Are these the same celebrities who denounced anyone who resisted the mask, the vaccine, and the lockdown in Covid times?

I'm reading "Pop Culture Takes Up Smoking Again/From movies and TV shows to music, the habit is no longer taboo. It’s even being celebrated for the way it makes characters look cool or powerful" (NYT).

Both Lorde and [Addison] Rae have worked with the singer whom [Jared Oviatt, the man behind the Instagram account @Cigfluencers,] credits with the smoking revival: Charli XCX, the Brat Summer pioneer who is a proud smoker. She even once received a bouquet of cigs for her birthday from Rosalía, another notable smoker. (The bouquet evoked the bowls of cigarettes Mary-Kate Olsen reportedly set out at her 2015 wedding to Olivier Sarkozy, a subversive, very French detail.)

"But if each of us moves about to a separate soundtrack, then is that even living in the city?"

"Or to put the question another way: If all space is private space, then what is public space even for?"

Asks the architecture and classical-music critic Justin Davidson, in "Public Space Has Become Earbud Space" (NY Magazine).

"Urban planners fit out plazas with a variety of seating, for instance... to accommodate a maximal range of groups and conversations. But most of those users just want to be left alone.... And yet I often suspect that... many people don’t actually like the isolation they permit. Lorde’s video ends in Washington Square Park, where the singer convened fans by TikTok for an impromptu concert that the police shut down for lack of a permit. When she did finally show up, that was the climax of an ultimate un-earbud moment...."

Onion rings have been a long-time focus of this blog, so I must show you this:

Well, she's just incredibly cool and charming, and her attention to onion rings is delightful. I am glad to cede my onion ring crown to her, but for the record, these are my top 8 onion ring posts:

1. "The new Hillary Clinton video is a take on the last scene of 'The Sopranos.'"

Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.

2. "Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring." ("Let's talk about the onion-ring shaped vortex I started yesterday. All I did was a little casual Freudian interpretation of a Hillary Clinton campaign video....")

3. "What is Althouse doing lunching in this sleazy dive?" (This enigmatic post marks the beginning of the Althouse + Meade love affair.)



4. "I've mostly stopped reading Ann Althouse, really."

5. "Meat is no longer murder.... meat is strategy. To attract men -- it's all about attracting men!..."

6. "We drove out into the Driftless Area of Wisconsin...."



7. The one with this picture:



8. The one with this picture:

"Two San Francisco radio stations have put the kibosh on Lorde's song 'Royals' until the World Series is over."

"Why send any positive vibes to Kansas City?... Why not give the song a rest? No one is going to get hurt over it."

The weirdest part is that the song, which doesn't seem to be about baseball, was, according to Lorde, speaking last year, inspired by a 1976 photo of George Brett:

"I'd been kind of thinking about writing that song for a while and been pulling together a couple little lines here and there, and I had this image from the National Geographic of this dude signing baseballs... He was a baseball player and his shirt said Royals. I was like, I really like that word, because I'm a big word fetishist. I'll pick a word and I'll pin an idea to that."

Can this lady, a citizen of New Zealand, sing "The Star-Spangled Banner"? She's pretty much going to have to now, right?

"You can go on the Tumblr of any young person in the world and see people marketing themselves."

"Everyone my age is like that now. We’re all hyperaware of how we’re being seen."

Said Lorde, the big pop star, who's only 17, asked about "self-constructing her persona."