[SIC] 319: Atypical Omelette

Volume 7, Number 9: [SIC] Talks 87 with Jesse Kirshbaum, my appearance on That Business of Meaning, slightly less links than normal and a lot of good recommendations.

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Hi all.

It’s Halloween and kids are (no exaggeration) banging on the door demanding candy so… short intro this week.

A little bonus content to start: my appearance on “That Business of Meaning”, the podcast Peter Spear hosts. It’s a good one. Listening back I think I might have just finished a workout or something - I sound a little breathless (and I managed to conflate “East” for “West” when it came to Syracuse’s location compared to the Great Lakes and to get the length of time the Dietz Company was in Syracuse (100 years, not 150) - but otherwise, a great chat. Hope you’ll listen if you have an hour. Feel free: Ben Dietz on Brand & Superformats

Ben Dietz on Brand & Superformats

And now… the links…

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[SIC] 319: Atypical Omelette

Fits and Starts

• Are Young Men Really Going to Vote for Donald Trump? Regardless of the election’s outcome, the trajectories of young men and women appear less aligned than perhaps they have ever been. The political consequences of this growing divergence will be immediate, but the societal repercussions may be felt for years / American Survey Center

• Are Americans Lying to the Pollsters?  Are people shading the truth or lying outright when they answer pollsters’ questions about politics — if they talk to them at all? / Forbes

• A Ph.D. student accidentally found a lost Maya city in a Mexican jungle, including pyramids and amphitheaters, the BBC reports / BBC

• Is aspirational luxury back in China? / Jing Daily

• More Teen Girls Smoke Pot than boys now / Quartz

• ‘PDF to Brainrot’  takes complex documents and recreates them in Gen Z/A vernacular /

• Why Is Horror So Popular Right Now? /

• This clip is the perfect time capsule of culture in the 00s /

TLDR

• The X algorithm feeds users political content — whether they want it or not / WSJ

• And An AI Travel Influencer Named Emma Is the New Face of German Tourism. Real Travel Influencers Are Livid. /

• Future Burnout: On the False Promises & Expectations of What Comes "Next" / Zine

• The banality of online recommendation culture / The New Yorker

• Why is ‘America’ Cool Again? Mina Le Investigates

• Benjamin Button’s clues for the US economy. Conditions are reverting to a time of solid, sustainable growth / FT

• Bezos endorsed a Trump-era slogan—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—for his newspaper, the Washington Post. Why wouldn’t he let it endorse a candidate? / The New Yorker

• Total meltdown: An astonishing 200,000 subscribers have canceled The Washington Post since Jeff Bezos blocked a Kamala Harris endorsement / NPR

• The Washington Post’s non-endorsement led to record-breaking weeks at other news orgs. The Philadelphia Inquirer had its best week for new subscriptions ever and The Guardian U.S. broke its single-day fundraising record — twice/ Nieman Lab

• Jeff Bezos should donate the Washington Post to a charity / CJR

• The Battle for Countrypolitan America / The Atlantic

• Historian Simon Schama wants to make truth sexy again / FT

• Could Steampunk Save Us? It’s fascinating to imagine, implausibly, how ravishing technology could be constructed out of yesterday’s parts.” But can steampunk also teach us how to live now?/ The New Yorker

• similarly a wave of social media creators invested in grave cleaning, providing content for an audience sometimes referred to as “GraveTok?” / NYT

• Johannesburg is South Africa’s largest (and Africa’s richest) city. In recent years the city’s image has been one of dysfunction. Can Africa’s richest city function again? / Monocle

SIC Talks: Jesse Kirshbaum

Since I’m dispensing with the intro this week… Jesse and I explain how we know each other and you just have to watch to get the details. Listen along as you multitask. It’s a fun one.

Things we referred to:

• Print magazines are having a (limited) revival in 2024 among high-end readers  / Bloomberg

• Tyler, the Creator released Chromakopia / PItchfork

• And on TikTok, fans are sharing their life phases set to Tyler’s album drops / Tiktok

• Be Like Water. We’ve seen how malleable the boundary between an idea and a product is. How a thing that’s barely a thing can become a low production cost, high margin thing / NEMESIS

• Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump: ‘Fandom has toxified the world’ Enthusiasm can be a productive force for good, but our culture has rapidly become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in / The Guardian

Other Conversations

• The Future of Everything explores how ping-pong star Ni Xia Lian, an Olympian at 61-years-old, has been able to play sports professionally for so long / The Future of Everything

