Talk about turning an L into a W.

Even if you aren’t cancelled by traditional means, there’s a business in losing. There’s an advantage to being made into a martyr. I don’t watch The Bachelor, but I know that it’s more lucrative to lose and be cast as the titular The Bachelorette in a subsequent season, positioning yourself as the nation’s favourite girl-next-door and extending your mileage in the media while collecting sponsorship deals. This, inadvertently, works in politics, too. Sometimes losing is big for your brand. Those who have lost political campaigns, such as Senator Bernie Sanders and former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have become symbols of The Left, visions for what we could have had, and liberal ideals. In September, former Vice President Kamala Harris will release a book called 107 Days, focusing on her short presidential run and eventual loss, which I’m certain will be instrumental in pivoting her to the next stage of her career.

I am publishing this on a Sunday, meaning that by the time this hits inboxes, millions around the world will rise to worship a man who was also publicly cancelled, crucified, and turned into a symbol. Although she has played a nun in the past, it’s a little too early to know if Sydney Sweeney and her ‘good jeans’ will become canonized as a saint. For now, she just gets to be a symbol, another role for the public to cast her in, and another opportunity for us to judge her sins. Then, she’ll be back. Not even Jesus stayed dead in the tomb forever.

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You are reading the final chapter of ‘Come If You Want,’ a serialized novella by Brendon Holder. Catch up on the first, second, and third chapters before jumping in.

When Palmer found the woman in the window, her vape was no longer coated in black sequins. The shaft of the vape was now washed in a camouflage print with the words ‘WOODLAND PISTACHIO’ embossed on its side. The smoke that he remembered from her original live stream still lingered around her like a grey bathrobe, snuggling her in a haze of nicotine and mist.

“Mizz Bella Noche,” she introduced herself, but Palmer remembered. In the window, within the room, her accent sounded vaguely coastal. Which coast, he was not sure. “I have been expecting you.” When she opened her mouth, Palmer could not see any teeth, just a black web beneath her nose.

“Palmer,” said Palmer as he invited himself to the empty armchair across from the woman. Up close, the woman’s smile lines gouged uneven valleys into her face. Her hair was redder, more alarming than he had initially encountered – a torched outlier in comparison to the dull gauze of the dim room.

Palmer’s legs crossed and then uncrossed, shuffling between an honest apprehension and a performed composure. He felt as though he should say something, but didn’t know what. Felt the need to fill the silence, to declare an objective for the meeting, but couldn’t find the words. He had just seen an open window, an escape from the group chat that was viciously dissecting Hank, and hadn’t planned much after that.

Sensing his discomfort, Mizz Bella Noche spoke instead. “It’s okay, sweetie. Having trouble knowing what to do next with your life?” A silver light entered her room as she careened towards a side table to grab a deck. As she began shuffling the cards, Palmer shuffled in his seat. Medieval faces and symbols flashed as she mixed the deck like romaine leaves: queens and kings, priestesses and fools; he understood the deck to be tarot.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I just need some guidance.”

Mizz Bella Noche flipped over a card and lifted it close to her face. The backside of the card was towards Palmer, its prophecy concealed like a secret. Next, she flicked the card aside, dismissing it altogether. The card cut the air and fluttered to the floor. “I could tell you what this card says, but… in the end, that would just be another voice. I think it would be better if you told me.” She kissed the vape and let the smoke exhaust from her snout. “It seems like you’ve been taking opinions from too many people.” Her acrylic claws drummed into her chest. “Clouding your judgment. Ignoring your center.”

Palmer swallowed dryly. “An outside opinion never hurt,” he chuckled falsely. He tapped his pocket for his phone but realized it was empty.

“Nonsense,” barked the woman. “We all have our own internal compass. What does your voice say? What do you say?”

“My voice?”

“Yes, your voice. Not the voice of someone else. You.”

Palmer dug deep to find what he needed to say, unsure if he felt it or not, but offered to just say it anyway. Unfiltered from the udder of his soul. “It would tell me to take control,” he said quietly, his words coming from some place beyond him, ventriloquized, perhaps written by some author instead.

“Yes, that’s good,” said Mizz Bella Noche. Her voice was becoming frayed, changing with each syllable, pitching down into a tone that was familiar to Palmer. “And what does that look like to you? How do you find control?”

“By reaching in deep,” he said. If he had willed Hank into his life, he only needed to will in something else. How could anyone’s voice be anything but their own? Loud if not heard, his love story with Hank was one that he wrote. Love functioned this way at times, its fictions more alluring than its facts. And he was ready for this story to end, to no longer be a character for his group chat or content for his therapist.

