[SIC] 236: Origami Mami

Volume 5, Number 28

The [SIC] newsletter on Thursdays is free, and will be forever, unless I change my mind. Unlikely.

But you CAN pay, if you want. I’m into it. Monthly or yearly, or founding support. Paid subscribers get an additional [SIC] Sundays newsletter each week. And founding supporters get invited to a dinner at my home in NYC with special guests.

Meantime, enjoy. Feel free to share, too. Here’s a button:

Corollary sources this week (all worth your review): Future of Transportation / Marginal Revolution / Nieman Lab / 1440 / Daily Upside / Nice News / Music Redef / Jing Culture & Crypto / Micromobility Report / Politico / After School / Future Perfect / Howard Lindzon

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Hi all,

Got a text from Noah Brier of Why Is This Interesting renown on Tuesday:  “Hey dude, just launched this [The BrXnd.ai conference, in NYC in May]. Mind giving me a shoutout in sic?”

Well no, I don’t mind at all, Noah - it looks great, and I look forward to being there. Thanks for sending. And thanks to Matt, David, Celeste, and Iolanda for stories this week, too.

Speaking of contributions, got this one from Isaac Bess, about this Instagram Account About Artists Borrowing From Other Artists that I linked to in the [SIC] Sunday’s letter for paid subs..  “This is a TIKTOK thing,” Isaac wrote (and he would know, because…) “Also, I shared an office with dude in 2005, we just had coffee a few months ago.”

That’s seredipity, right there.  Which coincided with my being served the very serendipitous headline “The Accidental Perfection of The White Album by The New Yorker newsletter. And which in turn, since it’s been De La Soul week, brought to kind the accidental perfection of their unsung third album Buhloone Mind State, which Chris Rock named the 10th greatest hip hop record of all time. I agree entirely. Rock later explained on Instagram it was the greatest example of “De La Soul and Prince Paul,” and that those collaborations are funnier than the Chris Rock Show (and therefore his new special too, IMO).

Apropos of Prince Paul, his Handsome Boy Modeling School Returns With ‘Music To Drink Martinis To’. Speaking of classics, too: HBMS’s “The Truth” is an all-timer. More circumstantial evidence that the pulse of pop music is changing, or Welcome to the age of lo-fi beats to take stimulants to, as the The Atlantic put it.

The links follow.

Ben

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Zeitgest / Gestalt

• Semaglutide, Ozempic, and the end of the Great Stagnation / Marginal Revolution

• Elsewhere in potent troikas: Bimbos, Midlife Revolution + New Age Rage/ Zine

• From David Bloom: What Comes After Ambition? Hustle culture is dead. Did American women’s drive go away, or has it morphed into something new—and maybe better? /Elle

• How Much Money Buys Happiness? / Ritzholtz

• Corollary: why are humans so bad at predicting the future? / Quartz

• Either way, ‘The Luckier You Are The Nicer You Should Be’ / Collabfund

• Speaking of doing better: Would you date a podcast bro? / NYT

• Sloganwear now is hyper-specific, earnest and sarcastic all at once. It also tells us a lot about what’s important to a generation that grew up with the internet / The Guardian

• Elsewhere, after the Emma Watson deepfake ad scandal, experts share risks (and rewards) of synthetic media/ The Drum

• Tho apparently when It Comes to OnlyFans, Humans Can Outcompete AI / Wired

• Corollary: “The Waluigi Effect,” whereby large language models like ChatGPT can unexpectedly do the opposite of what they’re asked/Less Wrong

• Also counterintuitive: The seduction of the big-box superstore / The New Yorker

• Related: WITI’s “The Costco Edition” / WhyIsThisInteresting

• And The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing / Wired

• But alternatively? Would sneakers and T-shirts lure workers back to the office? / FT

• Sky High Farm Workwear is leveraging high-profile fashion collaborations and retailer partnerships to raise funds for its co-founder’s non-profit. Is this a blueprint for a new kind of brand? / Vogue Business

• Related: The Jacobs effect. Louis Vuitton and most luxury fashion are still in the Marc Jacobs era / Sociology of Business

• #IceTok: The coolest trend on social media? Luxury ice cubes / NYT

• How Instagram sparked the clear ice trend / Wine Mag

World Order

• From Celeste Blewitt: What a fascinating topic and discussion, the age of galaxies and the research behind these is brilliant to read. 'Astronomers Were Not Expecting This' / The Atlantic

