[SIC] 352: Semi Centenarian

Vol. 7, No. 42. Birthday Reflections, HIP REPLACEMENT Ep. 17 Amani Hope.

Jul 11, 2025

[SIC] Weekly is a digest of developments in trends, tech, media, marketing, fashion, food, places and events, published free on Thursdays. Feel no compunction to open every item in a new tab; [SIC] is intended to be read as you would a bulleted list.

This digest was sent free on 7/11/25 to 7712 subscribers. Original source is cited. Corollary sources are listed at the end of each digest.

I'm Ben Dietz, longtime media/entertainment business guy, and now advisor-for-hire to brands, publishers and agencies. 

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Special thanks this week for stories: Harper Dietz, Geoff Renaud, Ben Pruess, Piers Fawkes, Celeste Blewitt and Iolanda Carvalho.

Comments, Questions and Contributions are invited from everyone.

Hi all.

Friday send this week because it was my 50th birthday yesterday and the festivities got in the way of normal proceedings. Thanks for your patience. Links this week are (mercifully, if you ask some people) largely free of adjoining language.

Now that I’m officially old enough for Robot Insurance, the premise of Seth Godin’s Notes to myself resonates particularly strongly; the benefits of wisdom and experience only manifest if you exercise a program of curiosity. And never stop searching. I’m grateful to all of you who engage with [SIC] every week - it’s validating to know this is useful.

To that end, if there’s anything you want to see more of / less of here in the weekly, drop me a line sometime. As I say to my cherished paying subscribers, your thoughts, feedback, provocations and especially contributions are greatly appreciated - and sincerely invited.

Apropos of that; I got my first contribution from my (nearly) 16 year old daughter this week - an IG post about why A Florida Store is now selling Chocolate Labubu Items encapsulates the deep-fried memery of the moment. I love this for lots of reasons, but mainly because it’s a manifestation of the intergenerational, conversational and cultural exchange I want to have with all the people I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by.

That exchange is, of course, also the motivating thrust of HIP REPLACEMENT - which this week saw Amani Hope of the books-and-stuff newsletter cherry bomb join Kyle and me to talk Oasis and Ozzy, emojicore, drinking culture among the youts, romantasies and a bunch of other stuff. Have a gander:

or a listen, if you prefer:

Last couple things before the links: Among the birthday presents I got was my annual gift / member benefit from A24’s subscription scheme AAA24. I picked out [SIC] homie Heidi Bivens’s Book ‘Euphoria Fashion’, which I’m stoked about - it underscores how good A24 is at its loyalty marketing, and how valuable this kind of CRM action is. I’m here writing about it, after all.

Speaking of audience engagement, the ‘events section’ continues to be well received, so here it is again. Notable on my calendar this week:

DJ Spooky at Cochecton Pump House is a wild collision of eras in my life - stoked for this, tomorrow.
Also upstate, From Piers: art stuff to do: [Upstate Art Weekend 2025 Expands to Include Over 155 Participants]
More to-dos: I haven’t yet made is to 'Geek Week' at Sotheby’s but thefree exhibition of some remarkable objects of natural history, science and space exploration before they hit the auction block, like a chunk of Mars and rare dinosaur bones sounds fascinating; gonna try to go Monday.
Also Monday, a stop at the David Zwirner Books Moving Sale July 14-18
More books, this weekend: SF Art Book Fair - including fave publishers TBW Books and Aperture. I’ll miss it (being back East) but if you’re in the Bay, go!
Meantime, Aurel Schmidt’s got an opening in Tokyo on Saturday. Won’t be there either, but I love Aurel’s drawings.
I also missed the The Opening Reception for MSCHF: King Solomon's Baby last night at Pioneer Works, but as usual the spectacle was spectacular.

Apropos that - [SIC] homie Haris Fazlani’s Always start with art for Sociology of Business yesterday rings true for me. So it’s art links first, below.

And now….

[SIC] 352: Semi Centenarian

Artists And The Arts

Bob Nickas: Has Contemporary Art Run Its Course? / Brooklyn Rail
Jerry Saltz Has Visions. When the art critic and author looks to the future, he sees a world where criticism is alive and well / Byline
Shameless biters and wild coincidence. Theft and creativity are intimately connected. Memory is porous and fallible / Blackbird Spyplane
Did Damien Hirst Rip Off the Work of This Lesser-Known Artist? / Artnet
NYC art schools see record-high application numbers as Gen Zers clamber to enroll / Gothamist
The global high-end art market is struggling to reverse its multi-year slump / Semafor
Want Art But Have No Money? This Art Fair Is for You / ArtNet
Also for me? A little Mark Gonzales Push Notification / IG
Towering ambition: the Swiss artist Not Vital's Alpine playground / Art Net
My Return to an Unfinished Dream. A portrait of [Beirut] in transition, and the memories that surface in its silence / Byline
Interview: Takashi Murakami / Brooklyn Rail
And Dustin Yellin / Brooklyn Rail
Apropos of A24 in the intro - this Gregory Crewdson x Ari Aster edition is sick/ A24
Related: Ari Aster & Bill Hader on Episode 50 of the A24 pod / A24
From Piers: “skate art roof” [transparent happiness: yinka ilori transforms iconic mounds of helsinki's amos rex] / Design Boom

