[SIC] 196: The Boulder in the Pool

Volume 4, Number 40

Jun 10, 2022

Paid subscribers now get an additional [SIC] Sundays newsletter. And founding supporters get invited to a series of dinners at my house in NYC.

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Apologies for the late send, all. I’m traveling back to NY from the West Coast as I write, and plane-ternet is not cooperating, so this will fire off when I hit the ground.

Veteran readers of the newsletter (and paying subs) will recall that I sometimes employee a free-association style of organization for the links, rather than categories. Given that my experiment last week with exceeding the “too-long-for-email” limit not only didn’t hurt consumption, but increased opens by 10%+, I’m trying out that alternate style here, going over the size limit again. Let me know what you think, please, I’d appreciate it. Here’s a little listen-along mood music to get you in the right zone: Horse Meat Disco’s excellent ‘Back to Mine’ mix / Spotify

Also appreciated, submissions this week from regular contributors David and Celeste for stories this week. S/o to Aaron Radin for the ‘read in browser’ button idea, too. All ideas welcome, always. Feel free to share with friends and colleagues too.

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======[SIC] 196: The Boulder in the Pool======

America is two nations barely on speaking terms / FT
So, should the U.S. have a monarchy? / Marginal Revolution
How science helps fuel a culture of misinformation / Nieman Lab
How the internet turned us into content machines / New Yorker via After School
So Amazon’s sending offers of up to $9k/month to attract popular TikTokers to Amazon Live, its livestream shopping feature / Input via Retail Innovation Week
While retailers are paying customers to review products on TikTok. / Bounty via Retail Innovation Week
And KOLs Are Dead. So: Long Live the Virtual Influencer / Jing Daily
Nevertheless, TikTok's runaway growth is helping influencer marketers stay afloat in a choppy economy / Insider Premium
Elsewhere, Everyone Wants to Work for Big, Boring Companies Again / Bloomberg
Sensing opportunity, LinkedIn doubles down on B2B marketing / The Drum
A Short History of Tech Predictions. What do Google Glass and Pokémon Go have in common? They didn't change the world / NYT
Hence, maybe Web3 Being Not Very Good Is Not A Conspiracy / Garbage Day
Attempting to make sense of it all, In Bed with Social surveys the next up socials and the overal timeline of change / In Bed With Social
Daily lifestyle vlogs are motivating men to take better care of themselves / via After School
And yet Americans — particularly young ones — want coffee that tastes like candy / via After School
Meanwhile The college enrollment decline worsened this spring / Forbes via Marginal Revolution
B/c you don’t need a degree for these new service sector jobs: Snoop Dogg’s full-time blunt roller making $40-50k a year / Twitter via Marginal Revolution
When They Had a Contest to Rename Jazz / Ted Gioia via Music Redef
Separately, Ikea wants to help name your baby / via 1440
While Friends with You x Fisher Price is taking over your nursery/Target
Hypebeast has a store coming to Division Street in the LES. Bowery Boogie via Lean Luxe
And Epic Games teamed up with Timberland to marry fashion design and Fortnite / Venture Beat
Plus, H&M and Lululemon Back New $250 Million Fund to Tackle Fashion’s Climate Impact / BoF
Which brings us to “The Week That Luxury Collabs Ate Each Other.” The ouroboros of luxury-streetwear mashups that just keep coming. / Highsnobiety via Jing Collectibles
In contrast: embued with the spirit of heavenly collaborators, Goated Spyplane debuts the C.R.E.D.I.T.S. mindset / Blackbird Spyplane
And points us to Visvim photoessays on the Limonta nylon factory and kurume kasuri resist-dyeing / Visvim via Blackbird Spyplane
On that topic, for those not buying the Lays-chips-as-fashion shtick, on the Truly Destroyed's page, you can buy actual pairs of shoes worn out by people living on the streets for €1,450 each, with funds going to The Salvation Army in the Netherlands. / Truly Destroyed via Jing Collectibles
Over the past 2 years, socks replaced t-shirts as the top clothing purchase, with 1/5 of all items of clothing bought in 2020-21 being socks / Quartz
So are people spending less on "stuff”? / The Economist via Thingtesting
Related: comparing past and present inflation / NBER via Marginal Revolution
Ergo: Highsnob asks “What is Luxury 3.0” in its new white paper, free here / Mailchimp
Corollary: What The Economist’s move into education can teach other publishers / Digital Content Next via Nieman Lab
Also: how Vox Media is expanding its e-commerce business with newsletters / Digiday via Nieman Lab
