[SIC] 289: Barbecue Machine

Volume Six, Number Twenty-Nine

This time: No [SIC] Talks, just the [SIC] Weekly digest of pertinent developments, compiled by me (Ben Dietz) and published free on Thursdays to 5557 subscribers who’ve opted in. [SIC] is a one-person operation that grows exclusively by via word-of-mouth. Pass it along to people you like. Here’s a button:

Paid subscriptions are also available. Paying subscribers get an additional [SIC] Day microdigest of 10 links every Mon, Tues, Weds, Fri, and the [SIC] Sundays dispatch. And founding supporters get invited to dinner parties at my home in NYC, with special guests. Many paying supporters expense their subscriptions as research for their work in marketing, advertising, entertainment and tech.

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Corollary sources this week include: Simple Magic / Kottke / 1440 / Five Things on Friday / Feed Me / Roca News/ Garbage Day / Nieman Lab / Politico / Morning Brew / Vogue Business / The Future Party  / Ben-Evans /  The Art Official  / Marginal Revolution / NYT / Scope Creep / The Daily Upside / The Carbon Almanac / GWI / Thingtesting

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Hi all.

Lots and lots this week. No [SIC] Talks due to illness (my guest’s, not mine) but since there’re a bunch of good ones coming up, I feel ok about it. In the meantime, have a listen to Jeff and me on the newest Culture Club Half Hour, which we’re doing every Wednesday now.

Next week I’m going to take the week off from the major digest, so this letter will probably just be a series of embedded conversations. I’ve got Jacob Donnelly from A Media Operator lined up. Jacob’s output at AMO is insightful and really well-informed, and I’m told he’s a great dude - looking forward to getting in the weeds of the current media condition with him. I’m also setting time with Ted Barrow, whose genius This Old Ledge series for Thrasher has been a highlight of the last few weeks. I kind of imagine Ted doing this whole spiel extemporaneously and in one take, with the skate tricks being the additional content that requires an edit. Here’s another fantastic episode about NYC’s Federal Courthouse, for illustration.

Emily Segal of Nemesis Global is another upcoming guests - Nemesis’s new A-Z series kicked off with a Brand Analysis called A is for Anbernic that I found fascinating. Likewise recent guest Daisy Alioto in her piece on Software Branding in DIRT. Daisy also shared slides from "You Are Heree,” a talk she gave at a private Metalabel x Dirtyverse  symposium - worth checking. Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick pondered who are shakespeares of our times?? in The Trend Report. And Emily Sundberg was on the Making Media Pod yesterday, too. Speaking of Feed Me: I have 3x free paid subs to give away to the first comers. Leave a comment if you want one.

This whole endeavor would be a lot less valuable without contributions and guidance from friends, who have been super generous with their time and insight, with me and others. Case in point: Piers Fawkes and co putting together a free AI-powered, 1000 page Broadmind SXSW report. Or writing: “The headline is clickbaity but definitely a read to the very last quote - great analysis piece on changing Portland as a whole - or what needs to change,” about Soho House’s new NW location. Hence….

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[sic] Friends Section:

Byline launched Readers Club (I joined, and continue to advise btw). Meanwhile, Byline cover star and [SIC] homie Adam Faze rebranded his media company, Fazeworld, to Gymnasium. And Carnegie Hall is having a listening party for the release of Alice Coltrane’s “Live at Carnegie Hall - another one near to me via advising the Coltrane Home.

Another s/o to Casey Lewis, whose citation of [SIC] Day in her “My Internet” installment last week ( welcome those who arrived here (or there) as a result). Thanks to Naz, who duly pointed out some dead links therein yesterday. And thanks to Kevin from The Independent Variable, Neal from Context Collapse and Armando for valuable feedback on my Sunday letter.

