Put On Your Jeans and Get In My Ice Bath

We have a lot to discuss.

Feb 23, 2026

Hi friends!

We now know that every generation gets the IKEA monkey it deserves.

In 2012, it was Darwin, a Japanese macaque wearing a shearling coat. Darwin was just a seven-month-old baby when spotted in the parking lot of an IKEA in Toronto. Those were simpler internet times, and from a few photos and a hashtag, Twitter parody accounts appeared, and a star was born. This “stylish yet illegal monkey,” as anointed by The Globe and Mail, became an instant meme and a global media darling. Trapped in a vestibule, gazing through a glass door in his most enduring image, he looked like a scared little kid waiting for his mom to pick him up from school.

Darwin had an overbearing mother he was indeed looking for, a lawyer named Yasmin Nakhuda. “I had no choice but to carry Darwin everywhere I went,” she told Mental Floss in 2017. “He would have anxiety fits if I kept him away from me.” That fateful day, Nakhuda, who previously tried to shop with him at IKEA and was asked to leave her monkey elsewhere, left Darwin in her car. He escaped his enclosure, unlocked the car door, and was eventually apprehended by animal services, but not before showing off his fabulous outerwear. His mother signed away her rights and then spent the next several years trying to win custody back.

Yasmin Nakhuda was a stage mom. She started a YouTube channel for Darwin and bought him a wardrobe that extended beyond tiny shearling coats. Right before Christmas in 2012, when Nakhuda and her husband, Sam, were denied the return of their monkey in court, it was noted that his Santa suit and New Year’s bowtie would go unworn. “Darwin is not a dog,” Sam said outside the courthouse in a plea to bring him home for Christmas. “He’s not a cat, he’s not a lizard. He’s 93 percent human DNA.”

Darwin never went home with the Nakhudas again. He moved to Stony Brook Farm, a primate sanctuary about an hour outside of Toronto, and on the tenth anniversary of his rise to fame, the sanctuary’s executive director told Buzzfeed that he’s doing well and is “allowed to behave like a monkey as opposed to a human baby.”

Forced to go no contact with Nakhuda, he healed from the early relational trauma of being snatched from his birth mother’s bosom and sold to a crazy lady. He now thrives alongside his very best friend, another monkey at the sanctuary named Maximus.

2026 has presented a second IKEA monkey, and his name is Punch. Like Darwin, Punch is a baby Japanese macaque with mommy issues. He was born just outside of Tokyo, at Ichikawa City Zoo, during a heatwave this past July, and immediately abandoned by his mother. In an attempt to soothe him and help him gain strength, his human caretakers gave him a stuffed orangutan from IKEA.

At the beginning of this year, Punch left the care of humans and joined the zoo’s “Monkey Mountain.” It was a brutal transition for the little guy. Without his mama to show him the ropes, he struggled to navigate the hierarchy of macaque social life. Viral videos show him searching for love from older monkeys, only to be swatted away or ignored. No real monkey love on offer, he clings to his stuffed orangutan and drags it with him everywhere he goes.

In one clip, he is attacked by the older monkeys when he attempts to socialize, and returns to his stuffed companion, hugging it with all his might. In another, he folds his tiny body into a cinderblock for protection and tries to pull the stuffed toy in behind him.

Unlike Darwin, who had his big day out and vanished from the spotlight to rehabilitate, Punch lives in a surveillance state. People flock to record him in his enclosure. Millions more are watching his every move from afar, emoting so deeply that the zoo put out a statement last week encouraging the extremely online community to focus on his progress and “support Punch’s efforts rather than feel sorry for him.” Good luck with that! Punch is a captive primate, abandoned by the natural order, left with only a lifeless simulacrum of connection. To people on their phones, he is relatable content. The reaction to his search for acceptance reveals an essential but buried truth — we’re all lonely monkeys aching to be loved and chosen. Most are just unwilling to admit it so openly until the internet serves up the right animal on which to project our collective baggage.

And this time around, because in the Age of Unhingement™ brands can’t let the broken masses get weird about anthropomorphizing a monkey without “joining the conversation,” IKEA jumped in with an Instagram post, captioned “We're ALL Punch's family now,” advertising Punch’s stuffed orangutan, which has since sold out. Prices are now soaring on the resale market.

you know someone at an agency called this a “huge win.”

The male unwellness epidemic is very loud and The New York Times is living.

I’m not reading about “Clavicular,” and an onslaught of profiles can’t make me, but here’s what I gleaned against my will: He exists and I can’t with it. I must now sanity mog1 the discourse.

The same goes for Jay Shetty, who, for reasons unknown to me, keeps getting attention. I guess a fake monk best known for befriending celebrities, clout chasing, and his smoldering gaze is the person to follow during the fall of Western manhood.

The star of the show, though, is obviously RFK Jr., who invited Kid Rock over to create a PSA that I’m sorry to say isn’t mere content but remarkable fine art. Loop it in the atrium at MoMA.

This is the aspirational “wellness” I’m looking for. Some women spend their life savings on high-tech forms of collagen-building self-flagellation, starve themselves back to their birth weight (vital muscle mass be damned), and remain terrifically smug about the whole ordeal, but I want to pump iron in jeans, ride a stationary bike in a sauna, and then get in my grotto, still wearing the jeans, like a leathery, lawless psycho.

My one and only note:

Suggesting that good health comes from a glass of whole milk gulped down in a jacuzzi is anti-Semitic propaganda.

If I could travel back in time and change the course of history, I would go to Germany, but I wouldn’t off Hitler; I’d land roughly 500 years earlier, seduce Johannes Gutenberg, and convince him to abort the printing press. That might be our best hope to fix the information situation we find ourselves in.

I don’t want to know about Polymarket. The only prediction market I crave info on is why my tarot cards have revealed the Two of Cups, the Lovers, and the Four of Wands over and over again for the past year. In Punch’s loveless economy, what’s their incentive to play me like that? I must investigate what’s in it for them. Journalism is better when it’s backed by my tarot cards.

I do, however, want to know that the palace staff had a nickname for the degenerate formerly known as “Prince Andrew” and that his nickname was “The Cunt.” I squealed a little squeal of delight when I received that tidbit from the algo.

Do I want to know if Trump really called into C-SPAN under a pseudonym to talk shit about Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries? Maybe! But they already said it wasn’t him, so I guess I’ll reserve the space for whatever he deigns to pollute my brain with on Tuesday night.

This battle — between knowing and not knowing, staying sane with strong informational boundaries or bingeing at a buffet of horrendous content — is one of the greatest we face as aching monkeys in this unhinged age.

It’s something that I think about a lot and have for many years.

This past summer, when BIAD BFF Amy Taylor was working on the latest issue of Nectarine Magazine and asked if I wanted to contribute, I was in the thick of working on a book proposal and writing about this very subject.

The theme of the issue is PERSPECTIVE — something we can all use more of — and this poem is my contribution:

Had I written poetry since I was a teenager? Absolutely not. But when I heard the theme, I immediately knew I wanted to write a reverse poem and it’s fun to just do shit.

You can buy your copy of Nectarine Magazine here! Look at the gorgeous cover:

Until next time, my loves! Know things, or don’t. And feel free to weigh in on which path you think is better.

Burn It All Down

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