Kirkland Brand Rules The World [#145]

Plus: Camo hats, great films you should see in theaters now, and Gus Walz.

Hello from Sedona, home of energy vortexes.

What a newsy, bratty summer it has been. I spent last weekend on the set of a Gen Z cable TV/digital network, where my actor daughter was working on a pilot. The barrage of youth slang I had to contend with nearly toppled me over. Overheard:

“You can mew in five”

“Oh my gyot”

The Thirty-something Director: “I’ll try to work negative aura into the script but not skibbity toilet, because I looked it up and it’s gross.”

The other thing that the youths are doing these days is putting their phones right up to another person’s forehead and taking of the top of their face, but using the .5 wide angle orientation. “Point fiving,” as they call it, is totally unflattering but HEEELARIOUS for some reason.

I’m just the messenger.

Reading

The fascinating NYT exploration of everyone’s favorite $1.50 hot dog vendor and overperforming stock, Costco. Fun fact: Korea’s Costcos have to supply 10x as many free onions for their cafes because Koreans make “Costco kimchi” as a side, which is a heaping mound of onions with ketchup and mustard on top. The eye-opening way to classify men into two groups: the ones who like women and men who don’t.

A visual guide to the influencers of the 2024 campaign. How liberals reclaimed the camo hat. If Tim Walz is America’s dad, here are America’s other family members. ICYMI: Tim Walz fixed your bicycle.

Evan Ross Katz

on the Gus Walz moment at the DNC: “Pride, admiration and awe. And it feels shared. And it feels like it’s theirs. It’s at once precious, but also contagious. It’s a powerful thing.” Unrelated: Anyone have an update on the alleged exes who won Olympic gold in mixed doubles?

Book on my nightstand: Democracy In Retrograde, by Sami Sage and Emily Amick. Support indie booksellers with purchases on Bookshop.org. My page has my 2024 reads, most recommended books, and fave children books.

Werk Werk Werk

Dropped in on the Vibe Check podcast to talk about beauty standards in the digital age, bodily liberation and how to rethink appearances. They didn’t cut out a riff on my lifelong appreciation of bears, my favorite subset of gay men.

On Forever 35, which I’m co-hosting indefinitely, we’ve been cooking up all kinds of fun episodes. The standout lately was Sable Yong, who we had IRL for a live taping in LA. She packed all kinds of mic drop insights inside of 35 minutes.

And … TED Talks Daily Summer Book Club has wrapped! I joined TED members in reading one book a month together before hosting conversations with the books’ authors: This summer we featured activist and model Geena Rocero of Horse Barbie, Emily Nagoski, the sex therapist who wrote Come Together, and Jonathan Haidt, author of the NYT bestseller The Anxious Generation, which has started a movement to keep smartphones out of kids’ hands until at least high school. We wrapped up the book club with a Q/A with me. I also did a brief Q/A for Shoutout LA, where I list some of my fave places to go in Koreatown, my fave neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Watch and/or Listen

The US Open is very interesting this year. All three men’s singles Olympic medalists (Djokovic, Alcaraz and Musetti) were knocked out within the last 24 hours, so it’s a wide open field on the men’s side. This favors world #1 Jannik Sinner, who was injured during the Olympics and is well-rested for the Open.

Two Sundance winning films are currently in theatrical release and both of them deal with young people in poignant and deeply emotional ways. There is the epic and intimate Sugarcane, directed by my friends Emily Kassie and Julian Brave Noisecat, which investigates what happened at the Indian residential school in Canada where his father was born.

And Didi, a coming-of-age tale about that time right before 9th grade, when everything feels huge and strange and no one seems to understand you. Run, don’t walk, to catch these films in theaters.

Will update on IRL events to meet up in the next dispatch. In the meantime, for my boss lady friends out there, it’s not too late to be part of the inaugural cohort of the Women’s Leadership Program at the Mills Institute of Northeastern University. (While Mills is now an institute and not the college, it’s still on its gorgeous, historic campus in the Bay area.)

Have a restful long weekend, for those of you who observe.

E