"To other Gen Zers, the stare may signal a cool detachment, showing that they understand the irony..."

"... especially when selfies are paired with absurd captions or filters. In sum, the Gen Z stare isn’t just a blank look—it’s an important signal. It pushes back against older norms of digital self-presentation, reflects changing attitudes toward visibility and authenticity, and may also be a subtle form of emotional boundary-setting in an age of constant exposure."

From "The Psychology Behind the Gen Z Stare/Have you seen the Gen Z stare? What's really behind it?" (Psychology Today).

There's something called the "aesthetic of resistance."

"There was a time last summer when the Democratic Party was cool."

"Kamala Harris had just stepped in as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in the waning days of Brat summer. She went on the popular podcast 'Call Her Daddy.' Tim Walz’s outdoorsy drip led to a Chappell Roan-inspired camo trucker hat. The memes were flowing, and the party’s mood was high...."

That's the beginning of a NYT article called "What Is 'Dark Woke'? Democrats are trying out a new attitude. It’s provocative, edgy and perilously toeing the line of not being too offensive." The author is Jack Crosbie.

How painfully embarrassing to remember things that were painfully embarrassing at the time. But the media tried to palm it off as "cool" last summer... back when they were pretending America would vicariously appreciate Kamala's "joy." I'd have thought no one would be so cruel as to bring up "Brat summer" again. It was so insanely delusional. And that is not cool. 

But let's keep reading.

With Donald J. Trump back in the White House.... so-called masculine energy... seems like the dominant [culture].... As liberals try to get their groove back...

Ugh. 

... some party insiders say Democratic politicians have been encouraged to embrace a new form of combative rhetoric... “Dark woke.”

Is this like "Dark Brandon"? Why, yes it is: 

"A picture of young successful happy people at a trendy cocktail party reads as right wing. A picture of a dad in flannel drinking a beer at Texas Roadhouse..."

"... also reads as right wing. Right wing is both cool, hip and metropolitan, and down to earth, older, mature, and working class. This is how you know that conservatism is culturally ascendant. We run the gamut. The only pictures that read as left wing are those of ugly, fat, mentally ill, dysfunctional, friend-less weirdos."

So says Matt Walsh, on X, looking at the "Cruel Kids" New York Magazine cover. 

 

That's one take. The other take is that the photo is cropped to make the event look all white. If you scroll down from that link above, you'll many tweets that should the wider view (and call attention to the text, "Have you noticed that the entire room is white?):

"For the unacquainted, Mr. Trump’s gyrations are a far cry from the complexities of the moonwalk, the Macarena or the Electric Slide."

"Both simple and strangely hypnotic, Mr. Trump’s wiggle incorporates the kind of stiff swivel often employed by arrhythmic wedding guests or awkward, one-too-many conventioneers."

Writes Jesse McKinley, in "Trump’s Signature Dance Move Finds Its Way to the Sports World/Jon Jones punctuated his U.F.C. win with the president-elect’s shimmy, and numerous N.F.L. players followed suit on Sunday" (NYT).

It says there that McKinley is "a Styles reporter who covered the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump earlier this year, from opening statements to guilty verdicts."

McKinley has written a lot of other things too. Why focus on Trump's criminal trial? Maybe subtle humor: Not long ago it seemed that New York authorities had found a way to put Trump in prison, and now we're just wondering if it's okay for football players to dance the Trump dance.

McKinley also wrote, recently:

"[Elon] Musk is so wedded to the idea of creating a civilization on Mars — he once said he plans to die there — that it has propelled nearly every business endeavor..."

"... he has undertaken on Earth. His vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns.... The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Mr. Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’s surface, two of the people said. Mr. Musk has told people that he bought X, the social media platform, partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company...."

From "Thermonuclear Blasts and New Species: Inside Elon Musk’s Plan to Colonize Mars/SpaceX employees are working on plans for a Martian city, including dome habitats, spacesuits and researching whether humans can procreate off Earth. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm" (NYT)(free-access link).

"My parent friends routinely post proud images of their newborns in Ramones onesies or their sixth-graders dressed up like Margot Tenenbaum from 'The Royal Tenenbaums.'"

