[SIC] 328: Tartare Renaissance

Vol 7, No. 18. [SIC] Talks with Troy Young. Prayers for LA. Links on links (on Links I Would Gchat You). And, in Troy's Words: A Lot of Work. Open in Browser for Best Results.

Jan 09, 2025

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Thanks to Iolanda Carvalho, Geoff Renaud, Jeff Weiner, Isaac Dietz, Molly Raskin, Piers Fawkes, Celeste Blewitt, and Gordon Hull for links. Contributions welcome!

Hi all.

My buddy Andrea Hernandez said it perfectly in Snaxshot, so I’m repeating her opener from last night: Thinking about everyone in LA right now—sending you all the love and strength. Lefsetz on The Fires also kind of says it all.

Since it’s heavy right now, I’ll keep the intro tight, despite the admonitions of [SIC] Talks guest Troy Young, who came to our (very fun, very illuminating) chat with two takes that I don’t hear much: 1) that he like fewer links and more writing about what I *think*, and 2) that he’s not a fan of the ‘corollary’ annotations I make to link items in the newsletter. Beholden to habit as I am, it’ll be tough take that advice, but Troy’s a very smart guy so I’m gonna take a cue from him on the second point today. Let me know what you think in the comments or in the subscriber chat, which should be open to everybody.

And definitely listen to the convo. Lots of gold therein, amidst plenty of fun ephemera.

Last thing:

Caitlin Dewey

from Links I Would GChat You reached out and asked if I’d name a few favorite newsletters for her Your favorite newsletter’s favorite newsletters post from last night, which she describes as “A chain-letter love note to an expanding multiverse”. I was flattered to be asked, and even more flattered to find [SIC] included, suggested by both

Casey Lewis

of After School and Matt Muir of Web Curios, which was new to me along with many, many of the newsletters named. It’s a pretty unbelievable source suggester for internet explorers, and I highly recommend you spend some time there discovering.

After you parse the week’s digest, of course. Huge thanks again to Caitlin, Casey and Matt, meantime. And stay safe, everybody.

Ben

[SIC] Talks #92: Troy Young. [Listen on Spotify]

Some of the stuff we talked about:

The excellent People Vs. Algorithms podcast /Spotify
Why there are so many Australians in Williamsburg / The Baffler
Harmony Korine on The Late Show / Youtube
Meta surrenders to the right on speech / Platfomer.
The Future of Trustworthy Information / Shorenstein Center
News Items by John Ellis / Substack
Planning Serendipity. Spontaneity is my new luxury / Club YOLO
Michael Cembalest’s “Eye On the Market” Podcast / Spotify
Daisy and Francis talk to Emily Sundberg on Tasteland this week / Spotify
Severance is back and it’s good! / Vulture
Omnivore / Apple TV+

[SIC] 328: Tartare Renaissance

Friends Section

Hard Copy Los Angeles. Opening January 10th at Webber Gallery / IG
HAMBURGER EYES No. 56 The Continuing Story of Life on Earth. James Han, Manu Jougla. Lex Kim, Don Standing and Thatcher Keats / Hamburger Eyes
VIOLET x Ryan McGinley “Lissy” board series / IG
Timothee Chalamet’s Bob Dylan made too much sense / Media-Events
Also, Twigs’s Subway Take is correct. / IG
Dan Ozzi’s kicking off a series called Alphabetical Order: My Life in Records, from A to Z / Zero Cred
From Gordon: What is Real When Nothing Is Real “made of of 56 different collages that create the animation” / IG

The State of Things

How Art Lost Its Way. An unserious culture lacks the ability to sustain high art / Persuasion
The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away / The Atlantic
The Femosphere The Guardian names the female corollary to the manosphere / The Guardian
Joseph Beuys Predicted the “Manosphere” / Hyperallergic
The Anti-Social Century Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. Gen Z — “aren’t trying to leave the house at all. They’re turning on their cameras to advertise to the world the joy of not hanging out.” / The Atlantic
From Iolanda: And this - Data Never Sleeps / Domo

