[SIC] 245: Injured With Children

Volume 5, Number 37

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. And do please pass along to people you like (or people you need to be smarter).

Corollary sources this week (all worth your review, and all easily discoverable): Public Announcement / Politico / Elevator / Morning Consult / Ben-Evans / Daily Upside / Garbage Day / Politico / After School / Politico / Motive Unknown / 1440 / Roca News

Hi all.

Back on my feet this week. Total hip replacement surgery (as referred to last week) went seamlessly and recovery’s been easy. Thanks to everybody who reached out with well wishes.

Also back on its feet this week: longtime [SIC] subscribers will remember my pandemic-era live audio show Culture Club, which I did with Jeff Carvalho, Ruba Abu-Nimah and Jian DeLeon. I’m pleased to say we’ve gotten the band back together, and did our first new show last night, with Bobby Hundreds, discussing his new book. It’s a little wooly owing to the new platform, but the show was really fun. Have a listen sometime: Culture Club Vol 2, Number 1. And lmk what you think.

A few more great listens while I’m at it: Avalon Emerson & the Charm is the record I can’t manage to turn off lately; sublime, shoegazey dream pop (Spotify)

Opposite to that - I recommend it once a year or so, but Nick CatchDubs and Mr. Ducker’s Radio Friendly Unit Shifter series is the smart radio alt rock of my twenties, bottled. This gets the biggest, dumbest smile from me, every time (Mixcloud)

And dialing the dial even further back - [SIC] Talks alum Darren Hemming pointed this week to OG pastiche-beat legends The Psychonauts’ genre-bending Essential Mix from 1996, which takes a sec to get going, but once it goes…. it goes (Soundcloud)

Thanks for that, Darren! Thanks also to Celeste and Iolanda for contributions this week. And an extra special thanks to homies Mike McGarry and Cameron Friedlander, who turned work team members onto SIC this week - it means a lot to have your recommendation. And welcome, teams!

And if there’s somebody *you’d* recommend [SIC] to, I’d love that. Here’s a button:

Ok, last reco. Former collegue and buddy Drew Millard’s book launch party is tonight Bushwick Country Club at 7:00 p.m; I’ll be there with my cool new walking stick (cane), hopefully. The book is called How Golf Can Save Your Life, and it has some people (well, mainly Daisy Alioto from Dirt) anointing Drew as “the new Mr. Golf in town”. Check it out.

Ok now, the (no pun intended) links:

Modern Art

======[SIC] 245: Injured With Children======

Zeitgest / Gestalt

• Are slackers keeping the labour market hot? / FT

• Why bacon, egg and cheese prices have doubled / WNYC

• Here’s what a $75,000 kids’ party looks like / NYT

• Related: What Is Luxury, Really? / Jing Daily

• The End of the Free-Returns Era / The Atlantic

• Are we more prudish about Michelangelo’s David in 2023 than we were in 1564? / The Art Newspaper

• Twitter is adding calls and encrypted messaging / CNN

• But maybe not adding Tucker Carlson.. / Axios

• Tho Musk invites ex-CNN anchor Don Lemon to host a show/ NYPost

• Here's why you can't get any work done / Axios

• Realted: Listening and the Crisis of Inattention / Emergence

• How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code / Quartz

• Elsewhere: the new cool thing in web development is WebGPU, giving web applications much more direct access to the GPU in your computer / Matt Rickard

• From Celeste Blewitt: ‘Great piece on navigating silence in conversations in many varying situations.  Embrace The Awkward Silence / The Atlantic

• Apropos of non-verbal interactions: why prosthetics are everywhere these days / Highsnob

• Americans Just Want to Have Fun at Restaurants, Concerts and the Movies Again / Morning Consult

• Good, because from Iolanda Carvalho: “If the future is this, count me out... 😉” [Don't want to spend time with other humans, but still want to make it look like you're hanging out with your pals IRL? Boy, do we have just the thing.] / Futurism

• Junebug Uber Alles: Gen Z really wants a phone break. Baby Boomers? Not so much / Fast Company

• Related: Turns out Doja Cat wasn’t being feline; the whole time she was a troll / IG

• Also trolling? Snow Strippers, the mysterious Detroit duo reinventing trashy EDM/ i-D

• Corollary to that: Jason Diamond on The New York Review of Memes / The Melt

World Order

• The list of cryptocurrencies the SEC has outlawed keeps growing and growing / WSJ

• China is very suddenly becoming a major car exporter / Digits to Dollars

• Related: The hidden force that shapes everything around us: Parking / Vox

• Unraveling the World in the Polycrisis Era. In Catastrophe Time!, Gary Zhexi Zhang questions how we make sense of our era when history seems to speed by us / Frieze

