• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, 3 hours ago

We were promised a song of the summer. Instead, we got brain rot summer — a handful of TikTok earworms, Coldplaygate chatter, and not much else. The monoculture, already limping, flatlined in 2025.

But culture doesn’t vanish when the monoculture dies. It migrates. This year, it migrated to a summer mainstay — Torch & Crown Brewery in Union Square — where the hot literati gathered not to read in hushed tones, but to shout over bingo cards. Writer Hailey Colborn was host. P&T Knitwear, the Lower East Side bookstore that has quietly become the city’s most generous patron of word-nerd gatherings, stocked the tables with books, donated prizes that became trophies for the night’s winners, and reminded everyone that bookstores still matter.

Forget prestige panels, forget chin-stroking Q&As. This was literature reimagined as a drinking game. The squares were a map of our collective readerly sins and quirks. Someone instantly called, “I’ve cried reading a book.” Another claimed, “I prefer audiobooks,” and the room let out the half-serious groan of print purists. Laughter spread when someone sheepishly admitted, “Still haven’t finished ‘The Goldfinch.’” That one was practically a group square — no one had.

The rhythm of the night built in confessions. “Said, ‘I’ll just read one more chapter’ at 1 a.m.” Groans all around. “Dog-eared pages instead of using a bookmark” provoked an impromptu debate between the preservationists and the vandals. When the card asked, “Used a receipt as a bookmark,” people started producing CVS stubs like proof in a trial.

By the time someone yelled, “Bingo!,” the room had tipped from literary salon into full-on comedy show.

That’s the point: the game wasn’t about books as objects of reverence. It was about books as excuses for laughter. Nobody was performing erudition. They were admitting they own books they’ve never opened, that they cast the movie adaptation in their head before finishing the first chapter. These weren’t guilty secrets. They were badges of belonging.

Meanwhile, outside the walls of Torch & Crown, BookTok has been rewriting publishing economics. Tens of billions of views turn paperbacks into chart-toppers. Bookstores slap “as seen on TikTok” stickers on front tables. Romance and fantasy dominate. Every so often, an older novel gets resurrected for a second life — “The Secret History,” “The Bell Jar,” a carousel of rediscoveries. It’s MTV in the eighties, except Madonna’s been replaced by Colleen Hoover.

But TikTok doesn’t sound like what we experienced during Book Bingo. It can make a book famous, but it can’t replicate the roar of a crowd when someone admits they’ve read while walking and actually smacked into a pole.

And here’s the kicker: Bingo wasn’t the only analog trend to break through this summer. Just ask Martha Stewart.

Yes, it was also the Martha Stewart summer. Pinterest searches for her aesthetic spiked, and TikTok made it viral. Suddenly, Stewart’s lavender-scented gardens and rustic tablescapes were back in the zeitgeist. Stewart stood for intentional comfort, for curated domesticity, for the fantasy that somewhere out there you could be both organized and serene.

The irony is almost too rich: once derided as overly polished, Stewart now reads as authentic compared to AI influencers and churn-and-burn trends. While the internet spun itself into brain rot, Stewart was quietly offering a lavender-soaked exit ramp.

Which is why it all fits together: the bingo at Torch & Crown, the BookTok explosion, the Stewart revival. They’re different expressions of the same hunger: for something grounding, tactile, communal. Books instead of memes.

So what will we remember about this summer? Probably not a song. Probably not a viral meme. We’ll remember fragments: the declaration of brain rot, the dominance of BookTok, the Stewart aesthetic taking over Pinterest boards, the hot literati crammed into a brewery shouting about bookmarks and banned books — and yes, the bookstore that showed up with an armload of prizes because it still believes in the party of reading.

Because even if the monoculture is gone, there’s still culture. And sometimes it shows up not as a hit single, but as a bingo square asking if you’ve ever lied about finishing “War and Peace.”

Here’s a scene from Hot Summer Bingo: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZNydidRUk8w