My pregnant bestie is a famous athlete, "looksmaxxing" is a word in the dictionary, and it's Q3 review time

Most people work on Sundays, Amazon and Meta are in a fight, it’s summer in San Francisco, and my suede boots are on sale

Let's get into it.

Amazon banned Meta’s new AI shopping bot within a week of it launching

Amazon and Meta's new AI agent Muse are officially beefing. Amazon shut Muse out of its site entirely this week, saying nobody at Meta asked permission before letting the bot loose to browse, and calling it a legitimate security and privacy risk. Which is a little funny given that when Meta rolled Muse out last week, the whole pitch was how safe it is, including a direct promise that it can't see your passwords or payment info. This isn't even Amazon's first AI bouncer moment: it sued Perplexity's Comet assistant last year for basically the same reason, and even though a court sided with Perplexity in August, that case is still tangled up over what these bots are legally allowed to do.

The four-day workweek was fake all along (we knew this)

Turns out the four-day workweek never actually happened, work just spread out to fill six days instead. A new report found 74% of people are working on a typical Sunday, and nearly half admit they pick their in-office days strategically just to be seen by leadership, aka a "billboard day." More than half say they've adopted "career minimalism," which is corporate for "I've stopped trying to get promoted and I'm at peace with it," and 38% are "job hugging," staying in roles they've outgrown because the market feels too scary to leave. Technically employed, fully exhausted. Relatable!!

Merriam-Webster added 1,395 new words this year

That’s way more than the roughly 1,000 they typically add in a given year, so either the internet is moving faster than usual or we're all just talking more nonsense than usual. The new class includes "looksmaxxing," "Sunday scaries," "cuffing season," and "crashout," alongside more normal-person terms like "Mandela Effect" and "superfood." Tech got its own haul too: "vibe coding," "uncanny valley," and "AGI" all made it in, and "compute" officially got recognized as a noun. The one thing people are less thrilled about getting canonized: a new survey found 61% of Americans don't think slang like "6-7," "skibidi," or getting Rickrolled deserves a dictionary entry, which tracks….nobody wants that.

Victoria got inducted into our high school’s Athletic Hall of Fame on Saturday! If you want a good cry, I recommend watching your now-pregnant best friend walk across the gym floor where you played volleyball together at fifteen to accept an award.

September is summer in San Francisco, but I don’t have the patience to wait any longer before bringing out my favorite suede boots. Did I sweat through this outfit while commuting to work? Absolutely! Did I get a (hot) PSL anyway? You know it! These Tony Bianco boots are almost sold out, but for my size 8 friends, a few pairs are left on major sale!

Oh perfect! Q3 wraps in about a week, which means performance review season is about to sneak up on everyone! How does this always happen??

Make sure you’re prepared for when your boss asks what you accomplished this quarter. Open a new doc right now and title it "Q3 Brag Sheet," then spend ten minutes listing every project, deck, deal, or fire you personally handled this quarter, with a number or example attached wherever you can find one (dollars, percentages, hours saved, whatever counts).

Do it now, while you still remember what happened in July, because you will not remember it come your actual review. If you have a check-in with your manager before the quarter officially closes, send them the highlights in a two-line email so the wins are on record before review season even starts.

Thanks for reading!