And From David Bloom: “Some interesting things to think about in creating/building/sustaining a newsletter component of your business.” [Substack reminds publishers to focus on email as a product]/ Digital Content Next
“Running Up That Hill” and the End of Music Charts As We Knew Them / The Ringer via Motive Unknown
Related: Why Were So Many Oldies Made Hits Again by New Syncs / Billboard via Music Redef
Because?! Record Labels Dig Their Own Grave. And the Shovel is Called TikTok./ Ted Gioia via Beats & Bytes
Corollary: Harry Styles’s new album Harry’s House generated 62% of its first-week revenue from vinyl sales. Vinyl sales generated more 3x+ revenue from streaming / Billboard via Trapital
And Frank Ocean is in talks to direct A24 film via Trapital
Hollywood is changing fast. The people running it are not / Los Angeles Times
Case in point?! Inside Roku, talk is heating up about an acquisition by Netflix / Insider Premium
64% of GenZ said they're "very" or "somewhat" interested in products that reference original series and movies from services such as Netflix and Hulu”/ Morning Consult
Corollary: Is It Finally Twilight for the Theater's Sacred Monsters? / NYT
On the topic of sacred monsters: Is Geneva the alternative to Discord we’ve been waiting for? / via The Week in Web3
More warm platform: A Chrome extension that lets you sort videos of TikTok users by the most viewed, called Sort for TikTok. / Chrome via Markus Bosch
While Hootsuite has published an entire TikTok Culture Guide / Hootsuite via Markus Bosch
Elsewhere, Meta Developing 'Basic Ads' With Little Or No Data Targeting aimed at brand advertisers focused on mass marketing, similar to the way a television station targets viewers / MediaPost
Related: Unconsciously ambiguous headline of the week: Apple May Hide More Ad Data on iphones / Ad Age
And Instagram's 'sensitive content' controls will soon filter all recommended content / TechCrunch
Elsewhere, there’s a group aiming to defund disinformation trying to drain Fox News of online advertising / NPR via Nieman Lab
Also draining: fave Chinese video platform Bilibili, which hasn’t made a profit since it listed in 2018, is laying off 20% of its staff / Technode via Splice Slugs
Unrelated but also bad: A better way for BNPL? / BoF
'Crying in H Mart' Made Michelle Zauner a Literary Star. What's Next? The New York Times
Paris Hilton Used To Be The Queen Of The Clubs, Now She’s The Queen Of The Metaverse / Forbes via The Week in Web3
And Madison Young Is the Anthony Bourdain of Sex Travel / Mel
A definitive list of every ‘Girl’ you can possibly be, according to TikTok. via After School
But if you’re “Riot:” Kathleen Hanna Won’t Save You / Creem via Music Redef
Burning out and fading away: the exhausting job of marketing new music / Midia Research via Motive Unknown
TV shows and companion podcasts become a package deal / The Future Party
To make podcasting profitable, we might have to lose some of what makes it great / Quartz
Apropos of pod and biz: Spotify Lays Out Roadmap to Higher Margins: Here’s the Plan / Billboard via Music Redef
Case in point: Defector is getting a subscriber boost from its podcast Normal Gossip / Nieman Lab
Meanwhile, Clubhouse has had a rough year, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of the space. Is social audio already dead? / The Hustle via Public Announcement
Corollary: the Perks of Being a Hot Mess / The Atlantic via PSFK
Counterpoint: I’m a Coastal Grandmother. Stop Appropriating Our Culture.,” / The Atlantic via After School
"The past goes fast” is an Aime Leon Dore short directed by the photographer JR / ALD
Related: How film cameras won over a younger generation / The Guardian via After School
Also old yet new: made over the course of 30 years by special effects legend Phil Tippett, Mad God Is a Descent Into Hell, a stop-motion animated epic east of creatively horrifying imagery / Hyperallergic
Also hellish: Sports Illustrated pokes into pickleball politics / SI via Lean Luxe
And also incomprehensible: Nobel Prize winners on what they don't understand about their own fields / The Fence via The Whippet
More hard to understand: A building in Manhattan has been listed as an NFT for 15000ETH / The Drop
Hence, a primer on Metaverse Land: What Makes Digital Real Estate Valuable. Via The Drop
And this video explaining crypto staking in 3 minutes /
A super helpful essay for understanding the nuance of ental models for competing Layer 1 and Layer 2 Web3 applications/ The Drop
Also mental: The Metaverse Needs to Figure Out How to Deal With Sexual Assault / CNET
Time’s Web3 bet. Keith Grossman is content to wait out the crypto winter / The Rebooting
Agree!! says GaryVee on the NFT crash 💥 “It’s just starting, but the fundamentals are real.” / Yahoo via New Fun Thing
