

Discover more from After School by Casey Lewis
Nebulous Multihyphenates and Formula 1 Fangirlification
has "woke" lost its meaning?
Cardi B has a line of skincare and feminine care products in the works; Gen Z climate activist Ayisha Siddiqa is on Time’s Women of the Year 2023 shortlist; and BTS’s Jimin is Tiffany’s newest ambassador.
THE FANGIRLIFICATION OF FORMULA 1, thecut
The megapopular Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which debuted in 2019, served as a major catalyst for the growth in the sport’s audience.
On YouTube, countless fan-made videos spotlight individual drivers — such as Sebastian Vettel, Charles Leclerc, and Daniel Ricciardo — and their friendships. Some of the videos have millions of views. Tumblr has returned as a space for private, insular F1 fandom. Discord even more so. On Twitter, Formula 1 edits could be mistaken for lyric-video stills. At the time of writing this, there are over 17,000 fan fics on Wattpad tagged “Formula 1.”
KSI, LOGAN PAUL, SALT PAPI: THE INFLUENCERS REDEFINING BOXING FOR THE TIKTOK GENERATION, theguardian
Speaking of fandoms: More than 10,000 people packed into Wembley Arena to watch a “string of match-ups between vloggers, TikTok stars, Love Island-ers and OnlyFans creators” that culminated in a headline bout between KSI, the 29-year-old rapper, YouTuber and co-owner of the energy drink Prime, and FaZe Temperrr, a pro Call of Duty player and co-owner of one of the world’s biggest esports organizations, FaZe Clan. Beyond the venue, 300,000 people on either side of the Atlantic paid to tune into the action from their homes.
THEIR LAST NAMES ARE GATES, JOBS, XIE AND CUBAN. THEIR BRANDS ARE STILL LOADING, theinformation (paywalled but aggregated by insider)
“I’m pretty realistic that people start following me because of my family name. And people probably find it funny to see my dad being a goof and playing Boxbollen,” said Phoebe Gates, the 20-year-old daughter of Bill and Melinda who has more than 64,000 followers on TikTok and 193,000 on Instagram. “But once they follow me, they stick around, and I think some of that is because of the issues that I post about, like women’s health.”
SHARING IT ALL AFTER BARING IT ALL, nyt
Eileen Kelly, the 27-year-old Instagram influencer and sex podcaster also known as @killerandasweetthang, “performs a version of herself in the theatrical milieu of the internet.”
Today one might have a tough time explaining to a college student why a young woman posting provocative photos would justify news coverage. Discussions about the way teen girls and young women interact with platforms like Instagram — and the effects on their self-image and mental health — still abound. But in the mid-2010s, conversations around influencers, sexuality and online behavior were only just taking shape
#STOPWILLOW IS TAKING TIKTOK BY STORM. CAN IT ACTUALLY WORK?, cnn
TikTok users have galvanized around halting the Alaska oil drilling project known as Willow. Videos with anti-Willow hashtags like #StopWillow have amassed close to 50 million views in the last week, and on Friday, Willow was on the site’s top 10 trending list, behind celebrities Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber. The online activism has resulted in more than one million letters being written to the White House protesting the project, as well as a Change.org petition with 2.8 million signatures and counting.
YOUNG REPUBLICANS ARE BEGGING PARTY ELDERS TO STOP SAYING ‘WOKE’, rollingstone
Some worry that going so hard on “woke” — a term now used almost entirely derogatorily by Republican detractors — will turn off upcoming generations of voters already disinclined to support the GOP. Others simply said it had lost its meaning, as many once-favored slang terms do, when the septuagenarians in Congress started punctuating their Fox News hits with it.
One last thought:
*this is a joke