"I like all the pics genuinely, but I think to myself, I know what you’re doing. And then I think and Godspeed,' because the odds are just as likely that if you try too hard to tip the scales of your kid’s coolness, it will backfire. You’ll be the liberal hippie parents on 'Family Ties' and your kid will resemble Alex P. Keaton. It is utterly normal to want your kid to like what you like, just as it is normal to instill them with your values, sense of community, ethics, or flair for vintage Swatch watches. There are jokes about this in the culture, such as the still-shared Onion headline, 'Cool Dad Raising Daughter on Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out of Touch With Her Generation.'"

Writes Tracey Moore in "Parents, you can’t make your kid cool. Maybe stop trying?" (WaPo).

I think the important point here is not what "cool" is or whether it matters or how to get there. It's not about coolness at all but vanity. Don't use your children for your purposes — to boost your pride, to make you feel right about everything. You can expose them to plenty of things that you think are good, but if they're only adopting your ideas and your tastes, something's missing. And it isn't coolness. It's independence of mind.

"These days, everyone wants to be a 'traveler,' not a 'tourist.'... But being a 'traveler' can be exhausting."

"After peeling myself off my train bunk bed, I trudged with my backpack (I go carry-on only — no wheels — for the practicality and the bragging rights) around the neighborhood in search of lunch before I could check into my hotel. Along a narrow and chaotic road, a passing motorbike caught one of my backpack straps and nearly dragged me to the ground into traffic. Shaken but okay, I finally found a street food stall with enough room for one more, sat down self-consciously and overanalyzed how I was eating. Being a 'tourist,' on the other hand, is freeing.... You are allowed to be a guidebook-toting, comfortable shoe-wearing, selfie-taking outsider — all enthusiasm, no shame. The tourist trap welcomes the tourist with open arms. You’re not just allowed to be there, they want you there...."

Writes Natalie Compton in "In defense of tourist traps/Being a cool traveler all the time can be exhausting" (WaPo).

Here's my old post on the traveler/tourist distinction.

Are you traveling or touring anywhere soon? Do you make it easy on yourself or hard? Does your pride/shame drive you to work on staying on the correct side of the traveler/tourist distinction? Does it just come naturally to you because you are cool? Is there subtle work entailed in getting to yes on that last question? Or are your standards just low?

Everybody is an influencer.

I'm reading "For Gen Z, Playing an Influencer on TikTok Comes Naturally/There’s stuff to promote now. The followers can come later" (NYT).

[Gen Z] is increasingly posting on social media in the manner of professional influencers: sharing daily routines, pitching or unboxing products, modeling clothing and advertising personal Amazon storefronts. These videos are often viewed as cool and entrepreneurial by peers (and sometimes by bemused parents)....

It's "viewed as cool" — that it, it's not delusional and embarrassing to behave, in social media, as if you're already an influencer. This is a strange issue, because what is it to be a "real" influencer? What are/were "influencers"? We used to critique them as fake celebrities, fake stars, so why be "bemused" that younger people are faking the fakery? If it was fake to begin with, then faking the fake should be cool. It's savvy and meta.

When Obama was a slang term.

Looking for something else — whether I'd ever blogged a particular video (I had) — I found this discussion, from 2009, of the use of "Obama" as a slang term:

August 22, 2009

Sorry. I don't believe it was *ever* cool/hip to call something/someone "Obama" to mean it/he was cool/hip.

But the NYT nevertheless has this style piece:

LAST week, if you wanted to use the latest slang to tell a friend he was cool, you could have called him “Obama,” as in: “Dude, you’re rocking the new Pre phone? You are so Obama.”

This week? Best not to risk it.

"[Jay] Kraemer completed the equivalent of walking around the world on March 2nd, tackling the 24,901 miles by traversing the Madison area..."

"... or going on hikes while visiting his son in Utah.... The 72-year-old tracked his walks meticulously via his FitBit, saying the journey took nearly 50 million steps to complete.... After eight years, and 10 months, Kraemer made it around the world while listening to 148 books, burning through an average of two pairs of shoes each year."

NBC15 reports.

