We’ve just finished reading Famesick - the memoir from the one and only Lena Dunham - in the Shit You Should Read About book club. And here is our official review!!!

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This is huge news, both for Shit You Should Care About (it’s our first exclusive scoop) and for the safety of children in the UK.

The UK government is announcing today that Big Tech, specifically Apple and Google, must activate technology that already exists inside your phone to detect and block nude images from reaching children’s devices.

Let me repeat myself: THIS TECHNOLOGY ALREADY EXISTS - IT’S JUST SWITCHED OFF.

So what we’re talking about are features that are built into the operating systems of smartphones and tablets right now, sitting there doing nothing, because companies decided to either leave them off by default or, at best, blur content instead of blocking it.

The UK is basically saying that’s not good enough (you’re damn right), and that companies have three months to turn them on, or they will legislate them into doing it and make your boss personally criminally liable.

“Tech companies have a moral duty to act, by making it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images. If they don’t, we will legislate.” - Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

“Companies should switch these protections on by default, for every child, on every device. We are giving them three months to show us that they will do the right thing.” - Technology Secretary Liz Kendall

When this tech is properly activated, here’s what happens:

• If a child tries to take a nude photo of themselves, it won’t be taken, shown, or saved.

• If someone sends a child a nude image, it’s automatically blocked before they ever see it.

• It works across all apps and services, not just websites.

• Oh, and it can’t be bypassed by using a VPN.

Why this matters

I feel like I don’t even have to explain this; of course it matters, but to reiterate:

• Right now, the average child views pornography by the time they’re 13.

• 52% of all child sexual abuse cases involve children offending against other children

As for the surveillance question:

Over-18s can still access adult content by verifying their age - there’s no data collection, no monitoring, no reporting. When a child attempts to take or receive a nude image, the device simply doesn’t process it. Nothing is stored, flagged, or sent anywhere, and adults retain full access to adult content by verifying their age.

Meet Rhiannon, a survivor of child sexual abuse

Rhiannon was 13 when someone found her in an online chat room.

This person said he was a girl.

She believed him. Why wouldn’t she? She was 13, and he said everything a lonely 13-year-old needs to hear - that she was beautiful, that she could model. Rhiannon had always struggled with her self-belief, her confidence, her appearance, and he knew exactly where to press.

He convinced her to send explicit images of herself to him, and then the blackmailing started. He wanted her to meet him in person, or he would release everything.

“I sent a topless photo and immediately everything changed. She wasn’t nice and complimenting me anymore. She was threatening me… I felt trapped. I did the only thing I could, which was what she told me.” - Rhiannon, Survivor

As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, the girl online was a much older man.

After he was sentenced, most people closed the chapter, but Rhiannon couldn’t. She’s spent years dealing with the inner turmoil that comes with someone taking something from you that you can’t get back. It hasn’t been easy.

"For like 15 years after, my mental health was significantly impacted. Panic attacks on a daily basis. I was depressed, I was self-harming. There were suicide attempts." - Rhiannon, Survivor

This week, Rhiannon is standing with the UK Home Secretary and demanding that the companies who build our phones answer for what happened to her. Not because it will undo anything. But because the technology to stop it happening to the next child already exists, sitting inside every smartphone, switched off by default.

“They are creating this playground that invites kids in. They are creating the algorithms to keep them there, the tools that allow perpetrators to find them, target them, abuse them. They have a duty.” - Rhiannon, Survivor

I am so honoured to be trusted with breaking a story like this, grateful to have access to the incredibly brave Rhiannon and the UK Home Secretary, but mostly ready to see Big Tech be held accountable for having this technology and just… not using it?

Angels! Hi!!!!!! I’m currently sitting in the beautiful Tāhuna (Queenstown) writing to you as I look over an icy lake where I can see BOTH sides of a rainbow. Happy Pride.

I’m here to speak at a Women in Business conference (the youngest one on the lineup, hell yeah) and am having a little moment reflecting on how lucky I am that my mahi (work) takes me to so many beautiful places.

Also! A very good ep of our podcast just dropped:

Oh, double also, thanks for all the love on my post yesterday - I was actually really proud of this one:

Ok! News time!

Spencer Pratt sure is acting like one

Ok, so if you’re like me (under 30), then the name Spencer Pratt might ring a bell to you, but you might not know who he is. Let me reintroduce you to Spencer Pratt.

He was the villain of The Hills, an MTV show that ran from 2006 to 2010. He spread rumours about castmates, lied like, all the time, and was voted Greatest Reality TV Villain on Yahoo in 2015. If that’s not a warning, then idk what is.

He is now running for mayor of LA, and as of this morning, he appears to be heading for a November runoff against incumbent Karen Bass.

Let me explain how we got here.

The backstory

Spencer lost his home in the Pacific Palisades fire in January 2025, which were those catastrophic fires that destroyed over 16,000 structures across LA and killed dozens of people. The city’s recovery has been painfully slow, and anger has been building.

So, with this as his launching pad, on the one-year anniversary of the fires, Pratt announced he was running for mayor. His campaign has been built almost entirely on that anger from the fires, and AI-generated campaign ads. He raised $2.7 million in a single month, (nearly ten times what Bass raised in the same period) and his donors include:

• the Winklevoss twins

• the CEO of Universal Music Group

• the CEO of Activision Blizzard, and

• the president of the LA Lakers

Trump also endorsed him, because of course he did.

His policies

• His position on homelessness is that LA doesn’t have a homelessness problem; it has a drug problem, and that homeless people are “choosing” to be on the street. (Experts at USC have explicitly said this is not supported by evidence.)

• He wants to increase LAPD funding and decrease homelessness funding.

• He wants mandatory drug treatment for unhoused people and says he’ll direct police to arrest drug users.

• He has said almost nothing substantive about housing supply, which is the actual problem driving homelessness.

• He wants to incarcerate people who participate in street takeovers.

He doesn’t have a plan to solve… anything. I feel like he just hates homeless people.

A few of his controversies

• He was caught by TMZ staying at the Hotel Bel-Air while running campaign ads showing himself living out of a trailer in front of his burned lot, positioning himself as a man of the people.

• In 2009, Spencer went on Alex Jones’ InfoWars and said 9/11 was “100 percent” an inside job and urged his followers to watch debunked conspiracy film Loose Change.

• He also praised Alex Jones for his “awakening” on topics including the New World Order, fluoride, and microchips.

• He and Heidi spent their entire $10 million fortune before the supposed end of the world in December 2012, including approximately $1 million on crystals. A single crystal cost $65,000.

• His own sister publicly told voters not to vote for him and called it “a vote for stupidity.” (She has since changed her tune, but still.)

The bigger picture

Pratt doesn’t want to fix things; he wants power. And he doesn’t even give a shit about LA - he literally said he will leave the city if he loses!!!!

Also, this isn’t surprising - the rise of reality stars in politics is becoming stupidly common - California gave the world Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. America gave the world Donald Trump.

People would rather be entertained than safe, it seems, which is why Spencer Pratt could be the mayor of Los Angeles by November, and why AI Batman campaign videos get more engagement than policy platforms.

The UK Just Banned Hasan Piker

For those who are out of the loop, Hasan Piker is a Twitch streamer with 3.1 million followers on Twitch alone (6.4 million across all platforms) who spends hours every day breaking down news and politics for young people. He was also the number one name that appeared when I asked commenters to give me a list of left-wing male role models (because we really lack them.)

Anyway, this week, the UK Home Office cancelled both his and his uncle Cenk Uygur’s travel permit, just hours before they were due to speak at SXSW London. Their official reason was that their presence “may not be conducive to the public good.”

Both Piker and his uncle have called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide (which is also the conclusion of an independent UN inquiry and, the truth, soooo.) Piker has said things that are more complicated than that, but when you basically stream your whole life, that’s going to happen.

Here’s what I will say. I understand that the UK was worried about their visit fuelling antisemitism, but I don’t agree with this ban. Banning someone from speaking doesn’t make their ideas disappear - it makes them a martyr and hands them a story about censorship that’s more powerful than anything they would have said on stage. The Oxford Union (where Hasan was also going to speak) got it right: “free speech does not require a visa.” They went ahead via livestream.

• Phoebe Bridgers to Play Surprise Madison Square Garden Show (For $1)

• Charli XCX announces new album, ‘Music, Fashion, Film’ and the album cover goes so hard

  

• The Loneliness Influencers: Inside the luxurious tedium of “I have no friends” TikTok (I love these videos so much)

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My darlings!!! It’s been a hot second since we’ve done a tradish edish of the daily newsy, and that's because I have been on a NO BOYS ALLOWED trip to Peru. I can’t wait to tell you all about it (very soon), but for now, I have some more pressing shit to talk about.