• Perfectly Imperfect: Olivia Rodrigo / Perfectly Imperfect

• 10 years after Serial: Nieman Lab looks at crime news now / Nieman Lab

• Hayley Williams Interviews Elke, Her "Favorite Artist" / Nylon

• Jeremy O. Harris interviewed Paul Schrader/ Interview

• There's a universe in your phone & a universe in a tree. Big Spyplane interviews Amine / Blackbird Spyplane

• A new MF Doom bio takes a peek behind the mask. Journalist and hip-hop historian S.H. Fernando chronicles DOOM’s rise from 90’s b-boy to influential underground rap artist / BK Mag

• Chatting with Malcolm Crews. Malcolm talks about his family’s artistic legacy, lunchbox notes, learning Illustrator in 1992, and a serendipitous elevator encounter / Blood & Champagne

• Jonathan Lethem on Novel Writing as a Memory Art / The Slowdown Pod

• Why isn’t anyone covering this? Semafor’s Max Tani on a common Twitter gripe / Embedded

• ARTIN CONVERSATION: BRUCE NAUMAN with Michael Auping / The Brooklyn Rail

Style

• Tapestry-Capri merger blocked: Why it matters / Vogue Business

• Can the Row Keep Its Cool? / NYT

• R U A Big Logo Boy? And what that might say about you / The Melt

• We’re in the Golden Age of Garbage Clothing. Pilling sweaters, stretched‐out socks, flimsy denim. What happened to good garments? / The Walrus

• Denim meets decarbonization: Levi’s unveils first climate transition plan / ESG Dive

• Why Is Vintage Clothing So Popular? Menswear Expert Aaron Levine Answers /Sharp Magazine

• How Steve McQueen Became Hollywood’s Favorite Artist / Vanity Fair

• World Series Merch Hits Record Highs Despite Dominant Dodgers / Front Office Sports

• Tunnel Fits have lost their way / GQ

• Boys of Fatith. Zach Bryan’s risen to the top of the contemporary country renaissance. His buddy Louie Nice is close behind with a camera / Creem

• German fashion label A Kind of Guise released A Kind of Wine, “a sparkling Rosé crafted in collaboration with Pranzegg, a biodynamic winery nestled in the heart of South Tyrol, Italy.” / A Kind of Guise

• Birkenstock and Filson come together to create three different styles; two boots and a moccasin / Birkenstock

• though the new Birkenstock x Union “Bimshire” is more my vibe / Union LA

• Vans Parent VF Corp Swings to Profit, Beats Sales Estimates / BoF

• The Private Train Car Edition. On hitching your luxury shuttle to an Amtrak, codependency, and industrial barons / WITI

• How ‘Britishcore’ cracked China. But can UK brands authentically leverage tradition and British-inspired trends to build clout in China without slipping into gimmickry? / Jing Daily

• When Scandinavia Was a Hotbed of Black American Culture / Hyperallergic

Screen Time

• Condé Nast Responds To Media Upheaval By Looking To The Screen / Deadline

• How brands can navigate the murky world of online streaming / Vogue Business

• Thirty Years Later, ‘Pulp Fiction’ Still Searches for the Good. There’s more to Quentin Tarantino’s classic than senseless violence / The Dispatch

• MomTok Is the Apotheosis of 21st-Century Womanhood. On reality TV, motherhood is turning into a jumble of feminist ideals and branded domesticity / The Atlantic

• One phenomenon dominating screens right now is the “squish effect,” an uncanny visual trick made popular by Pika AI’s image manipulation tool. Its eerily bizarre results have caught the attention of brands / Jing Daily

• In other news, Puma is wagering on the power of virtual influencers in its latest tech move, debuting virtual influencer, Laila / Jing Daily

• Universal Music Group struck a strategic deal with “ethical media AI music company,” Klay Vision / Hollywood Reporter

• Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck. Inside Hollywood’s Great Malaise / The Hollywood Reporter

• What it was like to write for Eddie Murphy on SNL / Cracked

The Marketplace’

• McKinsey does some useful head-scratching around the next big areas of competition / McKinsey

• Miu Miu sales spike 105% as Prada Group bucks slowdown / Vogue Business

• Two years post acquisition, and X's relationship with advertisers has never been more complex / Digiday

• Harris, Trump recognize power of creators as agencies advise pausing content as election nears / Digiday

