Welcome to the Millennial Midlife Crisis

When I was 10, I thought my father had lost it and that he and my mother were going to break up. He came home to our tiny apartment in the wilds of Toronto’s suburbs one random Sunday morning with a head of newly permed, newly blond hair. To make matters worse, he was wearing a buttery green leather jacket that obviously cost an insane amount of money that we absolutely did not have. Before I even saw him, I heard my mother calling out in a panicked voice, repeating the phrase “Is this real?” over and over again. When he finally came into my room, I felt genuine fear. Have you ever seen a brown man with blond, curly hair? As my mother put it later that evening when she’d stopped shrieking, “It’s not right; it shouldn’t be real.”

Melinda French Gates shared her post–Gates Foundation plans, and they include putting $1 billion toward women and families, as well as toward reproductive rights in the U.S. A BBC investigation revealed that perfume ingredients used by two major beauty companies are linked to child labor. “Effortless” style is usually anything but. Yesterday, a bunch of people fell down a hill in pursuit of cheese, in keeping with a longstanding English tradition. GQ makes the case that the era of merch is over. And happy sundress season, whatever that means to you.

Sign up to get Brooding, a subscriber-only newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.