“Deep?” repeated the woman in the window. Again, he clocked a hint of familiarity in her vocal register, her tone changing right before him into something he could identify. He looked down and noticed that his right palm was moving, opening and closing as the woman spoke. Like a mouth. How long had he been doing that?

“Yeah, by digging in deep,” he said, this time meaning it.

“Then reach deep, my boy,” the woman said, her voice a whisper but decipherable. Only now did Palmer recognize it as his own. Then she swiped, masking Palmer under a cloud of smoke as his white noise machine grumbled on, whisking him off to sleep. The silver light in his bedroom strobed briefly and then cut to black.

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“You should have seen the crowd at this one,” said Hank, still huffing elaborately from dragging his sock suitcase from across his bedroom floor. “I did a new song for the witch doctress. You would have loved it. All about how she can make Ozempic out of gooseberries. Can you believe that?”

“I can’t wait to hear it one day,” replied Palmer, his face in a book, barely looking up. It was the end of the day, and he was already rolled into Hank’s bed, entombed in a taupe duvet like an ill Victorian child. His face was glazed like a doughnut, fresh from his evening skincare routine. Gwyneth’s orders.

Hank studied Palmer, his eyes shifting from his boyfriend to the book he was holding. “Remind me,” Hank said. “Why couldn’t you come to the show this evening?”

Palmer looked up from his book, peering over the perimeter of the pages. “Tabata.” Then he added, “I told you.” This wasn’t the truth. He didn’t tell him, but these kinds of declarations, he was learning, were rarely challenged by Hank.

“Yes. Right,” accepted Hank. Hank slinked onto his bed with a performative flop and stretched his hand to Palmer’s left big toe. He then wiggled it in between his index and thumb, and wet his lips.

Palmer wedged a bookmark into what he was reading and set his book on a nearby night table. He smiled at Hank invitingly, knowing what would happen next. Pulling the strings, he pressed an open hand into the bedsheet.

Hank leaped to mount Palmer, his knees around his ribs, and whispered, “Do you remember the safe word?” Palmer noticed that the speaker was suddenly playing Jeremih’s ‘Birthday Sex’ although it was none of their birthdays.

“Of course, honey,” replied Palmer. His words generated breathy currents on Hank’s cheek. He was that close. “Ottolenghi.”

Hank rubbed his buttocks into Palmer’s lap, and Palmer allowed himself to stiffen. Hank grinned from the pressure, amused by his perceived power. Hank bounced off the bed and retrieved the Fisherman Fred sock from the suitcase. When on top of the bed again, he carefully pulled the mouth of the sock into a cylindrical gap and brought it closer to Palmer’s lap, only for Palmer to intercept the sock with his palm like he was blocking a punch.

“No,” said Palmer. “I want to try something new tonight.” Hank looked puzzled… and then interested, as his boyfriend took Fisherman Fred into his own hands and, instead, sleeved it onto Hank’s penis. “It’s my turn tonight to be the puppetmaster,” Palmer said. Hank’s cock was flaccid in the sock, like a sponge in a pillowcase, and then grew firm, and slightly hooked from Palmer’s yanks.

It didn’t take much. A couple of pulls and Fisherman Fred started to dampen, his eyes producing salty ocean tears and his mouth salivating. The whole puppet was wet as if it had been cast overboard. When it was done, Hank recoiled in ecstasy.

Instead of putting the sock back in the suitcase, unwashed, like they typically did, Palmer held the sock in his hand and thought about his conversation with Mizz Bella Noche. He looked at Fisherman Fred, now a drenched lump in his palm. His mind thought back to when he first laid eyes on the sock, crumpled in Hank’s fist at the farmer’s market. Palmer crunched the sock into a little ball and looked at Hank, who was on his back, his knees to the roof of the bedroom. There was an opening.

You find your voice… by reaching deep, he thought to himself.

“Hey Hank?”

“Yes,” quivered Hank.

“Remember the safe word?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Palmer pushed his fist, and Fisherman Fred, into Hank, and opened his palm once inside. He pushed until he was a full elbow deep, until it felt like his fingertips were grazing the inside of Hank’s skull. Hank’s eyes rolled in delight, his mouth opening and closing as Palmer’s fingers flexed in Hank’s guts. A bleat shook itself free from the man’s throat, warbling out of his mouth in a meek fury. His jaw opened like he was waiting for a treat, his lips moving in tandem with Palmer’s finger strokes. A puppet, a shadow of Palmer. He could feel his heartbeat.

