"I’m trying to manifest more abundance, but I’m really feeling the income streams have dwindled."

"I have over 800,000 Instagram followers. Before, if I wanted to do a brand partnership on social media, $10,000 was an easy get. Now it’s, like, $500. I pretty much live from a bucket of savings."

So says the "Author With One New York ‘Times’ Best Seller," who made only $49,000 last year — "$30,000 from book advance/$14,000 from teaching two retreats/$5,000 from narrating own audiobook."

Quoted in "What Do You Do and What Do You Make? 60 New Yorkers about what they brought in last year" (New York Magazine).

I selected that one story out of the 60 — all of which are interesting — because I was charmed by the statement "I’m trying to manifest more abundance." It's a lighthearted — and culturally connected — way to express real pain. How can you live in NYC on $49,000 a year? And yet you hit the envied goal of publishing a best seller!

I don't need to extend this post by expounding on the words "manifest" and "abundance." What would you pay me to resist the impulse? I'll continue. Briefly.

"Manifest" is New Age self-help jargon, used ironically by our best-selling author.

"Abundance." I think of it as an Ezra Klein word that was supposed to take off more than it did. Democratic Party hacks substituted the drearier word "affordability."

ADDED, ironically: Here's Ezra's book "Abundance," commission earned.

"During the trial it emerged that when [Barron] Trump phoned the British police, he gave the operator the woman’s home address, rather than her actual location..."

"...  which was at Rumiantsev’s home. How Trump knew her address is... unclear.... On November 3, 2024, Rumiantsev 'flew into a rage' and smashed an air fryer after discovering the victim had used the word 'sweetheart' in a message to Trump.... Rumiantsev eventually admitted he was 'jealous to some extent' but claimed the woman was 'leading him [Barron] on.' He told the jury he was merely trying to make her understand how her behaviour looked to others. 'I want to just make clear that her actions towards [Trump] were wrong and it was not fair,' he said. On the night of January 17 last year the pair drank Korean wine, whisky and cognac ordered on Deliveroo. When Trump called repeatedly that evening, she did not answer, [the prosecutor] said. Rumiantsev’s jealousy... 'boiled over.' He spat in her food and kicked her in the ribs...."

I'm reading "Russian guilty of ‘jealous’ attack over Barron Trump friendship/The US president’s son ‘saved a life’ when he called 999 from America and provided crucial evidence that led to the arrest of Matvei Rumiantsev" (London Times).

So Barron took action to save the woman from a man who supposedly thought the woman was being unfair to Barron. Nothing excuses the violence, but I find it interesting that Rumiantsev was — in his version of the story — looking out for Barron. 

"Ow!"

🚨🇩🇪 Meanwhile in Cologne, Germany

German Streamer Kunshikitty sets out with the intention of showing that Women can walk safely through the streets that are occupied by new foreign Men

Ends up being attacked twice live on stream ‼️ pic.twitter.com/OU9uDmIXJD

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) January 1, 2026

ADDED: To be fair to the men in this video: Their identity was appropriated for use in an influencer's video. Maybe they didn't want to be used like that. Even if the woman — Kunshikitty — thought she was doing them a favor by eliciting video showing how good these men are, they might not want her framing and characterizations and use for clicks. I have no idea how good or bad they are, but I can understand resentment of the intrusion of influencers. 

Just what I need, the founder of the Office of Applied Strategy mansplains going meta on performative maleness.

I'm seeing this in the NYT: "How Do You Spot a ‘Performative’ Male? Look for a Tote Bag. As a new archetype gains traction, contests in Seattle and New York have found some men embracing the label — and signifiers like books, records and Labubus."

I'm thinking didn't I just blog that, but it's dated today, so no, I did not. Six days ago, I blogged "Forget The Lonely Men Epidemic—The Performative Male Era Is Here, And We Need To Talk (And Run)/He knows his moon sign, wears thrifted clothes, and posts aesthetic carousels with captions about healing and self-love," which I found — in Elle India — because I'd googled "performative male." We were told, "he comes armed with wired headphones, tote bags, vintage clothes, matcha lattes, Spotify playlists ft. Clairo or Laufey, and Sally Rooney books."

