Pescatarian Arts and Lit Girls

“less prozac, more protein!”

Lorde’s new single “Hammer” is an “ode to city life & horniness”; The New York Post interviewed a bunch of teens obsessed with Parke’s $125 cult-status sweatshirt; and for The Face, photographer Sophia Wilson captures young women in their bedrooms.

MAGA AND THE SINGLE GIRL, washingtonpost
At Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit, over 3,000 attendees — mostly young women in their teens and early 20s with “ruffles on their dresses, cowboy boots on their feet, bows on their curls” — gathered around messaging that promotes homemaking over higher ed, celebrating mantras like “Less Prozac, more protein! Less burnout, more babies! Less feminism, more femininity!”

“This is Whole Foods meets The West Wing,” said Alex Clark, whose “Culture Apothecary” podcast for Turning Point vaulted her to the forefront of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. “It’s collagen, calluses, and conviction. It’s castor oil, Christ, and a well-stocked pantry.” The right has “the girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together,” Clark said. The left, meanwhile, has “TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light.” All this amounted, by her calculation, to the notion that conservatives are now “the cool kids” and “mainstream.”

GET YOUR HIGHLIGHTERS READY, thecut
Amid concerns about anti-intellectualism, attention-span erosion, and AI-driven “brain rot,” young adults — many post-grad and under 40 — are reclaiming education through learning collectives. In New York, Lectures on Tap sells out within hours for bar-based academic talks, while Jiayang Fan’s McNally Jackson seminars have become buzzy social gatherings. On Substack, projects like

Lit Girl

curate syllabus-driven modules that merge “cool-girl” culture with academic rigor. Unlike in college, this is learning for the sake of learning. “Your own fulfillment is the reward,” writes

Hope Corrigan

.

CHATGPT MIGHT BE MAKING YOU LAZY AND DUMB :(, dazed
A small MIT Media Lab study suggests that using ChatGPT may impair critical thinking and memory, especially in young adults. Participants aged 18–38 who used ChatGPT to write SAT-style essays showed the lowest brain engagement and produced “soulless” writing, while those who worked without AI exhibited higher neural activity, creativity, and satisfaction. “Education on how we use these tools, and promoting the fact that your brain does need to develop in a more analogue way, is absolutely critical,” lead researcher Nataliya Kosmyna told Time.

REAL RISK TO YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH IS ‘ADDICTIVE USE,’ NOT SCREEN TIME ALONE, STUDY FINDS, nytimes
A new JAMA study of over 4,000 U.S. children found that “addictive use,” not screen time alone, is the stronger predictor of suicidal thoughts for kids. Researchers warn that addictive behaviors (like inability to disengage or distress when deprived) often emerge even with relatively low screen time, especially among Gen Z youth in lower-income, nonwhite households. The findings shift blame from screen hours to platform design; tech companies have “baked addictive use into the product,” said Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association.

GEN X'S REAL ESTATE GRIPES, businessinsider
Though Gen X is often left out of intergenerational housing conversations, they’re currently bearing the brunt of the wealth transfer process as the “Sandwich Generation,” managing aging boomer parents’ estates while supporting their zillennial children. (Today, nearly 40% of Gen Z adults still rely on parental financial support.) Despite owning $14 trillion in U.S. real estate (29% of the total), many Gen Xers were set back by the 2008 financial crisis, with over 25% underwater on their mortgages by 2014.

One last thought:

@bigfishenergywe’ll always have “i went to NYU” 🙏🏼

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