Notes On: July Recap, Reclaiming Brainrot, Kamala’s Coconut Trees, A FeminoNOTinon (How Katy Perry Missed the Mark), The Aestheticization of Lit Girls, and A Plea for Nuance

‘It’s a NUANCED WORLD and we’re terrified to be living in it’ (to the tune of Katy Perry's new single)

Dear Noters,

Welcome to your August newsletter. We all know that August is one of the best months: when summer reaches its sweltering peak and salt air whistles through rusted hinges in seaside towns and lovers seek their reunions. August is for the colour butter yellow; it’s for barbecues on beaches and bare feet and sunsets and frozen grapes and spending whole days outside. It’s for ink-pen scrawled hopes, lyrics in old notebooks. For cramming plans into weekends like your life depends on it. August is, more than any other month, about living for the hope of it all (you knew that one was coming).

For the newcomers: welcome. This newsletter is intended to be read in a very specific way: with your Sunday morning coffee. It’s a snapshot from my Notes App (thoughts on pop culture and society and romanticising and everything in-between) structured in an anagram of ‘Notes’: N is for Noteworthy, O is for obsessing, T for texts, E for educated by and S for saved. I hope you love it.

Noteworthy

The Internet May Be In Its Brainrot Era, But Is That A Bad Thing?

• According to The New Yorker, the internet has entered its brain-rot era. Hold on, I hear you saying, hasn’t the internet always been in its brain-rot era? Well, as this article suggests, something hit fever-pitch this month when it came to the internet and actual, real-life events: ‘The attempted assignation of a former President was treated with the same catholic flippancy as a pop album.’ As one TikTokker put it: ‘does anyone else kinda think that getting shot in the head and then being completely fine afterwards is, like, really, really ‘BRAT’ summer though?’

• In the internet’s brain-rot era, this piece argues, actual journalistic reporting and chronically-online jokes are flattened to the same plain: ‘BRAT summer has the same weight as an act of political violence, and thus the two are inevitably mixed to create something even more clickable.’ It’s a good take, drawing around the troubling (if not funny) aspects of in-the-moment meme culture with a highlighter pen and forcing us to look.

• But then came Joe Biden’s resignation announcement and BRAT was ready and waiting in the wings to sweep Kamala Harris up in its fever pitch: a cross-cultural, intergenerational collaboration of pure Hope, set in-motion by Charli herself: ‘Kamala IS brat.’  

• If you’re not sure exactly how Kamala happens to be ‘brat’, here’s a TikTok I posted this week that might explain it – and a piece in The Cut, too.

• What I particularly love about this intersection of so many things (pop music and politics, feminism, American and British culture, two incredibly impressive ‘childless cat women’ of colour dominating the headlines in a positive way) is that the connection only works if you look at it in context. Nothing ever just falls out of a coconut tree.

• If you haven’t come across the term, ‘brainrot’ is a phenomenon whereby you can’t stop thinking about one (usually incredibly niche) TikTok trend/piece of content, to the extent that your brain starts to rot. And when faced with an act of political violence, it does feel inappropriate. But when faced with an opportunity for politicised hope? It feels like watching hundreds of thousands of young, brilliant, interested, engaged, funny minds create innovative, thoughtful edits that break mainstream news and (hopefully) inspire many more votes, come October. It’s the cross-section of the internet and the ‘real world’; brain-rot as lateral thinking; meme-culture turned political. Which leads me to wonder (insert Carrie Bradshaw voice): is brainrot just lateral thinking?

• Either way, the brat-ification of Kamala HQ is, to me, really quite hopeful.

• (On a serious note: she’s has already smashed donations (a record £77M in a 24-hour period), but we already knew she was incredible).

A FeminoNOTinon: How Katy Perry’s Comeback Missed the Mark

• I’m sure we can all agree that we’ve just been treated to the kind of Pop Girl Spring/Summer we could only have dreamt of, with new music from Billie Eilish, Beyoncé, Gracie Abrams, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Ariana Grande, Kacey Musgraves, Maggie Rogers, the list goes on. It truly is a Woman’s World, and we’re so lucky to be living in it. But Katy Perry hasn’t quite got the memo.

• The thing is, Pop Girl Summer has been kind of Femininomenon. By which I mean: an outburst of complex, aesthetically eclectic, lyrically brave, silly, wonderfully unapologetic music from women who are unafraid to take up the space they deserve. From the oh-so-relatable eye-rolls of Sabrina Carpenter as she deigns to allow her star-of-the-moment-A-List-actor-boyfriend to cameo in her music video (‘please don’t embarrass me motherfucker’) to Billie Eilish’s appetite-wetting LUNCH (‘I could eat that girl for lunch / tastes like she might be the one’) to Taylor Swift’s piercing challenge to her audience (aka the entire world): ‘WHO’S AFRAID OF LITTLE OLD ME?!’