At that moment, Palmer could have made Hank say anything. He could have made him say ‘I love you.’ He could have made him say ‘I ordered you edamame,’ or all the other things he once imagined he was worthy of hearing. But that window of imagination had closed. He had moved from fiction to fact. He was capable of telling himself anything. Instead, Palmer wiggled himself free of the man, leaving the sock that once clung to him inside Hank’s innards, and walked towards the door. Without Palmer, Hank seemed to deflate, a facsimile of himself withering on the toppled mattress. In a flattened heap, he looked at Palmer, mouth agape, but struggled to find the words.

“Come if you want,” Palmer said for him, taking one final glance, but the man on the bed just looked at him:

Gagged as if he had nothing to say. Silenced, like his voice was thrown away.

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There comes a point in a man’s life, roughly between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-two, when he decides to purchase a film camera. The camera becomes an extra appendage for the man, strapped to him like his shadow, accompanying him to various social functions: the beach, winter vacations, graduations, parties, and the like. I regret to inform you that I am just like the other guys.

To render my condition more universal (read: basic), my purchase coincided with a move to Brooklyn a couple of years ago, where, after a few months in a new zip code, I found myself at a used camera store buying a film camera that would quickly prove itself to be more faulty than functional.

A 35mm roll of Kodak Portra 400 has 36 exposures. To those of a particular generation, that might seem to be plenty, but to a generation pruned on an iPhone’s camera roll with a history of recording copious videos at concerts with zero intention of ever watching them back, a film camera is an exercise in restraint. I snapped photos sparingly, saving my lens for the most precious moments and most beautiful faces. I was lucky to find both in abundance. What I enjoyed most was the lack of immediacy, the delayed gratification of the end result – the image. It was always a surprise what I got back from the film studio, the underexposed images jogging my memory to extinct histories like an old diary entry. Some of those images even ended up in early LOOSEYs.

I wasn’t particularly talented, but I don’t think that was the point. The camera itself seemed to satisfy some condition, or more specifically, a return to tradition, that, whether I was aware of it or not, coincided with an innate wish to be perceived as a craftsman. What was a craftsman if not an upholder of a legacy? If I lived in the woods, perhaps I would have picked up woodworking; if in the suburbs, maybe I would have gotten into cars. But alas, I was in the city, and so, the Pentax Espio presented itself to me, like a pearl waiting to be plucked from an oyster.

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Whenever I see a guy with a film camera dangling over his shoulder like a Birkin or raising a grainy VHS camcorder at a concert, I think to myself, “I cannot interfere; it is a canon event.” And yet, this experience, and others like it – cycling, espresso machine mastering, triathlons, and, maybe even the ancient art of podcasting – seem to be progressively universal amoung men of a particular age. These can be chalked up to just regular hobbies, you know, boy shit. But, still, I wonder if it could be a symbol for something more significant. The longstanding influence of Sofia Coppola’s cinematic aesthetic, Miu Miu’s increased profitability in a shrinking luxury market, the commercial success of Gerwig’s Barbie, the great Girls re-watch, the popularity of the WNBA, and the surplus of essays on “girlhood” are all recent examples of our booming cultural interest in the performance of womanhood and feminine adolescence. Could it be that “boyhood” is something that is also performed? Was there a defining aesthetic or doctrine that supplanted what it meant to be a boy? And if the fabric of masculinity is something that can be manufactured and exported, what are its most effective products? A focus on legacy and craft certainly isn't exclusive to one gender, and the standards for any identity are unreasonably high. But over the summer, I've found myself confronted with visions for boyhood, all seemingly connected, and I felt compelled to dissect.

Last weekend, a friend’s birthday party migrated into familiar territory for any frequenter of house parties: music video hour. Party members in the living room spilled into a semi-circle, taking turns punching songs into the remote to communally watch and remark. Finally, the troupe settled on the artist of the week, Justin Bieber, beginning with the breakout ‘Beauty and the Beat,’ as it features one of the best Nicki Minaj verses (“gotta keep an eye out for Seleneeeeer”), and finishing with the music video for DJ Khaled’s ‘POPSTAR,’ in which Bieber lipsyncs to Drake’s rhymes that correspond with the fellow Canadian’s road to fame (“You would probably think my manager is Scooter Braun, but my manager with twenty hoes in Buddakan!”). Between the two songs, there are seven minutes and seventeen seconds, but the duration between releases eclipses seven years. Even though the boy at the center of both music videos has evolved drastically, hallmarks of his practiced masculinity are present across the work: the steal-your-girl smirk, the erotic crotch grab, and the biting of his lip. Hallmarks that recur across a spectrum of men, becoming interchangeable across the likes of Michael Jackson, Odell Beckham Jr., Troye Sivan, Timothée Chalamet, and Tyler, the Creator. But, maybe that’s just more boy shit.

