Parasocial Matchmakers and Einstein Mog
cannes dispatch deux
Olivia Rodrigo is doing her own Lilith Fair; Romeo Beckham will make his acting debut in a tennis romance called Forty Love; Carly Rae Jepsen announced a new double album Day And Night; and the kids have discovered Mazzy Star's 1993 hit “Fade Into You” (once dubbed “the dreamiest song of the ‘90s” by Pitchfork) via 20-year-old Sombr.
Quick dispatch from Cannes: The Yahoo panel I did yesterday with Beehiiv’s Tyler Denk and CatGPT’s Cat Goetze, moderated by the great Alex Heath, was a blast! We talked a lot about the advantages and limitations of AI. The consensus was that while AI is very helpful for streamlining business operations — especially for entrepreneurs and creatives trying to run scrappy companies — it will never, ever replace thinking, writing, and creativity. It simply can’t! Our own POVs are our — forgive me for being so girlboss TED talk, I’m underslept and undercaffeinated — our superpowers. My favorite question was when Alex asked us what we hope to accomplish in the next two years; Tyler and Cat both had thoughtful, ambitious replies, but my sincere answer: To keep doing exactly this.
In the evening, I went to Emily Sundberg’s gorgeous dinner hosted in partnership with Yahoo. (This newsletter is not sponsored by Yahoo, though it kind of sounds like it is — they are just a genuinely great team; look how cool Sona, who I was lucky enough to sit next to, is!) On the other side of me was Serena Kerrigan, and I spent a lot of the dinner marveling at how much work it takes to be an influencer. I really mean it! I was going to attempt to do “Day in the Life” TikToks while in Cannes and that lasted, oh, five minutes. The editing alone takes Serena two hours a day at minimum (can you imagine spending two hours editing footage of your own face and voice? This work is not for the weak!), and that’s to say nothing of the filming, which is constant. Emily said that influencers like Serena are athletes, and I think she’s exactly right. They’re creative directors, producers, stars, and often photographers and writers, too. The endurance it takes to execute all of that, every single day, is so impressive.
Today I’m heading to a breakfast put on by Ben Dietz and co., a lunch hosted by Cultured and OpenAI, and then hoping to catch a few panels this afternoon, before catching a few happy hours, before catching a few parties…but not too many parties, because I’m hosting an early breakfast with Day One, the agency that made it possible for me to be here!
I MOG, HE MOGS, YOU MOG, WE ALL MOG, nytimes
By now, we’re all (too?) aware of the word “mog,” but I enjoyed this piece that decoded how the term transcended incel chatrooms to become as culturally inescapable as it suddenly is. Linguist Adam Aleksic traced it to the acronym AMOG (”alpha male of the group”), which by the mid-2010s was circulating in “black pill” forums, a nihilistic incel outlook borrowed from The Matrix, before spreading to TikTok, X, and Instagram via looksmaxxing influencers like Clavicular. “It’s sort of been semantically bleached,” Aleksic said. “It’s lost a lot of the overt connotation.” (For example, TikToker Pierre Paul, 28, told the Times, “You can mog absolutely anything. Einstein developed the theory of relativity. We can effectively say that he mogged physics and mathematics.”) Aleksic pointed out that middle schoolers tend to drive adoption because they’re “extremely flexible in their sense of self” — this is exactly why I think the youths are the most interesting consumer group to track — and pull vocabulary from online streamers. But as one person commented, “If you’re reading about new lingo in the newspaper, you can be sure the term has already jumped the shark.”
GEN Z EARNING MORE THAN MILLENNIALS DID AT THE SAME AGE, theguardian
Well, well well! Real weekly pay at age 24 for those born in the late 1990s was 12% higher than for cohorts born in the late 1980s. Those born in the early 2000s are now earning more at 24 than any generation going back to those born in the 1950s. The lowest-paid 10% saw pay rise 36% in real terms between 2012 and 2025, fueled by minimum wage hikes, while workers aged 22–29 on median earnings saw hourly pay grow 15% over the same period, compared to 4% for those in their 30s. “The living standards stagnation of the millennial generation has been well documented over the past decade. Many have speculated that the breakdown of generational progress has continued for Gen Z too,” said senior economist Charlie McCurdy. “But with the oldest members of Gen Z now several years into their working lives, the good news is that they’ve enjoyed a mini pay rebound.”
NEWSLETTERS ARE THE NEW MATCHMAKERS, theatlantic
John Fulton’s year-old Eastside Rag, covering L.A. neighborhoods like Silver Lake and Los Feliz, runs personals alongside dispatches on Cafe Stella and Bub and Grandma’s, and in March, he threw a singles event at Los Candiles in Glassell Park that drew 300 people at peak. “People were talking to each other; people were going up to strangers and striking up a conversation,” Fulton said. “It felt so, sort of, magical and rare.” Miranda July launched “Beguiled” earlier this year, profiling a date-seeking reader monthly via a “looong” questionnaire (sample prompt: “How important is cuddling to you?”). bookbear express’s Ava Huang now runs a paid matchmaking service, realizing “my writing might be a way not only for me to meet people, but for other people to meet each other.” The pitch, according to Pleasure-Seeking’s Camille Sojit Pejcha, is that newsletter readers share tastes, so daters start from a “stronger baseline of compatibility” than at a mixer.
THE HOT NEW DATING SCENE ISN’T A BAR. IT’S HYROX., businessinsider
If Substack fails, maybe competitive fitness is the way to one’s heart? At a Hyrox race in NYC this month, Surf — a dating app for “wellness-minded singles” — paired strangers as mixed-doubles partners for the 77-minute fitness competition, which alternates 1K runs with strength stations like sled pushes and wall balls. (If you’ll recall, the New York Times touched on the trend of singles trading swiping for sweating last week.) A single Surf employee sifted through 5,000 applications, using social profiles to gauge fitness and personality. Hyrox, founded in Germany nearly a decade ago, now runs events in 85 cities with roughly 650,000 annual competitors; tickets run $200 and sell out in minutes. “As ‘lifestyle compatibility’ becomes more important,” gyms and run clubs are becoming “third spaces,” sociologist Dr. Jess Carbino said, adding that meeting a partner at Hyrox is “aspirational.” “People are hopeful. They want to fantasize that things will work out for them,” she added.
One last thought:
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Lovely seeing you at Breakfast Club, Casey! breakfastindustries.substack.com will have the recap on Monday (and info about BCs around the world as always too).
Wonderful piece.