• And Katy Perry, well, in the pop-girly golden days of yesteryear (aka, 2016), she was One Of The Greats. She almost inspired a whole generation of us to join the goddamn army, at one point, such were her quasi-feminist-bangers. But with her latest release – WOMAN’S WORLD – misses the mark. By a long shot. My question, really, is why – or how. What’s so different about WOMAN’S WORLD and Espresso? Why does one capture a zeitgeist and the other not even make it into the top 60?

• My answer? Subtlety. Nuance. The oh-so-unquantifiable thing that The New Yorker (there I go again) describes as ‘treating femininity as an inside joke.’ Because here’s the thing: to capture a cultural moment, in 2024, you have to a) put your money where your mouth is (aka not collab with a man accused of sexual assault) and b) hint at the thing, instead of bumpin’ it straight on the nose.

• Although she argues the music video is ‘just satire,’ the question then becomes: why are we satirising the women who bend to the wills of the patriarchy, instead of satirising, uh, the patriarchy? When it comes to feminist commentary in candy-floss-pop-music, there’s just too much to poke holes in, without the lens of first-person introspection through which to view it. And that – I think – is the problem. There needs to be a level of wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it all. We’re past the ‘Women Can Do What Men Can Do’ narrative: 2024’s pop-girl feminism asks slightly more: it says things like, ‘do I like you, or do I hate you’ to an old friend (‘let’s work it out on the remix’). It considers motherhood as something special, and extraordinary, and also life-changing in a scary way, and without a clear answer: ‘I think about it all the time.’ It is not Cookie-Cutter made for a Barbie World (sans Greta Gerwig’s self-aware winks).

• And it’s a shame, because Katy Perry is an icon. An icon! I’m still holding out hope for the album which will (hopefully) not be produced by Dr Luke and (hopefully) be less on the nose. A girl can dream (and Katy Perry certainly knows how to do that).  

‘Omg, I love your bookshelf, where did you get it?’: The Aestheticization of Lit Girls

• So the idea that ‘reading is cool’ has been around for a while now, with celebrity book clubs and the likes of Kendall Jenner reclining in itsy bitsy bikinis on yachts helping to rebrand one of the only remaining things that wasn’t about the male gaze. Sigh. And now – as lots of Pinterest t-shirts tell you, in capitalised letters – Reading Is Sexy. (Thank goodness for that!).

• But my point is, this isn’t new. What is new, though, is the phrase ‘thought daughter’: Summer 2024’s answer to Kendall and Dua Lipa and all those other A-Listers looking hot with books.

• This definition of ‘thought daughter’ is pretty on-point: ‘She is depressed or strives to be. Pathologically introspective, thinks she’s very deep, smart, and sensitive.’ A thought daughter is often also obsessed with Joan Didion; and The Bell Jar, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation (go figure).

• Sarah Cucchiara wrote a brilliant piece on the trend entitled ‘oh so you’re a thought daughter now? should I call joan didion?’ It reads like a splash of cold water to the face (in the best way). I implore you to read it.

• She argues that the ‘intellectualism that we see in lit girls and thought daughters is nothing revolutionary’: ‘They’re labels, adjectives that you read in product descriptions because this is all to sell something’ and, crucially, they lack nuance, plucking sentences from Sally Rooney novels at random, and completely without context (where are the coconut trees?!).

• She goes on to remind us that if Joan Didion were alive to see this trend, she’d hate it. Not just that: she’d write a think piece about how much she hates it. She’d inject an acerbic, beautifully written, critically feminist shot of espresso into the milky latte of this culture and say (similar to Sarah Cucchiara, I might add): wake up and smell the goddamn coffee!

• And I would read said piece, much as I read Sarah’s, in wide-eyed agreement. I would nod, and possibly write notes, and share it with my friends alongside the text: ‘this is so good. what are your thoughts?’ (I send this text a lot).

• And then? Well, I’d probably continue enjoying the aestheticized lit-girlification trend on social media right now. Why? Because it makes me feel seen. And it’s fun. And it’s a way of framing the mundane (washing the dishes, commutes, Monday, Friday, the days in between) in an almost cinematic light.

• And if there’s one thing I believe in, it’s that we can be critical of things and also enjoy them.

• Up to a point, obviously. But there are few things in this world that I engage in with zero criticism: I have a critical eye. I like to analyse ‘frothy’ things (read: this entire newsletter). I like to bring all my background of academia (and life) to think carefully about the things that ‘don’t mean very much.’ Because, in short, everything ‘means very much,’ to me. It’s just the kind of person I am.