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A nuanced explainer on the Pattie Gonia vs Patagonia sitch

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Angels! This is an update from Rubes, who you probably remember as 1/3 of the original SYSCA team!!!!!! And if you don’t remember her, you’re in for a real treat 𓆩♡𓆪 - Luce x

Eat All The Figs

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve put my writing boots on. Being vulnerable on the internet? No thank you! I prefer to cherrypick life’s hottest moments for my Instagram Story. Preferably when my arms don’t look too fat, when it appears like I have a ton of friends, and there’s enough of a candid blur that gives the illusion that I am still living in the moment (even better if it’s a repost from a friend’s story so I can show off without looking like a narcissist).

But, catch me on a night out, I’ll tell a stranger my life story. So maybe I need a drink in hand for this. Or a bottle.

Hi to the SYSCAhood! Some of you might remember me. For the newbies, welcome! Hope you are having the best time! Let me introduce myself.

I’m Ruby, one third of the trio who started Shit You Should Care About. Luce and Liv are my childhood besties. Liv, I met in kindergarten, but after over a decade of attending different schools, we reconnected when she became my neighbour at age 15 (I still pop over for wines or cups of tea with her parents when she isn’t home). And Luce, after we had a short stint of not liking each other at age 11, we were put in the same classroom at age 12 and somehow teachers weren’t smart enough to separate us until we graduated. From there, we chose to stick together ever since.

But we are not here for a history lesson.

Let’s rewind to 2024. There was a life in another city that is no longer mine. A cushy job, weekends spent celebrating friend’s engagements or pregnancies, living with the person I thought was my forever. It’s a tale as old as time. That life crumbled, but not around me, I was the one who took the bat to the foundations and smashed it down.

Some were swift, purposeful swings. Quitting the job, booking the plane ticket. Some, however, were hits I didn’t even realise I’d been making. I had slowly created cracks that had grown bigger and bigger until with one final swing, we hit a home run. “I don’t see a future with you” was all I heard. (Don’t know why I’m still using the bat metaphor lol).

I moved back in with my parents at 27, and damn if that wasn’t a reality check. I’d been manically tearing down everything in my life that I hadn’t really thought about what it would look like once I stopped.

When Luce asked me to write this piece, I spent a lot of time thinking about the fig tree metaphor. You know the one, by Sylvia Plath. To put it in my own words (and likely do it a great disservice), it describes all the different people you could be are like fat juicy figs, each sitting at the end of a branch. By selecting one particular fig, all the other figs are no longer within reach, and the longer you sit there trying to decide which fig to select, they start to rot and die.

That’s how I felt sitting in Blenheim, like I was watching all of the figs, all of the life paths I could take, all the people I could be, shrivel up and fall to the ground.

I felt I was too late in my career. I had bopped about from role to role and while most of my friends had climbed the corporate ladder, I still felt woefully unprepared.

Or love, marriage, kids. The life I had pictured for myself at some point in the future now felt like a cruel tease. Oh, you thought somebody wanted that with you? As if sweetie.

It felt like my fig tree that once bloomed so abundantly was withering away. I felt like I had missed my opportunity to pick the fruit, or worse, I no longer had the energy to reach for it even if I could.

I Know Where You Live

Shit You Should Care About had millions of followers before anyone really knew who was behind it, and that was on purpose.

When Rubes, Liv and I sat in the little coffee shop beneath my flat, we asked ourselves one thing: do people need to know anything about us? We decided that no, they didn’t. We didn’t know who ran the BBC, and this didn’t make us think any differently about it, so we would do the same thing with SYSCA! People could get to know us through our interests, our humour, our tone of voice, but that was it.

We knew what it meant to be a young woman who was publicly findable. We knew the risks (and also the embarrassment of a digital footprint like Timothée Chalamet’s.) So we controlled what was out there, and I thank myself for this every day, espesh since I’m now a bit more public!

But most people don’t have a reason to be so careful about what might be out there about them.

Most people are just living their lives, signing up for things, trusting that their information is theirs and that it’s safe, when actually, there are entire companies quietly collecting it, packaging it up, and selling it to whoever would pay.

These companies are called data brokers, and there are a LOT of them. Their entire business model is based on knowing your home address, your phone number, your estimated income, your health conditions, your family members’ names, and making all of that available to strangers. An ex. A scammer. An advertiser. Someone who wishes you harm. And this is completely legal.

I knew this world existed, and spent five years making sure I was invisible to it. But the average person hasn’t had to think about any of this, which means their information is out there in ways they’ve never had to consider.

That’s where Incogni comes in. It does, automatically and continuously, what I spent years learning to do manually. It contacts every data broker on your behalf, demands your information gets removed, and keeps doing it when they add it back. Which they do!!!! Incogni is independently verified by Deloitte too, which means it actually works, which in this industry is genuinely not a given.

And if something slips through, if your data is sitting somewhere Incogni doesn’t automatically cover, you can submit the specific link yourself and their team will go and get it removed. Because these companies are sneaky, but the people fighting them know that.

Privacy has always been something only people with money, lawyers, or a very specific reason to pay attention got to actually have, but everyone has a right to it. Incogni gives us that right!!!

✧ Use code SYSCA or visit incogni.com/SYSCA for 60% off an annual plan ✧

But let’s fast forward through the next 12 months, shall we. I’m not interested in dragging down this whole piece in self-pitying bullshit. Like girl, you were 27, not pushing retirement.

To sum it up, I got real low for a moment there, thinking I’d chosen a fig that had now rotted in my hands, and the others left on the tree had also died. I didn’t know where that left me. As Luce and our other bestie Flo say, I was feeling very “wompy”.

So, I doubled my anxiety meds, had a euro summer with my besties, and booked tickets to move to New York. And I realised that the fig tree metaphor, while beautiful, was dated.

Plath wasn’t wrong, she was simply speaking from the confines of the 1950s. Women are no longer shackled to one singular identity. This isn’t a fresh take, I get that. More than anything I’m reiterating it to myself. My female friends that are getting engaged and having babies, they aren’t saying goodbye to travel and nights out. Same goes if they choose their career, the babies thing can still happen. It all may look different and it will be really fucking hard, but it is still possible.

We don’t have to pick one path any more, or if we do, then there’s nothing to say that if we don’t like it, or it all turns to shit, you can’t pick another from the tree.

As I’m writing this, I am here sitting on my rooftop in the East Village. Now 28. I’m restarting in a new city, new career, new friends. The people I am surrounded by were strangers only two months ago, but this place now feels like home. It’s impossible not to get caught up in the endless possibility that New York has to offer. Everyone is hustling, but I’ve never felt more generosity to be brought into the fold. 12 months ago I didn’t think this was possible. I thought I had missed this moment.

A new season has bloomed, and now, when I look at all the branches snaking out in front of me, there on the end are plump, purple figs. Best believe I’m not stopping at one.

Book the tickets to New York with no job and no friends, talk to people on the train, take the job that takes you down a different path, hold the cute guy’s eye contact on the street, go on the date, say yes to writing a piece in your best friend’s insanely successful newsletter.

Gorge yourself to the point where you have a tummy ache because you are so full of life and love and joy and laughter. Eat all the damn figs.

Rubes xx

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much we talk about Trump, despite how much we hate him. He’s the king of flooding the zone, aka doing so many outrageous things, so quickly, so constantly, that nobody can keep up and it makes everything batshit thing he does seem… less batshit. Today’s scandal gets buried under tomorrow’s catastrophe. The thing that would have been the biggest news story of any other presidency gets a 48-hour news cycle and then disappears because something more unhinged just happened.

Trump posts on Truth Social 19 times a day on average, and he signs executive orders faster than journalists can read them. He fires people, threatens people, ignores courts, starts fights with the Pope, and starts wars.

The strategy is that somewhere in this chaos, the historically shit stuff just slides past us.

So, to combat how much we talk about Trump, I’m going to start a whole series talking about him.... more??? It’s called The Worst Things Trump Has Ever Done For [Insert Category Here.]

Each instalment covers one category, and I’m going to attempt to go through every significant, documented, verified terrible thing he has done to democracy, to women, to immigrants, to the environment, to civil rights, to the rule of law, and put it all in one place.

Starting with democracy. Because if this one goes, well, everything else goes with it.

He incited a mob to storm the Capitol and then pardoned every single one of them for it

Probably his most famous Bad Thing - on January 6, 2021, Trump's supporters stormed the US Capitol while Congress was certifying the election he lost. More than 2,000 people entered the building, smashing windows, ransacking offices, defecating in public spaces, and actively searching for members of Congress. Over 140 police officers were injured, five people died in connection with the attack, and four police officers took their own lives in the months that followed.

