microplastics, everywhere
the vibes are unstable!
It’s subtropical in New York. When it’s not humid, it’s raining. The Apple Weather app is often wrong and the only person I trust now is @nymetroweather on Instagram, not because I know anything about his meteorological methods but because he is good at describing just what the hell is going on. A recent series of sticky days were described as having “unstable” vibes, and I agree. This state of affairs cannot possibly be sustainable.
As a child in New Jersey I hated summers because they felt too long, I never had anything to do and I missed seeing my friends every day at school, and I was sensitive to the heat anyway. Somebody should have warned little me what my life would be like as an adult: a few years of finally understanding what summer is all about, and then unending brain-melting humidity for the rest of my life. Or at least until the seas rise and take the city with it.
The weather really intensifies something I’ve been calling, for lack of a better term, “microplastic vibes”. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that have microplastic vibes: GLP-1 drugs (which are more popular than I thought), ADHD, Addison Rae (complimentary), Love Island (derogatory, sorry), Trader Joe’s frozen food, planned obsolescence, yoga classes that have some kind of gimmick like puppies or weed, AI slop, Florida, the nutcracker seller I encountered in McCarren Park the other day whose business is basically a DTC brand. Don’t tell me I’m just describing capitalism, that’s too lazy. I will probably have more to say on this in the future.
Here are some things I think are interesting this week:
The haters are are now waiters at Zohran’s table of success. It’s been exciting, and also disorienting, to see the left act like winners now. Winners don’t complain about how rigged the system is against them every five minutes because everybody already knows that. Of course there are still people doing this on the internet, but it’s not clear to me that they make up any significant percentage of the left. This was a really interesting interview on Odd Lots about how CEOs are reacting to Mamdani’s win. Major takeaways: it seems like there is a divide in the business community, where real estate sees Zohran as an existential threat while other business leaders are apprehensive but not (yet) worried. Kathy Wylde seems a lot smarter than the billionaires she pals around with. That’s probably how it goes for most elite hangers-on.
Watching this video of Zohran and Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, brought me a moment of true joy this because this is how a winner acts. Hermelyn is chair of one of the most corrupt local Democratic parties in the country and has had a long, well-documented history of opposing DSA at every opportunity. None of that shows in the video, which is entirely on Zohran’s terms, using his framing, to advance his agenda. Junior partner in the coalition, no longer! We’re in charge now and it feels so good.
Why is Eric Adams campaigning with Hindu nationalists? This woman appears to be clinically insane? He has since quietly tried to back out of the event but it’s still I don’t think this will be the last time that Adams gestures toward Hindutva to get votes. It’s morally wrong, but also pragmatically stupid. Hindu Americans might lean to the right when it comes to Indian politics, but India has little salience when it comes to how they vote in the U.S. I haven’t seen any specific polling on this, but I’m going to take a wild guess that Hindus in New York voted enthusiastically for Zohran!
I am surprised by the staying power of Abundance. I really thought this was going to be a non-story in actual, real-life politics because no one really cares what writers argue about, but with Obama’s endorsement I think this is probably going to be an ongoing phenomenon as we head into the 2026 midterms. I can see Abundance mindset catching on with moderate Democrats because 1) it’s a vision that real estate donors will not be hostile to, 2) a direct counter to the tenant-centered politics of the left while paying lip service to the affordability crisis voters are worried about and 3) sounds way better than whatever the fuck the Dems have going on at the moment, which is nothing. It’s not the billionaires, it’s the zoning codes! You can just imagine a highly-paid consultant making a slide deck with that as a title somewhere in a nondescript office building in Rosslyn, Virginia right now.
This is not a rallying cry that will energize the Democratic base who are demanding they do something, but it’s the kind of thing people in Washington can get behind because it motions toward big change without actually changing all that much. It’s too early to make real predictions about 2026, but I don’t think Abundance mindset is going to win the Democrats much of anything. It won’t stop them from trying, though! (I wrote a review of Abundance for this newsletter a few months ago that I never ended up posting because at the time I felt like it wasn’t a productive public conversation anymore, but I think now is a good time to bring that back. Look out for it soon.)
Grok in the Pentagon. Sorry but I really have nothing to say to this except that I’m more aware of the microplastics in my brain than ever. We are well and truly fucked. Every day I wake up and I read the news and I think to myself, someone needs to do something about all this! I know no one’s going to do anything, but nevertheless, I persist.
The State Department on Substack. I followed them out of a sense of morbid curiosity and it turns out these are just glorified press releases with some CRAZY exceptions. Everyone’s an aspiring content creator now, including the most evil people on earth, I guess. I don’t like it!
I like this framing of Indian weddings as soft power. The concept of a wedding as a site of conspicuous consumption is obviously dependent on class; working-class Indians, in the subcontinent and across the diaspora, are not having fabulous destination weddings or spending hundreds of thousands on Sabyasachi. Indian elites’ desire to reframe the global perception of India in their image is good for their bottom line, but not for anyone else. It’s a problem that when people think of India, they think of the Ambani wedding, because that’s just not how people live. But all cultural traditions are an assertion of self and the collective: this is who we are, what we believe in, and how we define ourselves in relation to others. There is something to explore here about how the ultra-wealthy get to decide what that means in the public eye. It makes sense to me that like basically everything else in the world, Indian weddings are primarily about capital.
A fun Buzzfeed-style quiz to take if you work in media or are otherwise really annoying. It turns out I would not have gotten a job at Vogue in the 90s, but that doesn’t bother me because I can’t get a job at Vogue in 2025 either.
That’s all for now. Please enjoy this image of a cow that my friend sent me.