• Also unexpected? China’s ‘She Economy’ Booms As Women Invest In Their Own Happiness / Jing Daily

• Semafor is drawing criticism in the US for partnering with a think tank in China that is known to have close ties to the Chinese Communist Party / Axios

• Which is presumably not the most interesting think tank In American politics / Time

• Corollary: Peter Zeihan opines on if the US military can Fight both Russia and China? / Youtube

• Not fighting: United Nations members have reached an agreement to protect Earth’s oceans, a milestone hailed by a Greenpeace spokesperson as “the biggest conservation agreement in the history of the world.” / Greenpeace

• The Wollemi Pine’s Survival Proves We Can Save More Trees / ReasonsToBeCheerful

• Seed-Planting Drones Are Reforesting Canada With Lightning Speed / ReasonsToBeCheerful

• The supply of floppy disks is running low. Most computer users stopped using floppy disks decades ago, but in some industries where tech is replaced rarely, they’re still vital. They carry software updates and routines for old airliners, industrial embroidery machines and animatronics/ Wired

• Americans Are Having More Babies. Is Remote Work the Cause? / The Atlantic

• Cyclists now outnumber motorists in the city of London / Forbes

• From Matt@TheTechnorati: Phosphorus helped save our way of life—and now threatens to end it / The New Yorker

• Therefore? It’s Time to Fall in Love With Nuclear Fusion—Again /Wired

The Speculative Future

• The new job search process / Twitter

• LinkedIn's new "collaborative articles" feature seeks to encourage discussion by inviting creators to comment on conversations begun by AI / The Verge

• The Romanian government hired an advisory robot. And it promptly committed some copyright infringement / Romania Insider

• While Jesus meets AI in latest spot from ‘He Gets Us’ campaign / AdAge

• From David Bloom: “Lengthy and interesting piece about a woman who was trying to help her friend get a couple of “good” dates on the online apps, by using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to optimize the friend’s profiles, choose the best pictures, and initiate/respond to conversations with potential matches. There were some wins and some losses here, but mostly it’s an interesting look at the iterative process of fine-tuning the tools for the job, and figuring out where they’re good, and where they’re less good, in a space that is nothing if not highly personal and deeply annoying for millions of people.” [My Epic, Embarrassing, Shockingly Successful Ploy to Get My Friend a Date Using A.I.] / Slate

• In its quest to make the metaverse happen, Meta seems to have forgotten people use VR mostly for games  / The Verge

• Why everything about Apple’s culture, strategy, and vision would lend the company to being very bad at making cars / Micromobility Podcast

• Africa’s comic book superheroes tell continent’s forgotten stories / FT

• LVMH-chaired beauty industry coalition Cosmetic Valley is unveiling a €500,000 fund that aims to preserve Africa’s natural resources and their traditional uses in beauty / Vogue Business

• While in architecture it’s the dawn of the Timber Revolution / Dezeen

Pop Cultures

• On the eve of a big night for Everything Everywhere, indie studio A24 is making an unexpected move into live performance, purchasing a small Off Broadway theater / NYTHey btw.. What Is Cinema? / Vanity Fair

• New Art Books You Should Know, From Hilma af Klint to the Black Panther Party / Hyperallergic

• The lost New Jersey photos of Henri Carier-Bresson / WNYC

• Are Web3 Influencers Finally Earning Their Place In Fashion’s Spotlight? / Jing Daily

• Nike and Starbucks show how brands are rethinking NFTs / AdAge

• From Celeste Blewitt: “Interesting discussion of Spotify, DC Comics and celebrities behind the characters. Fascinating to read of the changes in podcasts and intellectual property.” [Behind Spotify's DC Comics Audioverse] / The Hollywood Reporter

• Web3 in Hollywood could pave the way for the hit IP of the future / Venture Beat

• Stefan Simchowitz is actually quite restrained on Jerry Gogosian’s Art Smack podcast / Spotify

• Hip Hop and the Machine. Rap Research Lab continues what hip hop has been doing for the past half century: playfully rearranging the words, sounds, and textures of postwar American pop music / Hyperallergic

