CATCHING FIRE: White text, David Jonsson and storage unit reveals
Do keep up!
Hello! How are you? I’m doing great, thanks for asking. Between writing and some consultancy work I’ve been spending far too much time obsessing over curtains for the new place and sweating my way through London’s fourth heatwave. I’m back in Los Angeles in a couple of weeks and unbelievably it’ll be cooler there. Make it make sense.
Today’s letter is mahoosive so buckle up as we take the temp of:
The Gen Z singer breaking Whitney and Mariah’s streaming and sales numbers
The students turning storage units into bouji walk-in closets
Women’s embrace of prediction markets
The rise of broke TV
The four ways Gen Z are being screwed over
AI companies turning their security nightmares into marketing
The new white text wheeze
The TikToker who exposed a kissing couple
The influencer row gripping Nantucket
A creator’s fury at being called a tradwife
Ballerina Farm’s latest move to (maybe) make money
The genius no-screens invention for kids
Paid subscribers get three courses, free subscribers get an amuse-bouche. Let’s jump in…
Everyone’s talking about
Tradwife-adjacent Nara Smith insists she isn’t a tradwife… One of TikTok’s biggest stars gave a rare interview to Call Her Daddy and hit back at being branded a tradwife…
For those who don’t know the background, Smith blew up on TikTok in 2024 for cooking elaborate meals “from scratch” for her husband and children. From fruit loops cereal to bubblegum to DIY SPF, there wasn’t a thing that she couldn’t conjure up in her kitchen. And that’s where 99 per cent of her content was based — in her kitchen.
At the time she wore modest, ultra-feminine dresses, started almost every video with a downward gaze and the expression “my husband”, added hashtags like #momtok and #marriage to posts and narrated her videos with a breathy, submissive sounding voiceover.
Smith never called herself a tradwife, but the label quickly stuck owing to her heavy-on-the-homemaking content, her marriage to Lucky Blue Smith, who was raised in a devout Mormon family, how quickly the pair expanded their family, having four children (some self delivered) in five years and her friendship with Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm.
While I and other writers pointed out that Smith, 24, was likely playing a caricature and baiting her audience to juice engagement, many of her tens of millions of followers took her at face value. If not tradwife then why tradwife shaped, many of them thought and who can blame them?
According to Smith they should never have believed their own eyes. She said: “I don’t prioritise being a homemaker. I’m a working mom.
“I love cooking because it’s my passion and because I kind of have to do it given my autoimmune [issues]. But that’s a passion of mine. It’s a hobby. It’s not something that I need to be doing.”
While I can understand her frustration at being pigeon-holed, I’m struggling to fathom her confusion that she has been misinterpreted. Smith even admits that: “I never felt like whatever the public saw was what was going on.”
Smith now wants to set the record straight (or pivot her brand) and while some of her more recent content focuses on her work outside the home, she’ll have more luck turning the page if she shows her followers rather than tell Call Her Daddy viewers what type of wife she really is.
RELATED Ballerina Farm’s next enterprise will almost certainly be ‘raw’ make-up after she posted a video of her “morning routine” and used a fresh beetroot as blush and lip stain…
ALSO RELATED content creator Audrey Peters, who has over a million followers on TikTok, admitted to New York magazine that she regularly produced rage bait videos - like ordering multiple coffees from DoorDash in one day - and described it as a reliable way to get engagement. Finally some candour!
The Nantucket influencer ban… When a shop known for its high-end baskets got sick of content creators coming into the store with their cameras on they put up a sign that read “NO INFLUENCERS”…
Given how to the point (and possibly discriminatory) the sign is, I guess it was going to pop off at some point but Paige Lorenze (now Paige Paul after marrying tennis star Tommy Paul) made sure we all found out about it after turning up in the comments.
She took the sign as a dig against her, and with over one million followers she sure is influential. It likely also hit home because the fashion brand she founded, Dairy Boy, just opened a store on Nantucket, and the long lines outside have been the talk of the town.
She opened her statement with: “If you call yourself a feminist but proudly put up a “No Influencers” sign, it’s worth asking who you are attempting to delegitimize, and why...”
Paige has a point. Influencer is a put down frequently directed towards women. But the shop owner is unrepentant. He told The Cut: “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video.”
Maybe a “NO FILMING” sign would have been more appropriate, but it wouldn’t have got us talking about Four Winds Craft Guild now would it?
The co-workers “caught” making out in Central Park… It’s just a little over a year since the Coldplay couple went mega viral and now another pair of colleagues are facing backlash after being caught kissing in public.
The drama started after big-time TikToker, Jay Guapõ, filmed two high-powered lawyers as they smooched on a bench in Central Park in Manhattan. As he approached them he said, “get a room, there’s kids around”. Both the man and the woman ask him to stop filming. He does not. Instead he edits the video to maximise their humiliation and posts it to his 3.5 million followers. I’m not going to post it here, but this is the link.
The New York Post identified the couple as Nathaniel Cullerton, 45, and Kelsey Borenzweig, 29. They also reported that Cullerton is married. Awkward.
While I’m not one to hand out passes to cheats, in this case it’s Guapõ who’s the real bad actor. Unlike the Coldplay couple who were at an event with thousands of cameras, Cullerton and Borenzwieg has little expectation they were about to be filmed, let alone by a content creator who’s been dubbed “New York City’s prince of TikTok” and the guy Kim Kardashian dressed up as one Halloween.
The saga led The Atlantic to write an article headlined “The Horrible Rise of the Makeout Police” and to note the chilling effect filming without consent has on us all. They’re right, if we stand any chance of reversing declining birth rates we might need to really lean into the idea of actively encouraging public pashing.
RELATED AntiZuck is a new app that alerts users when smart glasses, like Meta’s Ray-Bans, are close by. The app scans for Bluetooth signals connected to the privacy-invading tech.
So hot right now
White text… I told you last letter about the professor who hid white text in his black text instructions for a midterm paper to weed out students who got AI to do their work. Well it seems that case was just the tip of the iceberg and white text is being used to fool AI, and probably you. The latest hack benefits job seekers and it’s hard not to admire their savvy.