This post is intended as a palate cleanser after that last post on luxury gyms in L.A. and NYC, where only "cool" people can join. Kraemer epitomizes uncoolness — walking outside in a midsize city in the Midwest, paying only for a Fitbit, shoes, and (maybe) audiobooks — but coolness is always a matter of interpretation, and I was never willing to accept that the luxury gyms are cool. Your mileage may vary, and as you journey on your way through the world, it's up to you to decide what counts as cool and what constitutes walking around the world.

Makes me think of this song, which will always be cool to me.

"For those that look at a gym as a selfie opportunity, a place solely dedicated to performance-oriented training or a workout that needs to be done, you can probably find a gym that’s more affordable..."

"... that can deliver those things. We are not looking to bring in people who keep to themselves and don’t see the value of mingling with like-minded people."

Said Sebastian Schoepe, an executive at a fitness outfit called Heimat, quoted in "Think Getting Into College Is Hard? Try Applying for These Gyms. A new crop of luxury gyms requires referrals, interviews and even, in some cases, medical evaluations. And that’s before paying a monthly fee of up to $2,750" (NYT). 

So... they discriminate fiercely, but against whom? Is it too subtle to puzzle out — too hard to identify as something known to be wrong, like the admissions process at an elite law school? 

I thought maybe the name was a signal. What's "heimat"? Sounds German. Oh! It's the German word for "homeland"! Here's the Wikipedia page, "Heimat":

"I feel like the only solution is pretty clear... In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass 'seppuku' of the elderly?"

Said Yale economics professor Yusuke Narita, quoted in "A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan. What Did He Mean? Yusuke Narita says he is mainly addressing a growing effort to revamp Japan’s age-based hierarchies. Still, he has pushed the country’s hottest button" (NYT).

Dr. Narita, 37, said that his statements had been “taken out of context,” and that he was mainly addressing a growing effort to push the most senior people out of leadership positions in business and politics — to make room for younger generations....

"The form-fitting dresses and retro color palette that Sinema favors are a way of broadcasting her bona fides as a middle-class politician and thus someone in step with middle-class values."

"One might laugh at how literal this sounds as political stagecraft, but consider that almost all people in this country think of themselves as middle class, regardless of how much (or little) money they have. It is our cultural default, and we see it as normative. We use 'middle-class' interchangeably with other powerful nationalist signifiers like 'citizen,' 'voter' and 'American.' And, though my progressive comrades may balk at this comparison, if you compare Sinema to some of Congress’s best-known female politicians, her style is easily the most accessible to her constituents. I know enough about fashion, and how much it costs, to know that few American women can afford to dress like, for instance, the preternaturally turned-out Nancy Pelosi. In fact, part of what makes Sinema’s style performance so uncomfortable for many of us is how middle-class it is: She doesn’t seem to be trying to do better. But that does not mean her style story lacks aspiration.... [Her] presentation reads like 'someone who’s got a catalog budget but is trying to imagine what that high-end editorial looks like, someone who aspires to be cool and edgy.' One dimension of class in Sinema’s sartorial performance is that it is basic but aspirational, not in power, but in coolness."

Another article about Kyrsten Sinema's clothing in the NYT. This one is "How Kyrsten Sinema Uses Clothing to Signal Her Social Class" by Tressie McMillan Cottom, who is "an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of 'Thick: And Other Essays' and a 2020 MacArthur fellow."

"He was a diffident debutante with a distaste for politics. Post-presidency, he is trying too hard on things we don’t need."

"The culture is already swimming in Netflix deals, celebrity worship, ostentatious displays of wealth, not to mention podcasts. Did the world really need 'Renegades,' his duet with Bruce Springsteen? We already knew Obama gravitated to stars but it was disillusioning to see it on such a grand scale last weekend. 'I think the nouveaux riches Obamas are seriously tone-deaf,' said the authority on opulence, André Leon Talley. 'We all love Beyoncé. But people have so many things to worry about with Covid, voting rights, climate warming. People are afraid of being evicted from their homes. And the Obamas are in Marie-Antoinette, tacky, let-them-eat-cake mode. They need to remember their humble roots.' Obama was a cool cat as a candidate in 2008, but after he won, he grew increasingly lofty. Now he’s so far above the ground, he doesn’t know what’s cool...."

From "Behold Barack Antoinette" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

What have they done to my hula hoop?