• Can Hardy Revive 'Butt Rock'? / The New Yorker

• Turnstile Broke Hardcore. Now What?/ The Ringer

• From Celeste Blewitt: An intriguing insight into the trends of reality tv, what people are gravitating towards and why.  The Super-Ripped Rise Of Hardcore Physical Endurance TV' /The Guardian

• A pair from Iolanda Carvalho: "TV is dead..." 😉 / Esquire UK

• And “Game over or game on... (Rings a bell?) [The esports industry in 2023…]/ Sportspromedia

• FaZe Clan launches 1st all-female pro esports team for Valorant / Venture Beat

• Laura Reilly’s Be your best future shopper edition of her newsletter Magasin is low key the best Paris Fashion Week review out there / Magasin

• Metro Boomin Sells Portion of Publishing Catalog to Shamrock for Close to $70M / Billboard

Media Happenings

• A majority of millennials and Gen Zers pay for news / Poynter

• Inside the New York Times Blowup Over Transgender Coverage / Vanity Fair

• Meanwhile, a single engineer brought down Twitter / Platformer

• Wired tells readers what it will use generative AI for — and what’s off-limits / Nieman Lab

• The Washington Post looks to bring in new subcribers with its first in-house game, "On the Record" / Digiday

• While Tastemade tries again to get into the restaurant business with new taco chain / Digiday

• How do you unpack stories in the most engaging way while building a credible and comprehensive brand? Monocle on the best design for paper and screen too / Monocle

Market-ations

• AR filters on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram are becoming the latest way to launch a new song into culture/ The Future Party

• Speaking of Spiegel and co: Snap's stock price has surged as efforts to ban TikTok are increasingly gathering support in the US Congress / Inside.com

• Tho we should acknowledge a TikTok ban would make for an incredibly strange day on the internet / NYMag

• While Spotify is pivoting to video. The audio streaming app is adding an endless scroll feed to take on the likes of TikTok and YouTube Shorts/Quartz

• Fittingly, then: Spotify’s new design is part TikTok, part Instagram, and part YouTube / The Verge

• A better kind of social media is possible — if we want it / WaPo

• From David Bloom: “Terrific piece about a good-but-not-awesome college gymnast who has cannily used her social-media skills to generate far more money than just about anybody in her sport, while creating a post-college career for her. Fun to see how she’s hacked the system.” [How Olivia Dunne turned the male gaze into a gymnastics empire]/ The Guardian

• Corollary: TikTokers are updating how they make their videos or finding new outlets for creative expression (and making money) including … A switch to YouTube, Writing email newsletters and Optimizing their TikTok / The Future Party

• What long-form TikTok videos mean for brands' future social strategies / AdAge

• Why Luxury Brands Need To Create Cultural Capital To Stay Relevant / Jing Daily

• Inside the Early Days of J.Crew / Vanity Fair

• Esprit returns to the U.S. with a new global creative headquarters / Retail Dive

• Marketers adapt to serve niche communities as culture fragments, strays from universal water cooler moments / Digiday

• No longer Friends With You: NFT creators are abandoning Web3 over disappearing royalties / AdAge

• The Home Depot built a store in Roblox and is hosting virtual Kids Workshops there / AdAge

• And YouTube is killing the overlay ad format. Banner ads that cover videos are getting the boot / Ars Technica

Superficial Interest

• The Lasting Allure of Phallic Decor / Sitting Pretty

• Therefore? Twenty-five women architects and designers you should know / Dezeen

• Related: "Many cities do not work for women" / Dezeen

• Did Tuberculosis Shape Modern Architecture? Beatriz Colomina’s X-Ray Architecture reveals how the sanatorium inspired  the modern movement’s iconic forms / Frieze

• How Architects Used Performance to Reclaim Private Space. Performa’s online exhibition ‘Bodybuilding’ brings live and spatial work to the screen / Frieze

• Planning ahead is good, but planning backward is better / Quartz

• Wilson "reinvents the basketball" with airless 3D-printed lattice design / Dezeen

• And Young women are using weed more than young men now/ VICE

Food / Drink

• We Asked AI to Create New American Dishes. The Results Revealed the Cuisine's Cliches / Bon Appetit

• KFC's Double Down sandwich began as an April Fool's joke / YouTube

• HelloFresh stops sourcing coconut milk from Thailand because it could be a product of forced simian labor / Axios

Useful Diversions

• Do: 8 ball Community returns this Friday and Sat to @entrance.ny / Instagram

  

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