From Celeste Blewitt (Melbourne)

• “Another hit of nostalgia, the disposable camera, it's the moment of pause and waiting for the photos to be returned, the next gen loving the disposable camera.” Falling In Love Again With Disposable Cameras / Washington Post

• “Gatekeepers, Hollywood and profitability it's all the rage. It's not a new conversation, but the signals as to what happens next for regulators, production, studios and future projects are always showing recurrent change.” Megamergers Dreams Are Dying - And Hollywood May Be Better Off /The Hollywood Reporter

• “Love an artist tour, plus the story of the apartment gives life to the art, what an apartment.” Tour Artist Audrey Flack's UWS Apartment/Curbed

• “This is intriguing, the tech bros and their fights. Feeds into Kara Swisher's conversation from the SXSW Pivot live recording of the 'tech visionaries'.” The Drama Kings Of Tech / The Atlantic

• “This comes across as a light 'travel type' piece, but quickly dives into the history of Scottish fabrics, Drake's cloth for bespoke tailoring and the investments required to maintain factories of a time when fast fashion is continually taking over.” Bute Fabrics - A Loom With A View  / FT

From Gerhard Stochl: (LES, NYC)

…while Alta might be riding high on positive press recently, let's not forget they still don't allow snowboarding like the elitist skiers that they are (or at least own them).  Eric Blehm (who wrote the book on Craig Kelly recently) chronicled those silly holdouts in his famous Chameleon columns for TWS back in the 90s.

The excellent Looking Sideways podcast is always worth a listen, and not only for Matt Barr's soothing voice. His is a unique take on the activities / lifestyles we all love, from skateboarding to surfing and snowboarding. In the latest episode, Matt talks to Eric Blehm about his book "The Darkest White" which chronicles the life of snowboarding icon Craig Kelly and in the process sketches out the modern history of the "sport" itself. Go have a listen and / or head over to Slush Magazine where you can marvel at the incredible photographs Bud Fawcett took of Craig in his prime. And if you are still on the fence, even the Times review called it "probably the most unremittingly exciting book of nonfiction I have come across in years." I'm currently enjoying it, dreading getting closer and closer to the avalanche section just a little bit. 

From Josh Gardiner (Melbourne):

“give this a listen if you haven't as the US speeds along its election course (not that propaganda is limited to Nth America). Won't be news to your educated readers I know — and as Terry notes, you want to be careful around use of deception — but interesting psychological insights if employed positively and carefully.”

From Iolanda Carvalho (Lisbon):

• Starbucks is the latest brand to shelve the global chief marketer role / Adweek

• The new series, “Beast Games,” is billed as “the biggest reality competition series ever” and will feature 1,000 contestants competing for a $5 million cash prize / CNBC

• Now, six months later, we returned to the data to update our analysis, once again ranking the top 50 AI-first web products, according to SimilarWeb / A16Z

• "Most new product launches fail. Here’s how Liquid Death defied expectations and earned a valuation of over $1bn, according to founder Mike Cessario / Marketing Week

• Why high fashion brands don't have the luxury of ‘eating the rich’ / Contagious

• LinkedIn is a professional network. Maybe it can also be a place for news/ Fast Company

From Andrew Courtien (Greenpoint):

“Ben! Can I pitch something for SIC? We just launched our first product today.” [This Box Set Contains Scents Inspired by Classic Albums]

And now…

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[SIC] 289: Barbecue Machine

The Macro Narrative

• Online Art Sales are Booming / Hypebeast

• And International museum attendance figures back to pre-pandemic levels / The Art Newspaper

• Offices are half-empty on ‘peak’ days / Axios

• The Crime Rings Stealing Everything from Purses to Power Tools / The New Yorker

• Don’t Tell America the Babysitter’s Dead / The Atlantic

• In this year’s list of the world’s happiest countries, the US dropped to No. 23 from No. 15  Much of the dip stems from young Americans feeling worse about their lives /

• “Unregulated and unchecked” social media is a root cause of why so many young Americans feel unhappy with life, said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. / Semafor

