Friday is a media brand for progressive millennials and Gen Zers. Full disclosure, we probably spend a shocking amount of time thinking about celebrity gossip, trending TV shows and who said what on Instagram. But there’s a good reason for all that pop culture consumption: We believe that they matter.

It might seem like a strange time to focus on pop culture; hate crimes and income inequality are on the rise, reproductive freedom is under attack and the world is quite literally on fire. And all of those things deserve our attention, but so do our stories. The shows and movies we watch, songs that go viral, authors we idolize, internet memes that take hold despite language or geographic borders, celebrities we follow, both literally and figuratively—they all say something important about the world we live in, the beliefs we hold and what we value, or don’t.

As Canadian gossip maven Lainey Lui explained in a 2018 Washington Post article, “the conversation about celebrity gossip is a conversation about ourselves, not about the subject… It’s an illumination about who we are and what we believe in.”

And what’s more important than that?

 

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Who We Are

Stacy Lee Kong, founder & editor

Stacy is a writer and editor in Toronto. She has worked as an editor at some of Canada's largest publications, including Flare, Chatelaine and Canadian Living, and has written for outlets including Maclean's, Reader's Digest and The Globe & Mail. She thinks everything is political, and will happily spend hours deconstructing the week’s biggest entertainment stories… like, in our weekly newsletter, for example.

Nhi Tran, art director

Nhi is a multidisciplinary creative working in Toronto designing moments of joy in branding, packaging, print and animation.

ruth young, assistant editor

Ruth is a student in her final year of the journalism program at Toronto Metropolitan University. She has written for T Dot and Friday Things and loves to find the connections between the pop culture we consume and our daily lives. She can often be found three levels deep in a Wikipedia rabbit hole learning about nothing really in particular. (Did you know that nobody really knows where eels come from?)