• The Enduring Panic About Cow Mutilations. Aliens, the government, or unspecified shadowy forces—another round of “mutes” incites familiar fears / The New Yorker

• Corollary? Big Chicken is going after climavores / Sentient Media

• Meanwhile, Start-ups see sustainable future in seaweed farming / FT

• While Spout has developed a small device that creates potable water from the surrounding air / The Future Party

• From Celeste Blewitt: Art and war, an insightful and thoughtful piece delving into creativity and the dire times in Ukraine.  'Pass The Paint And Mind The Shrapnel' / The Guardian

• From Iolanda Carvalho: "Carl Sagan: a lovely and powerful new short film and automaton installation about the urgency of environmental action"

• Olive Oil prices are boiling. The global price of olive oil has reached a 26-year high: $6,000 per metric ton / Quartz

• Not hot: Miami is continuing to cool on its new crypto-world residents / WSJ

• Especially when Manhattanites bring their private school blood sport to Miami / FT

The Speculative Future

• Another from Iolanda: “Slack GPT has entered the chat" 🙂 / Emerging Tech Brew

• Tho It’s not as easy as just plugging in a few AI tools to power your workplace / NYT

• “The First Skirmish in a New War”: Why AI Should Be Central in the Writers Strike / Vanity Fair

• 'In the age of AI, putting creativity at the heart of education is more important than ever' / The Art Newspaper

• ChatGPT is already part of some coding courses. Instructors don’t want students to shy away from the technology that threatens to replace them/ Quartz

• A Photographer Embraces the Alien Logic of A.I. Charlie Engman’s experiments with Midjourney have yielded fleshy distortions, peculiar make-out sessions, and unfamiliar pictures of his mother / The New Yorker

• Related: The freakiest AI art of 2023 (so far) / Creative Blow

• Snoop Dogg expresses what we’re all feeling about AI / Ars Technica

• How To Delete Your Data From ChatGPT / Wired

• ChatFished: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People With A.I. / NYT

• The Filmmakers Who Voyaged Inside the Body. They’ve made the camera part of our flesh and blood / The New Yorker

• Related: A.I. Drug Discovery Is a $50 Billion Opportunity for Big Pharma / Bloomberg

Pop Cultures

• More than an 8pm reservation at Dorsia: Patrick Bateman, Gen-Z heartthrob / The Cut

• Also big and from the 90s: 32 things Kate Moss can’t live without / HTSI

• Hollywood Writers Strike Is 'Going to Be a While' / NYT

• R.I.P. Metaverse, 2021–2023 / Insider

• Also RIP: Sum 41 says it will disband / NYT

• And fellow Canadian The Weeknd Plans to Retire Stage Name / Variety

• More goners: Spotify removed thousands of A.I.-generated songs / FT

• The website aihits.co has collected the most listened-to AI-generated pop music / AIHits

• While Something Awful is racing to save the best and worst of web history / The Verge

• The Smashing Pumpkins admitted to paying ransom to a hacker who threatened to release the band’s unreleased music / The Mirror

• adidas may soon sell its $1 billion worth of Yeezy merchandise and donate the proceeds to charity / Bloomberg

• “BlackBerry” Tracks a Tech Dream That Died / The New Yorker

• Related: The allure of the entrepreneur movie, from Air to Tetris to BlackBerry. Scammers are over. It's time to make some deals /Vox

• The A-Lot-Ness of Little Richard / Hyperallergic

• The Forgotten Women Who Built a 90s Rave Scene. Audrey Golden’s “I Thought I Heard You Speak” is a new telling of Factory Records and The Haçienda’s history - one that puts women at the front / VICE

• Also being reassessed: The Fanelli Cafe, at 103, has become a stylish Gen Z hangout / WSJ

• But is its neighbor Supreme's $2 Billion Empire Cooling Off? / WSJ

• Gen Zers Might Buy Your Product if Its Logo Slays / Morning Consult

• How Can the Art World Respond to Perpetual Crisis? / Frieze

• And equally: Can Literal Mall Rats Save the Mall? / NYT

• More saving: Doing an Art Activity for Just 20 Minutes Can Help You Live Longer  / Fortune

• Marilyn Minter on Pioneering Sex-Positive Feminism in the Art World and Beyond / The Slowdown

• My home away from home, Syracuse’s Everson Museum on Basketball and Its Discontents / Hyperallergic

Media Happenings

• MTV News is shutting down after 36 years / Hollywood Reporter

• And The American Conservative May Be on Its Last Legs / Vanity Fair

• Why BuzzFeed and Vice Couldn't Make News Work  (Jill Abramson is a very dubious source here, but whatevs) / Vanity Fair

• 98% of Facebook traffic to small news publishers has vanished since 2018 / Nieman Lab

