Content Consumed: Taylor Swift, the VMAs, and Adderall
Hello! It’s Monday. A strange Monday. I hope you’ve all had a restful weekend and push through this week to the 3-day weekend ahead.
In today’s edition of Content Consumed…
🏆 The VMAs, from T-Swift’s new album to Bored Ape NFTs
🔌 TikTok wants you on Adderall
🎥 Critics and fans disagree about 2022 movies
🔮 The cast of Euphoria is collapsing
💊 College athletes and birth control
How Taylor Swift saved the VMAs
Does anyone tune into award shows anymore? The MTV Video Music Awards are the kind of show I watch via Twitter, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. This year’s notable moments, according to my Twitter feed:
- Taylor Swift announced a new album dropping in October titled Midnights about 13 sleepless nights she’s had (you know, because 13 is her favorite number). She wore a flapper-chic crystal Oscar de la Renta dress that set the Internet aflame, reminiscent of the one she wore exactly 13 years ago (you know, because 13 is her favorite number) when Kanye West interrupted her Best Video acceptance speech.
- Johnny Depp was there. Sort of. Virtually. As a floating face on an astronaut dummy. He made a really, really bad joke about how he “needed the work”, alluding to the fact that he’s been semi-blacklisted in Hollywood after his domestic abuse trial with Amber Heard.
- Nicki Minaj won the Video Vanguard award, thanking her past collaborators who have taken a chance on her in the industry. She also brought a handful of Barbz on stage with her to accept the award, which was sweet. I’m not a Nicki fan but I respect what she’s done as an artist!
- It got very digital, with performances including Bored Ape NFTs and plenty of holograms.
P.S. You should read this article from Vox, “How the Taylor Swift-Kanye West VMAs scandal became a perfect American morality tale”. Great stuff.
TikTok wants you to start Adderall
If you’ve ever been on TikTok, you’ve seen ads from companies like Done. The telehealth providers of Done quickly diagnose patients with ADHD and write prescriptions for “treatment” — typically stimulants — in a matter of days.
“Scary easy. Sketchy as hell,” one user aptly described it, as he had one 15-minute appointment over Zoom then walked out of a pharmacy with a container full of Adderall a couple of days later.
Apparently, prescriptions for Adderall and its generic equivalents increased by nearly 25 percent during the pandemic. Lax telehealth and ADHD influencers—I swear to god, it’s a thing—are largely to blame.
Just some of the misinformation spread by ADHD influencers to people scrolling through TikTok:
- You can forget people in your life even exist with ADHD
- It costs at least a thousand dollars to get a diagnosis for ADHD
- Individuals with ADHD lack “object permanence”
- “Anxiety shivers,” “random noise making,” and “being competitive” are symptoms of ADHD
Media literacy, people! Try it!
Anyways, sucks to see American medical corporations taking advantage of youth mental health crises for profit (as per usual).
Why do critics and fans disagree about movies this year?
Bloomberg spells out three reasons: Marvel fatigue, bad animated movies, and, well, it’s just still kind of early.
Listen, Marvel fatigue is very real. There’s just a ton of content being pushed 24/7 from Marvel right now, content that doesn’t compare to blockbusters that attained critical acclaim like Black Panther or Iron Man. The quality hasn’t exactly been getting better, either—if anything, it’s getting worse.
A lot of the issues in 2022 stem from franchises. We’re seeing a ton of sequels, especially in animated movies (Lightyear, Rise of Gru, etc.), that audiences eat up in theaters and critics roll their eyes at.
Don’t think that critics hate animated movies though—6 of critics’ top 10 films of this century were animated movies. Inside Out, Ratatouille, Wall-E, and others scored with both critics and fans.
Anyways, it’s only August. We’ll see how the year ends up.
The cast of Euphoria, in shambles
What will the cast of Euphoria look like in Season 3?
Let’s start up top with Sydney Sweeney. She just threw a 60th birthday party for her mom, a country hoedown complete with Blue Lives Matter t-shirts and MAGA-looking hats that said “Make Sixty Great Again”. People are mad about it, to which Sydney replied: “An innocent celebration for my mom’s milestone 60th birthday has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention. Please stop making assumptions. Much love to everyone”.
I feel like this tweet pretty much nails my thoughts (which are that this does not matter):
Okay, now onto Barbie Ferreira. She’s confirmed to be exiting Euphoria after two seasons, likely because of drama with the showrunner Sam Levinson. There are endless rumors and allegations that he was simply tyrannical on set and cut most of her lines and scenes in Season 2.
Let’s wrap up with Hunter Schafer. Right out the gate, I’d like to make it known that this issue is complex. Schafer, a trans woman, liked and commented positively on a post on Instagram blaming the non-binary community for conservative legislation that deems hormone replacement therapy and gender-affirming surgery not medically necessary in Florida. She’s getting a lot of backlash from the LGBTQ community, especially non-binary folks.
Zendaya, you’ve got this. We believe in you and your non-problematic off-screen behavior.
College athletes and birth control
What do I—what do we—even know about the pill’s effects, besides contraception?
College athletes struggle with the rarely-researched side effects in a way that the average woman in their early-20s might, but to a heightened degree. If I gain 5 pounds, I’m not going to deal with it at a daily team weigh-in. If I’ve gotta lay down on a Tuesday afternoon with cramps, I bring my laptop to my bed to continue to WFH. Not feel forced to release myself from an NCAA competition.
With increasing restrictions around reproductive health care post-Roe v. Wade’s overturning, athletes are calling for more conversation and research about the pill’s health hindrances, SI reports. Especially because in college athletics, it’s not uncommon for a student to be instructed by a coach or program to go on the pill.
But hormones are barely even talked about in the health realm of college athletics—not like hydration or proper sleep or even bone density.
And that’s all for today! Thanks for reading. I appreciate you.
Love,
Casey
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