You might just have to be bored. Or: How to fix an attention span / Embedded
Americans Need to Party More. Adolescents are engaging in markedly fewer risky behaviors than they used to; Jude Ball, a psychologist who has extensively researched this phenomenon, says a major cause is just that teenagers are having fewer parties / The Atlantic
A reconsideration of alcohol in our lives is in the air / NYT
Sammy Reis posits we should drink more coffee in 2025 / GQ
Apropos of that: Letting the Nitrous Oxide Talk We probably won’t like what it has to say / Dinner Party
From Geoff Renaud: Meantime US teens are using less of every substance – except for one. Teenagers in the US roughly doubled their use of nicotine pouches in 2024, despite turning away from alcohol and other drugs / New Scientist
Related? I’m Feeling Remarkably Upbeat About the New Year. Whether opinions shifting on Orwellian dogmas are due to political opportunism, hard lessons learned, or just the cyclical back-and-forth of the pendulum, it strikes Frederick M. Hess that the nation is starting the new year on a healthier, more genuinely tolerant, and more sensible note than it has in a while / American Enterprise Institute
MAHA is this Year's Ozempic / Snaxshot
Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? A scientist tried to discredit the theory that ultra-processed foods are killing us. Instead, he overturned his own understanding of obesity / The New Yorker
Exercise is "the single most potent medical intervention ever known" / PBS
How to Hit Peak Fitness After 40. You can’t train in middle age like you did in your 20s. But if you’re strategic, your best days can still be ahead / NYT
Fitness centers are trading the minimalist aesthetic for country-club preppiness / NYT
Seventy may really be the new sixty. Older adults in England today seem to be experiencing far higher levels of physical and mental functioning than did previous generations at the same age / Nature
‘People Feel They Don’t Owe Anyone Anything’: The Rise in ‘Flaking Out of Social Plans’ / The Guardian
The “no-buy” movement is taking over TikTok. Is this an actual challenge, or are people just broke? / Fast Company
69 Theses: Predictions, Lessons, and Longs for 2025. Messages from the darkest corners of the crypto and AI sewers / Redphone Crypto

Technopolis

Axios' running list of CES announcements / Axios
Shares in Tencent tumble after the company is added to a U.S. military blacklist after the Defense Department designated it as a “Chinese military company / NYT
TikTok's sister app Lemon8 has been sponsoring posts on TikTok encouraging users to migrate to Lemon8 amid a looming ban threat / Axios
Stop pretending Meta cares about free speech / User Mag
Meta’s move to end third-party fact checking does not mean what Washington seems to think it means. What actually gets seen on social media platforms is still ultimately decided at the algorithm level, mostly outside the realm of political debate / Politico
Zuckerberg donned a $900,000 watch to announce the end of the fact-checking program / Bloomberg
After a week of bad press, Meta has seemingly deleted its nonhuman chatbot profiles from Instagram that quietly rolled out in 2023… signaling a potential retreat from its plan to offer a community of AI users / Fast Company
Instagram begins randomly showing users AI-generated images of themselves. “Meta AI has an ‘Imagine Yourself’ feature in which you upload several selfies and take photos of yourself from different angles / 404 Media
Apple says it will update, rather than pause, a new AI feature generating inaccurate news alerts / BBC
Concerningly, then, from Iolanda: Augmented TV by Google [Google Unveils an AI TV that Summarizes The News For You] Techcrunch
From Piers: Turns Out Blind People Really Love Taking Trips in Waymo’s Self-Driving Robotaxis / SFist
Nissan unveils electric version of 1980s Skyline GT-R sports car / Dezeen

Screen Scenes

From Celeste: [Americans With Dementia Are Grieving Social Media] “Updates, changes in the user interface, password and tech updates, I hadn't comprehended the difficulties this would cause for those living with dementia who utilise tech in their everyday life” / The Atlantic
Substack’s social media vibe shift / Embedded
Spotify released its first-ever concert film, Billions Club Live with The Weeknd: A Concert Film, directly on its platform/ Hollywood Reporter
Variety released a report on the social, immersive, gamified screens that Hollywood is mostly ignoring / Variety
Could a sleek rebrand make Tezza the trendiest photo app for social media? / Creative Bloq
The marketing teams behind Anora, Longlegs, and Conclave about the campaigns behind the hits / LA Times
The Biggest Breakout Creators of 2024 / AdAge
How IShowSpeed Became a Global Phenomenon / Forbes
The creation and sharing of sexually explicit deepfakes will be a criminal offence in the UK, the justice ministry said / Reuters
What’s next for Web3 in 2025? / Jing Daily
Shenanigans finna boom. Memecoins are set to have their heyday this year as digital gambling isn’t just accepted but encouraged / Wired
Mikey Madison in the Criterion Closet / Criterion
Sheesh. Criterion Channel is killing it in January. / Criterion
Steven Soderbergh's annual list of everything he watched and read in 2024 / Extension 765
Apropos: Thousands of documentaries are fueling AI models built by Apple, Meta, and Nvidia / Nieman Lab
From Molly: The Ghosts in the Machine / Harpers
How ‘the algorithm’ became a scapegoat for bland style / Vogue Business
From Molly: What Happens When TikTok’s Trend Machine Shuts Down? / Bloomberg
TikTok Shop Rival Whatnot Raises Funds at $5 Billion Valuation / BoF

