Maybe Brat Summer is what a lot of us need right now

Wasn’t it amazing that Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” was able to put a feminist spin on aggressive pink? Well here we are in the summer of 2024 and slime green has taken its place. Brat summer is here and it seems to have taken over the meme-osphere.

OK, I’ll admit it, I had to have it explained to me

So there I was on July 19, getting ready for a beach-week raid at Costco with our son and his wife, then heading to Boston to speak for the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy on the 21. That talk was on the morning of the 21 and I spent much of the rest of the day battling the logistics of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (summer weather has not been kind) and making it out to Long Beach Island.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, the world changed — Joe Biden ended his campaign, Kamala Harris picked up a lot of support and suddenly everybody was talking about “Brat Summer.” By the time our week at the beach was over last Sunday, slime green had taken over the style section of the New York Times, the Today Show declared lime green to be the color of the season and an English singer-songwriter named Charli XCX was taking the world by storm.

It turns out I wasn’t alone in not knowing quite what was going on. On July 22, none other than Rachel Maddow…