Then, on his very first day back in office, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack, saying "these are the hostages" as he signed the order in the Oval Office. The order explicitly granted clemency to nine members of the Oath Keepers and five members of the Proud Boys, two well-known violent extremist groups.

Btw, Trump was impeached for this incitement of insurrection.

He deployed National Guard troops to US cities against governors' explicit wishes, and threatened to send in the military against protesters

In 2025, Trump forcibly federalised and deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, over the explicit objections of the states' governors. When courts blocked him, he threatened to go further by invoking the Insurrection Act, a rarely used law that would allow him to deploy the actual military inside the US to carry out law enforcement functions like arrests and searches.

The context for the Minnesota threat in particular is important - you’ll all remember when an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, as she attempted to drive away from federal agents in Minneapolis, sparking protests across the state. The community was protesting because a US citizen had been shot in her car by federal agents. Trump's response was to threaten to send in the military.

He literally called for sitting members of Congress to be hanged

In November 2025, six Democratic lawmakers (most of them military veterans and former intelligence officials) posted a video telling military members to refuse any orders that violate the Constitution. That’s not radical, that’s literally what military members swear an oath to do ◡̈

Trump lost his mind shit over it.

He posted on Truth Social that the lawmakers were “traitors” who “should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” then posted that their behaviour was “punishable by DEATH.”

Then, he reshared another user’s post that said “Hang them George Washington would.” The White House defended all of it, and didn’t walk any of it back. When asked about it directly, Trump said “I’m not threatening them, but I think they’re in serious trouble,” explaining that he was referencing historical punishments for sedition.

To be like extremely clear, these were veterans, aka people who served their country and the President of the United States publicly called for them to be hanged for asking the military to follow the Constitution. And the White House said that was fine. Awesome ◡̈

He ignored court orders, on purpose, and told his staff not to leave a paper trail

Quick civics reminder: in a democracy, when a court tells the government it can't do something, the government has to stop doing that thing. What it can’t do is just ignore the order entirely. Unless you’re Trump ◡̈

A Washington Post analysis of 160 lawsuits found that the Trump White House defied one in every three judicial rulings made against it, suggesting what the paper called "widespread noncompliance with America's legal system."

The most obvious example: in March 2025, a judge ordered Trump to halt deportation flights carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members while the legality was being decided. The planes were already in the air when the order came through, and they landed in a Salvadoran mega-prison anyway.

ALSO, a whistleblower from inside the Justice Department alleged that deportation flights were ordered to depart "no matter what," that officials were told to "stop asking questions" when they raised legal concerns, and that staff were advised to communicate by phone only where possible, to avoid leaving a paper trail.

The paper trail bit is the really cooked part coz it means they knew they were breaking the law, but they just decided to do it anyway and cover their tracks…

He tried to end birthright citizenship, which has been in the Constitution since 1868

Birthright citizenship means that if you are born on American soil, you are an American citizen. It’s been enshrined in the 14th Amendment since 1868, and it exists specifically so the government can never create a permanent underclass of people born here but denied rights, because the US had just come out of a civil war about exactly that.

On day one of his second term, Trump signed an executive order trying to end it. The order targeted children of undocumented immigrants and children born to parents on temporary legal visas, affecting an estimated 255,000 babies per year. Every single court that has considered the order has blocked it as unconstitutional. Not one judge, anywhere, has agreed with the administration’s arguments.

He tried to take over elections, sued half the country for voter data, and threatened election officials with criminal charges

A quick reminder, elections in the US are run by states, not the federal government. That’s intentional, because it makes them harder to interfere with from the top. Trump has spent his second term trying to change that ◡̈

In March 2025, he signed an executive order claiming the right to unilaterally rewrite how federal elections are run, overriding powers that legally belong to Congress and the states. A federal court permanently blocked key parts of it, ruling that the president simply doesn’t have that authority. So in March 2026, he tried again with a new order that would direct the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots to anyone the federal government hadn’t pre-approved, while threatening election officials with criminal charges if they didn’t comply and withholding federal funding from states that pushed back.

And the data collection of it all?

The DOJ also spent 2025 demanding sensitive personal voter data, including partial Social Security numbers and driver's licence information, from almost every state in the country, and when states said no, it sued more than half of them. When states asked what the data would actually be used for, internal emails show DOJ officials were told to respond only with "We will use the data in a manner consistent with Federal law" and say nothing else.

So: trying to control who can vote by mail, threatening the people who run elections, and secretly collecting the personal data of every voter in the country while refusing to explain why??? That’s not very democratic imo.

He continues to suggest he should be allowed a third term, which is unconstitutional

The 22nd Amendment which was ratified in 1951 and says, very simply, that no person can be elected president more than twice. It was introduced specifically because of FDR serving four terms, and the concern that one person staying in power that long is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. This, my friend, is one of the most basic rules of American democratic governance.

Trump has spent the better part of his second term implying he'd like to ignore it. He told NBC's Kristen Welker in late March that he was "not joking" about a third term, and that there are "methods by which you could do it." He added: "A lot of people want me to do it." He stocked red "Trump 2028" hats on a bookcase of merch just outside the Oval Office, and when Democratic leaders visited for government shutdown talks, the hats showed up on the president's desk.

Trump eventually conceded, on Air Force One, that the 22nd Amendment makes it "pretty clear I'm not allowed to run." Speaker Mike Johnson later said the whole thing had been a deliberate effort to "troll the Democrats."

He killed Voice of America, the broadcaster that has countered authoritarian propaganda since World War II

Voice of America has existed since 1942, when it was created specifically to broadcast free, independent news into countries where governments controlled what people could hear (it was a direct response to Nazi propaganda.) For over 80 years it has operated on the principle that people living under authoritarian regimes deserve access to real information, and it broadcasts in 49 languages to a weekly audience of over 360 million people.

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order declaring that the agency overseeing Voice of America should be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” and its entire staff of 1,300 people was immediately placed on administrative leave and then let go. The order also terminated grants to Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe, two of the US government’s key tools for countering Chinese and Russian propaganda.

He defunded NPR and PBS and shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

In May 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to terminate all federal funding for NPR and PBS, claiming the networks "spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as news." The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a private nonprofit specifically designed to be independent of government interference, and its CEO pointed this out immediately, saying the president simply didn't have the authority to do this. Trump did it anyway ◡̈

A wee reminder - public broadcasting in America has always served rural communities, small towns, and people who can't afford cable news subscriptions. Killing it wasn't about saving money, it was about eliminating a news source he couldn't control.

He used executive orders to punish law firms that represented his enemies

One of the most quietly alarming things Trump has done is go after the legal profession itself. In a functioning democracy, everyone, including the government’s political opponents, has the right to legal representation. Trump decided that law firms that had ever represented people or causes he didn’t like should be punished for it (????)

Starting in February 2025, Trump began suspending security clearances and terminating federal contracts for law firms he accused of “weaponizing the justice system.” The first firm targeted was Covington & Burling, because it had provided pro bono assistance to special counsel Jack Smith, who had brought criminal charges against Trump. Trump then signed an order against Perkins Coie, barring its lawyers from entering federal buildings entirely and cutting off all federal agency and contractor work with the firm, before going on Fox News to confirm: “We have a lot of law firms that we’re going to be going after.”

Legal experts called it unprecedented. "I've never seen an administration target firms for their case selection, the clients they select," said one civil rights attorney. "It really does set a very dangerous precedent of political interference in the legal profession."

The intended effect was exactly what happened: law firms began pulling back from pro bono work on causes that conflicted with the administration, because the financial risk of being targeted was too great. If people challenging the government can't find lawyers willing to represent them, the government wins by default.

I’m sure upon reading this, a lot of you have other examples of the worst things Trump has done for democracy - please comment them below! There is no way that one single Luce could find them all.

The next instalment is immigration. I’m so sorry in advance.

Luce x

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much we talk about Trump, despite how much we hate him. He’s the king of flooding the zone, aka doing so many outrageous things, so quickly, so constantly, that nobody can keep up and it makes everything batshit thing he does seem… less batshit. Today’s scandal gets buried under tomorrow’s catastrophe. The…

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The University of One Direction

Everything I learnt about being a person online, I learnt at the University of One Direction. I enrolled in 2010 and graduated in 2014, thanks to the five hot tutors who encouraged me to show up to class. The band were coming up at the same time social media was exploding, and they were encouraged to be everywhere, so I, the student, needed to learn how to be everywhere too.