And here's the NYT, replete with an illustration that includes — of all things — a Sally Rooney book. It felt too drain-circling to blog, but then I got to this, and I knew it was bloggable:

The "Oh no, not work!" guy is so repulsive that I had to wonder if he is an actor deliberately evoking our disgust.

"Oh no, not work!"pic.twitter.com/RSfBNl90j9

— Stephen Knight 🎙️ (@GSpellchecker) June 12, 2025

The lovely black woman also seems perfectly cast.

But I'll assume they are real people in a real confrontation. Somebody's there with the camera, and they know it, but everything's in front of cameras these days. Human behavior is behavior for the camera now. Is this scene real? It's real in today's terms — real and very viral.

The scene is so perfect: The ordinary person, burdened in her daily life, is so reasonable, so appealing, and the man, cocksure in his cause, is so enragingly and hilariously awful. His cause is, to him, so obviously more important than her work. But what is his cause? It is, ironically, persons of color getting to work in the United States of America.

"There is a deep irony here. If there is an operating philosophy driving the Trump White House, it is that of the unitary executive..."

"... the idea that the president is the sole and exclusive wielder of a broad and expansive executive power. This includes the power to dismiss federal employees at will as well as the power to resist congressional statutes or judicial decisions that encroach on executive authority.... Trump may be working from an expansive theory of executive power, but in delegating so much of his authority to Musk... he is both undermining that power and demonstrating [Alexander] Hamilton’s real insights about the importance of a singular executive. Hamilton wrote that 'plurality in the executive' tends to 'conceal faults and destroy responsibility.'... Hamilton says that 'the multiplication of the executive adds to the difficulty of detection…. It often becomes impossible, amidst mutual accusations, to determine on whom the blame or the punishment of a pernicious measure, or series of pernicious measures, ought really to fall. It is shifted from one to another with so much dexterity, and under such plausible appearances, that the public opinion is left in suspense about the real author.' It is hard to imagine a better description of our current situation, in which the presence of what are essentially two presidents has blurred lines of accountability for 'pernicious measures.'... If and when disaster strikes, Musk can walk away. After all, he isn’t really the president. The buck will stop with Trump and the Republican Party, because if Musk cannot be held politically liable, they will be."

Writes Jamelle Bouie, in "The Bewildering Irony Behind the Trump-Musk Partnership" (NYT)(free-access link).

But Trump himself says "The buck stops here":

And isn't it rich — isn't it ironic — to hear Trump antagonists rail about concealment and lack of clear lines of responsibility when they did not seem to care much about the radical opacity of the "Biden" administration? We're supposed to worry now about the "multiplication of the executive" when you didn't worry about the absence of any true executive and nothing but a multiplicity of executive substitutes?

"The diagnosis of online irony poisoning tends to understate the extent to which social media’s rightward drift regulates so much else in life..."

"... establishing the terms and the tenor by which we enter that bustling intersection called discourse. The comedification of America has become the memeification of America.... The puerile hasn’t confabbed with the establishment so much as replaced it, with the latter’s permission. Jokes mingle with cruel and lethal austerity measures. At the podium during a rally held after the Presidential Inauguration, Musk raised a stiff right arm in what looked like a Nazi salute yet it was laughed off by the Anti-Defamation League as just an 'awkward gesture.' This month, Musk briefly changed his profile name on X, the social platform he owns, to Harry Bōlz, a brilliant display of homophonic potty humor that prompted a surge in an obscure cryptocurrency by the same name. This is where America lives and what America does. Nothing is funny, but everything is. And therein lies a sense of impotence, because our ability to discern the consequential ghoulishness of this nation’s policies–LOL that’s crazy!–doesn’t in and of itself constitute resistance.... Laughter does not speak for itself. We must ask after it.... We ask the universe, as one memesmith did, 'does anyone know if we have to maintain our senses of kindness and empathy despite the world constantly trying to destroy the individual and destroy feelings in impersonal society tomorrow.'"

