hawk tuah girl built an AI dating app
standout features include "bald detector" and "height detector"
QUICK HITS
Wake up, people! RFK Jr. could soon be running the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Trump announced the nomination on Truth Social, writing, “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to public health.” Not everyone is thrilled. "Nominating an anti-vaxxer like Kennedy to HHS is like putting a Flat Earther at the head of NASA," Peter G. Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said in a statement. You know who’ll love this, though? The Longevity Bros. A while ago, Business of Fashion ran a story about RFK’s connection to the “wellness elites,” including Calley and Dr. Casey Means, the siblings behind his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, and maybe even Gwyneth Paltrow, who told The Times she found Kennedy’s point of view “interesting.”
I don’t love Kim as a personality, but I do often enjoy her auto-fictive brand campaigns. This shoot for the Skims x Dolce & Gabbana collaboration is super fun as is, but the whole Kourtney/Kim/D&G lore makes it even better. IYKYK.
shared this visual that charts the different ways couples have met over the last century, and I thought it was really cool. In 1930, 22% of couples met through family, followed closely by school and friends. In 2024, 60% of couples meet online, followed by only 13% of couples meeting through friends. A recent Dazed article read: “In films and TV shows about love, IRL meet-cutes still reign supreme.” No one is making dating app love stories, despite that being how most modern relationships start. Among my friends, it’s obvious that those who met their partners IRL believe they’re God’s favorites. Myself included. I’m sorry, it’s just a vibe.
Bumble released their 2025 Dating Trends Report, and the gist of it is that the girls want love, the girls want romance, and will settle for nothing less. But we say this every year, so who knows.
Hawk Tuah girl launched a dating app, and TechCrunch said it's actually good. Pookie Tools, named after a nickname for her boyfriend, offers an AI-powered dating assistant, outfit recommendations for dates, tips to enhance your dating profile, and a zodiac compatibility feature. To build the app, Hailey partnered with Ultimate AI founder Ben Ganz. Standout features include the “Bald Predictor,” which analyzes photos for potential patterns of hair loss, and the “Height Detector,” which uses proportions and surroundings to estimate height. Features like these exist because men lie. Say what you will, but this woman knows her audience. I’d love for one of you to try this and report back. It costs $7 per week or $50 per year.
Starface is launching StarMarket, their Depop marketplace featuring original merchandise for accessorizing Starface products. I mean, this is obviously smart. People are really into miniature pieces and tiny accessories and are selling these pieces anyway—owning that relationship, less for the $$$ and more for the community, makes sense. More than anything though, this reminded me of
’s essay Objectifying People, Personifying Objects, where she wrote, “Lately I wonder if our objectification is proven by its inverse — the personification of objects. (Maybe it’s a sense of kinship with Stanley cups that inspires us to dress them in little outfits.)” Imagine feeling a sense of kinship with a Stanley cup or a pimple patch. People are very unserious.
Everyone took something different from the election cycle—Spotify CEO Daniel Ek learned that YouTube is a bigger problem than he realized. “It’s becoming all about video,” he said about podcasting. “It’s kind of an irony.” Two years ago, Spotify overtook Apple as the No. 1 podcast platform in the U.S. Last month, YouTube claimed the top spot. Beginning in January, Spotify plans to offer premium subscribers in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada ad-free viewing of video podcasts and will start paying hosts who make popular videos and meet a certain viewing threshold to post videos on its platform. It’s wild how YouTube is beating everyone at their own game—the streamers, Spotify, Twitch—everyone.
The niche streamers are doing okay, though. According to a new report from subscription research firm Antenna, low-cost specialty streaming services like BET+, BritBox, Shudder, and Crunchyroll have generated significant subscriber growth over the last couple of years. Active subscriptions for niche streamers grew 27% last year and 20% so far this year, outpacing the biggest streaming services. I had a conversation with someone really smart yesterday, who agreed with me that the future of media is indeed niche. I told her, the moment everyone accepts they won’t be the next New York Times or Netflix, and builds accordingly, we’ll all be much happier.
The Onion, itself never far from bankruptcy, won the bid to acquire fake news website InfoWars out of bankruptcy—as a joke, kind of. It plans to relaunch the site as a parody of itself. The bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against InfoWars founder Alex Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems. The comments on this article are very fun; people seem excited. One person said the article should have been titled The Satire Strikes Back. Maybe I’m the only one worried about The Onion’s balance sheet.
