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We asked scouts what they’re buying this season, from Kapital bandanas to a robot guinea pig.
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Diffraqtion just announced their $4.2M pre-seed round. They're using tech to rebuild the retina; it’s a programmable quantum lens that shapes light before the sensor.
Effects of Generative AI-Powered Venture Screening
a hybrid of LLM infrastructure and investor judgment is the way
Holiday Gift Guide: ADIN
We asked scouts what they’re buying this season, from Kapital bandanas to a robot guinea pig.
Optics as Compute: Why ADIN Backed Diffraqtion’s Quantum Camera
Diffraqtion just announced their $4.2M pre-seed round. They're using tech to rebuild the retina; it’s a programmable quantum lens that shapes light before the sensor.
Effects of Generative AI-Powered Venture Screening
a hybrid of LLM infrastructure and investor judgment is the way
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The girl next door is increasingly likely to be Wasian. Not in a "rising demographic curiosity" kind of way—in a "your neighbor, your coworker, your kid's pediatrician, the barista who remembers your order" kind of way. Somewhere between the 2020 Census reporting a 276% increase in multiracial Americans and the quiet realization that half the celebrities under 30 seem to share a certain phenotype, a demographic shift became impossible to ignore.
The pattern recognition kicked in slowly, then all at once. The look is hard to pin down but easy to recognize—some combination of features that reads as vaguely exotic but entirely familiar. American, but optimized.
Which brings us to Eileen Gu.
The freestyle skier captures something people had been thinking but hadn't quite articulated:
The tweet is tongue-in-cheek—the "longevity: 120-150 years projected" and "permanent underclass score" give it away—but it gestures at something real. What happens when you combine genetic diversity, first-generation immigrant drive, and American opportunity? You get Eileen Gu. You get a lot of people, actually.
Asian Americans have the highest intermarriage rates of any racial group in the United States. According to Pew Research, 29% of Asian newlyweds marry someone of a different race, with white Americans being the most common partner. Among U.S.-born Asians, that number jumps to 46%—nearly half.
The result shows up in the Census data. The multiracial population exploded from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020. Asian-white is the single largest multiracial combination in America, and it isn't particularly close. Nearly a third of people reporting two or more races are under 18.
The future isn't coming. It's already in high school.
The story of Asian-white America can be told in three laws and 55 years.
1945: The War Brides Act. GIs returning from the Pacific brought home Japanese, Korean, and Filipino wives. The National WWII Museum estimates over 60,000 women came to America through this provision. These were the first Asian-white families at any real scale—scattered across military towns and suburbs, their children growing up in an America that didn't quite have a category for them.
1965: The Hart-Celler Act. This one doesn't get the attention it deserves. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas that had effectively banned Asian immigration since 1924. The floodgates opened. What had been a trickle of war brides became a steady stream of immigrants, students, and professionals.
1967: Loving v. Virginia. Interracial marriage finally legal nationwide. (Yes, it took that long.)
2000: The Census lets you check multiple boxes. Wasians finally get counted.
Three laws, 55 years, and suddenly Asian-white families went from statistical anomaly to the most common mixed-race pairing in the country. The arithmetic wasn't complicated—high Asian outmarriage rates plus the sheer size of white America plus a few decades of compounding. The outcome was inevitable; only the timing was uncertain.
The receipts are everywhere, and they're almost boring in their ubiquity.
Musicians: Olivia Rodrigo (Filipino-German-Irish), Bruno Mars (Filipino-Puerto Rican-Jewish, raised in Hawaii's particular melting pot), Anderson .Paak (Korean-Black), H.E.R. (Filipino-Black), Jhené Aiko (Japanese-Black-white).
Actors: Keanu Reeves (Chinese-Hawaiian-white, the original), Henry Golding (Malaysian-British), Chloe Bennet (Chinese-white, born Chloe Wang), Charles Melton (Korean-white), Ross Butler (Malaysian-Dutch).
Athletes: This is where it gets interesting.
Alysa Liu became the youngest woman to win the U.S. Figure Skating Championships at 13. She's now a two-time Olympian, qualified for Milano Cortina 2026, and training at UCLA. Her father, Arthur Liu, is a Chinese immigrant; her mother is white. She was born in Oakland.
Eileen Gu was also born in California. Also to a Chinese mother and white father. Also a prodigy. She chose to compete for China at the 2022 Olympics, winning two golds and a silver, becoming the face of a geopolitical debate about loyalty and identity that she didn't ask for.
Two Chinese-American athletes, born in California, both prodigies, competing against each other under different flags. The discourse has been intense. But zoom out and the more interesting story is structural: America (and China) are now producing these hybrid talents regularly enough that they compete against each other. The pipeline is real.