• One Millennial in response: Why I’m Out of Step with My Generation / American Enterprise Institute

• While in China, new retail and industrial data beat expectations —  but signs still point to trouble ahead / Quartz

• ‘He-vage’ and ‘babygirl men’: Is China updating menswear’s identity? / Jing Daily

• In London, pubs have created more elaborate drinking games to attract customers / NYT

• The stock of the world’s largest diamond jeweler is tanking because people aren’t getting engaged / Quartz

• How Shrinking Populations Determine Economic Growth / YT

• Elderly people in the U.K. will be given robot pets to treat loneliness / Semafor

• What happens to “stay at home girlfriends” after the breakup? / Cosmopolitan

• Corollary:  Bernie introduced a bill to mandate Universal Gentleman’s Friday / Lawyers Guns Money

• This Is What Life Without Retirement Savings Looks Like / The Atlantic

• Tiktok is Paying Creators to up its Search Game/ The Verge

• Influencer agencies prep worst-case scenarios if TikTok gets banned / Digiday

• MrBeast, inked a deal with Amazon MGM Studios to host and executive produce Beast Games for Prime Video / Hollywood Reporter

• And so: The Mr. Beastification of Entertainment/ Vox

• The number of girls in the US who do martial arts for fun has increased by 71% since 2021 / ABC News

• For Women’s Basketball, Caitlin Clark’s Lasting Impact May Be Economic / NYT

• SKIMS featured male college basketball stars in their latest campaign / Hypebeast

• Taking On the College Cartel / American Enterprise Institute

• The Ego Has Crash-Landed. If Donald Trump loses November’s election, it will be for one reason: He can’t help making it all about himself /The Atlantic

• Culture comes from everywhere, not just the 'top' / The Drum

• Hence? Don Lemon released the Elon Musk interview that reportedly cost Lemon his deal with X / Twitter

• VP Kamala Harris held a roundtable discussion on marijuana reform with rapper Fat Joe and others / AP

• What If Finding Affordable Housing Worked More Like Matchmaking? / Reasons to be Cheerful

Generationations

• Facebook’s ‘poke’ feature is back and Gen Z loves it!  / Insider

• Gen Z are ditching their smartphones, says Dazed.

Platformations

• A TikTok ban or forced sale would set a historic precedent that could disrupt the U.S. media ecosystem for years to come / Axios

• IE: social shopping is finally catching on in the US, thanks to TikTok Shop, Shops on Instagram, and Facebook / The Future Party

• As the government debates a TikTok crackdown, Instagram is mounting a comeback / Marketplace

• But! After its Instagram rival Lemon8 failed to catch on, TikTok might be working on another photo-sharing app / Mashable

• Meantime; Tiktok’s latest wellness trend is called Sexy Water/ WWD

• Social is lost to preachers, drunks and mad dogs. We need another town square / The Drum

• Case in point: X’s New Video Strategy Is a Pivot to Nowhere / NYMag

• And Amazon appears to be picking apart Twitch, with an eye toward potentially transplanting its most lucrative assets elsewhere in the company / Digiday

• Meta introduced a number of updates to ads that improve video formats and AI-informed personalisation / Facebook

• LinkedIn is rolling out puzzle-based games … and your employer’s ranking in the games will be affected by how well you do/ Engadget

• On that note: LinkedIn has been quietly changing over the years, establishing itself as a haven for content creators / Digiday

• While Reddit's IPO plan is dropping it into the center of a struggle between AI companies and content creators over rights and compensation / Axios

• The Future of Underground Rap Is Extremely Online / Rolling Stone

• Hence? Tidal Launches Circles, A Social Network For Musicians / Digital Trends

• While Users of Glassdoor are reporting that their names and job titles are being added to their accounts without their consent / Ars Technica

