The American Dream mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey, is home to the largest indoor surfing wave pool in the U.S. What’s the experience like for someone who grew up surfing in San Diego . . . outside? Are predictable artificial waves the future of this coastal pastime? Alexander Sammon writes an enjoyable, thoughtful essay on the trend, as well as the privatization and commodification of surfing and subcultures in general.
It’s tempting, of course, to stand on the hunched shoulders of Didion and Wolfe, the two patron saints of disdain, to blast this thing. But I felt so much more conflicted about it.
Because yes: The artifice was extreme, the wave was mediocre, and the whole thing was aggressively unnatural, near, and perhaps well beyond, the point of perversion.
And yet: Despite the surfeit of Shreks, despite its spot in the mall, despite seeming like the fakest fucking thing imaginable for an activity obsessed with authenticity, there was actually something somewhat legit in the root of the experience. As anyone who surfs will tell you, the surf anywhere almost always sucks. The wind is always wrong, or the size is too big or too small, or the tide is too high or too low, or there are too many people in the water, or none of those things are wrong but you just aren’t surfing that well that day and it’s easier to blame the conditions. So, yeah, the surf kind of sucked, which made it seem realer and certainly more democratic—more so, at least, than any of the perfection Kelly Slater cooked up.
Did I have fun? Yeah, I guess so. Did I get better at surfing? Maybe. Describing it as memorable seems a bit saccharine, but it’s not wrong.
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Since 2020, orcas off the Iberian coast, particularly in the Strait of Gibraltar, have taken up a hobby: ramming boats. Sailors have reported almost a thousand attacks. This behavior is atypical, as killer whales have rarely targeted boats in the past. Tomas Weber visits the region to understand what might be going on, and various orca experts and animal biologists have different theories. Are they seeking revenge against humans? Is it a display of orca culture or the group’s dynamic? Or are the instigators simply young whales who are playing with the rudders of boats? Weber tags along with Spanish orca expert Renaud de Stephanis to report on this whale of a tale.
Many captains now carry illicit firecrackers on board to throw at the whales. Some blast death metal on Bluetooth speakers. Others bash steel sticks against their hulls when orcas approach. Orcas have sunk at least three boats and damaged hundreds more. Nobody has died. Wild orcas, as far as we know, have never killed a human being. But sailors worry it’s just a matter of time, while orca biologists are anxious about captains arming themselves and taking things into their own hands.
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It’s easy to write about disliking something. It’s much, much harder to do so generously, with the skill to make even casual readers care about the nuances of a tennis point—yet that’s exactly what Scott Stossel does in this long, reasoned, highly enjoyable screed about Serbian tennis great Novak Djokovic. All haterade should taste this good.
But rooting interests in sports can be irrational and ill-founded, the arbitrariness of their application bearing no relation to their intensity. Maybe my inability to like Djokovic reflects badly on me. That I prefer Roger Federer, all effortless elegance and Swiss-watch precision, perhaps suggests an aesthetic (even an aristocratic) prejudice against the grittier, sweatier, try-hard style that Djokovic brings to the game. But no one is sweatier or grittier than Rafael Nadal, a Tasmanian devil in a cloud of red clay, and I adore him not only for his brute baseline grinding and the nuclear intensity of his game but for his manifest sweetness of soul: He is proof that an adamantine will to win can coexist with sportsmanship and humility.
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Some kids grow up loving horses. Others, apparently, grow up loving wolves. E.B. Bartels is one of those kids—now fully grown, married to a partner who shares her love for all things lupine, and on her way to Yellowstone to see her beloved creatures in the flesh. A charming journey to the root of one’s obsession.
They were so human, yet otherworldly — at least to me. I grew up in Massachusetts, which hadn’t seen wolves for over a century by the time I was in fourth grade. Reading about their size (the largest member of the Canidae family), speed (they can run up to 40 miles per hour), skills (a howl can travel nine miles), and power (wolves have a bite force of 400 pounds per square inch) — I was in awe. My perception of wolves might have been different if I grew up on a ranch in Montana, but wolves were like dragons and unicorns. Seeing a wolf in the wild would be like catching a glimpse of Nessie in Scotland. Only after reading about how McIntyre helps tourists spot Yellowstone wolves, I realized that this was something possible to do.
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I have never scrolled through TikTok without hearing the word “girl.” Last year, there were hot girl walks (San Pellegrino, AirPods Max, Alo skirt) and girl dinners (Diet Coke, trüfrü, Lesser Evil Himalayan Pink Salt Organic Popcorn). There were clean girls (TIGI Wax Stick, Gua sha, Glossier You perfume) and rockstar girlfriends (red bomber jacket, Dr. Martens, Valentino liquid liner). There were larger-than-life personalities—the tube girl who swayed on the subway, the interview girl known for being painfully dry—and singular descriptor ones: vanilla girls, coconut girls, Acubi girls, K-Girls, girls who bought the pickle sweatshirt, girls who bought the Skims dupe jumpsuit, white swan girls, black swan girls, and girl’s girls.