• And sometimes I wish there were more room for this, in the world. More room for nuance, for subtlety, for the grey area that falls between the moments of elation and those of despair; between two opposing (and equally interesting) hot takes. For the ‘I’m not sure(s)’ and the ‘let me think about it(s)’.

• We live in a world polarised by social media, which filter often oversimplified stories/takes to cause rage (and – sadly – interaction). We tap tiny essays into comments on social media apps that curtail our thinking into teeny echo chambers. Which is fine, as long as they’re countered by articles and podcasts and books that expand our thinking, as opposed to stifling it. As long as social media doesn’t become our sole and entire system of thinking: black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, ‘like’ or ‘dislike’. Because, really, that’s what I’d define as ‘brainrot’: the inability to see – or tolerate – nuance, or complexity, or the space between.

• Let’s occupy the space between if we can, this month: the slither between the sea and the sky, the moment of quiet as you lean against your counter and wait for your kettle to boil, the feeling of being unsure of your perspective when coming across a strong opinion online. It’s okay not to know. (I promise).   

Obsessing

• The word ‘yapping’ (oh, I’m such a yapper)

• The Devil Wears Prada reboot

• That Jemima Kirk post where she said that young women ‘think about yourselves far too much’ (I think about this post far too much, but what can I say? It calms me)

• Joan Didion

• Lattes with a tiny drizzle of hazelnut syrup in them

• Love Island

• Plain pasta with olive oil and cheese and a sprinkling of toasted sunflower seeds

• This new café that’s opened near where I live that sells huge croissants in flavours I haven’t even imagined before (marmalade, almond and hazelnut, praline, still-warm cinnamon buns crusted with brown sugar)

• The phrase ‘ciao’

• The messages I receive from people who read/watch engage with my work (no, you don’t understand: I’m obsessed)

Texts

• I’m a writer. Which means I’m a reader. Which also means that I spend some months reading absolutely nothing, and some months inhaling so much writing that my brain fizzes with words and phrases and accents and storylines as I brush my teeth and try (often unsuccessfully) to go to sleep at night instead of reading some more. This past month was a reading-all-the-time kind of month (they’re my favourite). Here’s what I loved:

• Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. If you follow me on TikTok, you’ll have seen me go on about this book, but it’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read. It’s so easy to read and so beautifully written and so complex at the same time. I couldn’t recommend it more.

• The Idiot by Elif Batuman was another favourite. A campus novel about first love and also philosophy and linguistics and the unique feeling of moving away from home for the first time. What a triumph.

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. No words describe this book, which is ironic, but there you go. Masterful, thoughtful, heartfelt, beautiful, ever-so-slightly heart breaking. I loved it.

• This profile about Lena Dunham is a must-read, if you like her work. She’s working on a new, semi-autobiographical series which sounds incredible. Also: she seems happy (which I love).

• This photo essay is quite fun, and it includes loads of book recommendations from New Yorkers.

• This piece about ‘the ballerina farm girl’ is heart-breaking. Really, truly, heart-breaking. It’s about a trad wife who gave up her (1 in 12!) spot of being a ballerina at Julliard (Julliard!!) to become a trad wife and live on a farm with her husband. It’s going viral, right now, and for good reason.

Educated By

• This piece by Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer is incredibly powerful. It shines a light on the ‘pervasive’ misogyny (coupled with racism) that is already being targeted at Kamala Harris – as well as the misogyny inherent to the social media platforms we all use. Cadwalladr exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal when it happened (you can watch the documentary here). Her war-cry to us is simple: “They used to call us witches because we knew shit. We still do. That’s what makes us so powerful. And dangerous. So, here’s what I need you to do now: to shut up and sit down and listen. You are at risk. We are all at risk. Because this is what I know: bad things are coming. We are in a code red emergency.”

• This episode of The Culture Study Podcast about The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders unpacks the cult-like undertones of the team though a feminist lens: it’s really, really interesting (and quite funny).

Saved

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There are few months in the year that feel like a gift: time outside of time, those last few days of summer slipping through our fingers before we had back to the reality of wooden school desks with words etched into them, chewing-gum clinging to their undersides. I don’t think it’ll ever leave us, this fevered August feeling: high hopes drifting on hot wind.

I hope this month brings you something you’ve been longing for; a painting, or a text message, or a piece of paper that opens doors to your future. I hope you find kindness within every crevice of yourself: every wrinkle, every soft fold. I hope you eat a really good ice cream and drink a glass of wine with a really good view and watch the kind of sunset that could never be captured on an iPhone. I hope you listen to the song ‘august’ really loudly in your kitchen and use a wooden spoon as your microphone. I hope you give yourself the freedom, the compassion, the grace, to be unapologetically yourself: to take up space, to think with nuance, and to live for the hope of it all.

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Until next time,

Hannah xxx