GOOD EVENING!

This is the POP CULTURE CHEAT SHEET, your weekly intel to fuel your water cooler conversations, delivered to your inbox every Monday. If someone forwarded you this email, be sure and subscribe here. 

LUNCH BREAK

five quick consumption recs for the time between meetings

1. RELIGIOUS PINTEREST. Pinterest is becoming a spiritual hotbed. 

2. YOU'VE BEEN (SOFT) SERVED. Tyra Banks finds herself in legal trouble on the rocky road to building a hot ice cream brand/ice cream science institute for underprivileged youth.

3. BEAU NO! Boyfriends are becoming a brand liability. 

4. IT ALL COMES OUT/IN THE WASHPO WashPo delivers a solid 2026 in/out list – despite some grumbling that legacy media in/out lists fall into the latter column.

5. THE DIRT ON MEADOW LANE. The CEO of NYC’s Erewhon gets raw (like the retailer’s $15 chicken nuggets).

is the club chalamet model sustainable?

Viral Timothee Chalamet fan account Club Chalamet has long been a mainstay of HL’s water cooler convos. Ever since she was catapulted into the spotlight on the back of a shocking revelation that the fervent fan is, in fact, a Gen Xer with a fully developed frontal lobe, we’ve watched closely as her cultural capital snowballed into a Wall Street Journal feature last month. 

These past few days have been tough on Miss Club (another moniker for Simone, the woman behind the account). Her arch-nemesis Kylie Jenner got a loving onstage shoutout from Timothee, and an awkward encounter with her muse prompted the cultural sentiment on Miss Club to swing. Onlookers are beginning to wonder where a parasocial fixation like this ends – and how much it will escalate along the way. 

Miss Club has assured she’s in it for the long haul. So the question then becomes: absent some shocking escalation, can the Club Chalamet shtick maintain the public interest in our attention-deficient culture? 

We think Simone could have it in her. She’s far outlived the shock value of her initial age reveal by leaning into something more durable than spectacle: voice. She writes with a deeply personal pen (see: “the shit I write is the shit I write”) – a real differentiator in the age of AI slop. She’s known for dropping lines like “glasses-wearing American” that hit notes of sincerity, kookiness, and somewhat misplaced gravitas – the exact alchemy for ironic co-optation and viral circulation. 

Miss Club is already a fixture of terminally online stan culture. As people morbidly wonder if this has the potential to devolve into a John Lennon situation, curiosity (if not concern) will keep eyes trained on her. If the one-liners keep coming, she has the potential to establish herself as a voice of a generation (though perhaps not her generation).

TREND RAPPORT

viral vocab of the week 

PICO INFLUENCER (n.) – A high-engagement account with under 1,000 followers – dubbed ‘in’ for 2026 by Glossy.

PARASOCIAL (adj.) – Denotes a one-sided relationship between a celebrity and fan. 

HIVE (n.) – A group of fans. The term spun off from “Beyhive,” the title of Beyonce’s fanbase.

SEE YOU NEXT MONDAY!

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