Bieber’s story is stitched with the fabric of manhood – the reinforcing of tradition, the maintenance of one’s own household – shepherding him from child star to teen heartthrob to husband. As he’s come of age, we’ve watched him negotiate relationships with the industry’s most powerful men – Diddy, Usher, Braun. Throughout this journey, where his well-being and commercial viability have been scrutinized, we’ve witnessed a boy sculpt himself into a man of his own image under the watchful eye of entertainment titans. If there is anyone who knows men and their power, it’s Justin.

Six weeks ago, during a confrontation with the paparazzi, the singer spewed out a series of words that would go on to launch a thousand memes, track a surprise album, and spearhead its subsequent non-rollout: “It’s not clocking to you that I’m standing on business.” The words found their way into my mouth like oxygen, as they did for many, reworking themselves into a common lexicon like most misused AAVE – first ironically and then earnestly, erasing its melanated origins through the scale of the internet. What was most interesting to me was his rationale for the aforementioned “standing on business,” defined by the words he said before and after it. “I’m a dad. I’m a husband… You’re standing around my car at the beach,” he said. Bieber’s identity as a man, a provider, an upholder of a legacy and family unit, is what galvanized his remark. The car, the beach, the protector of property. I empathize with Bieber. The level of fame he’s amassed has cost him his solitude, leading to scenarios like this, where he’s forced to litigate his humanity in public. One cannot assume to understand every component that led to Bieber’s unique combination of words that night, but I reckon that it had a lot to do with his masculinity, a masculinity that has become both a beguiling trap and a lucrative platform as he pushes through adulthood.

His deserted scaffolding of boyhood is on display on SWAG, the latest addition to the Bieber oeuvre, arriving amidst divorce speculation, a $35.1 million separation from his manager, Scooter Braun, and his wife Hailey Bieber’s meteoric rise backed by a Vogue cover and the sale of Rhode cosmetics for a casual billie. I have always been a more casual admirer of Bieber and his talent, but this time, I was paying attention. It was clocking to me.

On SWAG, Bieber finds a home within the album’s tightly stitched alternative rhythm and blues production, serenading the listener through an airy set of songs that come and go like the wind. His voice, impressive as ever, is layered, reverberated, and pitched up in some cases, settling into the album’s atmospheric tone so that it feels as though you are cruising across its twenty-one tracks. The lyrics themselves lack density, but this adds to the project’s fluttering lilt, the slight verses making way for Bieber’s emotive vocal ability. At times, it sounds like an exhale.

Bieber orbits through the challenges of parenthood, marriage, and his faith, often at the brink of a breakthrough without exactly puncturing it. This is fine for a vibes-forward album; like a man, he points us to the wound but is hesitant to tell us just how bad it hurts. My favourites are the songs where I can identify his influences: the chipmonked “YUKON,” in which he summons the echoes of Frank Ocean’s “Nikes,” to the breezy “BUTTERFLIES,” where I had to scrub the credits for evidence of Ryan Beatty. (He’s not there). By tapping Mk.gee and Dijon, some of the most innovative newcomers in the alternative pop and R&B circuit, Bieber has created his most experimental album to date. The final output is more legible than his next-gen influences, readied with the accessible finish that ‘big tent’ pop music typically extracts, and yet it feels the closest Bieber has ever come to an artist statement. One of independence, reclamation, and devotion.

During his “Purpose Tour” of 2016, Bieber performed from the awkward confines of a glass case, symbolizing the walls of emotion that often resulted in him being misunderstood. With SWAG, one can only hope that he has released himself from the strain of the man-made box and come out the other side. On “DEVOTION,” he begins with “I’m starting to be open to the idea that you know me too,” signalling a softening summoned by a woman’s presence. And yet, aside from Sexyy Red, the credits do feel like a bit of a sausage fest. Maybe that is expected for a project about navigating the entrapment of manhood, one where Bieber is both trying to wrangle himself free from the pressures and pitfalls of boyhood and also live up to something greater. But, I’m skeptical if the two can live next to each other, side by side: the duty, the release, you know, boy shit.

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If there is an album that points to another side of manhood, one built with confidence, rather than self-consciousness, and the joys of standing in your identity, rather than feeling burdened by it, it would be the latest Clipse album, Let God Sort Em Out. If you are planning on releasing a hip hop album later this year, just don’t. Delete those drafts. Get out of line. The Rap Album of the Year is here.

Brothers Pusha T and Malice have reunited after sixteen years to rap about EBITDA and focaccia, high ceilings and cocaine, penne alla vodka and lab diamonds under inspection. I listen to Clipse when I’m picking out lilies at the weekend farmer’s market and feel like an incredibly chic kingpin. This is the shit Kendall Roy was bumping before he backstabbed his father, Logan. It’s luxury rap.