Writes Lauren Michele Jackson, in "The End of Seriousness/Our unfunny times are rife with laughter that seldom offers relief" (The New Yorker).

I get to use my "Era of That's Not Funny" tag again.

How are you doing in the bustling intersection called discourse?

"The male reproductive system, in particular, seems to be under plastic assault."

"Men with severe erectile dysfunction were found to have up to seven types of plastic in their penises. (That study, published in 2024 by researchers in Miami, was the first to detect microplastics in human penile tissue, which was extracted from six individuals who were undergoing surgery to get an inflatable prosthesis.) Microplastics have also been found in human semen samples. One experiment conducted in China, from October, found that all the semen and urine samples from 113 men contained microplastics. The samples that contained Teflon (the chemical PTFE), which coats cooking utensils, cutting boards, and nonstick pans, had reduced sperm quality, lower total sperm numbers, and reduced motility...."

From "There’s a Spoon’s Worth of Plastic in Our Brains. Now What? An investigation into what microplastics are doing to our bodies" (NY Magazine).

ADDED: Ironically, the inflatable prosthesis is plastic. 

AND:

Teen Vogue weighs in on "Why the Harris Walz Camo Hat Is Becoming a Status Symbol for Liberals."

"Nearly $1 million worth of Walz inspired hats have been sold through the Harris campaign" — by Alyssa Hardy.

On August 6, VP Kamala Harris posted a video asking Minnesota Governor Tim Walzto join the ticket as her vice presidential nominee. He gleefully accepted from his living room, where he was sitting on a wicker chair wearing a black t-shirt, khakis, bright white sneakers, and a camo hat.

"Harris’s stint as vice president has often been pretty unremarkable, but it has provided a rich vein of memes, in part because she can be an awkward communicator...."

"It’s part of what fueled critical media coverage of her during the first year of her tenure, and which led the White House to largely sideline her during the first half of the Biden presidency.... As the first female, Black, and South Asian vice president, Harris was always doomed to receive an extraordinary amount of scrutiny and bias — and emphasized her persona as a 'joyful warrior' in part to combat some of those stereotypes. The joyful warrior, it seems, is sometimes a goofy one too. Harris delivers many of these lines in a genuinely funny way, with an affect unlike many politicians (described sometimes as just vibing along).... Plenty of people are... meme-ing their way to a new celebration of Harris — unburdened by what has been."

I'm reading "Why is everyone talking about Kamala Harris and coconut trees? Ironic Kamala Harris meme-ing isn’t so ironic anymore," a Vox article from July 3rd, when KH was just coasting along in the background, shielded by the seeming candidate, Joe Biden. I don't really understand what was ever "ironic" about any of this.

There are various embedded tweets at that link, including, "How are you supposed to exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you AND be, unburdened by what has been at the same time? Waiting for her 3rd great revelation that synthesizes these two." That's a reaction to this:

Four straight minutes of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” It’s incredible. I had no idea she used it this much. pic.twitter.com/TClfC1EyH6

— John Cooper (@thejcoop) June 29, 2024

I can understand her interest in being "unburdened by what has been," but she's stepping into the candidacy without having had to fight off rivals who offered new visions or even needing to present anything of her own.

ADDED: I didn't know people had taken to calling Kamala Harris a "joyful warrior," but this year is a lot like 1968 — President withdraws, VP steps into candidacy, convention in Chicago — and the candidate, Hubert Humphrey was famously called "The Happy Warrior."

ALSO: Gretchen Whitmer has called herself "The Happy Warrior." From a July 9th article in the NYT, "Whitmer Talks Tequila, Pearl Jam and Debates in New Book/The Michigan governor will not talk about running for president. But her new book, 'True Gretch,' is full of details keeping the chatter alive":

"The procedure, or the appointment — none of us seem to want to say the word death — has been moved from Thursday morning to the early afternoon."

