iPod Nanos, Bay Area Olympic queen, and my favorite red dress ever!

iPods are back, Tide pods are out, and I’m sharing my red dress from the weekend that (respectfully) broke the internet.

Let’s get into it.

The iPod is back. I think I need one.

Picture this: no notifications, no doom scrolling, just you and 2,000 songs in your pocket. Sounds nostalgic, right? For Gen Zers who just discovered the iPod, a phone-less world is completely new territory, and they’re loving it: searches for the iPod Classic and Nano were up 25% and 20% respectively in 2025, and refurbished iPod sales have grown an average of 15.6% per year since the device was discontinued in 2022. The appeal is pretty straightforward: it plays music and does absolutely nothing else. For those who want to replicate the experience on their existing devices, downloads of Brick, which blocks apps (not sponsored!), were up 600% in January, year over year.

Tide just reinvented laundry detergent

Tide evo is a palm-sized, plain white tile that contains zero plastic or liquid, and looks (luckily) much less appetizing than its Tide Pod counterparts. They’re expensive—42 tiles are $19.99 on Amazon, compared to $12.97 for the same number of Pods—but Tide has pulled this move before. When they launched Pods in 2012 at a premium price point, they became a $2 billion annual business. The tiles are rolling out nationwide now, and P&G spent about a decade developing them, so they're clearly committed to the bit. Whether or not I’ll swap my Pods for a little white square remains to be seen, but I’m intrigued.

The U.S. women’s hockey team has been absolutely crushing; the guys owe an apology

Figure skater Alysa Liu just won two Olympic gold medals in Milan, and she did it with the kind of joy that makes you want to cry a little. The 20-year-old UCLA psychology student took gold in women's singles (the first American woman to do so in 24 years) and helped Team USA clinch gold in the team event. Her sixth-grade teacher from Oakland School for the Arts, Laurice Guerin, basically described the same kid you see on the ice today: smiley, composed, and hardworking. "Her joy is just so infectious," Guerin said. What makes this even better: Liu had retired from skating after the 2022 Olympics, enrolled at UCLA, and took nearly two years off from the sport entirely. She came back anyway, won the 2025 World Championships, and then went to Milan and made history. She skated her free program to Donna Summer, smiled through the whole thing, and posted the highest score of the night. I can feel the entire Bay Area beaming!

I want to clarify to any doubters: I do know the rule! Never wear red to a wedding unless the bride specifically asks for it! In this case, she did! Okay, glad we got that cleared up. I spent the weekend at a gorgeous wedding in Cabo drinking way too much tequila and taking wedding planning notes (obviously). Now I’m back, slightly sun-kissed, heavily sleep-deprived, and aimlessly tagging my hundreds of emails to categories but not actually responding to them.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimized by California weather. Is it raining? Yes. Is it sunny? Also yes. Is there wind? Of course. But somehow it’s still warm? Explain that. I’m trying to dress for all of that with classic jeans, easy flats, and a sleeveless turtleneck that’s thick enough to feel cozy when the clouds roll in, but doesn’t leave me overheating the second the sun inevitably shows up for all of nineteen minutes.

There is a very real chance you are paying for something right now that you completely forgot existed. A streaming service from a free trial you meant to cancel, an app you downloaded once for a trip, a "premium" subscription to something you used twice. It's probably not a ton of money, which is exactly why it never gets dealt with. It just leaves your account every month…and you promise yourself you’ll deal with it.

The fix takes one sitting and maybe 15 minutes.

Step one: download a free budgeting app or check your bank's built-in subscription tracker if it has one. Let it scan your transactions and just look at the list. You will almost certainly see something that makes you say "wait, what?"

Step two: cancel anything you don't actively look forward to using. Not "might use someday," not "it's only $7." Actually look forward to. The bar is higher than you think when you see it written out.

Step three: for anything you want to keep, set a recurring calendar reminder for one day before the renewal date. Future you can either consciously decide to keep it or cancel it before getting charged. Either way, it was a choice.

Getting rid of subscriptions you don’t use has a very real chance of making you $20-$50 richer per month, which…obviously that means you can spend more on clothes.

Thanks for reading!