YouTube 101

In YouTube 101, I was introduced to ‘vlog’-style content by way of the chaotic video diaries the band uploaded weekly alongside their X Factor performances. My assignment was to log onto YouTube, admire, synthesise, download and then chop up the best bits of these videos to use in my other classes.

Editing 101

My favourite class, Editing 101, was held on Wattpad, where I learnt what self-published work looked like, but, more importantly, that if I wanted to write something, I could just go for it. The exams for this class entailed reading the most terribly written fanfiction known to fankind, and editing the grammar as I went.

Twitter 101 & Tumblr 101

In Twitter 101, I learnt what it took to make the clips go viral, as well as the function of a hashtag and how to make one trend, and in Tumblr 101, I turned those clips into GIFsets.

Photoshop 101

In Photoshop 101, I learnt how to make a ‘manip’ (a manipulated photo where you’d insert a picture of yourself next to your favourite band member), and in Media Literacy 101, I was tested on how well I could spot the ‘real’ photos from the ‘manips.’

Streaming 101

Live Streaming 101 was held on Twitcam, where I’d stay up until some ungodly hour to join 7,000 other fans watching a combination of bandmates sit in their lounge doing mundane teenage boy things. Here, I mastered techniques like transcribing, screengrabbing and annotating, but most importantly, I learnt how to be the first person to upload an ‘update’ or an ‘iconic’ moment to the internet. In a fandom, timing and speed were everything.

Community Management 101

Every time the boys were up for an award, I had bonus Community Management classes to figure out what strategy would rally people together and get the votes we needed. Timetabling across time zones, writing and sharing petitions, raising awareness for a cause we believed in – it was all there.

Graduating with honours (with a major in embarrassment and a minor in shame)

I graduated top of my class because although the study was self-directed, it was the most passionate I’d ever been about a subject. I’d e

arned my degree in cross-platform crushing, but out in the real world, I may as well have majored in embarrassment and minored in shame. I’d been doing all of this in secret, for the same pride-protecting reason you keep your childhood crush close to your chest, and there was no way I was confident enough to put the years of experience I had in editing, community management, photoshopping, social media – any of it – to use in the ‘real’ world. I had treated crushing as a full-time job, and I was quickly realising it would never become one.

Along comes Shit You Should Care About

Starting SYSCA was like meeting up with my old friend, the internet. As soon as I started searching, synthesizing, and posting, I felt old muscles begin to re-engage, and realized they were from my years of hard crushing. There were tangible things I could do for SYSCA, like building a website or writing for the internet, but more important were my intangible skills.

Like being able to tell which clip from a video would go viral, which quote would work best as a tweet, where the people we wanted to engage with were hanging out online, or how to get a group of people to care about a common idea. SYSCA was new, but my love for building community online wasn’t. From the beginning, our new platform paid homage to our fandom roots by blending the news with our latest crushes (notably, Harry Styles).

You’ll make it to these places because you were obsessed with the journey. Just make sure you put it all on your résumé.

Ten years after I’d graduated from the University of One Direction, Harry Styles’ sister Gemma DM’d me and asked me to come on her podcast. I spent an appropriate amount of time freaking out over what 15-year-old Lucy would have thought (probably something cringe and of its time, like “Jesus take the wheel!”) before considering what she would have liked to hear. She would’ve wanted to know that spending her teenage years crushing on a boyband wouldn’t turn out to be a waste of time and that she learned more practical skills during those years online than she did at university.

As Gemma and I were chatting, I felt a type of catharsis wash over me. None of this has ever been about having to make your crushes productive by building a business out of them or hoping that one day you’d get on a podcast with the sister of your decade-long fixation. It’s about letting ourselves love and obsess deeply and seeing where we get to when we don’t care what people think.

Plan and organize your way to the front row of a concert and be loud about it. Relish the hours you spend at the coffee shop working on a project that no one has forced you to create. Walk through the doors of HBO because they need someone with fan editing skills to market their upcoming shows. You’ll make it to these places because you were obsessed with the journey. Just make sure you put it all on your résumé.

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

This edish of culture vulture was written by SYSCA bestie Sacha Judd. If you want to read more of her musings on fandom and the internet, subscribe to her newsletter here.

Fans are more than our wallets ♡

Ever since I started crossing the streams between my fandom life and my professional life, I’ve been horrified to see more and more ice cold takes about the “economics of fandom”. If you spend more than five minutes on LinkedIn (not something I recommend), you’ll start to see people arguing about how “under-monetised” fandom is. And it will usually lead with some unhinged numbers about what Swifties spent on hotels and friendship bracelets and Eras Tour tickets, or what the anime fandom is worth annually, or what the Beyhive spends compared to a casual. The numbers are always posted as some kind of brand new revelation — look at all this latent value, look at this untapped reserve of passion that can be converted into money. Claude-generated slop pieces aimed at marketers and investors, anyone who needs to justify attention to a thing they previously dismissed as niche or girly or weird.

I think I find it exhausting because my experience of fandom joy is only rarely associated with spending. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve bled myself dry for stubhub Hamilton tickets and Harry Styles at Radio City and flights to another country to see the Eras Tour. But when I think of fan culture it’s the gift economy of fanfic and AO3’s volunteer tag wranglers. It’s the fan projects at concerts and swapping homemade bracelets with a little girl on a plane.

It’s sitting up late with my besties to wait for an album or single to drop, or to watch an interview on a late night show. It’s sharing gifs lovingly made by people more talented than me. It’s these Harry earrings someone made for Luce.

So much of that seems to be getting lost at the moment. This month it’s stories about “blue dot fever” as artists like the Pussycat Dolls, ZAYN, and Meghan Trainor cancel shows (the name comes from the blue dots of unsold seats on Ticketmaster). There’s lots of theorising and handwringing about whether it’s because prices are too high, or venues are too big or whatever. I’ve written a bunch already about tickets, and how much it sucks to be priced out, and what some stars like Olivia Dean and Ed Sheeran have tried to do about it. But I also think fans are just tired.

It’s not just in music. I’ve been watching the various mini-scandals around the FIFA World Cup. This includes ticket prices starting at US$140 to US$11,000 (yes, you read that right). And for fans who did shell out, when their seats are allocated, they find that they’re pretty crappy regardless of what they paid.

For Kpop stans, there’s an expectation that you’re paying regularly through subscription platforms like Weverse and Bubble. Even articles like this, bragging about the amount fans will spend, notes the risk of “wallet fatigue”. “A fan supporting a typical eight- or nine-member group entirely through Bubble could pay $30 or more per month. Furthermore, that figure does not include Weverse memberships, concert tickets, or merchandise. Some superfans are now spending several hundred dollars per month across multiple platforms. As a result, churn pressure may eventually catch up with the industry’s growth trajectory.” Yeah, no kidding.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot at the moment because, full disclosure, I’m building a new music business called Lume, which Luce and I talked about on the pod this month. It’s all about getting back to buying, owning and listening to albums again, in a rich digital bundle with behind the scenes content, alternate versions, photos, voice notes – whatever an artist chooses to share. As we’ve been working on this I’ve kept thinking about what’s important to me as a fan. If I’m going to spend money on something, it needs to be affordable. It needs to be mine to keep (I’m so tired of renting content). And I want to know that the maximum amount of the money I’m spending is going to the artist I love. I’m so aware of how hard it is for most musicians to make a living. And the chasm between those artists and the fans who are keen to support them is so wide. With Lume we want to try and change that.

It’s not launched yet, but it’s coming in June – and while we have global ambitions, we wanted to start with artists and fans in our own backyard, so if you love music from Aotearoa there will be something there for you.

As fans, we know when something feels gross and like we’re being taken advantage of. And our response to that is always to create more things that are free and more joy and more support for one another. Gifting networks in fandoms where people pass on extra copies of albums to other fans, or Harries opening their NYC apartments to others coming for the tour. The tens of thousands of fans who Taylorgated for the Eras Tour. The amount you can spend has never been a barometer of whether you’re a real fan.

When you start from what fans actually want rather than what you can extract from them, you arrive at an entirely different place. As serious music fans we want depth and proximity to the creative process — the things that streaming flattened out. We want to know more about our faves, and the work they put into making their art, and the journey they went on. The world that they built for us.

Luce and I went to see Audrey Hobert this month, and she was so good. It was an all-ages gig and the under-18s were upstairs, and at one point Audrey called them out and acknowledged how great it was that they were there. I looked up at these young fans, some of whom were probably at their first concert, dancing and shout-singing along and having the best time. None of them were there because a LinkedIn deck identified them as an undermonetised segment. They were there because the music was amazing and they needed to be near it. We all deserve more of these moments in our lives right now.

here to introduce you to our book pick for June which is the highly anticipated/booktok viral/everyone can’t stop talking about it Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Luce and I have been DYING to read this and have had to stay away from spoilers since it released in early April!

