ALIX EARLE’S AGE IS REFERENCED REPEATEDLY on her new Netflix reality series Earle Meets World, a show clearly constructed according to the doctrine of Kardashianpolitik, down to the production company and our parent-manager cares more about the lucrative sister arc. Observations that Earle is “doing all the things she’s doing at 25 years old” or “not like a normal 25-year-old” are usually made in close proximity to scenes where Earle’s younger sister and dubiously employed friends are, alternately, going out or laying around after having gone out. (In a transparent attempt to hook my older readers: Earle’s stepmother Ashley was one of the women involved in the 2008 Eliot Spitzer scandal.)
Earle’s abnormality becomes a consistent theme in the debut season. While the gals are gallivanting around a battery of Manhattan’s most overdetermined venues (a bar where you can play pingpong; a bar with trash-can-sized beer pong), Earle is herself gamely pingponging between coastal corners of the US for televised work obligations, an unholy number of which seem to be, inexplicably, courtesy of Dunkin’ Donuts. A separate television crew, provided by Netflix, dutifully trails her to each of these locales, its cameras capturing footage of other cameras capturing footage. She is portrayed as a dedicated, relentless wunderkind, sacrificing her youth in service of DoorDash product placement and Dancing with the Stars and cover shoots for magazines named after materials like PAPER and NYLON, as It Girls are wont to do.
This sentiment is reiterated with such matter-of-fact regularity that it took me until the sixth episode to remember that the vast majority of 25-year-old Americans also spend most of their time working, not playing arcade games in honky-tonk-themed speakeasies. Roughly half are already responsible for young children.1 What narrative purpose did it serve, I wondered, to make so much of Earle’s age and schedule?
Insisting that the abnormal thing about Earle’s life is the age at which she’s “doing all these things”—rather than her estimated $24 million2 in annual income derived from, mostly, documenting herself partying and promoting various products between said partying gigs—strikes me as a savvy obfuscation. It’s at once a rebuttal and preemptive strike against the sort of commentary that scenes of a family of seven (plus entourage) traveling via private jet to Aspen for a weekend music festival might otherwise provoke. The series does not try to avoid the unavoidable fact of her utterly unique lifestyle, but merely locates the source of that uniqueness in her supposedly unusual decision to prioritize her career at 25.
Obligatory comparisons to the imperial sprawl of the Kardashian empire—a veritable multi-decade and multidimensional consumer juggernaut—spawn primarily from the shared allegation that each family is famous for being famous. But the early seasons of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which premiered in 2007, were perfectly happy to present the golden, palm-tree-lined privilege of mid-aughts Calabasas without any such couching in the language of deservingness or hustle. Kim made a sex tape. Ryan Seacrest and Kris Jenner hatched a plan. The irony is that now we know just how calculated—how (assessed with moral neutrality) truly singular—Kris Jenner’s management and manipulation of her family’s fame really was, but at the time, the sisters did not seem engaged in such an explicit public relations effort.
The repeated emphasis on Earle’s schedule and work ethic reminded me of the theme pulsing beneath the dimly lit personal training sessions and frantic quick-changes depicted in The End of an Era, the 2025 six-part Eras Tour docuseries that I watched in a rapture of weepy credulity like the ideologically inconsistent voyeur I am. In his breakdown of the series, preeminent “Swiftologist” Zachary Hourihane describes the accretive significance of these snapshots:
“Taken together, these episodes aim to build a particular case, that Taylor Swift is not a greedy, hollow, girlboss billionaire stomping around the world in her private jet, draining cities dry so she can buy another mansion. She is a hard-working, almost pathologically professional woman, who has built this thing from the purest possible intention: love of the craft, love of the fans, love of work.”
Sounds about right to me, I say, tugging at the collar of my Eras Tour sweatshirt, which I am, hand to heart, wearing as I write this. Notably, Swift and Earle are both beneficiaries of sharky dadagers, their forays into entertainment helmed by a patriarch who shrewdly converted his daughter’s fame into a family affair.