But in every iteration of the girl online, one thing remained the same—the slate of products you could buy to become her. A hot girl walk is nothing without the HOKA shoes and matching athleisure set; a chain now offers girl dinners; clean girls run through branded skincare routines; and even the tube girl started to sell us lipstick. You cannot be any type of girl without being monetized, and you cannot follow a trend or a creator without buying into what’s for sale.
These girls—popular online archetypes, but incessant consumers above all else—are constructed so that material goods are as central to her identity as any actual interests. We read about “17 products to help you achieve the clean girl aesthetic” and buy “wellness girl” probiotics, hot pilates subscriptions, and sea moss (instead of going to bed earlier). We invest in products because we are told we can purchase an identity; we can be that girl, online and off.
But why is the internet directing these advertisements toward girls? What is it about a girl online that invites Amazon storefronts, product placements, aspirational wish lists, and slang like “girl math” to make consumerism a frilly joke? Is retail therapy a distraction from something bigger? These articles might not give us definitive answers, but they start a conversation about what girlhood looks like on the internet today—and the price tag we put on it.
Here are some things we know about the Dyson Airwrap: It is a tool for curling hair. It debuted in 2018. It is $600. And, along with the Supersonic hair dryer, cordless flat iron, and other hair-wrangling appliances, the Airwrap accounts for a third of Dyson’s business in the US market.
The Airwrap belongs to a specific camp of gadgets that markets toward girls and women, writes reporter Amanda Mull. These gadgets are all designed to simplify tasks: the Airwrap simplifies hair care; electric scrubbers, cleaning; and red light therapy, anti-aging (or skincare, if you want to call it that). But what are these gadgets really promising?
On some level, most of these new gadgets marketed to women do make something—usually the fulfillment of a particular aesthetic or domestic standard—easier. Less time and skill needed to perfect your hair and less elbow grease spent making your bathroom fixtures shine offer potential buyers the possibility of, finally, getting it all done. Perhaps most important, those gadgets provide the possibility of relief—if not from the standards themselves, maybe from the sense that fulfilling them all would be impossible.
Gadgets certainly make life easier—or, at the very least, make a show of it. When girls on screen have spotless kitchens tidied with an influencer-approved cleaning gadget, and perfectly curled hair achieved via the latest beauty tool, who can blame us for adding these items to our cart? But then pristine and perfect become the baseline, gadgetry becomes more and more advanced, and what we expect from our gadgets and ourselves—newer, better versions of both—becomes an impossible standard to reach.
Has there ever been a better primetime example of how we package the concept of a girl into something that can be bought and sold than 2023’s Barbie? Writer Delia Cai doesn’t think so. We’re all collectively obsessed with this idealized version of girlhood—a smooth, shiny, perfect Barbie doll—and the commercial means (pink outfits, TikTok filters) we use to live it out.
At least a part of this infatuation is the fact that the reality of girlhood is anything but Barbie-ish. There is little intrepid youth or naiveté. There’s almost no empowerment that isn’t tied to the erratic impulses of the internet:
The irony, of course, is that while such obliviousness is the whole appeal of this fantasy girlhood, what actual adolescent girls are encountering in real life is a kind of enforced ignorance . . . At the moment, the “girl power” credo of a generation ago, has deflated into the reality of widespread depression amongst teen girls, whose lives revolve around the whims of byzantine algorithms—and whose digital selfhood more or less requires whether or not they can perform girlhood correctly according to those mysterious forces.
When our current state of girlhood has been relegated to arbitrary digital metrics that determine how well we perform as girls, there is nothing Barbie Dreamland about it, says Cai. So we cash into the one on screen.
In her column, Freya India writes about “Instagram Face,” a mash-up of beauty standards dictated by social media and achieved through filters and editing. But India has noticed that it’s not just appearances but personalities that are slowly converging to a destination of wholesale commodification: a neatly marketable girl who subscribes to one subculture and loyally peddles its wares.
E-girls, for instance, have the same blush, freckles, eyeliner, and mannerisms. Trad Wives, too, behave and present the same way online, with the same outfits from the same brands, and promote the same lineup of products. So do cottagecore influencers, the woke, and the edgy creators. Our “personalities and interests,” India argues, silo us into internet subcultures that feed us near-identical memes, videos, TikToks, tweets, and advertisements as the next user:
It’s as if any trace of individuality is now categorised, mainstreamed and assimilated into online identities like “cottagecore”, “Insta Baddie” or “Trad Wives”, each of which come with a list of products, outfits and personality traits. Our subcultures aren’t organic and subversive; they’re commodified and marketable.
Yet here we are, allowing these apps and algorithms to dictate the way we look, the way we think, to the point where our personalities are becoming inseparable from the content we consume, the products we buy, the identities that flash up on our For You page. The market is so embedded in our lives that it doesn’t just decide what we like and what we should buy anymore, but who we are.
