Toward a Unified Theory of Uncool

Considering the NBA's swag crisis, Zyn, and the West Village Girls

Jalen Brunson, by all meaningful measures, is a winner. He is, more importantly, a loser. On the court, he debases himself, contorting his body to conjure ticky-tack fouls from thin air and constantly pleading to the referees; off the court, he posts Eminem songs after the biggest moments of his professional life. His aesthetic, to the extent that he has cultivated one, revolves around being a coach’s son and having gone to Villanova, facts that any ostensibly cool person would hide as diligently as they might a photograph of themselves in a racially insensitive costume from a high school Halloween party. He is the sort of profoundly uncool person who you might be tempted, via principles of horseshoe theory or normcore, to talk yourself into appreciating, but not even the most schizophrenic contortions of contrarianism can redeem Brunson’s lot. I look at him and feel more dismay than rage.

Tyrese Haliburton, the star point guard of the Indiana Pacers opposite Brunson in the Eastern Conference Finals, is both similarly and objectively a winner; he, too, is a fucking loser. His consistently improbable jump shot looks like one you’d chastise your child for not having fixed yet; he dresses like a Sonic The Hedgehog villain. To punctuate the biggest moment of his professional life, he reprised Reggie Miller’s iconic choking celebration by appearing to actually strangle himself—his was perhaps the first-ever on-court soyface in NBA history. Looking, as I often have, to the Western Conference in search of organically-farmed aura is similarly distressing. Anthony Edwards, perhaps the most authentically cool player in professional basketball, is pitted in an alternating series of humiliation rituals against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and his troupe of sycophantic court jesters, leaping in coordinated joy at his most anodyne post-game musings. For as long as I can remember, the NBA has served as a cultural North Star. These NBA playoffs portend a crisis of cool.

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Quickly—like stop reading this, grab your phone, and set a timer to ten seconds. Now: quickly, who is the coolest person in culture today?

If you thought of someone, good. Now, ask yourself: is this person “in culture,” or are they on my phone. Would my parents know who this person is? Would—say—my friends who aren’t addicted to their phones? If the answers are, “the latter, no, no,” then your answer does not count.

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I am wont to ascribe outsize importance to the nicotine delivery system du jour. Perhaps there is no significant cultural or political dimension to how, at any given moment, people get a buzz. Yet I can’t help but feel subjected, over the past few months, to an all-out assault of writing about Zyn. I have read, in Max Read’s instantly canonical terms, how shared Zyn addiction has come to group together the lamest young men on the internet. I have learned, per Carrie Battan’s incisive reporting, the irony of these attempts to code Zyn use as masculine. I have read about young men banding together on Reddit to quit Zyn. I have read these Reddit threads myself, because I have toyed with talking myself into these apparently harmless pouches to ease the moments during which life without nicotine starts to drag; I have come so far, at times, as to convince myself that the only thing to worry about with these pillows of nicotine salt are their aura, rather than health, ramifications. I have talked to friends who appear to be in Zyn’s vise grip—friends who would not be caught dead with the sort of people who tweet about dating in New York City from burner accounts. Zyn is in. Neither the perceived political or the real public health ramifications of this fact concern me. All I care about, for purposes of this blog, is what it means for the vibe.

Elf Bars and the End of Adulthood

Calling Zyn pouches “uncool” is a misdiagnosis not just of magnitudes but of kind. Zyn’s early American adopters were surely uncool, but the product itself is noteworthy precisely for its nothingness. In a moment where Instagram starter-pack-brain has convinced young phone users, consciously or otherwise, that they and the people around them are the sum of the objects they carry with or on them, Zyn stands as perhaps the first negative staple. Ignore, momentarily, the hockey puck-shaped container, the outline of which protruding through your pants immediately reduces you in my mind’s eye to one of my high school-aged cousins at Thanksgiving dinner. Consider the pouch.

Cigarettes are, regrettably, sexy. The twist of smoke, the alternatively sleek and threatening phallus…let’s not belabor it. That cigarettes look cool is a sort of universal truth; if it elides you, it won’t after two drinks. Vapes, in their assortment of shapes, sizes, colors, and flavorings, occupy a sort of spectrum of goofy, but goofy’s fine. Goofy, crucially, is something. The Zyn, once tossed into the mouth, disappears. There is no spit, no observable difference in the user, no activity. Literally nothing occurs. The Zyn is a sort of invisible IV drip eliciting in its users a functionally negligible buzz. From the standpoint both of experience and presentation, Zyn use ought form no closer fraternity among its users than their shared status as people who breathe air would.

Zyn is safe, if not in the FDA-approved sense. Virtually undetectable and in all likelihood healthier than other nicotine-delivery mechanisms (I don’t like talking about things so transactionally, but this warrants an exception), they transform an ostensible vice into an addiction divorced from its attendant risk. They represent a sea change: a nearly ubiquitous product that people expect, on some level, to be cool, but which by virtue of its safety—defined, of course, by its essential lack—ends up a sort of disturbing nothing. They remind me, in other words, of the current cohort of budding NBA superstars.

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I’ve joked with friends that the last decade of unsustainable, genetically-modified aura farming in the NBA has depleted the topsoil and established the preconditions for a swag dust bowl. The NBA’s crisis of cool concerns culture around it insofar as the NBA, more than anything else, is in the business of selling cool. All professional sports leagues exist to sell advertisements, but the NBA is itself a sort of advertisement for its aesthetics, personalities, and sneakers—if there’s an NBA deep state, the Nike headquarters is where they conspire. The league is, not coincidentally, the primary intermediary between many among its multiracial fanbase and Black American culture. It’s one thing if Patrick Mahomes is a dork; Jayson Tatum being lame is another question entirely.