Global Cities

We Shape Our Cities and Our Cities Shape Us / American Enterprise Institute
From Piers: also a list that reflects the bias we still have in our popular culture towards euro-centric fantasy… [London Is Quoted More Times In Movies Than (Nearly) Every Other City In The World] / Secret LDN
From Celeste: [There WIll Be A Bit Of A Slump: London Braced For Luxury Hotel Glut] / FT
What's really going on at London's biggest nightclub? A 15,000-capacity venue in a former IKEA has been allowed to remain open after defeating efforts by the police to substantially cut its capacity following two drugs deaths / London Centric
Snowed in at Britain’s highest pub / The Guardian

IP Conglomeration

From Iolanda: United to face AI…[Getty to Acquire Shutterstock]/ AP
From Piers: Interesting to think about these companies with legacy names and the relationships with the estates. does omnicom still pay the Ogilvy trust I wonder (not much) [High Court rules Zaha Hadid Architects must continue paying to use founder's name]/ Dezeen
From Jeff Weiner: Uncensored CMO: B2B brand building in the era of AI with Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg / Overcast

World Orders

Denmark’s redesigned coat of arms is a not-so-subtle refusal to sell Greenland to the US / Monocle
From Piers: maybe a first world problem will bring the issue home [A look into the future’: TV drama about Danish climate refugees divides opinion] / The Guardian
Home equity could fuel a massive wealth transfer. But baby boomers might end up needing that money themselves, and what they pass on could widen the racial wealth gap / Marketplace
Playing Jenga with Maritime Shipping / FT

The Arts

The latest UBS Wealth Management Billionaire Ambitions Report should bring some joy to the art trade. According to the report “an increasingly bright spot is art and antiques, where almost a third (32%) plan to increase exposure more / UBS
Ergo: Michael Oxley Wants to Show You Something / CARLA
IE: 10 Art Shows to See in Los Angeles This January / Hyperallergic
and 8 New York City Art Shows to Kick Off the New Year / Hyperallergic
New York’s Climate Museum secures permanent location / The Art Newspaper
‘It surprised me’: artist finds inspiration in what AI art gets wrong / The Art Newspaper
Artistry. Giving people what they want is commerce.Doing what you want is art / Lefsetz Letter
Creative Time on the occasion of the organization’s 50th anniversary / Family Style
The Largest Survey of David Hockney Prints Lands in Palm Springs / Hypeart
Summer Of Art. Exhibitions to catch around Australia while it’s still hot / Monster Children
In RugLife, 14 artists from around the world explore the rug as a medium to interweave discourse about issues on a global and personal scale at the Museum of Craft and Design / Hyperallergic

Culturati

What do movie producers actually do? / NYT
Haris Fazlani is chasing continuous refinement. Edmond Lau sits down with Creative Director and co-founder of WØRKS turned furniture designer, Haris Fazlani, to talk creative practice, designing furniture and why good design is necessary for a joyful life / World of Eso
Woody Harrelson’s Weed Lounge. Michelle’s mission to have an extremely stoned chat with Woody / Rave New World
What Magnus Carlsen’s Jeans Have to Do with Chess / The New Yorker
Psychedelic Exceptionalism Harms People Who Take Antidepressants. Shaming people who take antidepressants like SSRIs is just another example of psychedelic exceptionalism, a sentiment that's all too common within the culture / Doubleblind
From Molly: At the Movies, the ‘Older Woman’ Is Growing Up / NYT
RAFTM Rachel Tashjian observes that this YouTube account has many Thelonius Monk concerts / YT
From Isaac: Year of strange Movement by @matt_mccreary1 / IG
Who thinks they are better than whom? An exploration of the shifting definition of "elite" through art, community, and culture / Cento
Lupe Fiasco is going to teach a course about rap at Johns Hopkins / Complex
Financial Times speaks to the who’s who of interior designers to get their take on how we’ll live in 2025 / FT
21st-Century Architecture: 25 Years 25 Buildings. To kick off 2025, Dezeen is naming the 25 most significant buildings of the 21st century so far / Dezeen
Corollary: The best logos of the 2020s (so far) / Creative Bloq
Chef Clare de Boer’s top New York restaurants / FT
Pig Fucker Music. The Jesus Lizard are back, keeping it tight n’ shiny / CREEM
Teeth are so back / Twitter
Do You Even Maxx, Bro? / Mens Health