Stylistics

• Meet Jessika Alexander, Athletic Trainer To Skateboard A-Listers / Jenkem

• Palace Cofounder Talks Gap Collaboration: “It’s Cool, Innit, Man?” / GQ

• Highsnobiety argues that fashion has reached collab-inflation and lays out why “less-is-more” may be the next era for brands / HighSnobiety

• Hence? Reviewing Huckberry's newest brand with designer Aaron Levine / Sprezza

• The holy trinity of retail. Brand, product and business go together / The Sociology of Business

• Can Allbirds Survive Its Own Turnaround Plan?  / BoF

• The Place to Buy Kurt Cobain’s Sweater and Truman Capote’s Ashes / The New Yorker

• Meanwhile: The Real Real has a tab where it sells all the unbranded vintage items it can’t ID but still accepts / TheRealReal

• MSCHF Co-Founders Discuss Their Long, Strange Journey with Angelo Baque / Business of Hype Pod

• Also kinda strange: this Molly Lewis album of vibes-heavy whistling is going to kill the Jazz guys this summer/ Spotify

• Speaking of: Molly Lewis How Long Gone / Spotify

• Meet Fetico, the womenswear label redefining sexiness in Japan / Vogue Business

• Gucci sales down on China slump / Semafor

• Gucci to launch experience on Apple’s Vision Pro / Jing Daily

• The artist is not present: What's left for brands after the founder departs? / Vogue Business

• R.I.P. Martin Greenfield / NYT

Culturations

• ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ Remains Hard to Forget / NYT

• Also rememberable? The Oral History of Pitchfork / Slate

• A visual essay about how Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" lists changed from 2003 to 2020 / The Pudding

• 22 of the funniest books since “Catch-22,” / NYT

• Not including: The Cat That Killed Dick and Jane / January Magazine

• How Women Artists Flourished in Northern Italy During the Renaissance / Hyperallergic

• While modern day contemporary Nina Beier Is a Self-Confessed Hoarder / Frieze

• OMA’s work for Prada is 25 years old and still awesome / Wallpaper

• Neon work in Whitney Biennial features unexspected ‘free Palestine’ message / The Art Newspaper

• Corollary? Decolonizing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness / Hyperallergic

• Ezra Koenig on the journey out of pessimism, swag secrets of the new Vampire Weekend album, copping Yohji and Margaret Howell bangers & more / Blackbird Spyplane

• How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything / Texas Monthly

• Antimeme Zines / Less Foolish

• Not anti-anything: Racking up over 1 billion hits on Weibo, K-Pop band Treasure / Jing Daily

• Dinner Parties Diaries with Jose Andre premiered on Prime / YT

• NYC’S HOTTEST NIGHTLIFE SCENE IS A LITERAL CANDY SHOP / NYPost

• Also, check out the Turquois Hercules Demo 2024 / ArtLess

Technopolis

• They Praised AI at SXSW—and the Audience Started Booing / The Honest Broker

• Because like? Could AI replace all music ever … with Taylor Swift Covers? / New Scientist

• Uhh, maybe not? Amazon, Google Quietly Tamp Down Generative AI Expectations / The Information

• Old-school ASCII art sort of breaks the major LLMs’ brains / Ars Technica

• Also blocky: Lego is the latest brand to apologise for using AI art / Creative Bloq

• An extensive oral history of music-ripping platform LimeWire / Mel

• Denmark is building its own AI supercomputer / Bloomberg

• While Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind, joined Microsoft’s new consumer artificial intelligence unit / Semafor

• Apple is in talks to license Google’s Gemini AI for iPhones and other Apple devices / Bloomberg

• Nvidia, revealed its new, more powerful graphics processor chip design, which is significantly faster / CNBC

• Increasingly, Nvidia’s only market competitor is itself (and AI Fatigue) / WSJ

• Tho … AI powered IBM’s stock to a multi-year high / Bloomberg

• So? AI’s next job: Protecting you from spam calls / TechCrunch

Media-tions

• How ‘Creem’ is coming to music lovers’ emotional rescue / Fast Company

• Vox Media offloads Outsports to Q.Digital / Digiday

• Cuz? The traffic firehose days of the 2010s aren’t coming back/ Garbage Day

• But?! Sports Illustrated may end up sticking around in print after all  / NYT

• Plus celebrated climbing magazine Summit Journal is back in print after an absence of more than 27 years / Monocle

• And The Economist is attracting younger readers with cut-price Espresso digital edition / Press Gazette

• But wait..SI Lives? A Lot of Unanswered Operational Questions Exist / A Media Operator

• Meantime: Fortune is expanding its European footprint / Digiday

• Elsewhere:  the New York Times Audio exceeds 1 million downloads / Press Gazette

• And New Statesman Made Podcasts the Spine of Their Multimedia Strategy / A Media Operator

Market / Influence

• The holy trinity of retail. Brand, product and business go together / The Sociology of Business

• So Was Starbucks right to eliminate its CMO role? / The Drum

• Bentley’s Profit Buoyed by Customized Cars / The Daily Upside

• Inside the turnaround plan to make Vans, Supreme, and The North Face cool again / Yahoo

• Amazon kicked off what it’s calling a “Big Spring Sale.” Bank of America projected that the six-day event could generate billions of dollars in revenue / Quartz

• Meantime, Temu’s Ad Blitz Is Working / BoF

• Chipotle is doing a 50-for-1 stock split / Quartz

• What the rise of China’s ‘moonlight clan’ means for luxury / Jing Meta

• How brands can tap the booming Chinese ‘old money style’. Brands are leveraging China’s cultural heritage to expand into the high-end market / Jing Daily

• How the Fed and Interest Rates Impact Startup Operators / Mostly Metrics

• Related?! How the Jolie showerhead became a viral hit by exposing a dirty truth / Fast Company

• Corollary to that: Gen Alpha is driving 49% of Drugstore Skincare Sales Growth / The Daily Beast

• And Selena Gomez is reportedly considering selling her cosmetics brand at a $2 billion valuation / Bloomberg

• Nordstrom is considering going private (again) / Quartz

• Corollary: Inside the world’s biggest sports retailer as it rebrands / The Drum

• Eats, Drinks and Ephemera

• The Bodega as Chaotic Good, the Salad Joint as Neutral Evil / The New Yorker

• Also chaotic good? Dolly Parton's cast iron cookware / Lodge

• Don’t tell the bros! Intermittent fasting puts practitioners at higher risk of dying from heart disease / CNBC

• Why is the FBI probing some of Napa Valley’s fanciest wineries?” / L.A. Times

• WHY WE LOVE GOSSIP SO MUCH (& HOW IT’S ACTUALLY GOOD FOR US) / Service95

The Natural (?!) World

• A study found that long Covid appears to be no different from the syndromes developed after contracting other types of viruses / ABC.au

• 5 Spring Incantations: Spells for a Season of Transformation / The Early Majority

• How to boost the urban tree canopy / The Walrus

• Elsewhere: Python farming as a flexible and efficient form of agricultural food security / Nature

• Animal-Friendly AI NOW! We stand at the precipice of a new era in artificial intelligence – and ethics has never been more important / Bold Reasoning

• Also: Nudity Why wear clothes at all? / Articles of Interest

• Especially when a four-day weather forecast today is as accurate as a one-day forecast 30 years ago / Kottke

• Also weather dependent? The Feds have hired a company to figure out if it’s possible to make a railroad on the Moon / QZ

• Corollary: A volcano taller than Mount Everest was detected on the surface of Mars / Semafor

• Meantime, on earth: Panama has the most popular flag of convenience / Statista

• And an interesting map developed by iQAir from the study results, which shows the level of air pollution by area so you can see how your area ranks / IQAir

[SIC] 289: Barbecue Machine