Meme Report 7/2/26
Love is in the Air
Taylor Swift’s Wedding
I am in the war room and still don’t know the truth. It was always going to be fun, but the month of intrigue up until this point has made it more so. We still haven’t heard from Taylor Swift herself that this is the event the Garden is preparing for, but I’m excited to find out either way. I like both “it’s for security” and “it’s a decoy” answers. I’ve long held that a lot of the people who criticise Taylor Swift for certain behaviors don’t understand how famous she is and what it would be like to be that famous. It would lead you to do crazy things, like rent out MSG for your wedding and also pretend to rent out MSG for your fake wedding.
Now that the venue and the guest list are finalized, I can’t wait to find out more. I am delighted by Taylor Swift wedding news in any capacity because weddings are like the Olympics for judgmental bitches like me. This is kind of the event of the summer for me. Online Chatter, Mysteries, Weddings, Gossip, Rumors, Speculation, Celebrities, Feuds, Zohran, New York City. That’s kind of everything I love. I would expect no less from Ms. Swift. We’re going to be talking about this for days. I am going to read so many tweets fired off from someone’s backyard 3 lime-a-ritas deep.
I also love this wedding because it’s making me feel connected to people in the past. As a student of culture and history, I sometimes struggle to understand the celebrities of the past and how someone could garner that much attention and love for doing or being basically nothing. A common explanation is that there just wasn’t as much going on in the past, so people would pay attention to anything, as opposed to now. Taylor Swift is as much a socialite as she is a musician, so her wedding is comparable to a Royal Wedding or the wedding of one of the Astor girls. A July 4th wedding for a self-made American princess. It’s a good story! One that ensures the New York Times Vows column runs for at least another century.
Couple that Scaled the Empire State Building
Sometimes random shit happens, and it doesn’t matter one way or the other. It has no effect on anything. It’s just kind of going on. What the hell, sure!
Sharp Objects
I guess everyone decided it was Sharp Objects summer without me? Probably at the same meeting where everyone developed a lifelong love for Sharp Objects that was not present when we all watched 8 years ago. I watched it week to week then, and while we all loved the gif of Patricia Clarkson and the pen, nobody loved the show. It was not the instant classic it is being remembered as. I thought it was fine! I didn’t like it as much as Gone Girl or True Detective or Big Little Lies, and it sits at the center of all 3 of those things, and yet it does not grab me. It’s a cult that I’m not in, I guess. What’s odd to me about Sharp Objects Summer is that I should like it. It’s all my TV people. It’s of my ilk! It’s in my milieu! I would say my problem with Sharp Objects is that it’s not camp enough to be fun or good enough to be truly great. It’s middling. We all have middling properties that we love, but I just don’t see what everyone else sees.
Political Compass
Ugh. Actually, I decided it doesn’t matter, and I don’t care.
TikTok
This is not a ship edit
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Innovation in the form. TikTok Editors refuse to take the death of the author lying down. Their work is not open to interpretation. If you also spent hours in Final Cut or Pro Tools or iMovie making these things, wouldn’t you want the audience to know exactly what you meant when you put a Phoebe Bridgers song under clips of two people looking longingly at each other?
Your Camera Roll if You Were Dating
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
The synthesis of a Pinterest board and a joke will always work for me. It’s a gateway drug of plausible deniability. Someone who is otherwise too cool for all this can play make-believe. Or someone who is in the Pinterest trenches, pairing images day in and day out to create moodboards for almost no one but themselves, can have a little fun with it. Just when the joke was getting a little bit stale, new, even more esoteric figures arose. Storylines are developed. Now it’s not just dating, it’s cheating with a second figure. There are levels to this. Can’t wait to see what they have next week.
Big 3
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
I like to see other people reporting on the landscape of TikTok from within TikTok. For those of you on the NYC influencer beat, both out of curiosity and need for information, this report is pretty accurate in terms of “girls I like”. Though I would swap out Kitty Murphy for Emily Sarre. There is a sweet spot with these influencers. They have enough attention that it doesn’t feel sad; they still enjoy making content; and they haven’t gone all brand deal, all the time. There is a line one crosses when we lose an influencer forever. They reach their final form as living advertisements and stop making silly jokes on the internet about being a woman in New York City. These girls are far from that, and if they keep their wits about them, they might never lose. This new class is hitting its sweet spot. For the most part, they are clever, creative girls who seem fun to party with, rather than purely aspirational blank slates to project onto. I look forward to watching their trajectories and fun summers on the streets of New York.
Best Edit I Saw This Week
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
It never occurred to me that edit could just be a recut trailer. Now I want to watch Major League, a movie I had no interest in before.