"Another lifetime of waiting. By 9 a.m., the clouds have broken, and my mother is already dressed, her hair in curlers. She is sitting on the bed, looking at her computer. My sister and I suggest a walk. My mother declines: 'I’m doing emails. Just unsubscribing from Politico.' 'Mom!' We splutter. 'We can do that! It’s your last day on earth!' Which it is, and so we desist. Around noon, we go down to the hotel bar. My mother orders a whiskey-soda, ice cream, and a glass of Barolo. She enjoys the wine so much that I suggest she could just not go through with it and stay in this exact hotel and drink herself into oblivion for the rest of her life. Like Bartleby, she’d prefer not to."

From "The Last Thing My Mother Wanted/Healthy at age 74, she decided there was nothing on earth still keeping her here, not even us" (NY Magazine)(the mother opts for assisted suicide, available in Switzerland)("She had a three-pronged rationale... The world was going to hell, and she did not want to see more; she did not get joy out of the everyday pleasures of life or her relationships; and she did not want to face the degradations of aging").

I don't think I'd ever seen Bartleby used in the context of suicide, but here's a 2011 New Yorker column by Ian Crouch, "Bartleby and Social Media: I Would Prefer Not To":

"Mr. Trump ended the first day of public trading $4.6 billion richer on paper...."

I'm reading "Trump’s Social Media Company Opens New Avenue for Conflicts of Interest/Ethics experts say Trump Media, now a publicly traded company, would present a new way for foreign actors or others to influence Donald J. Trump, if he is elected president" (NYT).

Isn't it funny how his haters got him kicked off Twitter and — only because of that — he made his own website and 3 years later, it makes him $4.6 billion?

Anyway, this new Times article, by Sharon LaFraniere — "an investigative reporter currently focusing on Republican candidates in the 2024 presidential campaign" (I love the plural) — casts shade on Trump's insanely good fortune. 

Hipster Trumpism.

I was never a big "Trump guy" but the way the media is treating him like he's some kind of criminal makes me want to go out and vote for the guy again.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) August 23, 2022

ADDED: The post title is based on the old concept "hipster racism." Remember "hipster racism"?

Carmen Van Kerckhove coined the term hipster racism in the article "The 10 Biggest Race and Pop Culture Trends of 2006", citing "Kill Whitey" Parties and "Blackface Jesus" as examples. "Kill Whitey" parties, as described by The Washington Post, were parties held for hipsters in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by Jeremy Parker, a disc jockey who goes by the name The Pumpsta, in an attempt to "kill the whiteness inside". These were parties in which white hipsters mocked the black hip-hop industry, and essentially a part of African-American culture, for the sake of irony. Van Kerckhove also regarded the use of blackface by white people and the normalization and acceptance of such use from other individuals as hipster racism....

There was also "hipster sexism," circa 2012: 

I'm trying to read this Slate article about Greg Gutfeld, but I can't get past the performative garnering.

There's one word I've been following ever since Jeb Bush low-energied his way to defeat, and that word is "garner." There's an upstart word on my radar. I've been talking about it since last Saturday. That word is "performative."

This morning Meade sends me the link to "A Fox News Host’s Strange Backstory Shows How Liberals Lost Comedy/Conservatives now have one of the most popular shows in late night" — and I run into this:

Gutfeld has long demonstrated an obvious knack for garnering attention through what would now be described as trolling. Developing a highly performative, occasionally over-the-top style of comedic presentation....

Speaking of trolling... I don't want to be paranoid... but I feel... summoned. Who does a garner/performative one-two like that?

Anyway, here's a passage from the article, in case you're hankering for the substantive:

"It doesn’t matter which of these jokes is intended, because Gervais has already rejected the counterargument that a hateful joke is only 'ironic' when everyone is in on it..."