And so, he files trademark for ‘Vayner3’ NFT consulting arm that will offer “technical consulting in the field of NFTs, cryptocurrencies and other metaverse and Web 3 activities and assets” / CoinDesk via The Drop
Hence: Budweiser becomes the official beer for Zed Run, an NFT horse racing game / The Drop
CoinDesk is using crypto tokens for in-person event sponsorship deals, both gamifying its Consensus conference, and giving advertisers more insight into their sponsorships’ performance / Digiday
‘Buy My Cancer’ is being touted not only as “the first NFT series designed to save lives,” but an entirely new type of medical funding model / The Drum
You Can Now Buy a Color via NFT. What does this mean for art?! / Harpers Baazar via Jing Culture & Commerce
And what your favorite color says about you (it’s probably blue) / BBC via 1440
More color: Parade and fabric dye brand Rit on plastic-free tie-dye kits to customize your new undergarments. CNN via Lerer Hippeau
Chris Blackwell: ‘I’m interested in what’s different’ / Guardian via Music Redef
Different, for sure: David Cronenberg Creates a World Where “Surgery is the New Sex” / Hyperallergic
More film: My So-Called Selfish Life, is a newly released documentary about a woman’s choice to be child-free via Service95
“Clotheslines,” a wonderful short documentary about women doing laundry in early-’80s NYC / via Blackbird Spyplane
Depicting products “you would only find in a Latinx household”, Javier Fuentes illustrates mundane and ritualistic aspects of life as an immigrant / It’s Nice That
Waste! Store: welcome to London’s coolest shop / via Retail Innovation Week
Elsewhere back in Blighty: House Windsor: Are the Royals A Family or a Business? / Vanity Fair
The updated American Dream may be fractional home-ownership / Future Party
Related: Why life as a millennial is so dull. In Gen-Y world, depending on the spectrum, life indexes towards safe, minimal, and, yes, dull / The New Statesmen via Lean Luxe
On the other side of the generation gap: No addiction required, how fake drugs are quickly killing / LAmag via After School
Related: “Start-up Cerebral Soared on Easy Adderall Prescriptions. That Was Its Undoing.” / WSJ via Dealbook
Also not not-amphetamines: Fine Dining Faces its Dark Truths in Copenhagen /FT
Less dark? Land-based aquaculture startups are producing healthier fish without polluting the sea. The Ocean is Becoming Obsolete/ Reasons to Be Cheerful
And is This the Beginning of the End for Leather? / BoF
The strange and secret ways animals perceive the world / The New Yorker
The Return of Luxury Travel Is Boosting Innovation / Jing Daily
Why events still matter / Convening people remains a good test of a brand / The Rebooting
Also experiential: from David Bloom: Fun confluence of three or four big trends: street art, a reviving travel industry, augmented reality and gamification. Invader’s turning traveling into an app-driven art-finding quest / Future Party
Ummm… who’s asking?! Are you smart? / Seth Godin
And if you are, answer me this: who decides what the drink of the summer is? / Thingtesting
Not hot: there’s apparently a global shortage of sriracha. / Bloomberg via Dealbook
200 restaurants, 100 tips / Grub Street via WITI
Also, what’s with dictators and bad art? / The Art Newspaper
Not bad, and ‘not just the outsider show': Exhibition of Norway's overlooked artists to open new National Museum / The Art Newspaper
While closer to home The Met opens an exhibition of employee artworks to the public for the first time / Hyperallergic
Also letting the team run things: [SIC] Talk alum Bill Strobeck talks to The FACE about his new skate brand Violet / The FACE
While The Talks talks to Flume / The Talks
Speaking of DJs: PodRunner. It's like this DJ that makes a mix where the BPM changes according to how fast you should go / Podrunner via Perfectly Imperfect
From Celeste Blewitt: “Quite a fascinating account of geniuses, science and words…” [Did Inhaling Nitrous Oxide- And Glimpsing Madness- Inspire Roget's Thesaurus?] / FT
Corollary: how Deadheads and Directioners Made the Internet What It Is Today / Pitchfork via Music Redef
Pop Culture Consumption in (Canadian) Prison / Dirt
Related: ‘You're lifted out of the horror’: how music offers hope in detention centres / Gal-Dem via Music Redef
Greece's Sigma Group was a supercar-equipped police force that shut down illegal street racing in the 1980s / via Micromobility Report
Oh, good. On the heels of Top Gun Maverick, Air Force sees 2 business models for integrating robotic wingmen into combat formations / FedScoop
Also not the least bit scary: Sound Waves Could 3D-Print Implants Inside Your Body / CNET
Final corollary: extensive thoughts on rebuilding Manchester United / via Lean Luxe