Pop Culture Diaries: Love Jonson
This week: A millennial government worker works on her newsletter, dives into pop culture, makes prints, and gets inspired by a perfect Greek crop top.
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Welcome to Pop Culture Diaries. Forget tracking calories and dollars—here, we follow the consumption that actually matters: books, music, TV, movies, threads, podcasts, YouTube videos, memes, and more. Think of this as a guilt-free way to read someone else’s diary and discover new pop culture obsessions, one week at a time.
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First: I’ll be giving a talk on American Girl at the James Monroe Museum on Saturday, May 31st at 1 pm (more info here). Come say hi!
Name: Love Jonson
Occupation: Affordable housing policy analyst
Week Covered: May 4 - 11, 2025
We’re starting off the week strong with a taste of (lowercase-i) insomnia. It strikes me when my partner’s snoring unleashes a tangled spiral of thoughts. (Are Breathe Right strips pop culture???) Around 3 a.m. I give in and flick on my very cool, very grown-up dented bubble of a desk lamp from PB Teen.
I peer into Emily Mester’s American Bulk: Essays on Excess, which I found, like so many things, on the Culture Study newsletter. I was expecting something a little more laser-focused on bulk culture, like, I dunno, meditations on the bulk bin section at the food co-op. But I appreciate the author’s broader themes of consumption, consumerism, and the psychological roots of those behaviors in her family.
I also think it can be hard to make (the character of) yourself likable when you're talking about your family's expanses of money, objects, houses, glut. We all exist somewhere on the spectrums of income, wealth, and class status. From my position on these spectrums, which is lower than hers but surely not at the bottom, I think she succeeds at this.
One point that sticks with me most is the disconnect between money and class. Becoming midwestern/suburban/new-money-rich doesn’t mean you aspire to the refined tastes of the already-wealthy, the historically-wealthy — rather, it means you just consume more of what you already liked. I’ve seen this and I feel like she puts words to it well (to say nothing of the overflowing, evocative imagery that makes the story move so richly).
Dented-bubble desk lamp (nighttime not pictured)
Monday
I love reading essays, and I love writing them too. After my job working on racial equity policies for our state’s affordable housing, I piddle around on a piece for my newsletter, love notes.
I swim across the internet gathering sources to put to a vague but deep malaise I’ve felt since my tax refund thunked into my bank account. I try not to bequeath my attention to Sir Zuckerberg, but this Instagram graphic about where our taxes go is too good (bad) to resist (and it’s backed up by the inimitable National Priorities Project).
The end result is a piece about the moral valence of paying taxes during this time of utter governmental f*ckery, bookended my Mean Girls memes.
My newsletter goes direct-to-inbox (rather than living on a platform like Substack) because I have some lightly spicy takes unsanctioned by my employer (and because I fear my family’s Greek-American phone tree of gossip).
But I’m slowly considering whether to make it public as the first point in my plan to become a fairy who writes books inside a forest mushroom. (Step 1 to getting a book deal: have a ~*following*~. We are all little cult leaders!! Or at least we’re supposed to be!)
Tuesday
My bike of nearly nine years got stolen last week (🪦), so I spend a lot of time walking for errands today. Podcasts accompany me on my feet. Amy Poehler makes an appearance on Las Culturistas with Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers (presumably to promote her own new podcast, Good Hang, though I feel we learn more about Matt than about Amy in this episode).
Next, I enter the world of Kimberly Nicole Foster, a writer and cultural critic who uncovers every nuance, nook, and cranny of pop culture, politics, and economics in the tradition of Black feminist thought. Her ecosystem includes a newsletter, two YouTube channels, and a podcast. Today I listen as she questions whether AI is simply revealing an apathy toward art (and artists) that was there all along.
I hit the grocery store and, down the street, an establishment that strikes my millennial eyes as a physical manifestation of the Gen-Z cultural aesthetic. A rainbow of thrifted clothes encircles displays of blobby rugs, food-shaped candles, glittery keychains, highbrow puzzles, and Baggu in all its forms. It all floats in a comforting sea of goopy pastels.
I pick up a baguette-shaped candle for my mom, a lifelong lover of breads. It looks the part and says it smells like rosemary focaccia, but I think it actually smells like tsoureki, a lightly sweet, braided Greek bread we serve at Easter and the new year.
Grab that bread-flavored candle! Don’t eat it, like my mom almost did when she received it.
When I get home, I check my inbox and open an email from National Bail Out about their #FreeBlackMamas campaign. Every year, they raise funds to bail out some of the many thousands of mothers who are being held in jail before trial simply because they can’t afford to post bail.
I figure if I can spend $36 on a fancy candle for Mother’s Day — plus $27 to mail it from Portland, OR to Richmond, VA — I can spend a little more to help get other people’s mothers out of a jail they should not be in in the first place. Mother’s Day has now passed, but they’re doing this work all year round!
Wednesday
I work in government, but I promise, I’m fun!!! And even kind of young (31, and but 22 when I entered)! The strictures of the government employee’s way of working — the dictated schedule, the regimented processes of bureaucracy, the implicit expectation of roboticism — grind me. This way of working requires that I have other outlets.
One of those outlets is making art, sometimes splattery mountain landscapes and sometimes whimsical collages compiled from the castaway detritus of daily life. Today I tinker with the latter, splicing together some animal cutouts and celestial backdrops. I search for some words, thumbing through the goodies I took home from the pretentious Little Free (magazine) Library on Woodward Street. It’s emblazoned with a sign asking people to only deposit magazines that fit the intellectual sensibilities of the neighborhood. Accordingly, I land on some snippets from The New Yorker.
