Chip Nerds and Generation Larp

performative matcha boy

Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere are on the cover of Vogue, following in the footsteps of their parents Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere, who were on the cover of Vogue in 1992; Malcolm Todd and Inde Navarrette star in Gap’s fall denim campaign, soundtracked by a cover of Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own”; Matt Damon’s daughter Isabella signed with IMG Models; and I’m excited to see Phoebe Bridgers’ acting debut alongside Robert Pattinson in A24 drama Primetime.

HOW BAMA RUSH CHANGED THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA, townandcountry
Since #BamaRush first went viral in 2021 (were we ever so young?), out-of-state enrollment at the University of Alabama has climbed to 65%, driven — presumably — by interest in Greek life. The prestigious rush coaching service Hiking in Heels has already registered 30% of its class of 2027 Alabama girls a full year before recruitment. But while more people are rushing, fewer are posting about it: Noted #RushTok scholar Anne Helen Petersen says she’s noticed that most rushees are no longer documenting their experiences online. “If you are serious about getting into a good house, those people aren’t doing videos.” The girls still posting, she says, are largely out-of-staters treating recruitment as “a career pathway” for building a following, which sororities read as being “in it for the wrong reasons.” Fascinating!

GEN Z-ERS DRESS LIKE THEY’VE NEVER WORN CLOTHES BEFORE, nytimes
In an op-ed that’s ostensibly about personal style but really about loneliness and community among young people, former Vice editor Thomas Morton — who now works as a door guy at a bar in Chicago — writes that “everybody under the age of 30 these days” is “dressed like an actual lunatic,” decked out in illegible outfits like “JNCO jeans with a blazer, a cardigan sweater tucked into camo pants with no belt, a T-shirt over a peasant dress with sleeves pulled through with a belt.” The punk, goth, and ska tribes of his youth served as “a bulwark against the fracturing sense of atomization,” whereas today’s hyper-specific micro-aesthetics (“performative matcha boy,” “urban-witch-prairie-goth”) keep kids “permanently aloof.” A top-voted comment from a late-30s former California punk mentions Brandy Melville selling a “HARDCORE PUNK” shirt and her Gen Alpha niece requesting a Nirvana tee despite never having heard of the band. “When everyone looks like everyone else, you cannot find ‘your people’ anymore,” they write.

ALL OF GEN Z IS LARPING, usatoday
Gen Z has repurposed “LARPing” — live-action role-playing — as a sort of catchall insult for anyone they perceive to be performative. (Back in the day, we called them posers.) Going to a fitness class just for the photos, for instance, is “larping being a pilates girl,” while a summer internship is “larping a corporate 9-to-5.” Morgan Hurlock, 24, of Philadelphia, said it describes “someone who is performative in the way that they’re dressing or acting or doing something, and it’s not actually authentic to who they are as an individual.” Sophia Weber, 20, a UC Santa Barbara student studying abroad, said she and her friends even use it to describe themselves, joking “Oh, we’re larping London, because we were just there for a few hours.”

THE DATING SCENE THAT’S SUDDENLY DOMINATED BY CHIP NERDS, wsj
In America, the summer’s hottest arm candy may be a private equity boyfriend, but in South Korea, semiconductor engineers have become the most coveted bachelors, according to local matchmaking agencies. Samsung and SK Hynix employees, long ranked below lawyers, doctors, and accountants as marriage material, are pulling even thanks to bonuses expected to reach $500,000. Law student Jung Da-kyung, whose boyfriend works at Samsung’s chip division, told the Journal that a friend recently asked her SK Hynix-employed brother-in-law for an introduction to a co-worker and was turned down. SK Hynix workers, the friend was told, are only dating each other. “They are aware that their value has gone up,” Jung said.

SUPERCHARGED BY SOCIAL MEDIA, THE GLP-1 BOOM IS WARPING TEEN PSYCHES, bloomberg
Clinicians wrote roughly 33,000 GLP-1 prescriptions for people under 18 in the US last year, according to a Komodo Health analysis for Bloomberg Businessweek, and nearly every teen girl interviewed said she knows peers taking the drugs with no clear medical need. “My friends and people I know, we’ve all lost track of what a normal, healthy, especially female body looks like,” said Amelia Cate Prosser, 17, who has battled anorexia and bulimia after being bombarded with weight-loss content on social media. Teens are using algospeak like “zemp,” “z3mp,” and “sk!nnyt0k” to surface restricted content, and TikTok’s AI search summaries offer tips on how to push back when a doctor refuses a prescription. Sometimes I think girls today don’t have it as bad as millennials who lived through the dreaded “skinny starlet” era, but then I read stuff like this.

One last thought:

@sssobrienI need to stop falling…

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