How are girls feeling these days? Journalist Jessica Bennett reminds us that the current situation is . . . bleak. The year 2023 may have been the year of the girl: Of Beyoncé, Barbie, and Taylor Swift. Of “girl dinners” subverting the domestic expectation to serve full meals. Of “rat girls” who scurried around independent of the patriarchy. But Bennett suggests that all of it might’ve been skin deep:
Of course, that idea of girlhood is—and perhaps has always been — a fantasy . . . They’re anxious. They are inundated with conflicting, and constant, messages about whom they should dress like, look like, act like, be, on platforms that have been shown to be toxic to them and where they also face frequent harassment. In the real world, even amid celebrations of so-called body positivity and endless reminders (usually in the form of product placement) that you are enough, girls face record rates of eating disorders and body dysmorphia; they’re wearing anti-aging products designed for middle age.
Celebrating girlhood, Bennett argues, is the safe fix. It is much easier to emphasize online connections than to acknowledge that girls feel lonelier and more isolated than ever. It is less painful to buy skincare products than to face the fact that internet filters have warped our idea of beauty to the point of dysmorphia. But as girls sway to the beat of the Eras Tour and wear pink for Barbie, they’re allowed for a brief moment to believe they can be the girls of the content that they consume.
What do strawberry girls, cherry girls, vanilla girls, tomato girls, coconut girls, coastal cowgirls, rat girls, and downtown girls have in common? Supposedly, they’re all girl trends, but writer Rebecca Jennings thinks they’re something else altogether: marketing campaigns.
The concept of girlhood is almost too easy to sell, writes Jennings, because being a girl is fun. A girl is untethered from the condition of being a wife or a mother—a woman. A girl’s story is her own:
If the absence of a spouse or child is the condition of being a girl, then it’s hardly surprising that so many modern women are referring to themselves as such. More of us are free from the assumption that traditional womanhood is something worth aspiring to. “Woman dinner” is sad; the phrase evokes an image of a tired lady, having already fed her spouse and children, eating the last scraps of whatever was left over before shoving the plates in the dishwasher. Nobody wants to eat “woman dinner.” “Girl dinner” is, crucially, fun.
Women on TikTok know what they’re doing when they dub their meals “girl dinners” or coin terms like “hot girl walk.” They know what trends have gone viral in the past—VSCO girls, e-girls, “soft girls”—and that their clickable, immediately gettable names had everything to do with why people care. They know that this year the highest-grossing movie and what may become the highest-grossing musical tour in history center on the very conundrum of women in their 30s experiencing their own versions of girlhood. They know that people will always care about what girls do, because girls are not yet women and therefore less easy to despise. Girls are more available for consumption, and girls have more available to them.
Zoe Yu is a writer from Texas.You can find her on Twitter here.
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Faced with crushing academic debt and unable to find gig economy jobs in Las Vegas, Krista Diamond started to sell her plasma. After some react with horror when she reveals how she makes ends meet, she considers the far more demeaning work experiences she’s had in the past—in contrast with the kindness she’s experienced at the plasma bank.
“You shouldn’t have to do that,” people often say to me when I tell them where a portion of my income comes from. “It’s gross.”
But then I think of other things I’ve done for money, other people I’ve worked for. A restaurant where a manager would say “I like seeing you on your knees” each time he made me scrub the floor by hand. An artist who offered me $14 an hour to be her assistant, then forgot to pay me when I invoiced. A startup funded partially by a donor to anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. All of these places where I did a lot more for a lot less, where I found myself physically ill over who my boss was, what my labor meant.
Of course you should be paid more to donate your plasma. Of course you’re getting the bad end of the deal. But isn’t that true of a lot of jobs?
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Carey Baraka lifts the lid on the lives of some of Kenya’s elite. What she finds might not be unexpected—these young adults are privileged and yet still discontented—but she paints their characters with vibrance.
One of the most well-represented nationalities among these African students are Kenyans. And when they return home, to a country where poverty rates hover at about 40%, they almost instantly find themselves among the country’s highest earners. In Nairobi, many of this social class, especially those in their 20s and 30s, are easily identifiable. They live in central neighbourhoods – Lavington, Kilimani, Kileleshwa and Spring Valley. They eat cheese and drink wine in the garden at Chez Sonia, go for live music at Geco Cafe, dance at The Alchemist, and have beer and lobster rolls at Nairobi Street Kitchen. They go to gin-tasting soirees. They brunch. Sometimes, there are alumni parties (Harvard Club of Kenya, Yale Club of Kenya, Oxford and Cambridge Society of Kenya). They have potted plants, and go to Blankets & Wine, a popular music festival held in Nairobi every few months. Their taste in books is not too trashy, not too literary. Delia Owens, the American author of Where the Crawdads Sing, is perfect.
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