Big Skate and Tinder Tenders

after school weekend edition

Hi friends! Welcome back to After School ✨weekend edition✨, an extra long and extra opinionated youth culture digest for paid subscribers.

This week, I had the pleasure of chatting with cultural theorist Matt Klein (who currently leads the Trends Practice at Reddit — coolest job) for his stellar publication called Zine. We talked about employee boomerangs, algorithmic lotteries, and “old-phobia.” He is incredibly smart and thoughtful, and this quote of his has stuck with me all week:

We’ve been collectively disillusioned over the last year with “power to the worker.” These philosophies are temporary — contextual to the larger zeitgeist. When layoffs come in the face of a teetering economy, three days in-office sound a lot better when a paycheck is still hitting. NFT values only hold for so long while BNPL debt adds up quickly.

Read the whole thing here.

Oh, and also! My bud Ben Dietz who writes [SIC] Weekly gave me a couple of free gift subscriptions to his excellent newsletter. Want one? (Trust me, you want one.) The first three people to email me get ‘em!

Today, we’re talking about:

• The hot, anxious girls of Twitter

• Big Skate is taking over

• Tinder Tenders (it’s more insane than you could imagine)

• U.S. Army TikTok plants

• “Quantum flapdoodles”

• Whether TikTok is ruining live music (it is)

• The Away luggage for Gen Z

• The DTC brand I saw at the TJ Maxx in Flatiron

• The cool fall shoe with an insane waitlist

• And, as always, everything I’m reading, buying, listening to, etc.