Beyond their cutting lyricism, which veers from the humourous (“yellow diamonds look like peepee!”) to the lethal (“Calabasas took your bitch and your pride in front of me,”), what I love most about Clipse is that their art is founded on a set of strict ethics. There is an aesthetic consistency that you can trace back to their Hell Hath No Fury album that is present in their work today. There is a coded architecture that governs the way they write that extends to how they evaluate their peer set. Throughout the press cycle for Let God Sort Em Out, and within the work, the pair has been quick to take shots at those they deem fraudulent, namely Travis Scott and Drake, establishing them as morally bankrupt and not ‘real’ rappers.

To Clipse, their manhood is founded on the fierce preservation of truth within their personal and professional relationships as well as artmaking. You understand that they are living the lives they rap about. Remember, this is the same Pusha T who outed Drake for hiding a child on the 2018 diss record “The Story of Adidon.” This rigorous standard extends to how they view hip hop, which is as a craft, and not a trend. It’s something to be studied and upheld with mastery. On the now viral “P.O.V.”, Pusha T emboldens this distinction, sing-songing “They content create, I despise that. I create content, then they tries that!”

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The product of masculinity has extended itself to this summer’s blockbuster hits, all similarly expressing a return to tradition and the preservation of craft. In F1, Brad Pitt assumes the role of a racing veteran who returns to the track to extend wisdom to a struggling Formula One team with a training plan rooted in substance and wit; in Eddington, two mayoral candidates of a pandemic-era New Mexico town go head-to-head in a battle of ego and values, with competing boundaries on where progressive ideals jeopardize historic rights, and, in Superman, a man balances a complicated history to fight to uphold justice and eventually save the day. Boy shit persists at the cinema.

The doctrines of manhood are integrated into the plot of these films, but what registered to me most was the aesthetics of the film 28 Years Later, the third installment of the 28 Days Later zombie-apocalypse franchise. I am not embarrassed to say that I rated this movie five stars with a heart on Letterboxd…but I am surprised. I love how the movie really went for it with the gusto of an angsty, stoned teenager. The visual language of the film, which was shot on a series of iPhones, drones, and camcorders, felt like I was inside a teenage boy’s head. The cinematographer used a technique called ‘bullet time,’ in which the camera revolves around a slow-motion action moment (think The Matrix) to provide the audience with a rotating angle of when a bullet strikes the head of a zombie. It is akin to an XBOX first-person shooter, perhaps fashioned after Call of Duty. But the most striking aspect of its boyish aesthetic was the music, almost entirely comprised of screamo and heavy metal, at times covering the Teletubbies theme song. It was cinema, transporting me to the Warped Tours of the early 2000s, something that I never experienced personally but understood to be in tandem with a specific type of boyhood.

It was strange, sitting in the theatre with a direct view of a presentation of boyhood that I was intimately familiar with but had never tried on. As a boy, I didn’t listen to much screamo, nor did I wear Vans, but I did scan the texts? Sure. Seeing it presented again made me wonder why I have not seen more of that aesthetic in the contemporary. The culture is rich with Y2K girl aesthetics: Nokia flip phones, the latest PinkPantheress and Addison Rae’s album covers, Petra Collins’ dreamy and youthful female gaze. These aesthetics don’t have to be gendered, and are often effective when not, but I am curious if there is a masculine equivalent today. Does the dated boyhood aesthetic of the early 2000s exist in 2025? Or did we kill it, like the rest of our youth, on our way to becoming men?

Maybe that’s why I have used the words ‘boyhood’ and ‘manhood’ interchangeably throughout this essay. It’s difficult to discern the difference as the tenets of manhood are propagated to boys at a young age. Be tough. Don’t cry. Be strong. You can trace the lessons thrust on boys to the foundations of modern masculinity. It is no wonder it’s so present across our media ecosystem today; the two are practically twins.

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There are public figures who are working to redefine this. If podcasts are the podium for the modern male and his cultural interests, for every Joe Rogan or Andrew Tate within the manosphere, there is a Middlebrow or Las Culturistas attempting to broaden the aperture of what ‘boy shit’ can be.