"... and when no one is secretly having their actual bigotry reinforced by the cruelty at the center of said irony. Toward the end of the show, he drags out an appalling sketch full of racist Sinophobic stereotypes, which he insists isn’t racist because it’s 'ironic.' Doesn’t matter that this kind of 'irony' is what allows white supremacists to operate in plain sight. Doesn’t matter that five minutes into SuperNature an audience member audibly laughs at a mention of rape, which might indicate that perhaps Gervais’s audience isn’t as ironically humorous as he wants them to be. No, Gervais seems to have decided that because words aren’t literal physical violence, nothing he says can cause harm.... We’re expected to speak his lingua franca of bad jokes and meet him halfway by agreeing that 'identity politics' should be just as susceptible to mockery as everything else...."

Writes Aja Romano in "With Ricky Gervais’s new special, Netflix yet again suffers transphobic fools/Does Netflix even care that Ricky Gervais’s SuperNature is rife with transphobic TERF ideology?" (Vox).

I love Ricky Gervais, but I have to agree with some of what Romana is saying here. In his new show, Gervais relies too heavily on just saying what he knows are terrible things to say and topping it off with a reminder that it's a joke. It's like something an unfunny uncle might do at an unbearable family gathering. He's taking license to say all the transgressive things, but ha ha doncha know it's a joke. I found that repetitive and tiresome, and at some point you really do wonder whether the laughter is based on a different understanding — not that we all know it's untrue but that we secretly think it is true. That's an especially nagging concern when the topic is transgender people.

"Cow struck and killed by milk truck..."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

And this is news because....? 

It's a test of whether you're an asshole — i.e., did you think it was funny? The irony or something. Poetic justice? What's the literary term that applies when a humble being is further humbled by the force that has been humbling it all along?

I think the editors must think it's funny. The struck/truck rhyme is evidence. Or do you think the headline writers are so inept with language that they don't notice and fix unintended rhymes? Actually, that's what I think. If you wanted the rhyme, wouldn't you improve the meter? 

"Into this lacuna created by non-naming come degrading, disgusted terms for labia – 'beef curtains,' 'fanny flaps'” – that reinforce the sense that squeamishness is warranted..."

"Second-wave feminists [had] consciousness-raising women’s groups where everyone would examine their vulva with a hand mirror. That fell out of fashion in the 90s and 00s – surfing a post-ironic, anti-earnest wave, feminism was suddenly fine with the hidden, private vulva. Any public notion of what a vulva looked like was created by pornography, starting with complete hairlessness..... [There is a] digital native generation that [looks at pornography and thinks] 'Oh my God, that is not what I look like' [and doesn't want] to talk to anyone about it, because that would be mortifying.'... The artist Jamie McCartney produced The Great Wall of Vagina – 400 plastercast vulvas – in 2011... (He knows that the casts he has made are of vulvas, not vaginas, but the word play doesn’t work so well.)... 'While casting, I discovered that loads of women.... would look at other casts and say: "This one’s so neat," or: "I wish mine looked more like that." I was incredulous – there really wasn’t any sense in my mind that some were good and some were defective. And this ideal was created in my name, apparently, because that’s what men like. I just thought: "Fuck that."'...  On social media, even the most conceptual works of feminist visual representation often have to be taken down due to nudity or 'community' guidelines...."

From "Labia liberation! The movement to end vulva anxiety for good/Women have long been taught to be ashamed of their vulvas, with increasing numbers turning to cosmetic surgery in pursuit of genital ‘perfection.' But a new generation is fighting back" (The Guardian).

ADDED: I'm trying to grasp "post-ironic, anti-earnest." Seems contradictory, but maybe that's what they were. I do remember finding the consciousness-raising era feminism too earnest. But I don't really know when feminists were not earnest. As for irony, if the later feminists were post-ironic, when was the ironic era in feminism? I lived through the whole thing and observed it, through my own varying levels of irony and earnestness.

"And now, jorts—those frumpy jean shorts worn by beer-clutching dads behind the barbecue—have wormed their way into style."

 A Wall Street Journal article calls out to me.

Nostalgia is also what pushed Aaron Levine back to jorts. “They harken back to a simpler time,” said the 44-year-old menswear designer who until recently worked at Abercrombie & Fitch. Jorts are “a bit of a ’70s situation, worn with a Faith No More T-shirt or a big polo,” he said....