The point isn't that these people are exceptional because they're Wasian. It's that they're exceptional and Wasian—and that's increasingly unremarkable. The default American is shifting. The girl next door looks like Devon Aoki, and nobody comments on it anymore because why would they?
Fashion has always been a leading indicator. The industry discovered decades ago that Wasian faces photograph extremely well—familiar enough to read as accessible, distinctive enough to stand out. Devon Aoki. Kimora Lee Simmons. More recently, the endless parade of half-Asian models booking campaigns that their monoracial peers can't quite land.
There's a cynical read here about beauty standards and marketability, and it's not entirely wrong. But there's also a simpler explanation: when you're drawing from a larger genetic pool, you occasionally hit combinations that are visually striking. This isn't eugenics; it's probability.
This isn't a "master race" argument, and anyone reading it that way has missed the point. Mixed doesn't mean better—it means different. A few honest notes:
The fetishization problem is real, and it runs both directions. Asian women have dealt with it for decades; Wasian women inherit a version of it.
"Not Asian enough, not white enough" is a genuine identity navigation for many. The algorithm might optimize for aesthetics, but it doesn't account for the experience of never quite fitting into either box at family gatherings.
Class matters enormously. Eileen Gu's Stanford-supermodel-Olympic-gold-trust-fund existence is not representative of anything except what happens when you combine genetic gifts with generational wealth and Tiger parenting. Most Wasians are just... people. Regular people with regular jobs and regular problems, who happen to check two boxes on the Census form.
Specific ethnicity matters too. Chinese-white, Japanese-white, Filipino-white, Korean-white—these are different communities with different histories and different cultural baggage. The "Wasian" umbrella is useful for demographic purposes but flattens a lot of variation.
But the demographic trend is the demographic trend. You can caveat it all you want, and the numbers still say the same thing.
In 50 years, "Wasian" might not be a category anyone thinks about—just absorbed into the American mainstream like Italian-Irish or German-Polish before it. The great-grandchildren of war brides will have married the great-grandchildren of other immigrants, and the whole taxonomy will seem as quaint as "WASP" does now.
But right now, in 2026, we're in the middle of the shift. You can see it in the demographics, in the culture, in the faces that populate screens and feeds and the actual physical spaces where Americans live their lives. The girl next door is Wasian.
The future is too.
The girl next door is increasingly likely to be Wasian. Not in a "rising demographic curiosity" kind of way—in a "your neighbor, your coworker, your kid's pediatrician, the barista who remembers your order" kind of way. Somewhere between the 2020 Census reporting a 276% increase in multiracial Americans and the quiet realization that half the celebrities under 30 seem to share a certain phenotype, a demographic shift became impossible to ignore.
The pattern recognition kicked in slowly, then all at once. The look is hard to pin down but easy to recognize—some combination of features that reads as vaguely exotic but entirely familiar. American, but optimized.
Which brings us to Eileen Gu.
The freestyle skier captures something people had been thinking but hadn't quite articulated:
The tweet is tongue-in-cheek—the "longevity: 120-150 years projected" and "permanent underclass score" give it away—but it gestures at something real. What happens when you combine genetic diversity, first-generation immigrant drive, and American opportunity? You get Eileen Gu. You get a lot of people, actually.
Asian Americans have the highest intermarriage rates of any racial group in the United States. According to Pew Research, 29% of Asian newlyweds marry someone of a different race, with white Americans being the most common partner. Among U.S.-born Asians, that number jumps to 46%—nearly half.
The result shows up in the Census data. The multiracial population exploded from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020. Asian-white is the single largest multiracial combination in America, and it isn't particularly close. Nearly a third of people reporting two or more races are under 18.
The future isn't coming. It's already in high school.
The story of Asian-white America can be told in three laws and 55 years.
1945: The War Brides Act. GIs returning from the Pacific brought home Japanese, Korean, and Filipino wives. The National WWII Museum estimates over 60,000 women came to America through this provision. These were the first Asian-white families at any real scale—scattered across military towns and suburbs, their children growing up in an America that didn't quite have a category for them.
1965: The Hart-Celler Act. This one doesn't get the attention it deserves. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas that had effectively banned Asian immigration since 1924. The floodgates opened. What had been a trickle of war brides became a steady stream of immigrants, students, and professionals.
1967: Loving v. Virginia. Interracial marriage finally legal nationwide. (Yes, it took that long.)
2000: The Census lets you check multiple boxes. Wasians finally get counted.