The Stylistics

Matty Matheson’s Recipe for Life—and Red-Carpet Style / Esquire
From Celeste: The Gallaghers style strikes again. [The New Anoraks Combine Staying Dry With 90s Inspired Cool] /FT
From Kevin Tachman: Hiroyuki Sanada on Shōgun, the Golden Globes—and His Impressive Eyewear Collection / Esquire
Preserving craft know-how is a must for Europe’s storied luxury brands; their future depends on safeguarding the traditions of the past. That’s why schools across the continent are working to ensure that younger generations learn about craft heritage / Monocle
From Molly: Why the ‘Walmart Birkin’ Struck a Nerve / BoF
From sex-positive Rui’s boundary-pushing collaborations with brands like Osuga and Adidas, to “quiet luxury” favorite Ruohan, 10 Chinese designers to know / Jing Daily
What’s Hedi Slimane’s Next Move? / Show Notes

Broadcastery

The NFL had 70 of the top 100 most-watched live events in 2024 — making it an off-year of sorts, down from 93 of the top 100 live event broadcasts in 2023. The presidential election and the Olympics ate into the league’s ratings dominance last year / Front Office Sports
W Magazine Editor Sara Moonves Moonves—who you should listen to on this new episode of the very good podcast What’s Contemporary Now? / Spotify
Tiktok brand strategy sensation Eugene Healey on Chaos & Meaning / That Business of Meaning

Communicationaries

Per Rei Inamoto: The Flywheel of Brand. Company creates Product -> Product attracts Customers ->Customers trust Brand ->Brand differentiates Company / LinkedIn
J.Crew is casting writers for The New Yorker in their campaigns now.
Jesse Kirshbaum’s 2025 predictions for music and culture / Beats and Bytes
GroupM, the largest media buying agency by revenue, is shifting its business to focus on many big data sets instead of a single proprietary one, propelled by AI / Axios
From Iolanda: It's an AI world, we just live in it, ahahha [A new model for AI advertising emerges as agents could replace human attention] / PPC Land
Have we reached peak ad network? / Digiday
Publishers Battle for the C-Suite. Media outlets, looking for new lucrative lines of business, are pursuing newsletters and events aimed specifically at top executives / NYT
While McDonald’s drops diversity targets for its employees and suppliers. The fast-food chain is the latest company to overhaul its diversity, equity and inclusion policy
Dollar Shave Club returns to its roots after Unilever ‘neutered’ its vibe / The Drum
Plant-based meat brand This drops mockumentary-style Veganuary campaign / The Drum
From Celeste: [The Problem With Veganuary] Another with/without January proposition, and the discussion of meat free January. / The New Statesman
From Iolanda: Decoding Alphas [10 Things Creatives Need to Know About Gen Alpha] / Creative Boom

Stores of Value

Vans installs A travertine ramp to forms the centrepiece of the Vans West End store in London / Dezeen
Brands brew up opportunities with in-store cafés. Can in-store cafés blend mass-market accessibility with luxury appeal? / Jing Daily
How Good Are Amazon’s Luxury Dupes, Really? The Row sells jelly flats for $890. Amazon sells the same ones for $30 / Back Row

Randometria:

The house from Breaking Bad is for sale. It’s $4mm / Robb Report
So, like, Should America privatize the postal service? / Marginal Revolution
The Guy Who Invented Graham Crackers Was Trying to Cure Masturbation / VICE
The Hidden World of ‘Hedgehog Highways’ / Reasons to Be Cheerful
From Celeste: [Life As A Millenial Stage Mom] The competition, the stage moments and the level of skill, motivation and detail … the amount of time, skill and energy it takes to make it to Broadway, child or adult actor! / New York Magazine

[SIC] 328: Tartare Renaissance

Corollary Sources this Week: Declarative Statements / Opulent Tips / The Future Party / The Fox is Black / Public Announcement / Champion Weekly / After School / Line Sheet / Today in Tabs / Dirt / 8Ball / Feed Me / Deez Links / Platformer

[SIC] 328: Tartare Renaissance

Vol 7, No. 18. [SIC] Talks with Troy Young. Prayers for LA. Links on links (on Links I Would Gchat You). And, in Troy's Words: A Lot of Work. Open in Browser for Best Results.

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