• The AI-generated spam sites that suck-up programatic ad budgets / AdLingo

• next week’s sale of a few pieces from S.I. Newhouse’s art collection reminds us of a different age in media / Christies

• Or, the next one? Crypto media firm Blockworks raises $12M at $135M valuation / Axios

• To that end: what If This Isn’t A Digital Media Crisis In The Way We Thought? / Garbage Day

• Ergo: Where the media business goes next / The Rebooting

• The streaming wars are over, and it's time for media to figure out what's next / CNBC

• Nearly half of YouTube’s US viewing is now on TVs / The Information

• And Eurovision is bigger than the Super Bowl, but marketers are only now realizing / The Drum

• Some elite podcasters are suffering while the podcast masses thrive / Semafor

• SoundCloud debuts a fan engagement tool for artists. It’s DMs / TechCrunch

• While TikTok tests new feature to connect TikTokers with music artists / Music Ally

• And iHeartMedia launches a branded podcast studio / Digiday

• Why are new social media apps like BeReal doomed to fail? / The Guardian

• Because? The Platform Era is Dead. Long Live The Homepage! / A Media Operator

• Twitter is now purging accounts that have been inactive for "several years," which is likely to result in a decrease in users' follower counts / Daily Beast

• Meanwhile, More than half of Twitter Blue's earliest subscribers are no longer subscribed / Mashable

• TikTok’s parent ByteDance eyes a new chapter in book publishing / TechCrunch

• While TikTok launches a new hub to help brands better connect with its audiences / TechCrunch

• As Hollywood Writers Strike, Momentum Grows for Creator Labor Movement / The Information

• 64% Of Buyers Consider Creator-Generated Videos 'Premium' / Mediapost

• The Athletic’s live audio rooms bring sports talk radio into this century / Nieman

Market-ations

• [SIC] homie Tariq Hassan on the Speed of Culture / AdAge

• Why Some Designers Are Creating Their Own Dupes / BoF

• The Companies Trying to Make Live Shopping a Thing in the U.S. / NYT

• ‘We’ve chosen both’: How Nike aims to connect DTC and wholesale / Retail Dive

• Related: How ‘Deconstructing the Sneaker’ Is Protecting the Amazon / Reasons to Be Cheerful

• Switching Feet: Is Deckers the California LVMH? / Howard Lindzon

• How California plans to crush Ticketmaster’s monopoly / Quartz

• In the meantime: Live Nation sees massive revenue jump despite ticket fiascos /Daily Upside

• How OpenAI is working with brands, according to its head of sales / Ad Age

• How Epic Games is revamping the ecosystem, building out YouTube-like tools and infrastructure for in-game creators inside Fortnite / Digiday

• How to turn your ads into entertainment / Fast Company

• American Girl is leaning into ’90s nostalgia and brand collabs / AdAge

• And Westminster Dog Show is embracing Gen Z’s social-first sports consumption / AdAge

• While BluDot’s training the next generation in interior design with an ‘Open Studio’ series / Bludot

• Apple’s new high interest savings account had $1bn of deposits in the first four days. LINK

• Here’s a candle that smells like an increase in the cost of good and goes up in price by $1 every day / Thingtesting

Food / Drink

• Oh also, Behold the $29 Hot Dog / Axios

• Goodbye to the Bread Basket. Hello to the Bread Course. / NYT

• An exhibition at a private club for bibliophiles in New York City showcases hundreds of antique restaurant menus / Hyperallergic

• The economics behind super-aged whiskeys / Inside Hook

• Japanese design studio Nendo designs beer can with two pull tabs to "create an ideal foam" / Dezeen

• Corollary; Why don't Americans value food textures more? / T Mag

• And why are Americans smuggling Fruit Roll-Ups into Israel? / NYT

• In celebration of National Shrimp Day, sunscreen brand  Vacation®’s Crustacean Committee brings you the ultimate guide to shrimp cocktail consumption / Vacation

• Elsewhere on the Riviera: The best bars in Cannes. See you for a spritz in six weeks! /Inside Hook

Useful Diversions

• A No-Nonsense Guide to NYC’s May Art Fairs / Hyperallergic

• And 20 Art Shows to See in New York This May / Hyperallergic

• Dezeen has launched a digital guide to NYCxDesign festival, which outlines the key events from 18 to 25 May 2023 / Dezeen

This weekend, tho:

• Creative Growth’s Postcard Show at 6397 in Nolita.

• Chloe Sevigny’s closet blowout Sunday is gonna be a SCENE / IG

• While Chloe Pal and [SIC] homie Patrick O’Dell’s got a photo book release Sunday at ICP

• And IYKYK .. follow the Mark McNairy Estate sale online.

======SIC 245: Injured With Children======

The Bench is Over.