Yesterday, Substack competitor beehiiv announced the creation of a multi-million dollar investment fund to establish the "beehiiv Media Collective". Selected journalists on its platform will get a health insurance stipend, legal review support, editorial tools like Perplexity Pro and Getty Images, and office software for tasks like accounting. Axios broke the news, just a day after scooping Substack’s latest fundraise—obviously intentional. What's interesting about Substack and beehiiv are the different ways they’ve positioned themselves as platforms for “independent journalism”. The obvious advantage Substack has are its network effects, while beehiiv has invested heavily in ad tech. In some ways, it’s ideological too—two different perspectives on what writers need, how they should grow, and what role the platform should play in that growth. To wit: I’ve heard many publications described as “Substack newsletters”; beehiiv newsletters are simply newsletters that happen to be built on beehiiv.
The F.B.I. raided the home of Polymarket’s founder on Wednesday—something about investigating whether he allowed users in the U.S. to place bets on the platform in violation of a government settlement. This man is only 26, by the way. I hadn't realized.
Trump promised to save TikTok if he got elected, and The Post reported that he’s probably going to try to make good on that promise. TikTok, meanwhile, is doubling down on its U.S. business. According to Semafor, parent company ByteDance recently filed two trademarks that hint at where the platform is going. The first, TikTokGo, appears to be an app promoting “restaurants, retail businesses, the travel industry, and other online and offline businesses.” The other, more interesting filing, TikTokPayLater, will allow customers to split their TikTokShop purchase payments into up to 12 monthly installments, according to information on its Philippines website. This really scares me.
Lisa Jahovic’s work for the Jacquemus holiday collection featuring Alex Consani is pretty darn cool. All those cucumbers, though—they trigger my trypophobia.
British Vogue editorial director, Chioma Nnadi, confirmed what we all knew: "We're in this moment where we're seeing the pendulum sort of swing back to skinny being 'in' and often these things are treated like a trend and we don't want them to be." She suspects Ozempic might have something to do with it.
As of last month, the percentage of liberal-identifying Gen Z adults dropped from 41% in January 2021 to 27%, and the share of self-described conservatives grew from 16% to 23%. Are you guys ready to discuss this? I think not, but I’ll open the floor anyway. In that same period, the share of Gen Z adults who cited economic issues as their top concern when voting grew from 31% to 42%, a figure that is 4 percentage points higher than the share of all U.S. adults who said the same. Young people are poor, cannot find good jobs, are not tuning into traditional media, likely cannot afford to pay for traditional media, and are hooked on podcasts, TikTok, and X, where conservative influencers reign supreme—thus my frustration with publications like The Guardian and NPR leaving X. We have all these tropes about what Gen Z is and is not, what we stand for and what we won’t allow… mostly bullshit, of course. Maybe I’ll start writing more on this because everyone is convinced Gen Z is going to save the world in between breaks from TikTokShop and it worries me.
Ben & Jerry's is suing its parent company, Unilever, for attempting to silence their stance on Gaza. “The lawsuit claims that Unilever recently tried to dismantle Ben & Jerry’s independent board and sought to muzzle it to prevent the company from calling for a cease-fire and safe passage for refugees, supporting U.S. students protesting civilian deaths in Gaza, and urging an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.” To which Unilever responded, “We reject the claims made by B&J’s social mission board.” Naturally.
Hachette employees are protesting a new conservative imprint launched by the publisher after Trump’s win last week. Described as “dedicated to publishing serious works of cultural, social, and political analysis by conservative writers,” Basic Books will be led by Thomas Spence, former president of the conservative publisher Regnery and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that coordinated the Project 2025 initiative. Following the announcement, an anonymous letter was posted on the Instagram account xoxopublishinggg, calling for Hachette to “re-evaluate its decision.” Alex DiFrancesco, an editor at Hachette UK’s Jessica Kingsley Publishers (JKP), which focuses on books about neurodiversity, mental health, and gender diversity, resigned in protest. I read an article last week about how companies basically don’t care about their employees protesting over social and cultural issues anymore. We’re seeing this in media, tech, and we’re going to keep seeing it. Big companies are firing people at the slightest provocation—I’ve been covering a lot of that. I keep saying: it’s an employer’s market now; no one is even pretending to care anymore! Interested to see how this all plays out in the next few years.
It's time someone made fanfic about Mark Zuckerberg's and Priscilla Chan’s love story. Call it Get Low.
Gen Z swinging to the right is so interesting & I can totally see it. Instability has never been higher for a generation, no one can afford to buy a house or has job security and that level of insecurity 100% bleeds into your politics, it becomes everything to vote based on economic issues that directly impact you more than anything else. People are tired and pissed off and v poor. Plus social media is just getting more and more politically polarised which deffo feeds it into. It’s tragic extreme political narratives have become so common place.
I think Gen Z has all the characteristics to be more liberal leaning but I think the absolutely fucked economy has taken that leaning and swerved it to the right. How can Gen Z ‘save the world’ if we’ve got no money, housing or jobs?
Would def read more of your writing on the whole “Gen Z is gonna save us all” bullshit — I think that rhetoric is so fascinating next to the actual numbers + what feels like a real cry for help?