Pop Stars and the Semiotics of Lol
The Realities Of Being A Pop Star
Charli XCX | Charli's Substack | 20th November 2025
The architect of "brat summer" has a newsletter. There are great things about being a pop star, she says — you get to wear earrings so valuable they have their own security guards and you can call in sick whenever you want. The less good aspects include the mockery of old friends and all the time spent in "strange and soulless liminal spaces". And the more successful you are, the more paranoid you become (1,800 words)
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Lol I’m Trying To Tell You How It Feels For Me
Harriet Armstrong | Granta | 21st November 2025
Towards a semiotics of the ubiquitous abbreviation "lol". It's short for "laughing out loud" but can mean something quite dark. "Like an exclamation mark, which adds something jovial and upbeat, ‘lol’ indicates that a sentence should be taken less seriously — but this often feels like a sort of mutually understood but unacknowledged mask. Often ‘lol’ conveys a near-explicit desperation to connect" (1,000 words)