Louis Vuitton names Alysa Liu as brand ambassador; Gracie Abrams announces new song “Hit the Wall”; Noah Kahan earns first No. 1 album with The Great Divide; and Lola Tung is starring in a sapphic soccer rom-com; and I need Blue Ivy on the cover of Teen Vogue (or WYouth, I guess?).

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN AMERICAN TWEEN, newyorker
Anna Wiener spent months reporting in San Francisco on Mira, a 12-year-old sixth grader with peach-dyed front strands who commutes alone, tracks her allowance on Excel, performs aerial hoop five days a week, reads “smut novels” alongside her mom, and recently swore off Shein after her dad explained Xinjiang internment camps and the global supply chain (“but only once she’d bought the dress”). It’s impossible to choose my favorite detail in this perfect profile, but Mira’s group chat called “4th Period Baddies” is up there:

For years, Mira has been agitating for more independence. Last August, she began commuting to and from school alone, hurtling around the edge of the continent on the public bus. Since fifth grade, she has worn a silver Apple Watch, a glorified tracking device, which she pushes to the outer limits of usability. She is a member of several large group chats, including one called “4th Period Baddies,” and regularly consults Siri, summoning facts and images from the ether. (“Photos of hazel eyes.” “What does A.S.M.R. stand for?”) Still, the watch is no phone. A phone would be much cooler; would be, perhaps, the coolest thing. An Apple Watch was a bridge from childhood to adulthood. A phone would be a portal.

I SPENT 3 DAYS INTERVIEWING TEENS AT AMERICAN DREAM MALL. HERE’S WHAT I LEARNED., thestrategist
The New Jersey retail complex has become a weekend destination for teens, with young shoppers traveling in from states like Maine and Rhode Island to spend their allowances (supplemented, in some cases, by their parents’ Apple Pay) at Pacsun, Hollister, and Garage, where girls were buying “tops, tops, and more tops.” As for stores they wish would open at the American Dream, young shoppers named Brandy Melville, Edikted, and Skims, all of which are staples at Soho’s Tween Row. The de facto uniform among adolescent mall-goers was gray sweats and a white tee for boys, low-rise baggy jeans or sweatpants with a tank or sweatshirt for girls, a look 13-year-old Hana called “lazy girl or clean girl.” Lululemon should hire 14-year-old Juliet, who correctly identified what’s currently wrong with the retailer: “I used to like Lululemon, but I think Alo has better quality and colors,” she said. “Me and my mom both think that Lululemon just needs a big influencer or celebrity to make a video on them, and they will come back.”

THE STRANGE, MULTICULTURAL SLANG OF TORONTO’S TEENAGERS, economist
Toronto teenagers are speaking a hyper-local multicultural slang called Toronto Mans, marked by TH-stopping (”dis” instead of “this”) and rapid “squawking” delivery. The vocabulary borrows from Jamaican patois (”ah lie,” “two-twos”), Somali (”kawal,” to scam), Arabic (”wallahi”), and heavily from London grime — ”peng,” “ends,” “oppblock,” “wasteman,” “mandem” — with the “Mans” itself derived from “mandem.” (This phenomenon is not new, but it is new to me and might be to you, too.) University of Toronto Mississauga linguist Derek Denis, who calls it “Multicultural Toronto English,” says speakers “strategically deploy certain lexical or phonological features to make certain interactional moves,” and the dialect is spreading — TorontoTide social channel films teens screeching in the upscale Yorkdale mall, though Jane & Finch kids say many of the posters are just using the lingo for clout and actually come from nicer suburbs like Vaughan. I need 10,000 more words on this; the New Yorker should send Anna Wiener to Toronto.

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YOUNG NEW YORKERS HAVE A NEW HOT SPOT: SUNDAY MASS, wsj
While much of the data around Gen Z’s religious revival has been challenged, churches in New York are nevertheless reporting standing-room crowds. At St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village, 22-year-old Anthony Gross and Kate DePetro started gathering twentysomethings at The Pizza Box before 6 p.m. Sunday Mass — 100 people came to “Pizza to Pews” the first week, 200 by the third, with attendees driving in from Long Island and taking the train from Boston. Gross found the parish after asking ChatGPT where to find a young Catholic community. “Nobody wants to go to Mass alone,” he said. “Better than going to a bar and spending $400.” Rev. Boniface Endorf of St. Joe’s, where the post-Mass young adult discussion group has grown from 25 to 200, said, “People are looking for more than career and consumption. What does it mean to grow up? They’re looking for guidance.”

STRICTLY PERSONAL, airmail
The newspaper personal ad — the back-page classified that faded with the rise of online dating in the early 2000s — is back, positioned as an antidote to image-saturated swiping. Emily Sundberg launched a personals section on Feed Me after readers kept sending her Hinge profiles that said things like “We’ll get along if you read Feed Me”; and New York magazine recently revived its 1980s-era “Strictly Personal” column, which is free and runs monthly with a strict no-AI policy by editor Amy Rose Spiegel, who calls herself “a switchboard” for romance. Spiegel said the format draws “public-facing figures” because anonymity means they “can’t be screenshotted,” and that submissions show such “originality and verve” she’s frequently accused of ghostwriting them. One recent ad reads:

“LANKY READER with too many hobbies, 31M, Boston, seeks creative woman 28–34 (readers of all shapes and lengths welcome) to talk dirty to me, by which I mean, ‘I actually just read an article about…’ Let’s walk fast together. And make everything harder than it has to be. And become old, hunched-over city people in a too-small apartment.” It continues: “Kind of want like five kids, but in a non-Republican way. Let’s raise a passel—a large brood—of weirdos.”

One last thought: