[SIC] 247: The Intrecciato Agenda

Volume 5, Number 39

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): Marginal Revolution / Elevator / Metaproof / Public Announcement / Morning Consult / Guardian / Ben-Evans / Politico / 1440 / After School / Ungerleider Works / Snaxshot / Morning Brew / The New Statesman / Semafor / Music Redef / Dealbook / Articles of Interest / Built with AI / Roca News /  Embedded

---

Hi all,

Knocking around lower Manhattan yesterday (still walking outside with a cane but pretty much fully recovered from my hip replacement surgery), I meandered under the Brooklyn Bridge, which was serendipitously turning 140 years old. The anniversary coincided with the reopening of skateboard Mecca, The Brooklyn Banks As somebody who grew up dreaming of skating the banks, it was slightly emotional, especially since my new hip might actually allow me to roll around there again sometime. I hope so. S/o and thanks to [SIC] homie Steve Rodriguez and everybody who’s worked tirelessly for that great result). The Ken Burns Brooklyn Bridge extra that the Times published yesterday is cool, btw.

On the topic of shouts out: thanks as always to Piers, Jeff, Celeste, Iolanda and the other Jeff for contributions this week. They’re hugely appreciated.

Also appreciated: everyone who’s recommended [SIC] to friends and colleagues. The audience for this dispatch continues to grow quickly, and on the 1 year anniversary of adding a paid subscription option, I’m gonna be piling on some new features in the coming weeks, so hopefully it’ll be even more useful going forward. So share away. Here’s a button:

Last thing: longtime readers know I host a weekly Breakfast Club in Brooklyn every Wednesday. It’s free for everyone, there’s no requirement to RSVP and no agenda, and it’s always a welcoming group. Which is to say - if you’re interested, come hang sometime. And if you’d like me to add you to the weekly reminder email list, just reply to this newsletter, or leave a note in the comments.

Now, the links.

Ben

Misprint 1

======[SIC] 247: The Intrecciato Agenda======

Zeitgest / Gestalt

• Strange tho it may seem: the internet is not forever / The Lindy Newsletter

• But the dream of the personal machine is, maybe? / Kyle Chayka

• A copyright case against Andy Warhol has broader implications for remix culture / NYT

• Experts have ‘extreme doubts’ about viability & enforceability of Montana’s TikTok ban / The Drum

• But what would happen If TikTok Suddenly Disappeared?/ Vogue

• Cause, like, The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up—And They’re Horrified / The Atlantic

• In fact, Zs and Millennials saying social media is making them buy what they can’t afford, and it’s sending them into an anxiety spiral / Fortune

• To that end: How much does it cost to live like this? / Curbed

• Hence? Why Every Fashion Kid Is Suddenly Collecting Old Books / GQ

• Suggestion: if you’re feeling flush, buy the first 13 issues of Tibor & Maira Kalman’s Colors Magazine / Harpers Books

• Also old style, from Celeste Blewitt: “Given the seasons are heading to the height of a European summer momentarily, this piece really does draw on the nonna moments of doilies, table cloths, it's all the rage.” [How Italian Nonna Chic Became The Biggest News In Interiors’] /Vogue UK

• Corollary: Lana Del Rey’s Father, Loves Being a Nepo Daddy / GQ

• More Dads: Talking With ‘Swiftie Dads’ in Philly/ GQ

• Related: Philly’s [SIC] homie Drew Millard and the inimitable Trey Smith visit the democratic people's republic of taylor swift (sort of) / Nersey

• More Core: Is Quiet Luxury Coming For Gorpcore? / Jing Daily

• And. Is Tanning Back? / BoF

• Further, from Celeste: “I could be wrong, but mermaidcore seems to be popping up as a 'trend/core’?!” / Netflix

• Corollary: “There’s a Movement”: Inside the Fight to De-gender Awards Shows / Vanity Fair

• Apropos: HBO’s Sensitivity Reading for Entourage isn’t real but could be/ McSweeneys

• But the next up in the right’s campaign against woke companies really is Fox News / Vox

• Elsewhere: putting Black Cuisine at the Center of U.S. History / The New Yorker

• BTW: When Will the Writers Strike End? Three Scenarios, From Fantasy to Hellish Dystopia / Vanity Fair

• Because finding a job right now isn't only tough, it's deeply weird.” / Insider

• iMessage vs. Snapchat: The Battle for Gen Z’s Texts / WSJ

• Corollary: Now there’s Industrial-scale ‘catfishing’ (fake online romance)/ Wired

• And Twitter’s new 2-hour video feature is already making it a hub for pirated movies / Quartz

• The other danger to Twitter is that most people don’t actually like being on it. / The New Statesman

• Tho maybe that means  Your Grail Twitter Username May Finally Be Up for Grabs /Highsnob

• Corollary: s/o James Fucking Friedman and yours truly, Dirty Dietz: DJ Absolutely Shit: the unstoppable rise of cringe names in dance music

• A Silicon Valley culture that was once obsessed with reason is going woo / The New Atlantis

• A vacant big-box store is being transformed into the country's first "Picklemall," / Axios

World Order

• Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, has given an interview to the New Statesman as he likely awaits rearrest / The New Statesman

• While Mexico is preparing for the potential evacuation of 3M people amid increased activity at an active volcano / NYT

• Related: The Ancient ‘Wonder Material’ Sucking CO2 Out of the Atmosphere / Reasons to Be Cheerful

• “She-cession” no more: US companies employ more women now than at any point in history / Bloomberg

• Peter Zeihan on The Truth About De-dollarization / YouTube

• But beware the Secretly Left-Wing Siren Song of ‘Common Good Capitalism’ / NY Sun

• Corollary?! The Future of Antibiotics / FT

• The surgeon general's warning is a wake-up call for social networks / Platformer

• Danish studio BIG has been named as the masterplanner of the floating port city of Oxagon, part of the Neom development in Saudi Arabia / Dezeen

• Self-driving cars face their most daunting test: human-generated insanity on the road / WSJ

• Recycling plastic has an unintended consequence: emissions of microplastics in the air and water supplies / WaPo

• What the Global Plastics Treaty negotiations mean for fashion / Vogue Business

• What do Elon Musk and the YouTuber MrBeast have in common? They are both bringing back the 19th-century company town / The New Statesman

• After all, Space Is the Place. Is Web4 just Real Estate? / Dirt

The Speculative Future

• Let’s not write people off as ‘AI losers’ / FT

• Especially since this tutorial, shows you how to use retrieval augmentation to give LLMs access to new information beyond their training data and help reduce hallucinations / YouTube

• Related: News stripped of all hype and emotion, by AI / Boring Report

• Elsewhere, a Swedish newspaper is having AI rap its articles in an attempt to get young people interested in the news / Business Insider

• Man writes 100 books using ChatGPT and Claude, earns roughly $2K / Science Times

• From Jeff Carvalho: “Good article on Bright Moments which just happened in Japan.” New wave generative artists and Japan’s bright future/ RightClickSave

• MP3s made by NPCs? The rise of AI-generated muzak / Dazed

• Future of chief metaverse officer—how brands are rethinking the Web3 role / AdAge

• Meanwhile, After Nike’s virtual sneaker drop, NFT cynicism is making way for intrigue among marketers / Digiday

• Ergo, from Jeff Carvalho: Nike NFTs: Dot Swoosh is in the Building / Sporting Crypto

• Brxnd.ai’s Marketing AI Landscape 1.0 / BrXnd

• And from Celeste Blewitt: “Fascinating, the tech behind why it is still part of the phone process is intriguing. It raises important points on the meshing of both new and old technologies, while drawing on the favourite topic of nostalgia.” [Voicemail Refuses To Die] /Atlantic

• Computer Art With a Human Touch. An exhibition of early computer art shows that artists working with early-stage technologies make their best work by combining old and new techniques / Hyperallergic

Pop Cultures

• The Artists Depicting the Power and Strangeness of Breasts / TMag

• Ian McEwan on Martin Amis (RIP) / The New Yorker

• Some remarkable anecdotes about Martin Amis in this piece / Guardian

• Elsewhere in anecdotes: Blur’s return prompts the issuance of The FACE’s archive newsletter #1 / The FACE

• But the brilliance of Blur apparently doesn’t include “Girls & Boys”?! / NYT

• Also missing, the wobbly, warm swing of “Ghost Ship,” from late-period Blur’s Magic Whip album / Spotify

• Herb Sundays 81: Kool Keith, however, does include “Jungle Boogie” / Herb Sundays

• More Disco, via Celeste Blewitt: “Loved reading the dive into Ibiza club culture and how it's changed in 50 years. A great point in the article highlights the changes in technology, some great stories weaved throughout” [Everything We Do Is About Connection: 50 Years Of Pacha And The Ibiza Club Scene] / The Guardian UK

• Jelani Cobb on 50 Years of Hip-Hop and the Future of Journalism / Time Sensitive Pod

• Related: Radiotron, the ’80s Youth Center That Shaped LA's Hip-Hop Scene / Hyperallergic

• ‘It was fun until it wasn’t’: hip-hop A&R Dante Ross on De La Soul, ODB -- and punchups with P Diddy / The Guardian

• Can You Love the Art and Hate the Monster? / The New Yorker

• Visitors to the National Gallery in London have spotted what looks like a pair of Nike sneakers in a 17th-century painting / Hyperallergic

• A lawsuit over a jointly owned Anna Weyant painting is making opaque art market structures more transparent / The Art Newspaper

• Yayoi Kusama Turned Art Into a Selfie  / The New Yorker

• While Versace and Dua Lipa usher in a new era for celebrity collabs with a co-designed collection / Vogue Business

• Related: Inside fashion megabrands’ whirlwind at Cannes Film Festival / Vogue Business

• What Timothée Chalamet at Chanel signals about men’s beauty / Vogue Business

• [SIC] Talks alum Eugene Rabkin posits that we’re at the end of the hype designer era / IG

• Related: ‘It’s come at the right time’: why fashion prizes have become the holy grail for struggling young designers /The Guardian

• The V Files: The Shocking Legacy of an ’80s Sci-Fi Cult Classic / Vanity Fair

• Elsewhere, [SIC] homie Ryan Babenzien, who founded the sneaker brand Greats, has an unusual new hit: Jolie, a showerhead pitched as a wellness product/ BoF

• Billy McFarland wants you to invest in Fyre Festival 2 – but why trust him? / The Drum

• From Piers Fawkes: fave artist Ed Templeton’s Unsparing Photographic Diary of Skateboarding Life / The New Yorker

• The Memory Hole Of DJ AM. Expanded documentary reminds us of Adam Goldstein's immense impact / The Cadence

• Confessions of a Steely Dan Fan / The Melt

• Who was Cinzia Ruggeri? She was bonkers. Now she’s getting her due / Artnet

• Just cause: Also “Bonkers” / Spotify

• From Jeff Carvalho: A new digital experience from Moog Music celebrates the historic synthesizer manufacturer’s 70th anniversary, re-release of its most legendary analog synthesizer / Moog

Media Happenings

• Ted Gioia on why media IP franchises keep on going and going / Ted Gioia

• Why podcasters are selling subscriptions through third-party vendors / Digiday

• From Jeff Weiner: Have you checked out Dane's latest project, Good Tape? A print magazine for podcasting! / Good Tape

• Welp, the advertising recession is definitely here / Simon Owens

• What if ChatGPT could replace a media planner? / Digiday

• Related: the looming existential crisis for cable news  / WaPo

• Industry Dive's Sean Griffey's guide to sustainable media businesses (and a measured take on VICE) / The Rebooting Pod

• How Reddit plans to win over the small advertisers turning away from its big tech rivals / The Drum

• Because, for instance: The Daily Wire plans to put its entire slate of podcasts on Twitter / Axios

• Meanwhile, Buzzfeed is launching a new online shop / Axios

• And bringing AI to the kitchen with “Botatouille”, which is a terrible pun / NYT

• Why publishers hope chatbots will be the latest retention tool / Digiday

• Seeing stories of kindness may counteract the negative effects of consuming bad news / Nieman Lab

• The Washington Post announces new teams to “harness the power of generative AI” / WaPo