Let me introduce you to Yesteryear…

Read more

Luce note: This is a Liv edish!!!! The OG SYSCAhood knows what that means, and new SYSCAhood members, you’re in for a treat x

Hello dear readers, wow - it’s been a while. Lucy thought it would be fun for both Ruby and I to have a guest appearance in the newsy, as apparently people (I’m assuming 1-2) have been asking about us? Incredibly flattering! For those of you who have no fucking clue who I am (and I am sure there are many), I am one of Shit You Should Care About’s co-founders, alongside Luce, and our other best friend, Ruby. We went to high school together, uni together and had the privilege of building SYSCA’s foundation together, up until I left at the start of 2023.

So where the hell am I now?

Three years on and I’m sitting in an East London bedroom listening to Pat Benatar’s tiny desk concert (unique choice, I’m aware), with a cup of tea and a block of Whittaker’s chocolate. A lot has happened in the past 3 years (did Lucy tell you I’m now a rockstar??), so I’ll take you back to why the fuck I would ever leave a dream job, like the one I had at SYSCA.

SYSCA was incredible, formative, and I feel so lucky & proud to have been a part of it. However, sometime in 2022, I realised I was watching Luce dedicate herself to this platform in a way that I was in awe of, but could never match. She was up at 5am every morning, managing to create an ownable space in an impossible, ever-changing industry. It just was not like that for me. Don’t get me wrong, I adored so much about working at SYSCA (I got to make shit with my best friends), but instead of feeling certain and capable, I felt under-qualified and confused. I had no clue where I wanted to be, let alone how I was going to get there. So a little after my 25th birthday, I left SYSCA, left NZ and moved to London by myself, hoping I would somehow figure it all out.

I got on a plane to Norway and solo-travelled Europe for two months, partly in a cliched attempt to “find myself”, but mostly because it sounded fun. Which it was, except for a tiny blip halfway through when my then-boyfriend (who was still in New Zealand) broke up with me over a video call. I was sitting on the ground of Copenhagen train station, trying to find enough reception to hear that the relationship was over (“Sorry, could you say that again?? I didn’t quite catch you”).

Then came London

Living in London started off HARD, got easier, then MUCH harder and now (thankfully) easier again. It’s been a montage of getting pissed at the pub, being rejected by jobs I didn’t want, getting on the wrong train, being completely broke, then earning some money and spending it on cheap flights to Iceland or over-priced festival tickets. There’s been another break-up, another job, an eviction (now that’s a story), and 3 different flats, all intertwined with coffee (or wine) catch-ups about failed hinge dates and work crushes.

Enter: my rockstar era

Alongside this chaos, I’ve gone and started a band!!! It’s called Not My Wife, and not to be overly sentimental, but forming this band has been the backbone of my London experience. Although we’ve been playing together for about 2 years now, we’ve only JUST started releasing music, which I can assure you is harder and more expensive than it looks, but I am honestly really proud of the two songs we’ve put out so far (our second single came out yesterday if you care to take a listen).

What started as a drink with a friend of a friend along the Thames turned into 5 of us writing music and gigging all around London (we’re headlining XOYO next Friday if any Londoners are keen for a dance), allowing me to live out my Stevie Nicks dream. We got invited to record an EP in the south of France, have played sold-out shows to our small but incredibly loyal audience, and have learned a little about the wild west that is the music industry (filled with bot marketing campaigns and a void of bizarre TikTok content). It’s a strange world where inside contacts and money are basically prerequisites to success (we are limited in both), but the journey so far has been fun and fulfilling in a whole new way.

Thank you to Luce for letting me debrief you all on my life post SYSCA. It feels so special to watch you as a one-woman media phenomenon do your thing in a way that no one else can. Ruby is now living in New York, and GOD it looks fun. I’m sure you’ll get her update soon on what it’s like to be 2026’s Carrie Bradshaw.

Thank you for having me back. Love you all, Liv xx

[Luce note: this has been SO cute and nostalgic for me, HANDS UP IF YOU MISSED LIV???????

PS go stream/ follow/ obsess over her band, Not My Wife!!!!]

Angels! This was originally a paywalled essay, but now that we’re nearing this year’s halfway point, I figured we could all use a little nudge on loving ourselves again!

If you want access to essays like this as they drop, become a paid subscriber!

Subscribe now

How to love yourself again

No one ever asks me to hang out on New Year’s Eve.

I don’t have shitty friends, and this isn’t because I despise group trips; they just know that I always have a plan. The same one I’ve had for about the past 10 years.

This annual routine is what I do to love myself again. It preps me for the year ahead, not in an ambitious ‘let’s smash those goals’ kind of way, but in a ‘let’s clean this brain out’ kinda way.

It’s this:

I drive eight hours to The Lake on my own. Always on my own.

On the way down, I am always antsy and I am always bored.

I am listening to a podcast on 1.75x speed and speeding and counting down the hours til I reach the campsite.

I’ve been coming here since I was a child and know every fruit stand and bend in the road. On the way down, I don’t notice anything new.

I arrive at The Lake.

There have been years when I’ve come to The Lake and wanted to fall in love. Wanted a cellphone. Wanted to be skinnier. Wanted reception. Wanted to be a lawyer. Wanted to disappear. Wanted to start a business. Wanted a break.

Now I just want to be here.

Dad has set everything up. Jimmy used to help with this, but Jimmy now only lives here in the air and the water and the sunrise and the stars. I think he’s still helping out though (notice how it wasn’t raining when you wanted to put the tent up, Dad?)

In a perfect world, I have at least a week here each year. That’s the case this year.

I exchange all the stagnant oxygen in my body with the good stuff.

I don’t forget to bring anything because I don’t need anything.

I eat bacon and egg sandwiches for breakfast every day.

I drink instant coffee from the camp stove, and remember how much I prefer the piercing whistle of the kettle to the barista yelling my name over the rush of suits and Lululemons.

I shower and bathe in The Lake with some sort of 5-in-1 concoction. I wonder what those five things are without having to know. I don’t need any answers right now.

I let my hair get greasy, and no one mentions a slick back.

No one wears shoes.

No one has botox.

No one is talking about the news.

I have not looked in a mirror in a week.

I am seeing myself as we were supposed to, in the reflection of The Lake, and only when it’s still enough to catch a glimpse of myself in. No wrinkles, just ripples. She’s smiling back at me.

I want to keep being beautiful in the way a human is beautiful and not in the way an algorithm recognises as beautiful.

No one here is professionally beautiful and everyone is happy.

I got sick of all the men in my life knowing how to invest, so I learnt how ♡ .𖥔 ₊

And I filmed the whole thing so you can learn too!!!

Nothing grinds my gears more than women being left out of things. For so long, finance has felt like a boys’ game - something my brother and Dad understood, and a career that all the worst dudes from uni wanted to go into. BUT instead of letting my envy fester, or letting my lack of knowledge act as an excuse for not being rich (yet), I decided to just learn. And not only did I realise that it’s not as hard as it looks to get on top of your money or learn to invest, it’s also something I really want to share with my girlies!!

So, Soph & Vic from (with help from BNZ) took me under their wing to film a fun practical course where you get to sort your finances out ALONGSIDE ME.

It’s 7 short lessons, built for beginners, using words we ALL understand, and I promise you are going to feel so much better for it - I can vouch for this because I legit did it.

So what’s stopping you? IOU (The Practical Lessons) are here!!!!

TAKE THE COURSE

I am sharing a block of toilets that are cleaned by someone called ‘Mouse’ who leaves us sweet little passive-aggressive notes, reminding us not to drink the water from the tap, or flush anything that isn’t toilet paper.

I let myself be bored and my brain adapts to a slowness I only know once a year.

I don’t worry about when it will speed up again.

I don’t worry about anything, actually.

I let my edges roughen up again.

I am not thinking about my chin or my legs or my arms.

I sunbathe without sucking in my tummy.

I am thinking about the afternoon Easterly and whether or not I should shave my legs.

I am not scared of capsizing the kayak or opening my eyes underwater.

I read a classic and then a new release, and I love both because I contain multitudes.

I only notice that I’ve grown because none of the life jackets fit over my boobs anymore. Funny how my brothers and I used to be the same size.

I am desensitised to road kill and cellulite.

I am following all my cues.

I eat when I’m hungry, and only with the food that I carefully selected a week ago.

I sleep when the stars come out, or in the afternoons.

I get up to pee and look at the stars. Hi Jimmy.

I wake up with the morning light or the birds or when my tent gets too stuffy.

I take the scenic route home, listening to a playlist called ‘Past Lives’ which holds every song I’ve ever remembered loving, in all my 28 years.