This recurring throughline in popular media—that which is designed to supply an ostensible “behind-the-curtain” glimpse at female objects of cultural fascination—is notable to me because it seems obviously in conversation with a broader shift in the zeitgeist, evidence intended to refute an amalgam of both legitimate class antagonism and subconscious misogyny that says the gains of any woman rich and famous enough to command her own reality docuseries must be, in some way, ill-begotten.
I suppose you could argue that the grunting, expletive-heavy reality shows that center highly compensated professional (male) athletes—Quarterback, Hard Knocks—perform a similar legitimizing function, though these series appear to do so without the defensive crouch. (Elite athleticism is its own indisputable proof of deservingness; it doesn’t require as much narrativizing.) In fact, fans of Hard Knocks may know Earle, too: Her ex-boyfriend plays in the NFL, and she made her television debut in the role of WAG in the Miami Dolphins season.
But in Earle Meets World, Earle’s primary role is as a stand-in for the market itself, a proxy for aggregate demand. This is the sort of observation that’s insufferably “capitalism blogger”-coded, but I struggle to explain the sensation I had while watching in any other terms. Earle manages to be both a shiny surface and inscrutable black hole, absorbing and reflecting the desires of The Audience. The empty, fractured storylines plastered against a backdrop of excessive wealth are somehow both a letdown and the show’s chief selling point. As Alison Herman’s review for Variety puts it, Earle’s broad appeal is not that she is “particularly funny, opinionated, or inventive,” but that she is “a wealthier and more conventionally attractive version of the average consumer.” In many scenes, we are invited to be entertained by their deliberations about what we will find entertaining; to enjoy the marketing strategy sessions where they determine how best to market to us. The subject matter may be lowbrow, but the show is bizarrely high-concept in this regard. We are, in other words, watching content about a woman making content, and as everyone knows by now, the primary economic utility of content is to make a sale. The viewer is partaking in a sort of circular infomercial for Alix Earle, a woman who is entirely beholden to us, The Audience; whose job (at which we are assured she works very hard!) is to be whoever we want her to be.
Maybe that’s why my experience of dry-swallowing all eight episodes in the 24 hours following their release was so strange. As I watched, a distracting and frustrated metacommentary chattered away in my head, and yet now I am left only with a vaguely pleasant impression of the Earles, a hazy sense that I’ve gotten to know them. Have I? Stranger still is the fact that I can hardly remember a single event responsible for my new, nonspecific affinity; can’t point to any one scene that consciously endeared them to me. Attempts to do so feel like groping for fragments of a dream.
It was only after a few days that I understood the product I had been sold was not the Dunkin’ Donuts Earle-y Riser Meal or even Earle’s own skincare line Reale Actives, but a particular vision of Earle as a sympathetic, authentic, and worthy pitchwoman. The effort was, largely, successful, a fact made counterintuitive when you consider that there are entire episodes which contradict swaths of her TikTok persona, as when we see the frenzied and protracted behind-the-scenes damage control of a situation that she treated with dismissive humor online.
A television show about an influencer sure makes it easy to reach for Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “simulacra,” or the representation of a thing that no longer refers to an actual, underlying reality. And it’s true that there are surreally self-referential scenes which depict discussions about what, precisely, they’re going to cop to on the very reality show we are, at present, watching. But this is not a new tendency in entertainment, just a spinoff befitting the panopticon age. “Television shows about the business of television shows were rare for a long time,” David Foster Wallace writes in “E Unibus Pluram,” his famous 1993 essay about television. “The Dick Van Dyke Show was prescient, and Mary Moore carried its insight into her own decade-long exploration of local-market angst. Now, of course, there’s been everything from Murphy Brown to Max Headroom to Entertainment Tonight.”