I'm reading the "Ask a Cool Person" column at New York Magazine, and I see "100-Teen Poll: What Is Actually Cool to Buy in 2021? We surveyed high schoolers around the country. Here, 19 takeaways about how teens shop." After seeing the cool type of "top" is a corset and something about comfortable sweatpants and favorite "loungewear" brands I get to: 

4) The only workout item mentioned multiple times was the weighted Hula-Hoop. 

A respondent named Aida bought this Hula-Hoop after seeing it on TikTok. “I like it because it’s not an intense workout and instead it’s a more relaxed one you do for a long period of time,” she says. “I watch TV while I do it sometimes.” Just don’t expect to magically get a waist like the girl in the video, Aida says: “Definitely not the realistic outcome of hula-hooping for, like, 30 mins a day.” Plus, she added, TikToks like that one “are quite triggering,” and the platform is “very toxic when it comes to body positivity.”

The hula hoop is a workout item?! I was a kid in the late 1950s, when the hula hoop became a big fad in the United States. I had a hula hoop, and I was pretty good at it.* It was all for fun — fun and some thinking about Hawaii, which was about to come in as a state (and my young head envisioned "coming into the United States" as the islands floating steadily toward California and about to connect). 

No one talked about "working out" back then, and certainly no one — no one anywhere around me — regarded the hula hoop as an exercise device. It was play and a display of skill that was amusing to watch, because it was like doing the hula, which was not treated with politically correct cultural respect in those days, but seen as an entertaining dance, like the twist, that entailed hip wiggling with accompanying arm movements. 

And, of course, no one talked about "triggering" and being "toxic" or "body positivity" back then. Here's this toy that was perfectly fun for young people in the days when Baby Boomers were kids, and now it's part of a grim agglomeration of everything but fun, where you have to work on your body, worry about it, and also worry about worrying about it. Did you watch the linked TikTok video? It's all about tape-measuring your waist over and over and earnestly attempting to reduce the number by hula hooping.

I know I'm old, and I'm even giving this post my tag "these kids today," so I'm aware that I'm speaking like a stereotypical old person, but what are we doing to our culture? The NY Magazine column purports to represent coolness, but it's only finding out what teenagers are buying and assuming that things going on with teenagers are cool. I wish they were! 

__________________________

* If you told me Wikipedia's photograph — by George Garrigues, at the top of its article "Hula hoop" — is in fact a photograph of me, I could not with 100% certainty say that it is not:

"Biden was not part of the Obama entourage. He was sort of a goofball and windbag. He was a member of an older, outmoded generation."

"In other words, uncool. The West Wing attitude was that Biden should simply be grateful that the Great Obama had handed him a ticket to ride. Biden was viewed as a past-his-sell-by-date pol who needed the president’s guiding hand to keep Uncle Joe from making a fool of himself as vice president.... They trashed him anonymously to reporters, froze him out of meetings and barred him from doing some national media.... In eight years, Biden said in a recent reveal that stunned Anderson Cooper — and left Washington gasping — he and Jill were never invited by the Obamas to their private digs in the White House.... So now comes a delicious twist: President Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty, while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas.... Obama’s failure to go big and to send the tumbrels rolling down Wall Street certainly greased the runway for Donald Trump. The paradox of Obama is that Americans embraced radical change by electing him but then he held himself in check, mistakenly believing that he was all the change they could handle.... Obama seems more comfortable as Netflix talent, sitting pretty with celebrities and chit-chatting with Bruce Springsteen...."

Writes Maureen Dowd (NYT).

Posing around pardons.

True of both Snowden and Assange. Exactly this: https://t.co/9ACi91c2UY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 17, 2021

"The Sixties set the stage, the players and the rhetorical range of cultural life. The counterculture became a co-culture, then..."