• Moncler champions Chinese artist Lulu Li / Jing Daily

• Adidas is trying to wind down its remaining €50 million ($54 million) of its long-dead collaboration with Ye by the end of the year — at cost / Quartz

• Two Gen Z founders want to change the OOH ad marketplace for their generation. Old-school marketing tactics on coffee cups and pizza boxes: what a new ad marketplace for on-product campaigns is all about / Digiday

• Over Half of WNBA Coaches Have Been Fired. What’s Happening? / Front Office Sports

• New Dwyane Wade Statue Looks Like Anyone Except Dwyane Wade. Memes draw comparisons to The Matrix, Kelsey Grammer, and seemingly everyone except Miami Heat’s star player / Hyperallergic

• The arts fund at Chanel is one of the more interesting ways a fashion brand has attempted to infiltrate the culture / WWD

Sustenance

• The largest ocean predation event ever observed saw 10 million fish eaten within a few hours off the coast of Norway. The shoal of capelin, small anchovy-like fish, was tracked with sonar as they came into contact with a group of Atlantic cod, their primary predator / Semafor

• Animals consume more alcohol than previously believed. Researchers found that ethanol occurs naturally, via fermented fruit, in almost every ecosystem, and that a wide range of animals ingest it / Semafor

• The Rules of Pre-Modern Medicine for Modern Health / The Lindy Newsletter

Playlist

• The track that caused so much dance-floor chaos it got banned / BBC

• Listen to a newly discovered Chopin waltz / NYT

Wisdom of the Crowds

From Jeff Carvalho:

• 7-Eleven to open 500 food-focused stores by 2027 / Restaurant Business Online

From PIers Fawkes:

• Robert Downey Jr. Will Sue From the Grave if Hollywood Ever Recreates His Likeness With AI / Gizmodo

• And slightly left field but we all want to know about sports snacks Why Are Baseball Players Always Eating / the Atlantic

From Mark Fleming:

• I hope you are well, not sure if you follow Tetragrammaton Did you listen Jim Morrison conversation?, if so this one’s next level, Rick chatting with Alfred Hitchcock and sharing insights into his iconic approach to tension, creativity, and the magic behind Psycho and Rear Window. An interesting new take on podcasts, maybe a whole new genre / Spotify

• If you’re up for more inspiration, check out the Inspiration section on our Substack, plenty in there you might find interesting and would love any feedback / Unorthodox Blend

• [And] Wanted to share this digital version of OG11—thought you might like it / The OG

From Kate Lee:

A couple of Every stories for you this week:

• Why startups should aim to disrupt a category rather than create a new one (and how AI makes that easier)

• Why building in AI is totally different than making conventional software (because of the feasibility risk)

• How Union Square Ventures uses AI to capture and synthesize the firm's collective wisdom

Hope you enjoy!

From Iolanda Carvalho:

• Real business / Forbes

• Calendar shifts 😉/ WARC

• "Netflix has this week launched Moments, a new feature for its mobile app that allows users to save and share clips of scenes from shows and films on the streaming service" / Thompson Reuters

From Celeste:

• 'The Taylor Swift Of Classical Music' The evolution of a classical music pop star, how fun to read this trajectory from classical musician to TikTok sensation of classical music / Tatler

• 'Cornwall's Sleeping Beauty: The Tale Of Heligan's Lost Gardens' I listened to SIr Tim Smit (rediscovered these gardens- on Desert Islands Discs another 20 yr old episode) and was intrigued by the gardens left to grow over in 1914 when war was yet not only this, the stories of The Lost Garden of Heligan, the magic, the mystery and the stories of land and gardens that had been in a family for over 400 years. I went down the rabbit hole of The Lost Gardens Of Heligans and found this piece from 2022 fascinating. / The Guardian

• Tina Brown (Desert Island Discs 2000) What an effervescent conversation between Sue Lawley and Tina Brown, it could have been recorded last week, Tina's recognition of events, storylines, magazines and publishing is full of vim and vigour. A pleasure to listen to and interesting to step back in time, 24 years since it was recorded. Still extremely current from many perspectives, yet much has changed / BBC

• The Wallenbergs Start Succession To Sixth Generation. Contrary to the tv series Succession, the Wallnebergs appear to have succession planning for their multi million dollar family companies under control. The sensibilities, the structure and this family, as one of Europe's leading families of industrialists, but as the article states, you won't see this family in the big lists of millionaires and billionaires. / FT

[SIC] 319: Atypical Omelette