That the budding faces of the league are profoundly uncool is relatively uncontroversial, notwithstanding Anthony Edwards as the exception that proves the rule. Jalen Brunson nods impishly as Josh Hart wins the internet; Tyrese Haliburton spits out strings of mimetic signifiers like a large language model trained on House of Highlights clips; Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drolls on as his Rosencrantz clip-farms with a Gatorade bottle; Donovan Mitchell’s messianic meat has been exposed as an exaggerated, angle-assisted bulge; Jayson Tatum’s Kobe Bryant cosplay led him to an achilles tear in a Day-Lewisian bit of method acting; Jalen Green is bad at basketball; Zion Williamson’s anime-inspired bellybutton tattoo is but a footnote in his series of aesthetic mishaps; for Ja Morant, I can only wish well. Around every corner, the European slob menace lurks with what a perceptive reader of the blog has aptly named “unconditioned Slavic indifference.” At the risk of sounding alarmist: the sky is falling.

The better, more elusive question: why? Here, it’s easy to lose touch. I write this less than 48 hours removed from Jay Williams publicly speculating that the drought in American-born MVPs owes to “cancel culture;” prognosticating about the ills plaguing the American basketball-development apparatus predisposes people to hysterics. And yet, a theory: the instant cohort of NBA stars-in-waiting exemplify the ways in which our intensely mediated, image-calculated cultural moment has substantially eliminated risk by purporting to have charted and documented all possible paths. In arguing that the current crop of corny heirs suck because they have expected stardom their entire lives, forcing them to approximate its trappings, the above-mentioned anonymous reader analogized to the way in which Charli XCX’s 360 video smacked of reverse-engineered downtown cool while (with Chloe Sevigny’s limited exception) lacking the authentic article. I’d suggest that contextualizing the NBA’s impending aura crisis requires us to train our attention on an adjacent Manhattan neighborhood.

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Cue this month’s government-mandated The Cut rage-bait, Brock Colyar’s “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl." (I joke—in truth, it has been too long since everybody read an article at once. I’m happy that The Cut is back.) By now, you’ve either read the piece, determined it was none of your business, or both. My standing to discuss the article is…attenuated…from New Jersey, have never lived in New York City, a guy, extremely limited disposable income (editors, I am available for freelance assignment; readers, you can give me some of your money if you’d like).

Still, the West Village Girl piece seems to fall on the interesting side of the eternal debate: is this a New York-specific trend piece, or a piece about a trend happening to manifest itself first in New York? Idea being: a bunch of young, ostensibly upwardly-mobile (ed note: this part isn’t true, family money greases the wheels for the young men and women alike in this neck of the woods, but we already knew that) women have descended upon the West Village in a uniform of white tees and light-washed jeans, toting matcha lattes by day and Aperol Spritz’s by golden hour. This annoys the older cohort of West Village residents committed to fetishizing the “weird, cool” neighborhood of their valiant first-wave gentrification push, who resent the girls for their apparent homogeneity; the girls, whose moodboards are more Sex and the City than Village People, don’t really give a fuck.

Here’s where the story gets interesting: Colyar, a reporter who has covered some unsavory young people in the past, resists the temptation to pen a hacky hit piece. Instead, they nestle into an understanding of being basic—of dissolving easily into, yes, a start pack—as something like ego death. Per one of the interviewees: “Basic isn’t a bad thing…there’s a reason everyone wants to be like that.” Elsewhere, being basic is presented as a sort of group safety mechanism. Colyar appears to see the same sort of beauty in the basic as someone else might in a flock of birds arrowing across the night sky; the birds in a v-formation aren’t being very unique or quirky, either. If anything, it’s the self-styled “cool” West Village residents in the piece who come across as grating, resenting their more homogenous successors for exposing the neighborhood’s fundamental lack of risk. I would be remiss, at this juncture, if I didn’t note that this basic ground zero is bordered in part by the newly christened “Jalen Brunson Boulevard” on 7th Avenue and West 11th Street and “Josh Hart Street” on 6th Ave and West 3rd.

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The average citizen—I, the girl reading this—has the right to be basic; as mentioned above, the rapidly expanding memetic universe of our phones threatens to sand off all behavior as basic to someone. If you want to begin so closely identifying with certain brands that they begin to constitute, well, your own brand, that is your god-given right. It’s nobody’s business. And yet still, basic needs lodestars as sheep need shepherds. The plague of basic, corny, uncool NBA superstars, then, suggests the impending collapse of aesthetic signifiers. The West Village girls have Carrie Bradshaw; young men have Jayson Tatum copying Kobe Bryant copying Michael Jordan, a swag Disintegration Loops. I’m kidding, sort of. I don’t actually think that Jalen Brunson’s hairline or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s mirror-rehearsed aura compilation-fodder are going to trigger the equivalent of the subprime mortgage crisis in American cool, that there’s going to be an “if we’re both here, who’s driving the car?” moment when we realize that the people meant to establish the terms of cool have grown up on the same slop bullshit as us, that the implosion of the symbolic order will plunge Americans into a swag Tower of Babel. It’s dissonant, is all—that at the most otherwise volatile moment of my life (geopolitically, economically, name it), risk has become so totally cleaved from the process of image-production. But no matter. The point I’m getting at is that the crop of NBA stars-in-making suggest the ongoing mass West Villagification and Zynning of culture, an aesthetic min-maxxing whereby identies are formed through the most legible, least risky behaviors. Like the girls, these stars are all knocking off the previous generation’s iconography that they learned from their phones; like the boys, these guys attempt futilely to excavate transgression from the utterly anodyne. The long arc of history bends toward basic.

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All that being said: on May 16, 2025, ten men escaped the overcrowded, hellish Orleans Justice Center. I do think that’s pretty cool.