SAG Awards + Doechii For The Cut + Diddy's Lawyer Quits + "Flight" IRL + Black Architectural Excellence + Karen The L.A. Fire Looter + LASD Gangs + Walton Goggins Early Adopters

I’m back and recharged after a 10:01 AM IKEA breakfast and aimless decompression walk through a dozen showroom vestibules. If you feel like you’re suffocating under the chaos of an overstimulating news cycle in a country mid-collapse and need to regulate your nervous system, I recommend an early morning immersion into the world of perfect order, hygge, and fluorescence that is IKEA.

The blueberry scone is to die for.

Anyway, for any SAG Awards thoughts, I’ll refer you to this:

xoxoxo, culturework

---

THE DROUGHT IS OVER. MAGAZINES ARE FINALLY FEEDING US. I chat more on Doechii further down the newsletter!

• Doechii for The Cut (TheCut)

• The Hollywood Reporter Is Def Batshit For This One (THR)

• Hold Up — Osama Bin Laden’s Lawyer Just Dropped YOU As A Client?!?! (USA Today)

• Don’t Let Luigi’s Brows Distract You From Some Very Real Concerns (ABC)

• Hollywood Bowl 2025 Lineup Is Here! (Variety)

• Denzel Is Yet Again The Blueprint (CNN)

• Among The 100 Highest Paid Athletes, Zero Of Them Were Women (Sportico)

• Dave Grohl’s Baby Mama Revealed (Spoiler: He Has A Type) (New York Post)

• Snoop Looking Like The Witch From Hansel & Gretel (TMZ)

• “They paved paradise and”… Actually, The Melrose Triangle Project Never Even Made It To Paving! (Weho Times)

• Meta Laid Off Mothers On Maternity Leave To Boost Exec Salaries (Fortune)

• So… Former Meta Employees Are Re-Branding Layoff Narratives (Forbes)

  ---

Read it! While you can! This book from Great American #bitchass J.D. Vance might be on its way to the banned list! The irony! The jokes write themselves at this point.

Also, don’t read it. At all. If you already read it, take lots of acid¹ until your brain forgets everything you did during reading it. We’ll throw the movie in there as well. If there’s one book from one author I want banned, it’s this one. Lock it up! Lock it up! Lock it up!

---

“Several years before Rosa Parks made national news for an act that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and just two years before the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, John S. Chase graduated from the University of Texas School of Architecture with a degree that came with zero guarantees.

One of the first Black graduate students to enroll at University of Texas at Austin (just two days after the Supreme Court decision in Sweatt v. Painterforced the school to integrate its graduate programs), and the first African American to graduate from its School of Architecture, Chase was stonewalled from internships at the predominately white architecture…” (read more at Dwell).

Chase registering for his first semester at The University of Texas School of Architecture, 1950.

Chase receiving the The University of Texas Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Texas Exes, 1992.

Explore more of Chase’s work at Cooper Union (here).

---

A white lady named Karen Matsey was caught by police in a “Palisades Strong” t-shirt looting burned out homes in L.A. The image police released to the press intentionally blurred out Karen’s face and hid her likeness. Videos of Black Angelenos evacuating from their actual own homes during the fires were spread across the world with looting accusations, with no apology from the networks that platformed the lie. So there’s that.

Elsewhere…

• Also, the mayor fired the police chief, and rightfully so

• Prolific Political Roach (insert trademark symbol) Eric Adams is now suing Donald Trump

• A Jewish man who drove around Miami looking for Palestinians to kill mistook two Israeli tourists for Palestinians and opened fire on them and then one of those victims went on Facebook to blame Arabs until he found out the hard way that Zionism is a snake that is eating its own tail

• What to expect at the National Parks after their staff layoffs

• TikTok ban was fueled by Israel, not China. All together now: WE KNOW

• Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fires the Navy’s #1, Air Force’s #2

• LA County Sheriff’s oversight commissioner resigns amid alleged threats from county attorneys

• That's because, of course, the L.A. Sheriff Deputies are a gang!

• Utah governor signs collective bargaining ban for teachers, firefighters and police unions

• Schools and colleges have two weeks to ban diversity initiatives (or lose federal funding!)

• CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) deems Standford a “hostile campus”

• Cholera sweeps Sudan

• Trump’s DOJ Erases Report On Violence Against Native American Women

My last two surviving brain cells.

---

Let’s have a round of applause for editorial creatives — fashion editors, stylists, creative directors, photographers, and, of course, the MUSES. I’ll even give the set team an honorary mention for keeping the pile of trash and rose petals within budget, but my-fucking-god, I want the gray-parchment-water stained looking seamless abolished from the publishing industry. From Annie Leibovitz’s sets. From Vogue in general. From everywhere.

I might be giving the team too much credit here because it’s clear Doechii’s doing the heavy lifting. The range. The angles. The range. Did I say the range?

For contrast, I want you to relive NYLON’s digital cover from December