Three laws, 55 years, and suddenly Asian-white families went from statistical anomaly to the most common mixed-race pairing in the country. The arithmetic wasn't complicated—high Asian outmarriage rates plus the sheer size of white America plus a few decades of compounding. The outcome was inevitable; only the timing was uncertain.
The receipts are everywhere, and they're almost boring in their ubiquity.
Musicians: Olivia Rodrigo (Filipino-German-Irish), Bruno Mars (Filipino-Puerto Rican-Jewish, raised in Hawaii's particular melting pot), Anderson .Paak (Korean-Black), H.E.R. (Filipino-Black), Jhené Aiko (Japanese-Black-white).
Actors: Keanu Reeves (Chinese-Hawaiian-white, the original), Henry Golding (Malaysian-British), Chloe Bennet (Chinese-white, born Chloe Wang), Charles Melton (Korean-white), Ross Butler (Malaysian-Dutch).
Athletes: This is where it gets interesting.
Alysa Liu became the youngest woman to win the U.S. Figure Skating Championships at 13. She's now a two-time Olympian, qualified for Milano Cortina 2026, and training at UCLA. Her father, Arthur Liu, is a Chinese immigrant; her mother is white. She was born in Oakland.
Eileen Gu was also born in California. Also to a Chinese mother and white father. Also a prodigy. She chose to compete for China at the 2022 Olympics, winning two golds and a silver, becoming the face of a geopolitical debate about loyalty and identity that she didn't ask for.
Two Chinese-American athletes, born in California, both prodigies, competing against each other under different flags. The discourse has been intense. But zoom out and the more interesting story is structural: America (and China) are now producing these hybrid talents regularly enough that they compete against each other. The pipeline is real.
The point isn't that these people are exceptional because they're Wasian. It's that they're exceptional and Wasian—and that's increasingly unremarkable. The default American is shifting. The girl next door looks like Devon Aoki, and nobody comments on it anymore because why would they?
Fashion has always been a leading indicator. The industry discovered decades ago that Wasian faces photograph extremely well—familiar enough to read as accessible, distinctive enough to stand out. Devon Aoki. Kimora Lee Simmons. More recently, the endless parade of half-Asian models booking campaigns that their monoracial peers can't quite land.
There's a cynical read here about beauty standards and marketability, and it's not entirely wrong. But there's also a simpler explanation: when you're drawing from a larger genetic pool, you occasionally hit combinations that are visually striking. This isn't eugenics; it's probability.
This isn't a "master race" argument, and anyone reading it that way has missed the point. Mixed doesn't mean better—it means different. A few honest notes:
The fetishization problem is real, and it runs both directions. Asian women have dealt with it for decades; Wasian women inherit a version of it.
"Not Asian enough, not white enough" is a genuine identity navigation for many. The algorithm might optimize for aesthetics, but it doesn't account for the experience of never quite fitting into either box at family gatherings.
Class matters enormously. Eileen Gu's Stanford-supermodel-Olympic-gold-trust-fund existence is not representative of anything except what happens when you combine genetic gifts with generational wealth and Tiger parenting. Most Wasians are just... people. Regular people with regular jobs and regular problems, who happen to check two boxes on the Census form.
Specific ethnicity matters too. Chinese-white, Japanese-white, Filipino-white, Korean-white—these are different communities with different histories and different cultural baggage. The "Wasian" umbrella is useful for demographic purposes but flattens a lot of variation.
But the demographic trend is the demographic trend. You can caveat it all you want, and the numbers still say the same thing.
In 50 years, "Wasian" might not be a category anyone thinks about—just absorbed into the American mainstream like Italian-Irish or German-Polish before it. The great-grandchildren of war brides will have married the great-grandchildren of other immigrants, and the whole taxonomy will seem as quaint as "WASP" does now.
But right now, in 2026, we're in the middle of the shift. You can see it in the demographics, in the culture, in the faces that populate screens and feeds and the actual physical spaces where Americans live their lives. The girl next door is Wasian.
The future is too.
the girl next door is increasingly wasian. wrote about the multiracial shift behind it — and the eileen gu moment https://paragraph.com/@adin/welcome-to-the-united-states-of-wasia-is-the-future-wasian?referrer=0xBFD1EaFD71A770D640Ec3B4cEb0AE0AbF9D22faa
1 comment
the girl next door is increasingly wasian. wrote about the multiracial shift behind it — and the eileen gu moment https://paragraph.com/@adin/welcome-to-the-united-states-of-wasia-is-the-future-wasian?referrer=0xBFD1EaFD71A770D640Ec3B4cEb0AE0AbF9D22faa