“You almost chuckle the minute you hear the word ‘jorts,’” said Albert Imperato, 58, a classical-music publicist in Manhattan... The lightheartedness of jorts might actually be the secret to their surging popularity among younger men....

Will Rebholz, 29, a wine and beer salesperson in Grand Rapids, Mich., wore jorts “ironically” to rowdy tailgates in college. He still breaks them out at parties just “to bring some humor” to the room....

Do you believe you've got what it takes to wear clothes ironically/humorously? Or is that like saying "I meant to do that" after you fall off your bike?

 

And I must object to "They harken back to a simpler time." I've said it before, so let me quote myself, from a January 2016 article with the amusing/foreboding title, "Why there are so many things with titles like 'Why I still believe Donald Trump will never be president'":

"Hearkens back" (or "harkens back") is wrong (though common): “An old sense of the verb hark (which mainly means to listen) was used in hunting with hounds, where the phrase hark back denoted the act of returning along the course taken to recover a lost scent." We're not talking about listening back. Sound, unlike smell, doesn't remain on the trail and can't be traced. So please say hark back or just use normal English like it reminds me of.

"Fish Tinder has been pretty widely mocked for years now, so when I encounter a dude on Tinder holding a fish, I like to assume he must be doing it ironically. "

"Like how could you not know at this point? But when there’s a fish involved, unfortunately there generally just doesn’t seem to be a lot of self-awareness elsewhere in the profile."

From "The Men of Fish Tinder Are Still the Internet's Favorite Punching Bag/If there's a photo of you proudly hoisting up a dead fish on the internet, beware" (Inside Hook). That's from last year. 

I got there clicking through from more recent article, "Tim McGraw Is the Only Man Alive Who Looks Hot Holding a Dead Fish/The dead fish pose has long been one of the most widely mocked internet clichés, so how does Tim McGraw look so good doing it?," which says: 

Posing with a dead fish is an original Tinder faux pas, a cliché so long and widely mocked that it has long since passed the point of irony. And yet, here’s Tim McGraw, foisting up a scaly trophy more than half the length of his own tanned bod and looking like freaking god of the sea while doing so.

Personally, I did not know that posing with a fish was a big subject of internet mockery, but honestly, there's a lot I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't want to take a test on who Tim McGraw is. And yet, I have a sneaking feeling that I've blogged about him.

Ah, yes! I did! One of my best post titles — from November 2017 — "If it weren't for Tim McGraw's nipple, I'd have to say this casino is sexually harassing me.."

"'History,' E. M. Cioran once wrote, 'is irony on the move.' Bearing out this maxim, cultural revolutions have now erupted right in the heart of Western democracies...."

"The appeal of Maoism for many Western activists in the nineteen-sixties and seventies came from its promise of spontaneous direct democracy—political engagement outside the conventional framework of elections and parties. This seemed a way out of a crisis caused by calcified party bureaucracies, self-serving élites.... Tony Judt warned, not long before his death, that the traditional way of doing politics in the West—through 'mass movements, communities organized around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties'—had become dangerously extinct. There were, Judt wrote, 'no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself.' Trump emerged six years later, channelling an iconoclastic fury at this inbred ruling class and its cherished monuments. Trump failed to purge all the old élites, largely because he was forced to depend on them, and the Proud Boys never came close to matching the ferocity and reach of the Red Guards. Nevertheless, Trump’s most devoted followers, whether assaulting his opponents or bombarding the headquarters in Washington, D.C., took their society to the brink of civil war while their chairman openly delighted in chaos under heaven. Order appears to have been temporarily restored (in part by Big Tech, one of Trump’s enablers). But the problem of political representation in a polarized, unequal, and now economically debilitated society remains treacherously unresolved. Four traumatic years of Trump are passing into history, but the United States seems to have completed only the first phase of its own cultural revolution."

From "What Are the Cultural Revolution’s Lessons for Our Current Moment?/The great question of China’s Maoist experiment now looms over the United States: Why did a powerful society suddenly start destroying itself?" by Pankaj Mishra (The New Yorker).