Status groceries

Not the Eyes Wide Shut Glasses, Gen Alpha likes Wallace Shawn?

Last night, I saw the epic What We Did Before Our Moth Days, a new all-monologued play that reunites writer Wallace Shawn and director André Gregory, frequent collaborators of My Dinner With Andre fame (do not try to tell me what Wallace Shawn is most famous for). The three hours and two intermissions flew by. Audrey and I had a late, late dinner at Emmett’s on Grove after.

John Early, a star and a genius, texted me today about the birthday party of tweens in the front row, who kept turning to each other and giggling at references to incest and pedophilia. I’d assumed they were someone’s daughter and her friends. Nope! Just a gaggle of 12-year-olds interested in experimental theater on the last day of previews.

I was admittedly distracted by the thought that I’d seen each of the other actors in a repeat-watched indie movie that I couldn’t quite place. Come to find I was right, for each of them: Hope Davis starred in The Daytrippers (1996), Maria Dizzia has a memorable part in While We’re Young (2014), and Josh Hamilton is a corner of the quintet in The House of Yes (1996).

A week ago, I saw the Daniel Fish-directed Kramer/Fauci, another super stripped-down play, but in one, 90-minute act using all real dialogue, with some surprise flourishes. It’s moving.

Last week, for a guest post on Akosua T. Adasi’s Consumption Report, I took the blog’s title extremely literally and kind of went crazy listing/linking literally every single thing I used, bought, or otherwise absorbed. It was the week of that snowstorm in New York, so I barely left my apartment and only ordered a couple things online, but because I’d given myself such a rigid brief, the list was ridiculously long anyway.

I have become obsessed with America’s obsession with products—a word that has morphed, for some, to mean strictly the type of substance that one ingests externally (via the skin or hair): a non-thing in an exciting package; stuff that gets absorbed, and then we get to buy more.

A product isn’t timeless and it never said it was. It is a fancily-wrapped present to be opened every day. It is meant to be consumed and then replenished, because consumerism, a disease from which everyone I know suffers, means the false sense of taking steps in a direction, no matter which. We want to assign value to actions by spending money. We want to feel productive by buying.

Highsnobiety announced today via email that their next report will be a three-part series called The Status Economy. It will purportedly cover “how consumers have shifted their focus from fashion to everyday lifestyle categories as primary markers of status.” The categories are: “Groceries, Health & Wellness, and Travel.”

Not only did we approach this in the report I co-wrote for Highsnobiety last year (which has been assigned to Yale students, I’m told), but I’ve been saying that for Gen Z and below, every item visible in a front-facing camera video is a marketing encounter. As the stats suggested in 2025,

Luxury consumers are spending as much as ever, especially younger ones…The younger set are even investing almost as much in non-fashion purchases, such as homeware and beauty products, as they are in clothing, shoes, bags, and sunglasses. In fact, our survey shows that Gen Z and millennials are more likely to buy jewelry and watches than their Gen X and boomer counterparts.

I would be surprised if the spend on consumables such as startup olive oil didn’t skew younger year by year, especially with non-luxury consumers. Anyway, after I sent that guest post, I kept noticing things I forgot to list/link: the tiny diamond-flecked silver signet ring etched with a letter S I wear every day; the cotton pads and swabs I use to wipe away makeup and apply toner; the handmade velvet scrunchy I bought in an antique mall upstate. It’s endless!

Something I read: “The Grand Dame of the Epstein Files”—New York magazine’s perfectly unhinged profile of Peggy Siegal—and then, because I hadn’t, Vanity Fair’s “Peggy Siegal Sends Her Regrets” from 2020. She really is interview gold.

Something I watched: (a while ago, but I was just reminded of it by the Oscar nom) The Perfect Neighbor (2025), made of mostly security and police body camera footage. This documentary made me sob uncontrollably. It’s shockingly sad.

Something I acquired: A new pair of prescription glasses from Gentle Monster that Audrey says are very Eyes Wide Shut. The internet tells me that those are Oliver Peoples.

What I used up: The last of my Perfumer H Icons collection, which is no longer on their site (a second drop is, though).

None of these made the cut

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