Fashion designer Jonathan Anderson has made a career by confronting the confines of boyhood and masculinity across his namesake label of JW Anderson to his recent appointment at Dior. To know his work is to know that it exists at the borders of contradiction, dismantling expectations and prescribed doctrine with humour. This past June, for the debut of his Dior Men’s collection, Anderson’s first look featured a male model wearing a Christian Dior Bar jacket, an hourglass blazer that was traditionally fashioned for women. The clothes seemed both wearable and high concept, perhaps straddling both boyhood and manhood in a medley of Japanese denim, backward ties, high top sneakers and loafers. Anderson borrowed book totes from the women’s wear line, blurring again the gender ideals across the legacy French fashion house. But maybe, with such artful reference, Jonathan Anderson is just being a man and upholding tradition and craftsmanship. No longer skeptical, I see how the two can live next to each other, side by side: the duty, the release.

Last week, I developed a roll of film that had been wedged in my camera for nearly a year. I had been neglecting shooting, but thought to bring my camera on an upcoming trip to Marseille, which would mean I would need to address what was on the old roll of film. I assumed I used the film up, all 36 exposures, but upon developing, only seven photos were legible, the remainder eroded by overexposure. The surviving images are decent; grainy half-thoughts of me testing the camera on whoever is around me before ditching it and moving on to something else. I study the photos, the smirks of friends, the mess of an apartment. Not quite a craftsman, but ready to work towards it. You know, boy shit.

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Thousands of people are reading ‘Come If You Want’ every week, my serialized novella on modern romance. Catch up on chapters one, two, and three before the finale. The final chapter drops on Tuesday, July 29th.

LOOSEY is a newsletter about culture, art, technology, and the way we live. If this is something you like, consider subscribing and sharing. Let’s be friends on Instagram.

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You are reading ‘Come If You Want,’ a serialized novella by Brendon Holder. This is the third chapter. Catch up on the first and second chapters before jumping in.

When Palmer ran out of compliments to give Hank, he resorted to giving him a handjob. He gripped Hank tenderly as he kissed his nose. Then he moved to his forehead, his lips migrating across the imaginary border where his hairline had once been. Hank swelled in Palmer’s fist, his passion hidden underneath the plastic patio table of Raoul’s Roundhouse. Most of the townies cleared out by this point; it was just the two of them and Christmas lights that twinkled earnestly in the back garden year-round. It looked like a romcom if you squinted.

“Tell me about your favourite part again,” said Hank. His left hand was still clothed in a sock puppet, the mayor this time. His free finger popped in and out of the mouth of a beer bottle suggestively. The bottle was half-finished and on the table when they sat down, abandoned.

“The witch doctress,” answered Palmer. Hank had yet to ask Palmer anything about himself, but he thought this was fine. Mason had told him it was best to maintain a sense of mystery for the first few dates. Leave something to be discovered, was what he said. “I like the line about her making her clients look like Halle Berry.”

“If only. The town eventually finds out her medicine is no good.”

“Yeah?”

“Still workshopping it, but by the time I hit tour, I’ll have a more developed storyline for all three characters.” Hank nodded towards his aluminum briefcase that was on the ground, underneath the patio furniture. The box of silver stood on the dirt like a raided treasure chest. “That’s where I keep ‘em.” Palmer thought about this, how someone’s whole life – their career, their passion – could fit so neatly in one briefcase. For some, it could be this simple. He nodded at nothing until he found himself in the dark gloss of Hank’s eyes. In Hank’s eyes, a window of imagination opened:

Palmer couldn’t help but imagine a ‘VIP’ lanyard laced around his neck as he accompanied Hank’s performances from pub to pub, town to town. His mind moved faster than he could rationalize, parachuting him into a rose-coloured world with Hank. He envisioned himself in Hank’s green room, which, in reality, was often just an employee coat room, helping him run lines and rhymes before he emerged on stage and wooed a sea of white women with dreadlocks. By then, he would have soft-launched their relationship on Instagram, selecting a photograph of two hands interlaced, one socked and one not, with the caption: ‘sock it 2 me❤.’ He salivated at the prospect of weekly sashimi dinners, no longer $67 but now $33.50. Destiny fulfilled.

Slowly, Palmer began to experience the things he imagined in real life. The universe brought forth his manifestation just as it had brought him Hank. And when things happened like this, Palmer was happy. Happy enough to close the window.

