‘It-Girl’-y Cluttercore and Sandwichness

the tiktokification won't stop

Starface launched full-body zit stickers; Hayley Williams and Julien Baker are performing at a music festival protesting the Tennessee drag ban; Shein is looking to raise $2 billion in lead-up to IPO; and most people buying Apple products are quite young.

MORE PEOPLE ARE EMBRACING ‘CLUTTERCORE’ AS MESSY ROOMS GO VIRAL ON TIKTOK, nyt
Here’s a trend I didn’t anticipate: According to the Styles section, clutter is cool now. “There’s something sort of ‘it-girl’-y about the messy room,” said Amalia Soto, the digital artist known as Molly Soda. Relieved to hear the clothes currently strewn about my bedroom are ‘it-girl’-y rather than pigsty-y.

Last week, the influencer Alix Earle took a break from her regularly programmed makeup routines to share a tour of her home on TikTok. There’s a shot of “casa cucaracha,” a birdhouse placed on the kitchen floor to house cockroaches. Then a sticky-looking dining room table laden with open beverages. Then a pair of jeans crumpled up next to a case of Corona Light. “When did living like this become a flex?” one of the video’s nine million viewers asked in the comments.

DO YOU SPEAK NEW YORK TIMES?, newyorker
As the paper of record changes — “to address new realities, like cryptocurrency, but also to cover new communities, like whatever Gen Z is” — the Twitter bot @NYT_first_said tracks in real time the introduction of lingo like “sandwichness,” “sleevage,” and “corntastic.”

CAN TEENS MAKE THE MALL COOL AGAIN?, fastco
An entrepreneurship club at the New England Innovation Academy (NEIA) in Marlborough has made a school project out of a local mall’s uncertain future. These teens “have become informal advisers offering ideas for helping plot out how the mall could adapt and evolve.” Very cool.

MORGAN WALLEN’S CHART-DOMINATION STRATEGY? REALLY LONG ALBUMS, wsj
The 29-year-old country-music star’s 36-track ‘One Thing at a Time’ capitalizes on how Billboard’s rankings operate in the streaming era. The album, released Friday, has scored the largest first-week numbers of 2023. I’m sorry to say that a significant number of those streams are me :/

SPOTIFY’S NEW DESIGN IS PART TIKTOK, PART INSTAGRAM, AND PART YOUTUBE, theverge
Spotify is rolling out a new TikTok-like home feed, with a vertical, video-heavy scroll, allowing creators to showcase their work. Notably, Reddit announced a similar TikTok-inspired video feed this week, too.

RECESSION-BLIGHTED MILLENNIAL PARENTS ARE TRYING TO RAISE THEIR ‘GEN ALPHA’ KIDS WITH THE ONE THING THEY NEVER HAD, fortune
Gen Alpha is already on its way to wealth, with most of this generation’s parents having already opened — or planning to open — savings accounts for their little Alphas, Morning Consult finds, with a general savings account and college savings account at the top of the list.

One last thought:

caleb hearon @calebsaysthings

there’s a lot of talk about kids choices here tonight. well i know a kid who made a pretty big choice for all of us. and you see, it wasn’t easy! his dad was a pretty important guy and he had a big job to do for all of humanity and—

taylor @sassygayroot

Oh, he's gone the full youth pastor way. Right there on the Kids Choice stage he's doing promo. https://t.co/Gnt90qaIc1