YouTube Brain and Chill Pill

"I’m the daddiest daddy"

The next great tennis teenager is here; Dua Lipa is on the cover of Vogue (and wearing Prada that is poised to go viral); and I’m obsessed with Chill Pill, a new Gen Z-ish mental health app that launched yesterday after raising a $2 million seed.

PEDIATRICIANS HOLD THE FRONT LINES OF A MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS, nyt
With child psychiatrists underwater, adolescent mental health care is falling on pediatricians and GPs, whose medical advice ranges from “you need to get off the phone and the computer” to “when it’s pretty outside like this, put on a bunch of clothes and go for a walk.”

TEENS TAKE UP MORE JOBS, AND MORE PAY, IN TIGHT LABOR MARKET, wsj
Teens are now working in greater numbers than they have since before the 2008-09 financial crisis, when summer and part-time jobs were a more common rite of passage into adulthood, government statistics show.

THE YOUTUBERS ARE NOT OKAY, vox
For years, digital creators have been trying to convey the ennui of this supposed dream job (burnout, loneliness, etc)…but another, less discussed reason is what reporter Rebecca Jennings has dubbed “YouTube brain” — what happens when you are both creatively and financially subject to the whims of other people’s attention spans for years at a time, weighed down by neverending demand for more content for dwindling returns.

HOW TIKTOK’S IRREVERENT HUMOR BECAME HOLLYWOOD’S INDISPENSABLE TOOL FOR REACHING GEN Z, variety
Big buttoned-up corporations — like entertainment giant Lionsgate — are embracing the weird and unvarnished when it comes to their TikTok strategies (as they should be…there’s literally no other way to succeed on TikTok).

“I’m the daddiest daddy,” [The Mandalorian star Pedro] Pascal says in one of Lionsgate’s viral TikTok videos, taken from a livestream the actor did for the studio. “Am I the daddiest daddy? Because I’ve been seeing that name get thrown around a lot to other people and I just wanna make sure that I’m the daddiest of the daddies.”

WAKING UP FROM THE NAP DRESS, nymag
”At a time of almost no fashion — we didn’t have anywhere to go, after all — the Nap became, for many young women who follow the trends, all that was left.” A fascinating profile on Nell Diamond, the “proudly personally privileged” founder of Hill House Home and inventor of the nap dress, beloved by millennials. (This is one trend that’s decidedly not Gen Z.)

One last thought:

Delia Cai @delia_cai

the slip dress craze and the nap dress craze have not prepared us for what is about to be the long black bodycon knit dress craze this summer