Happy with the way that Hank would reach back for Palmer’s hand when the two of them were walking, because Hank's legs were longer than Palmer’s and, therefore, naturally, were a couple of steps ahead. Palmer found himself happy with how Hank would remove the pickles from his bison burger, because Hank thought they were nasty – “like biting into a sausage casing of battery acid,” he’d say – and give them to Palmer because he knew, or really, he assumed but never got around to asking, that Palmer liked them more than he did. Palmer became amused with the way Hank would excitedly attend weddings with him as a plus-one, except for that one time he accompanied Palmer to Lindsay’s wedding and, to Palmer’s surprise, brought Fisherman Fred to their dinner table and demanded that Fisherman Fred have his own plate, ruining the meal for Palmer, the accompanying guests, and the culinary team, and embarrassing him greatly, only afterword, when Palmer confronted Hank in their hotel room (as Lindsay’s wedding was a destination wedding, duh), for Hank to say that this was his method and “you knew what you were getting into when you started dating an artist.” Palmer became less amused when Hank would start hiccuping ferociously in bed. It always happened the night before a big show while the two of them were trying to sleep because Hank was ‘nervous’ and the only way for Palmer to calm him down and put him to sleep – which would then allow Palmer to go to sleep – was to jack-off in a sock, slide it on top of Hank’s right hand and watch Hank throw his voice to the cum-sock to sing cum-logged lullabies to the two of them to coax him back to sleep, Hank’s hiccups fiercely evaporating as he fell into a deep slumber while the cum-sock-sleep-puppet miraculously continued belting. Palmer became rather peeved when Hank would forget to put his name on the guest list for his shows, resulting in Palmer having to shell out a modest $14 to gain entry and stand in general admission, amid Hank’s increasingly feral fandom, the quaint charm of the townies now dormant, replaced by something more erratic and cursed, as if hexed by the witch doctress herself. And then there were the times when Hank would make Palmer upset and hurt his feelings with his indifference. Palmer soon learned that Hank lived through perpetual shrugs and nondecisions, his passiveness weaponized to either lull Palmer into submission or have him act aggressively to force an outcome, just like when Hank said, “Come if you want.”

And Palmer – finally! – said, “What do you mean?” His trousers were already on, and he was halfway through ironing a paisley button-up shirt. “It’s your brother’s engagement party. I feel like if I come… I should be enthusiastically invited. I mean, I thought you had invited me.”

“Yeah, no. For sure. That makes sense.” The words rolled out of Hank’s mouth casually, like they just happened to meet at an intersection by chance or something. Palmer eyed the man who was sitting on the edge of the bed, already dressed, strapped into a navy double-breasted jacket despite telling Palmer that the dress code for the party was ‘sport casual.’ His legs kicked back and forth like a child rocking in a swing.

“I don’t really know what to do with that…” It had been one and a half months. Technically too early to ‘meet the family,’ but Hank brought it up so casually over rigatoni the week before. Almost like he assumed Palmer would be there. Or, at least that’s how Palmer heard it. Palmer put the iron on the board and thought about how his group chat would have heard it. He folded his hands underneath his armpits and said, “Does your brother even know I exist?”

Hank blinked and said, “Of course, he does.”

“Alright. So, do you want me to come?”

“I want you to come if you want to be there.” His smile that once seduced Palmer had now decayed into a thin line.

“That’s not really the same thing as wanting me to come.” Palmer wondered how getting the thing he wanted could make him feel worse. Like the empty feeling he sometimes experienced as a child after opening the last Christmas present and not finding a puppy. Sharp stabs used to claw a sense of lack into Palmer, but this was something else entirely. A vacancy. “I feel crazy for having to clarify.”

Palmer stared into Hank for an answer. Certainly, it was his turn to speak; that’s just the way conversations worked, but Hank remained faithful to his blank expression. No response is a response. Who had said that? It struck Palmer then that perhaps Hank never really had to answer to anyone, so used to being the chief conversationalist, throwing his voice only to hear his own words said back to him. How one could live within a hall of their own voice, Palmer didn’t know, but he had grown exhausted sustaining this behaviour.

Tired of it all, and not sure if what he wanted was worth being tired for, Palmer sighed. Then he said, “I won’t come.”

“As you wish,” offered Hank as he played with the metallic buckles of his briefcase. Palmer couldn’t believe that the socks were coming to the engagement party, and he wasn’t. Hank pushed a kiss into Palmer’s forehead and closed the apartment door behind him, leaving Palmer alone once again.

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It wasn’t like Palmer was in a rush to be single. It just seemed like the practical thing to do.

He found himself longing for the solitude that came with eating overcooked stir-fry in his apartment alone, the independence he misplaced when he began a relationship with Hank. Vital aspects of his personhood became debris, whittled and replaced with the lint left by Hank and his socks. Where was Palmer’s free thought? Did he ever have it? At times, it felt like there was a force guiding his future. A cosmic pull. But wasn’t this the truth for all romantic love? A mystic compulsion yanking you from one person to the next, be it an algorithm in a dating app, a savvy matchmaker, or an invisible string? This was how people in his life seemed to describe love. Not as an active choice but something that, instead, chose you. But, surely, if he hadn’t picked this for himself, who did?

