Happy Monday! 

I hope you are enjoying this long weekend because I certainly am. I’m making this newsletter short and sweet so you and I can both enjoy the rest of the holiday. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about Clavicular, the looksmaxxing streamer who has seemingly been everywhere in recent days. I made a quick primer on him for those curious about him below.

I have a lot of links for you, and of course a playlist, below. See you Thursday!

Clavicular, the controversial 20-year-old looksmaxxing streamer, has been slowly inching his way up in relevance for months. Like most IRL streamers, he is constantly doing crazy, often offensive stunts for attention and views. Before this past week, he had allegedly hit someone with his car on a livestream; got arrested for possession of drugs, a fake ID, and “a forged instrument”; repeatedly said the N-word to provoke a reaction in public; and injected a 17-year-old girl with some sort of sculpting treatment. All of these incidents are merely means to an end. His entire brand is built off of one thing: sculpting the perfect face.

The looksmaxxing movement was born and bred in the trenches of alt-right incel forums about a decade ago. It promotes the idea that peak male attractiveness is the ultimate goal, which can be achieved by altering your features in line with the PSL scale. I have a distinct memory of learning about looksmaxxing, although it wasn’t called that in the article, from a cover story in New York magazine. I saw the issue in a store somewhere and was intrigued by the headline: INCEL PLASTIC SURGERY. That was 2019 — and the methods for becoming a “Chad” have only gotten more extreme.

Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, is what happens when you let a young boy steep in this culture. He claims to have done steroids, crystal meth, and fat dissolvers to keep lean, starting in his teen years. He has rubbed shoulders with far-right white supremacists and misogynists like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, although he apparently finds politics to be irrelevant to his goals. It is a bizarre, nihilist existence to live for nothing but attention and looks, although that is a major part of social media stardom.

Unfortunately, it looks like his work has paid off, at least a little bit, further validating his shallow ideology. Clavicular’s quest for handsomeness has opened doors for him. He was rewarded with a closing spot on the runway at Elena Velez’s show during New York Fashion Week, where he was later seen at a few afterparties. He also got a profile in the New York Times, which is a must-read to get his whole schtick.

I’ve seen so many clips of Clavicular following his NYFW appearance. His name ballooned in search on Google Trends over the weekend. While he’s still a bit of a cultural novelty, it’s clear that he has taken looksmaxxing into the mainstream. I’ll be curious to see the consequences of that.

Every Monday letter gets a playlist. Today, songs to listen to while looking wistfully out of a window.

In this week’s playlist:

Other things I want to share with you.