"... a co-opted culture and eventually a co-opting culture. Cool was absorbed by consumerism, and became a manufactured good, like the battle between liberals and conservatives, or fights between the sexes. The old ferocity and subversiveness was bought off, lobotomized and placed in a zoo. Over half a century, the quality of the animals on display declined. Lenny Bruce became Hannah Gadsby, Joan Baez became Taylor Swift and Malcolm X became Ibram X. Kendi.... There was no Cool left in America by the time the Trump era began, just noise....  Over there: howling patriots, conspiracy lunatics, Nazi bodybuilders, militarized trolls, hustlers and grifters. Over here: brittle liberal worthies, nerds, meritless meritocrats, academic Torquemadas, trust-funded podcasters, pseudoscientific TED speechifiers, hysterical talking heads and way too many lawyers. Not to mention all the creepy racists, the OnlyFans fans, the ‘wine o’clock’ mothers, the whining, weepy- kneeling athletes, the hate-crime fakers, the wannabe Bolsheviks, the acorn-brained influencers, the over-exposed YouTubers, Jerry Falwell Jr’s pool boy, Bret Stephens versus the 1619 Project....  [A]ll the psychotic grouplets of American life studied each other incestuously, searching for their enemies’ blunders and fails.... Cool was an impossibility... Awkwardness and shame brooded over the land...."

From "From Cool to Cringe: what’s happened to American culture?/From Miles D to Cardi B" by Will Lloyd (The Spectator).

"You have, then, the calm conservatism of George H. W. Bush and the fevered conservatism of Patrick Buchanan; the balm of Jeb Bush and..."

"... the bluntness of Donald Trump; the moderation of Theresa May and the flamboyance of Boris Johnson; of Angela Merkel, perhaps the most properly conservative of our contemporary leaders, against the radical outliers of reactionary German nationalism. Fawcett sees this as the core conflict within the right, always present, forever waxing or waning, and central to the future of Western democracy."

Writes Andrew Sullivan, in a NYT review of "CONSERVATISM/The Fight for a Tradition" by Edmund Fawcett. Fawcett calls himself "a left-wing liberal."

The quote I cherry-picked has Sullivan contrasting the conservatism of Edmund Burke — who "believed in pluralism, modest but necessary reform and the dispersal of power" — with the conservatism of Joseph de Maistre — "who found adaptation to modernity to be indistinguishable from surrender" and "saw decline everywhere and always, enemies within and without."

I'm struck by the silliness of the phrase "the balm of Jeb Bush." 

Sullivan makes the contrast between moderates and radicals sound like a matter of physical heat. And the best people are the ones whose nature is to remain cool. This distaste for "flamboyance," "bluntness," and "fever" is openly elitist — as we see in the last paragraph:

Moderate conservatism is a vital counterbalance to liberalism, as the Trump years have shown. For it to disappear into a populist cult, hostile to democratic norms, contemptuous of all elites, captured by delusions and sustained by hatred and ressentiment, would not be completely unprecedented. But, unchallenged by moderate conservatism, populist or “hard right” conservatism will be deeply destructive. In that sense, the battle for moderate conservatism is now inextricable from a battle for liberal democracy itself. 

IN THE COMMENTS: hawkeyedjb says:

Liberals pretend to respect Moderate Conservatism, but when a moderate conservative like Mitt Romney comes along, they turn him into an evil, money-grubbing, cancer-giving Hitler youth. Just one example out of many that comes down to the same thing: all Republicans, of any stripe, are Hitler in the end. So why not be Trump?

That's a different perspective on what — to use Sullivan's phrase — "the Trump years have shown."

"The Obama staffers are now cutting out the people who got Biden elected. None of these people found the courage to help the VP when he was running and now they are elevating their friends over the Biden people. "

"It’s fucked up.... There’s real doubt about whether they will be taken care of...People are pissed.... I think I’m going to be taken care of but I have not been taken care of yet. I am really interested to find out how you even find out how you got a job in this White House."

Said a Biden adviser quoted in  "'People are pissed': Tensions rise amid scramble for Biden jobs/Veterans of the Democratic primary campaign fear they're being squeezed out of plum posts by later arrivals" (Politico). 

The current fears about the transition being taken over by the previous generation of Obama staffers who make up Washington’s permanent establishment are coming from a younger set of Biden true believers who chose to work for him in early 2019 even when all of the cool young operatives were flocking to Beto and Bernie and Warren. Even then, there was a disconnect between the brain trust at the top of the campaign, which is now seamlessly moving to the top of the White House, and the Biden proletariat that made up the bulk of the campaign operation. The fear from the proles is that the brain trust doesn’t understand that they are being left behind.  

Why wouldn't they be left behind? They're not cool. 

ADDED: The real trick will be Phase 2 — leaving Biden behind. He's not cool.