He walked across Hank’s kitchen, taking in his surroundings with clear eyes. The ribs of the radiator were practically peach-fuzzed under a layer of dust, and a curtain of lace hung like a stained doily in front of the kitchen window. Is this how he imagined he’d be spending the summer? Instinctively, he stretched his hand to the curtain to get a peek beyond the window, but as he pushed back its soiled lace, he was met with the brute sledge of red brick. Hank’s apartment window had no view; its tart veil of bricks cocooned one to themselves without the chance of introspection. Finally, he understood.

Palmer could not recall the last time he got off the train early to meander through the farmer’s market. Hank’s sleep troubles and his late-night cum-logged lullabies caused Palmer to forfeit his weekly routine of morning Tabata. He became dull and groggy, which only made him more susceptible to Hank’s silent agenda. It made Palmer quick to acquiesce. To play his part like a puppet. Passively pathological, were the words he had once read from a wise woman.

Hank made Palmer happy until he didn’t, but this time, it was Palmer who cooled.

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“Dump his ass.” Three words texted by Calvin, read by Palmer in bed. After bottling his feelings for months and keeping much of his relationship with Hank a secret from the group chat, he finally spilled the tea the week after Hank’s brother’s engagement party. “There is no need to be dealing with an indirect man,” the text said.

Basil delivered a groundbreaking thumbs up emoji that wasn’t exactly his skin tone, and then sent, “The man of your dreams will CLAIM you with confidence.”

“If he wanted to, he would,” sent Michael definitively.

“And a rhyming sock ventriloquist? I don’t mean to yuck your yum but… YUCK,” wrote Terry.

Jack sent a sock emoji, followed by a water droplet emoji, followed by a yellow face puking. Palmer responded with a “Haha” reaction to obfuscate the horror that the string of emojis closely resembled his bedroom activity with Hank. He adjusted his mouth guard, thinking.

“Well, he’s actually quite gifted,” replied Palmer. “His raps are on Spotify.” Just what did Palmer obtain from defending Hank’s talent? Did it defend Palmer’s taste in men and, therefore, Palmer himself?

“Drop a link,” texted Mason

“Share his IG,” texted Kieran.

“Send a screenshot of the last message he sent you, a recent pay stub, and his blood type,” texted Michael.

Palmer did what he was told and watched his group chat tear at Hank’s digital footprint like a pack of hyenas. The group chat came to new conclusions about the rhyming sock ventriloquist that Palmer had never thought of, which made him feel like his judgment ought to be questioned. Like, what did he know anyway?

“Okay, so, he posted the black square on his IG. That’s good, right?” sent Terry.

“I guess, but like… it doesn’t really look like the real black square. It just looks like he put his hand over his phone’s camera and took a picture. Look closely. You can kind of see that the black isn’t even a consistent shade throughout the whole square. It has these dark magenta blotches in the middle of the square where you can see the backlight getting through his fingers,” voicenoted Calvin. His voice sounded hoarse, like he had just been running uphill. “It was like he was in a rush to put something up.”

Palmer saw what Calvin saw and imagined Hank snapping a photo with the phone camera wedged into the fist of the witch doctress sock. The Black Power fist took on a new meaning at that moment.

“Homeboy was stresssssseeeed,” texted Mason.

“Wait,” texted a number Palmer hadn’t seen before in the group chat. “He kind of looks like Stanley Tucci.” The number belonged to Palmer’s therapist. “He’s hot.”

“What the hell are you doing here?!??!?!??” replied Palmer. But the group chat moved on, changing their minds in unison the way a pack of flying birds changes direction. Heading south, then north, then left, then right. Off was now on again.

“Awooooga,” sent Michael.

“BINGO! Yeah, I see it now,” sent Kieran.

“Thaaaaaat’s who he looks like,” texted Basil.

“Wait, you gotta stay with him,” sent Calvin. “He IS hot.”

Quickly, Palmer felt his love life melt into content, having now, finally, ‘shared with the class.’ He shuddered at becoming romantic entertainment to be picked over like an episode of reality television.

The therapist replied to Palmer’s message. “I’m just doing field research! Turns out some of my other clients are also in this group chat. I never put it together until a couple of them talked about one friend dating a sock guy in therapy. I assumed it must be you.”

“Consider this an intervention,” said Jack, followed by a wink emoji.

An intervention, Palmer parroted back to himself. A notification bloomed on the top corner of his screen. Venmo. Another $350 from the therapist. Palmer smuggled out a groan. From all the voices, what he needed was a break, not an intervention. Some fresh air, he thought.

He thought about his sock but resisted. Instead, he opened up TikTok: flipping a window open, and, begrudgingly, climbed through.

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