I notice so many things that I missed on the way here.

I am fulfilled and not productive.

I am lighter and have not lost any weight.

I am happy.

I am in love with myself, again.

It’s not an accident, it’s an industry - the clipping industry, to be exact ◡̈

What is clipping?

Clipping is basically just chopping up long videos into the most interesting, funny, or unhinged thirty to sixty seconds and posting those bits as their own clip. You take a three-hour podcast or a gaming stream, or even a music video and pull out the moment everyone's going to talk about, whether that's a punchline, a controversial take, or the best lyrics, and you post it like it's its own piece of content.

Then, those clips get blasted across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, and:

• The clips rack up views

• The original creator gets exposure

• The clippers get paid

The people doing this don’t need to be fans, and they don’t even need to watch the full original video.

They also don’t need to add anything interesting, creative or thoughtful to it. They just need to find the most outrageous, shocking, or emotionally provocative ten seconds and post it with a caption like “Joe Rogan said WHAT 😨.”

How do ‘clippers’ get paid?

There are entire platforms built specifically to find and pay clippers. The most popular one is called clipping.net, and Mr Beast has also just launched his own platform for this, called Vyro.

How it works is that brands and creators post campaigns, clippers (usually young people wanting some extra cash) sign up, and they get paid based on how many views their clip gets. It helps if clippers have built up their following on the different social media platforms.

The Dan Bongino Show, for example, ran a 31-day clipping campaign when his podcast returned earlier this year. Clippers were paid $150 for every 100,000 views, across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, with a total campaign budget of $2,000, The only requirement is to include #danbongino in the caption.

Perplexity ran a similar campaign around Joe Rogan’s show, paying $1.20 per thousand views, requiring the tags #PoweredByPerplexity and #sponsored. When The Verge asked Perplexity about it, the company said it had “no knowledge” of the clipping platform being used. When asked to confirm they hadn’t authorised the campaign, they stopped replying…

The founder of Clipping.net told The Verge: “It’s just a necessary marketing play that if you’re not doing, you’re behind. Clipping lets you abuse the algorithms of other platforms to grow your product exponentially.” He says 62,000 clippers use his platform, earning $3,000 a month on average.

Wanna learn how to budget/ plan/ invest/ not freak out about money with me? ♡ .𖥔 ₊˚

God I wish I did this when I was 20, but even better, I did it when I’m 28. I sat down, for only TWO HOURS TOTAL and learnt how to budget, how to invest, and how to not let money freak me out - and I did it for you!!!!! You can do it with me!!

Soph & Vic from (with help from BNZ) took me under their wing to film a fun IOU (The Practical Lessons) where you get to sort your finances out ALONGSIDE ME.

It’s 7 short lessons, built for beginners, using words we ALL understand, and I promise you are going to feel so much better for it - I can vouch for this because I legit did it.

So, if you’ve been meaning to sort your money out, no matter how old or young you are, this is the best way to do it.

TAKE THE COURSE

Who’s using clippers?

A LOOOOOT of people.

• MrBeast, who employs over 1,000 clippers and uses Vyro for his Beast Land campaigns, pays $50 for every 100,000 views

• Jake Paul

• Clipping.net features photos of Ed Sheeran, Emma Chamberlain, Charli XCX, Jay Shetty, and many more:

Is clip farming bad? Or is this just 2026’s version of marketing?

I mean, it doesn’t feel great, but I think this is just a part of what marketing looks like in 2026. Since social media has become the main avenue for content distribution, ‘gaming’ or 'playing’ the algorithm is par for the course, and this is the next iteration of that.

The ‘bad’ part is that because clips are how most people access information and culture now, people are far less likely to watch long-form podcasts/ streams/ videos - the original content just exists to generate the clip.

Clips are not just advertisements for the longer-form product anymore; the clips are the product - the full version is just the prop.

This means content with shape and plot and nuance is traded for content with nothing but a string of moments - usually fake, exaggerated, or enraging ones.

So no, I don’t think we need to panic about clipping, but I do think it’s helpful to know it exists, so that we can ask ourselves who’s paying for it, and whether we’re watching something because it’s good, or because 520 anonymous clippers got paid to make sure we saw it ◡̈

Which is, as always, why you’ve got me!!!!

Luce xxx

Let me break it down properly ⋆｡°✩

Introducing the cruise ship

The MV Hondius is an expedition cruise ship owned by Dutch company Oceanwide Expeditions. It departed from Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1, with plans to visit Antarctica and several remote islands in the South Atlantic. These are not your average cruises either: they cost between $6,000 and $25,000 depending on the cabin and last a month or more. The ship had about 150 passengers and crew on board from 23 different countries, including British, American, Dutch, German, and Spanish nationals.

Here’s how the outbreak unfolded

This one is easiest to follow as a timeline:

April 6: A 70-year-old Dutch man falls ill with fever, headache, and mild diarrhoea on board. By April 11, he’s developed respiratory distress and dies on the ship. No tests are done at the time, so nobody knows what killed him and his body stays on the ship for nearly two weeks.

April 24: The ship docks at Saint Helena (a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic). His body is removed, and his 69-year-old wife, who is already showing symptoms, disembarks with him.

April 25-26: His wife flies to South Africa, becomes severely ill mid-flight, and dies at a hospital in Johannesburg. She is later confirmed by PCR test to have had hantavirus, which is when things start clicking into place.

April 27: A British passenger who fell ill after Saint Helena was evacuated to South Africa and later transferred to the Netherlands for ongoing care.

May 2: A German woman dies on board, four days after falling ill - her body remained on the ship throughout the voyage.

May 3: South African health authorities finally get a positive hantavirus result for the British passenger, but this is 21 days after the first person died. That’s how long it took to identify what was actually happening.

May 6: Three people are evacuated from the ship and flown to the Netherlands for medical care: a 56-year-old British man (previously critical, now more stable), a 41-year-old Dutch crew member, and a 65-year-old German.

May 7: A man who had left the ship early at Saint Helena and made his own way home tests positive for hantavirus in Switzerland.

So where does that leave us today?

• Everyone has been evacuated from the ship and sent into quarantine in their home countries, mostly for 42 to 45 days from their point of potential exposure.

• Three people have died, and five people who left the ship before the outbreak was even identified have since tested positive for hantavirus, including the man in Switzerland and a British national on the remote island of Tristan da Cunha, (where a British Army team literally parachuted in to treat him.)

• One of the five French nationals repatriated on Sunday developed symptoms on the flight home. All five were immediately placed in strict isolation on landing and were being monitored in Bichat Hospital in Paris.

Ok so what actually is hantavirus?

Hantavirus is a virus that lives in rodents, specifically in their urine, droppings, and saliva. You get it by coming into contact with those things, usually by breathing in particles from contaminated material, like cleaning out an old shed, or disturbing a nest.

There are at least 38 recognised species of hantavirus globally, 24 of which cause disease in humans. It is rare, but it can be very serious.

It attacks the lungs and kidneys. Early symptoms look a lot like the flu: fever, fatigue, muscle aches, nausea, vomiting. Then it can progress to severe respiratory distress as the lungs fill with fluid. The strain on this ship, the Andes strain, causes something called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which has a fatality rate of up to 40% in the Americas. There is no specific antiviral treatment; care is mostly supportive: oxygen, fluids, blood pressure management, and ventilation.

Crucially, most strains of hantavirus do not spread between people at all. The Andes strain is the exception, and that’s why this outbreak is getting so much attention.

Why does the Andes strain change things?

Labs in both South Africa and Switzerland confirmed the outbreak was caused by the Andes strain of hantavirus, which is the only strain known to have limited capacity for human-to-human transmission. But here’s the key word: limited.

The WHO’s acting director of epidemic and pandemic management said she believes any human-to-human transmission on this ship happened between married couples and people providing direct medical care. Not casual contact or breathing the same air in a corridor.

And, if this virus were spreading efficiently between people, you would expect far more than eight cases on a ship of 150 people living in close proximity for over a month.

Has the ship docked?

Yup! The MV Hondius arrived in Tenerife in the early hours of May 10, and evacuation began immediately. 94 people of 19 nationalities disembarked on Sunday alone, all in PPE, taken by small boat to shore and then by bus to Tenerife airport, where government-chartered flights were waiting to take them home. The final flights departed May 11, including one to Australia carrying four Australians, one Australian permanent resident, and one New Zealander, who were among the last to leave. The ship will now sail on to the Netherlands, where it will be disinfected.

How did it get on board?

This is where it gets complicated, because the leading theory is now being contested.