• Criticism and essays might be waning in traditional journalism is because people like Culture Work are doing them better / TikTok

• Semafor has raised $19 million, replacing money from Sam Bankman-Fried  / NYT

• Tensions flare inside The Messenger, a fledgling news site / NYT

• Also rough: FaZe Clan laid off roughly 40 percent of staff. The layoff comes during a period of uncertainty about the sustainability of the esports industry / Digiday

• Related: the e-sports world is starting to teeter / NYT

Market-ations

• Marketers closely watching backlash to 'woke' advertising from Bud Light, Miller Lite and adidas / Digiday

• Three years after the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter movement, Black creators say paid opportunities have all but dried up / Digiday

• While Uber suspended its DEI chief after she hosted events titled “Don’t Call Me Karen” / Quartz

• Google debuts new AI ads in its search experience / The Drum

• The Unexpected Reason Apple Is Dominating the U.S. Smartphone Market. It’s not just lavish marketing and the threat of green bubbles—Apple’s commitment to supporting old phones / WSJ

• Jeffrey Katzenberg on the quick flameout of Quibi, the video app he co-founded: “I’m proud to own the failure.” / Variety

• Related: Meta sold Giphy to Shutterstock at a steep loss after the UK demanded it unwind its acquisition over antitrust concerns / TechCrunch

• While Lenovo uses mixed reality digital OOH to appeal to creators / Digiday

• The Future of AdTech: Daisy Alioto in conversation with Cindy Gallop / Dirt

• Related: RIP ad-free search service Neeva /  Neeva

• From Iolanda Carvalho: “If only it was THIS easy... 🙂 "The Boohoo X Pantone collection offers 13 different styles in eight colourways, including ‘Poison Green’ which encourages “balance” and ‘Love Bird’ which is believed to inspire “new growth”." [Boohoo partners with Pantone on collection for Mental Health Awareness Month] /Fashion United

• And another from Iolanda Carvalho: Lululemon’s brilliant dupe strategy should be duplicated by every brand / Fast Company

• Corollary, the real deal: Lego releases 2,650-piece Pac-Man arcade cabinet / Engadget

• Ringo Studio positions sex toys in athletic-themed room at Contact Sports / Dezeen

Superficial Interest

• From Celeste Blewitt: “This is quite fascinating … why and how humans use foresight. Add in philosophy and ancient history and there's a great read.”  [Foresight: The Mental Talent That Shaped The World] / BBC

• Why do many people find slow motion appealing? / SagePub

• The 100 Most Famous Quotes of All Time, apparently / Hubspot

• The parable of Stevie and Marvin / Seth Godin

• The ultimate sourcebook of Made in USA apparel / CraftedwithPride

• Public furniture design exhibition in Brooklyn highlights "public access not private excess" /Dezeen

Food / Drink

• Inside Portugal’s tinned-fish industry / Monocle

• How to shuck oysters/ Food 52

• IYKYK: My personal favorite oyster knife is so low key you have to just trust me / Greenpoint Fish and Lobster

• New data from a German catering provider showed a precipitous decline in cafeteria currywurst consumption, as it was overtaken by a vegetarian dish, pesto pasta / Semafor

• Meanwhile, Pasta prices are soaring in Italy, leading to an emergency government meeting and calls for a consumer “pasta strike.” / CNBC

• S/o [SIC] homie John Lee: Meet the Sea Monsters! / Advertising Week

• Also snacky: Kraft Singles are getting a major makeover / CNN

• Now available at Walmart, Van Leeuwen x Arizona Iced tea / IG

• Monocle speaks to the founders of one of the world’s most renowned cocktail bars, Attaboy in NYC / Monocle Pod

Useful Diversions

• Read: Sophia Coppola’s first monograph looks rad / Mack Books

• Do:

  • Sunday, Upstate: Meet me at Downtown OG and [SIC] homie Dave Ortiz’s artist talk for his Show “Alphabet of a Colored Man” Upstate / IG

  • Saturday, June 24, 11AM - 7PM - Check out the East Village Zine Fair 🌻

======[SIC] 247: The Intrecciato Agenda======

Misprint 2