Charlie Warzel

My name is Charlie Worzel, and I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of its podcast, Galaxy Brain.

Oh, great question.

The question of our age, really.

Let's see.

Clavicular is a young man.

He's in his 20s.

What up, Jack?

He started posting on the internet as a teenager around when he was about 15 years old on these looks maxing forums, which are forums that are dedicated to making yourself as aesthetically perfect as humanly possible body modification.

And so he started posting there.

His real name's Braden.

And he basically toiled in obscurity for a really long time until he allegedly hit someone with his Cybertruck while he was livestreaming on Christmas Eve of this past year.

The Luxemaxers are complicated because they are in an overlap

with lots of other communities online, right?

There's the involuntarily celibate community known as incels, right?

That have links to violent extremism.

But really there's this core feeling in looks maxing that the only thing that matters in all of life is how good you look.

That that is tied to your self-worth in every way and that what you should be doing

is trying by all means necessary, whether that is breaking bones in your body, whether that is chewing on a rubber ball for hours a day to get your jawline to be straighter, whether that's steroids or drugs or anything to get a leg up, you need to do that because the best thing that you can do is go out in the world

and look better than everyone else and document the heck out of it.

Well, we only know what he tells us, right?