The initial hypothesis from Argentine officials was that the Dutch couple contracted the virus during a bird-watching tour in Ushuaia, at a landfill on the outskirts of the city where rodents are common. But local health officials in Tierra del Fuego are pushing back hard. The province’s Director General of Epidemiology has pointed out that Tierra del Fuego has never recorded a single hantavirus case since the disease became a notifiable illness in 1996, and that the specific rodent subspecies that carries the Andes strain isn’t even found there.

His theory, shared by several experts, is that the couple were most likely infected two to four weeks before boarding, somewhere in the Patagonian provinces of Neuquén, Chubut, or Río Negro, where hantavirus does circulate. The couple had been travelling through Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay for months before boarding. Chilean and Uruguayan authorities say the virus wasn’t contracted in their countries. Argentina’s national government says it can’t rule Tierra del Fuego out, but acknowledges the evidence points north.

Without the Dutch couple to fill in the gaps themselves, and with investigators still reconstructing their travel using border records, the origin of this outbreak hasn’t been definitively confirmed.

Also, Hantavirus has an incubation period of between one and eight weeks, which is part of why this took so long to identify and contain.

So is this another pandemic?

Nope. The WHO has officially assessed the global public health risk from this event as low, and has said so repeatedly. The WHO director general was asked directly at a press conference in Tenerife on Saturday night whether letting passengers fly home and self-isolate could cause further outbreaks. His answer: “Based on our assessment, what you have said is not going to happen.”

The CDC’s acting director also pushed back on pandemic comparisons this week, saying: “This is not Covid, and we don’t want to treat it like Covid. We don’t want to cause a public panic over this.”

The international response has been fast, coordinated, and transparent across multiple governments and health authorities on three continents. It is not perfect, but it is working.

What should you actually take from this?

Three people are dead and more are seriously ill. That is genuinely awful, and the people who spent weeks on that ship are going through something incredibly traumatic.

But this is not a global threat. The reason there aren’t hundreds of cases on a month-long expedition cruise is coz this virus, even in its most transmissible known strain, does not spread easily between people. The evacuation has gone largely to plan, and the quarantine protocols are in place.

I promise you, you don’t need to panic, you just need to be informed - which is why you’ve got me!!!

Love you!!!

Luce xxx

Let me break it down properly ⋆｡°✩

Introducing the cruise ship

The MV Hondius is an expedition cruise ship owned by Dutch company Oceanwide Expeditions. It departed from Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1, with plans to visit Antarctica and several remote islands in the South Atlantic. These are not your average cruises either: they cost between $6,000 and $25,000 depending on the cabin and last a month or more. The ship had about 150 passengers and crew on board from 23 different countries, including British, American, Dutch, German, and Spanish nationals.

Here’s how the outbreak unfolded

This one is easiest to follow as a timeline, so let’s do this.

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Hi angels! How was your weekend? Mine was iconic because I had Squish and his fiancée Sophie here for the weekend & it was sunny!!! Nothing exciting to report on my end, except I’m house hunting right now, and I am learning that there is so much that I don’t know. Eeeek. Tips welcome, and if you’re selling a sanctuary in Wellington that is either by the water or in the trees, lmk x

The US just banned abortion pills via mail???

What you need to know

A federal appeals court in the US has blocked the mailing of Mifepristone, which is the most common abortion pill used in America. As of Friday, it can now only be distributed in person, at a clinic. The ruling applies everywhere in the country, not just in states where abortion is already banned.

Why this matters

Aabout half of all abortions in the US are medication abortions, and roughly one in four of those are prescribed via telehealth. That option is now gone while this works its way through the courts. And for a lot of people, telehealth isn’t a convenience; it was the only realistic option. Women in rural areas, women with low incomes, women fleeing domestic violence, and women with disabilities. The ACLU put it plainly: when telemedicine is restricted, those are the people who suffer most.

The ruling came from a three-judge panel, all appointed by Republican presidents, one of them by Trump. They sided with Louisiana, which argued that allowing the pill to be mailed there was effectively cancelling the state’s total abortion ban. The FDA, which approved mifepristone in 2000 and has monitored it for 25 years across dozens of studies, had no say in this. A court just overruled their scientific regulations.

What happens now?

The manufacturers are already asking the Supreme Court for an emergency block on the ruling (the same Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 btw.) They did unanimously protect mifepristone access in 2024, but on a technicality, not on the actual substance of the case.

Amsterdam just banned public adverts for meat and fossil fuels btw

As of May 1st, ads for burgers, petrol cars, and flights are gone in Amsterdam. Now, the banning of this isn’t what’s so interesting; it’s the fact that they grouped meat in with the ban, as a climate issue.

In theory, this is a slay, but one criticism I’m seeing is that yes, it’s great that these will be banned in public, but in reality, where are most of us getting hit with ads the most? Our phones.

Unsurprisingly, the Dutch Meat Association isn’t stoked, saying it’s: "an undesirable way to influence consumer behaviour". It adds that meat "delivers essential nutrients and should remain visible and accessible to consumers".

Anyway, we’ll take what we can get!

A Nobel Peace Prize Winner Is Dying in an Iranian Prison

Narges Mohammadi is a 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner who has spent her life fighting for women’s rights in Iran. The Iranian government has arrested her thirteen times for it, and she’s been sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes across those cases.

Right now she is in a hospital in north-west Iran and her family believes she is dying.

Last month, she was found unconscious in her cell after a suspected heart attack. Prison officials refused to transfer her to the hospital for weeks, despite her having a documented history of cardiac problems. Her brother told the BBC he wakes up every morning waiting for the worst phone call of his life. The head of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has said her life is at risk.

She was released on medical grounds in late 2024, kept campaigning, got arrested again in December after speaking at a memorial for a fellow activist, was beaten during the arrest, sentenced to an additional seven and a half years in February, and then transferred without warning to a prison hours from Tehran, where she’s had almost no contact with her family since.

Her brother’s take on why the world isn’t louder about this: the war in Iran has shifted attention to oil and trade routes. His words were, “it seems that oil is now more important than freedom.”

Read more!

Do You Have an Emergency Fund? ♡ .𖥔 ₊˚

Today’s mundane poll:

If you voted no, I need you to listen to Episode 3 of IOU (Some Money Education) - a new podcast (and practical lil course!) that I created with and BNZ - immediately.

For this episode, our audience sent us the wildest things they’ve done for some emergency money, and I have never felt more seen:

• Someone sold their underwear and bra to a George R.R. Martin lookalike on Craigslist.

• Someone got paid $25 to have their feet tickled on camera and then got fired because their ticklishness gave out.

• Someone spent their entire emergency fund on surgery for a constipated lizard. And then someone used their emergency fund on a cat enema and rebuilt it by selling feet pics.

All of these moments could have been avoided if we’d learnt at school the purpose (and importance) of having an emergency fund.

But, since we didn’t learn it at school, let’s learn it together now <3

Just this minion Scientology speedrun

@juicy.jacobbGru & minions go to Scientology #scientology #meme #prank #minions #funny

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This edition of the newsletter is made possible by the angels at Squarespace!!!

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Hi my angels!!!! Big news! Harry Styles is engaged to Zoë Kravitz and this is the sexiest couple I could possibly have imagined. This is the royal wedding that I know we have absolutely no access to, and I am incredibly pleased about that.

So let me set a challenge to everyone to please be normal on the internet about this, starting NOW!

In more important news, Abby and I just dropped perhaps one of my fave podcasts we’ve ever done:

This week, Abby and I chat about a real mixed bag of topics:

• The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner

• Scientology (and the speedrun trend) Explained

• Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz are engaged

• Noah Kahan’s documentary touches on traumatic brain injury and body dysmorphia, and you should watch it!!!!

• Singer D4vd (David Anthony Burke) has been charged with first-degree murder

The Scientology Speedrun Era Is Upon Us

This is not a hot take, but I have been obsessed with Scientology for… quite a while (everyone is, we love things that we don’t understand.) I used to bike past the New Zealand centre every day on the way to work, and then I found out WE WERE THE FIRST COUNTRY OUTSIDE OF THE USA TO START A SCIENTOLOGY CHURCH.

But I don’t think we are talking about its origins enough:

Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, a sci-fi writer who dropped out of university after two years. He invented a self-help system called Dianetics in 1950, lost the rights to it in bankruptcy, and then just... rebranded it as a religion. Multiple people documented him saying, before any of this existed, that starting a religion was the best way to make money. He literally wrote to his business manager in 1953, calling the shift to religion “a problem of practical business.” King of the pivot.

Also, his ‘heroic’ war record, which Scientology uses as gospel IS NOT EVEN REAL! A journalist fact-checking the church found that the document they provided was signed by a man who never existed, and two of the medals Hubbard supposedly won weren’t even commissioned until after he’d already left active service.