Wallace was writing almost a decade and a half before the first season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians and 30 years before Alix Earle would explode on TikTok. But where early seasons of Keeping Up were about people who were famous for being famous, Earle Meets World seems to cut out the middleman, instead documenting the tedious maintenance of fame for fame’s sake. “Earle and her family seem almost paralyzed by their luck,” Allie Jones writes in The Cut. “They know they have a golden ticket, but they’re not quite sure what to do with it.” The most straightforward moment of Earle Meets World, then, occurs in the very first episode, in an interview with Earle’s nine-year-old brother Thomas. When asked why the family is doing a reality show at all, he deadpans to a roar of fourth-wall-breaking laughter from the crew: “So they can make profit.”
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My favorite tribute to Gloria Steinem was Rebecca Traister’s. It did a good job of capturing the complexity of legacy and lionization. (The Cut)
Also worthwhile: This short interview about Steinem with Angela Davis. (NPR)
Nathan Fielder made a secret documentary about America’s Girlboss Elizabeth Holmes with A24. (!) (Variety)
Wake up, babe, there’s a new Daniel Kolitz essay about payday loan apps. Kolitz—of “Goon Squad” fame—is, for me, one of the truly great essayists of our time. Here’s an unjustifiably lengthy teaser, because it is sensational and the exact type of financial writing I’ve come to love most:
And, just in time, a few new friends came to the rescue: Albert, Cleo, Brigit, and Dave.
Such beautiful names. Let’s hear them again. Albert. Cleo. Brigit. Dave. They are—one hesitates to say it, before plunging right ahead—winsome. Each belongs to a personal finance app launched between 2016 and 2019, at the dawn of the VC-backed fintech rush. Each offers a variety of personal finance tools (mostly glorified budget planners) but is built at its core around short-term, small-dollar, high-interest loans. You sign up and grant them access to your banking history, and their automated underwriting tools make an offer, typically between $25 and $500, with a repayment window of seven to fourteen days. If you’re wondering why they’re all named like people, you can find plenty of answers in the pay-for-play business press that once bankrolled my existence. Dave CEO Jason Wilk, for instance, told eMarketer, “We wanted something approachable and friendly,” something that would distinguish their finance app from the “unapproachable” banks, with their “big, fancy names.” It’s true that I know at least four guys named Dave and none named Bank of America. At the same time, not one of the Daves I know—nor even Bank of America—has tried to saddle me with a 400 percent APR on a two-figure loan.
[…] In interviews, these apps’ founders paint their prototypical user as a broke college kid, someone who might need financial guidance and a little extra walking-around money every now and then. In truth, as they and their many high-profile investors know, broke people exist at every stage of life, and many are more than happy to accept what these apps are offering, which they call “cash advances” and which their critics call “payday loans.” (The Baffler)
It has come to my unconsenting attention that a Republican senator has taken to calling the educated, downwardly mobile millennial members of the Democratic Socialists of America “Lulu Lenins.” Regrettably this is one of the funniest epithets I’ve ever heard and as a result there’s no choice but to grudgingly embrace it. (The Atlantic)
Relatedly, I have a page of notes about the whole “Woke 1 vs. Woke 2” discourse following the Economist op-ed called “Woke 1 was about identity. Woke 2 is about class.” It remains to be seen whether the disparate observations are going to cohere into anything insightful. In the meantime, here’s a collage of my favorite things that Fox News has called “woke” at some point in the last five years:
See you next time.
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The median age of a woman’s first birth in the US is 27, so at 25 fewer than half would have kids already, but the cutoff feels close enough to justify “roughly.”
(extrapolating from her $12 million-by-June earnings covered in Forbes this summer)
I appreciated that you watched 8 hours so we don’t have to 😂 I have struggled to understand why Earle appeals to so many, but I think the bit you quoted about Earle being “a wealthier and more conventionally attractive version of the average consumer” sums it up perfectly.
Oh the "dadager," that's something to talk about. Earle and Swift are both part of a conversion process in which an individual woman's earning capacity is being restructured into a family enterprise with a patriarch at the top. And the sister arc isn't just a lucrative storyline, it's the mechanism for propagating business. Once the siblings have their own deals and the entourage is on payroll, one girl's tiktok is a family enterprise. And then they can all sit around and talk about work ethic.
Also, the show is so boring! I couldn't get past how boring it was, beginning with them driving around in the truck.