Like any good millennial fraught with hobby monetization energy, I have an Etsy shop that has languished a bit since its birth in 2020, so I add some new listings for the first time in a long while.
Lunar Magma triptych of prints, comprised of (New Yorker-titled) Lover, Taste of Cherry, and Dreaming of You
I pretend that this visual art remains separate from my work-work, even more so than my newsletter. But sometimes the work seeps in, like this collage I named The Owls Are Not to Blame for the Housing Crisis. After all, my work — trying to serve the city, state, public, and community — is inseparable from my role as a member of that community, despite the human-bureaucrat line we are taught to hold as government workers. Though the line is a myth, we must tiptoe it wisely, with an understanding of the power, histories, obligations, and resources we bring. And we must do so with constant humility and (re)humanization of ourselves and others!!
The Owls Are Not to Blame for the Housing Crisis!!!
Thursday
I work a four-day schedule of ten-hour days, which I highly recommend if your employer and brain allow it. This means, though, that my pop cultural consumption dips as I desperately doggie-paddle through the remainder of the week’s work.
Sleeplessness strikes again, so this time I try another tactic — the podcast as lullaby. The trick is to find something soothing and not SO interesting that my brain latches on for a middle-of-the-night learning session. Sometimes I replay episodes of We Can Do Hard Things, letting the words of our queer elders Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach swirl over me. I think about checking out Sam Irby’s episode of Sleeping with Celebrities, which I just read about in her giggle-inducing roundup of stuff she’s into.
Tonight, though, inspired by a crop top that rests in an anthill pile at the foot of my bed, I continue my attempt to learn Greek through osmosis. All sides of my family descend from Greece, and I’ve been trying to learn the language on and off my whole life. I set the Easy Greek podcast a foot from my ear and bathe in nostalgia for the somewhat-intelligible tongue of the grandmothers, great aunts, and uncles of my childhood.
The shirt displays a bit of Greek I learned way back in the 3rd grade, when My Big Fat Greek Wedding came out: the iconic line in which Aidan Shaw Ian Miller unwittingly announces to the matriarch, “nice boobs!”
For the very niche sliver of audience that may enjoy this shirt (lesbian Greek-Americans, or John Corbett superfans???), you may find it here!
Friday
The four-day work schedule grants me with a joyful and strictly held Friday routine, sacred enough to rise to the level of ritual. I go for a trail run in Portland’s storied Forest Park and have breakfast at my favorite little vegetarian place. Then I head to Portland’s best chocolate cafe, Roste Chocolate House, to do some writing, volunteer work, or let my mind’s interests wander through the caverns of the internet alongside a warmed brownie and a dainty cup of pure, liquid, melted gold chocolate.
Soundtracking my drive between these locations, always: my Release Radar playlist on Spotify. This week I’m digging the opening line of Zara Larsson’s new song: “Have you ever seen a pretty girl get ugly like this?” It resonates as I sit here on the other side of a few years shedding the attention of men — nay, diverting their very eyes! I’ve come into my queerness and out of the disordered eating and running patterns that, while not driven by notions of pretty/ugly, had me looking like a beautiful, small child throughout my twenties. (This is absolutely not what certifiably hot Zara Larsson is talking about, but still!)
During those precious sun-beamed moments between afternoon and dinner, I start packing for a trip my girlfriend and I will make to the epic rock faces of Smith Rock State Park in Central Oregon, where we will take part in climbing-bro culture for the weekend. This distinct subculture involves, at its worst, an archetypal straight white man spraying unsolicited, condescending advice to everyone he deems beneath him, regardless of their actual experience level or desire for “help.” And at its best, people like my girlfriend’s highly skilled, excellent, mutually supportive group of queer, trans, and women climbers can be climbing bros (non-gendered!) too.
While I’m packing I stumble upon the Spotify BILLIONS CLUB, a list of songs that have amassed over a billion plays, truly the popular-est of the popular. I reflect on how I haven’t heard a full 50% of the top 10. Who is Gigi Perez? I guess I missed several of the One Direction hits?? Why can I never remember who Gracie Abrams is???
Saturday
On the drive, my girlfriend patiently accompanies me through my sixteenth listen of Lady Gaga’s MAYHEM. I share how I learned in the Switched on Pop episode about the album that “How Bad Do U Want Me” can be read as a tribute to Taylor Swift. Gaga adopts Swift’s introspection into the minutiae of her own emotional life, subverts the perspective of her good girl/bad girl dichotomy, and adultifies it a bit, relative to Swift’s girlish storytelling. I’m not a Swiftie — or an anti-Swiftie, don’t come after me! — but I sure fell into the Gaylor vortex when the release of undeniably lesbian-coded Midnights coincided with my own late-in-life coming out. (Don't worry, I’ve since climbed out of the vortex!)
I continue my DJing duties with my Release Radar, which blesses me with an impressive, if somewhat baffling, global songbook every week. Given my middling proficiency in Spanish, my attempts to learn Greek through music (now I know all the love song words), and my appreciation for the trap Bollywood mixes of my partner’s home country, Spotify has decided I must enjoy songs in other languages too: Armenian, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, Korean, French, Tagalog, Swahili, and more. And they’re right!
I wonder if Spotify’s Release Radar may be the only big-tech algorithm in existence that takes you out of your bubble instead of burrowing you deeper into it. With the incalculable climate impacts of AI and increasingly obvious political impacts of techno-billionaire money — much too much to get into here! — I can only hope for this small solace.
With that, we pull up to the park, and I log off the screens and the streams for a weekend outside.
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