And the actual beliefs, which you only find out after spending tens of thousands of dollars working your way up the ranks: 75 million years ago, a galactic dictator named Xenu transported billions of beings to Earth, placed them around volcanoes, and blew them up with hydrogen bombs.

READ THAT AGAIN!

And the spirits of those beings are now attached to all of us and causing our psychological problems, obviously ◡̈

Oh and one of the key books laying out this version of human history was reportedly created when Hubbard gave his son amphetamines and transcribed what he said. Awesome.

The speedruns

For the uninitiated (like I was): speedrunning is a video game thing where you try to complete a game as fast as possible, usually by exploiting bugs or glitches the developers never intended.

Someone has now applied this to Scientology buildings.

It started on March 31 with an 18-year-old TikTok creator called Swhileyy, who walked into a Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, filmed himself getting as deep into the building as possible before staff could stop him, and posted it. The video got 90 million views. Now there are copycat runs everywhere - people weaving through hallways, dodging staff, getting escorted out within seconds.

Someone on X has also started crowdsourcing all the footage to build an actual hand-drawn floor plan of the Hollywood facility (which kinda freaks me out if it gets in the wrong hands…)

This has all since escalated, as things do. In Florida, a 19-year-old was arrested after firing a BB gun at a Scientology building, which is not part of the bit. The original creator has distanced himself from the copycats, which feels a little like opening a box of chocolates and then telling everyone they’re not allowed to eat any….

And finally, someone in the comments said, “If they reach 100% map completion, will they unlock Tom Cruise?” and I just think that’s really funny.

Kia ora booooookies!!!

I needed to let you know that we’re reading Famesick by in the Shit You Should Read About book club for May! We are big fans of Lena and her work, she’s fucking hilarious and just an icon so we can’t wait to read her memoir about “illness, fame, sex and everything in between.”

Here’s our intro to the book if you want to learn more!

Don’t forget to become a paying supporter of SYSCA to get exclusive access to the book club - we have some great books lined up for the bookies <3

See you in Fable, happy reading!!

A trip down memory lane with Squarespace!!

Angels - if you’re an OG, you’ll remember that when SYSCA first started, we were a blog hosted on Squarespace. Then we were an Instagram account, then a podcast, then a newsletter, and now we’re…. everything????

Anyway, I thought it would be cute to do a little trip down memory lane from back in the Squarespace days. Indulge me in my nostalgia, won’t you?

My very first newsletter intro

One of our first homepages

Our first-ever podcast award (and first and last press release lol)

That time we interviewed Lorde:

The first of my annual “Good News Only” newsletters, in honour of my late little brother, Jimmy:

So yes - Squarespace and I have a LOT of history, because they’ve always made it so easy for me to do my job!!

Being able to manage my domain, Google Workspace, email campaigns, AND analytics all from one website made it so much easier to be a 20-year-old SHE-EO who didn’t really know what she was doing. It was like, well, ‘at least the technical stuff is all handled - now I can just focus on making the news make sense!’

So, to all those aspiring young writers/ bloggers/ media girlies out there, I say - START THE THING! JUST DO IT! AND DO IT WITH A FREE TRIAL!!! And then, when you’re ready to launch, use code ‘SYSCA’ to get 10% off your first website or domain!!

PS, PLZ LINK THEM TO ME SO I CAN SEE!

• Order our book Make It Make Sense here!

• Join our Book Club here!

• Become a Close Friend on Instagram here!

• Support the independent media you love by becoming a paid supporter here!

PS, if you wanna chat to me about anything I’ve written today, your latest crush, or if you just want a pen pal, reply to this email and we can be friends 𓆩♡𓆪

Subscribe now

Yesterday, I spent a few hours away from my phone looking at open homes and having lunch with some friends. On the way home, while stopping to put some fuel in my car (a luxury in these times, I know), Abby opened up Instagram and saw Brittany Broski, of all people (iconic), asking what the hell was going on in DC. Turns out, since I’d been offline, there was a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner??????

Now that I’m caught up, let me explain.

The Nerd Prom Gets a Plot Twist

Every year, journalists, politicians, and celebrities get dressed up and have dinner together in Washington DC. It’s called the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and it’s basically “Nerd Prom” (I’m allowed to say this because I’m a nerd and would love to be invited.)

This year, Trump showed up for the first time as a sitting president, which was already going to be A Whole Thing given that he has spent the last several years calling journalists the enemy of the people.

Side note: the entertainment was a mentalist named Oz Pearlman who was mid-trick at the head table, trying to guess the name of press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s unborn daughter, when everything went sideways.

So what actually happened?

At 8:34pm, a man named Cole Tomas Allen, 31, from Torrance, California, sprinted full speed through a Secret Service security checkpoint in the hotel lobby. He was armed with two handguns, a shotgun, and multiple knives, and made it to a staircase leading down to the ballroom before being tackled and taken into custody. One Secret Service officer was shot at close range but was saved by his bulletproof vest and is reportedly doing fine.

Inside the ballroom, guests heard what sounded like muffled pops. Trump said he thought a waiter had dropped a tray. Others, closer to the action, could smell the gunpowder and immediately hit the floor. Within seconds, Secret Service agents were sprinting down the centre aisle, climbing over chairs, pulling Cabinet members to the ground. Trump was evacuated from the stage about 20 seconds after JD Vance.

And he fell over on his way out:

The dinner was cancelled and Trump went back to the White House. The guests went home, but not before multiple attendees grabbed the bottles of alcohol from their dinner tables and took them along for the ride (honestly, you’ve just witnessed an active shooter… low key I would do the same.)

What we know about “The Friendly Federal Assassin”

Cole Allen was, by LinkedIn, a mechanical engineer and computer scientist with a degree from CalTech and a master’s in computer science. He had also, apparently, written a manifesto, which he sent to family members roughly ten minutes before the attack, in which he clearly stated he wanted to target administration officials. He referred to himself in those writings as “The Friendly Federal Assassin.”

His brother contacted police in New London, Connecticut after receiving it, and his sister had separately spoken to law enforcement flagging that he had a tendency to make radical statements and constantly referenced a plan to do “something” to fix the issues with today’s world. She confirmed he had purchased two handguns and a shotgun, storing them at their parents’ house without their parents’ knowledge.

Trump’s Response, Ranked From Normal to Very Trump

Normal (for Trump)

• He called the attacker a “sick person” and a “thug.”

• He praised law enforcement.

• He posted photos of the suspect face-down on the ground, shirtless, hands bound, on Truth Social within hours.

Only Trump would do this:

• He used the incident to argue for the giant ballroom he’s building at the White House, posting that “this event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction.” The correspondents’ dinner is, for the record, organised by the press association, not the White House, and is held at the same hotel every year. But ok.

• At the press conference he said he was honoured to be an assassination target: “When you’re impactful, they go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone.” He then went on to say he’d studied assassinations, and that the most impactful people are always the ones who get targeted. “I hate to say I’m honoured by that,” he added, “but I’ve done a lot.”

When Nobody Believes Anything Anymore

Here are the facts: This is the third time Trump has been “targeted” since 2024, his team immediately had security footage ready to post to Truth Social, and they used the incident within hours to push for his White House ballroom, DHS funding, and a 60 Minutes interview. The one officer who was shot was wearing a vest and is completely fine, and Trump was back at his podium two hours later saying it was an “honour” to be the target.

These facts have caused a loud and immediate “it was staged” instinct, and honestly, while understandable, this its own kind of problem. When political violence becomes so normalised, and when the people in power have lied so many times about so many things, the natural human response is to stop believing anything at all, and that erosion of trust - even though it’s their own fault - is pretty dangerous.

When we can no longer collectively agree on what is real, it becomes almost impossible to respond to things that actually are. When real attacks gets dismissed as theatre, and a real threats gets memed into irrelevance, the people who benefit most from that confusion are the people already in power.

What Happens Now

Cole Allen will be arraigned in federal court Monday, and the dinner will be rescheduled within 30 days, per Trump’s insistence. Also, King Charles’s state visit to the US is going ahead as planned this week, because apparently nothing slows down the royal calendar.

And this kind of stuff will continue to happen, because this is Trump’s America.

Yesterday, I spent a few hours away from my phone looking at open homes and having lunch with some friends. On the way home, while stopping to put some fuel in my car (a luxury in these times, I know), Abby opened up Instagram and saw Brittany Broski, of all people (iconic), asking what the hell was going on in DC. Turns out, since I’d been offline, there was a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner??????

Now that I’m caught up, let me explain.

The Nerd Prom Gets a Plot Twist

Read more