Shitegeist

My lawyer told me to quit writing about Trump, but I was way ahead of her. [Lawyers] everywhere are advising non-U.S. citizen content creators to avoid politics and scrub their social media to minimize risks of unwanted scrutiny from authorities or competitors /Bloomberg
CHINGA LA MIGRA On the ground at a massive ICE raid in LA's MacArthur Park/ Rave New World
Trump Loves ICE. Its Workforce Has Never Been So Miserable / Atlantic
Think Work-Life Balance Is Overrated? You’re Hired! / WSJ
The Great Soft Skills Scam. A brief plea for what remains stubbornly human / In Bed With Social
The Vibe of Summer 2025, According to T-Shirts on the Jersey Shore / The Cut
Over half of young Americans are apparently “vibe-based budgeting.” / Fast Company
Kyla Scanlon was on The Ezra Klein Show to talk about how the attention economy is devouring Gen Z / NYT
ARE YOU EXPERIENCING POSTING ENNUI? / The New Yorker
Stop making me log in to everything. The internet now happens behind closed doors / Embedded
How Zohran Mamdani drove over 20K clicks from Instagram DMs / Link in Bio
I Fought Plastic. Plastic Won. [The] futile quest to avoid the material that my entire world is made out of / The Atlantic
What is Kitty Flipping? Mixing Ketamine and MDMA. How much you know about this popular combo says a lot about your familiarity with club drugs—and Jennifer Lopez movies / Doubleblind
The Death of Partying in the U.S.A.—and Why It Matters. Young Americans today spend 70% less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the 21st century. Why? / Derek Thompson
Women are spending big money for small boobs / WSJ
From Celeste: “The race for agelessness begins at such an early age these days.” I Can Have My Cake And Eat It Too. Why Younger PAtients Are Seeking Facelifts / Glossy
Hardcore Wellness: Why Anti-Aging Doesn’t Exist. Head of Spa at Augustinus Bader, [on] why anti-aging is a flawed concept / 032C
WHEN DID LIFE ADVICE GET SO UNHINGED? / Dazed
Collapsing the Urban-Rural Divide / The Drift
Disarming at the Precipice / Are.na
The Depopulation Bomb. What if the challenge for humanity’s future is not too many people on a crowded planet, but too few people to sustain the progress that the world needs? / Reason
The Baby Bust Reality Check / AEIdeas
Less than two years after opening, the Museum of Censored Art in Barcelona has closed its doors / The Art Newspaper

Slopternet

LITTLE VIDEOS ARE COOKING OUR BRAINS / Vox
From Piers: “A little pre-mainstream but it reminds me of the tools we use today (instagram, for example) and how they only blew up with a shift in hardware tech in our phones (cameras in the ‘grams case). maybe my next phone will have LoRa and ESP32?? [Jack Dorsey just released a Bluetooth messaging app that doesn't need the internet] “/ Engadget
ChatGPT kept directing people to use a non-existent feature on Soundslice...so the team built it / Soundslice
From Geoff Renaud: AI Manhattan Project / Epoch.AI
Against "Brain Damage" AI can help, or hurt, our thinking / One Useful Thing
From Geoff Renaud: Large Language Models Are Improving Exponentially. The capabilities of LLMs are doubling every 7 months. By 2030, it may take them mere hours to do tasks that take humans a full month / Spectrum IEEE
Grok 4 is here, but 4 who? AI browsers are data-collecting machines / Ben’s Bites

Creative Ouevres

From Piers: Photo-music collab to encourage the listener to “stand above the record player exploring the artwork until the needle spins into the dead wax” [Hyperreal photography meets minimal tech house] / It’s Nice That
What makes a great party? Forget chandeliers in trees and expensive portable toilets, the perfect event is about good times and human chemistry / FT
The Wild, Inclusive Brilliance of New York’s Pyramid Club / Hyperallergic

The Natural World

In Defense of the Tourist Trap: Why Following the Crowd Might Be the Smartest Way To Travel. Tourist traps aren't failures of imagination—they’re optimized cultural hubs built for your enjoyment / Reason
New York City beaches are not being inundated with more sharks. They're being inundated with more shark-spotting drones / Gothamist
From Piers: Bird Sound Infographic / Twitter
Oysters Are Breathing Life Into the Chesapeake Bay. As the world’s most ambitious oyster reef restoration nears completion, many millions of tiny mollusks are revitalizing America’s largest estuary / Reasons to Be Cheerful
Effectiveness of plastic bag bans and fees/ The Carbon Almanac

Media Massage

From Ben Pruess: felt like a BD episode [Google Zero Fears and the Creator Economy Correction] / The Powers That Be
What happens to the news business when people stop clicking? / The Stok
Cloudflare Sparks SEO Debate With New AI Crawler Payment System / Search Engine Journal
Substack's Founding Members Tier Seems Promising. Does it Work? / A Media Operator
Can The New York Times turn its writers into video stars? / Vulture
From Iolanda: Top creators 2025 /Forbes
CNN relaunched its free, ad-supported channel last week / Axios

Entertaining

From Celeste: “What a brilliant watch, loved watching and listening to the passion of this paleontologist, Mark Loewen, dissect Jurassic Park films and scenes. Intriguing. [Paleontologist Reviews Jurassic Park Scenes] / Vanity Fair
From Piers: “a very long essay on a very long running show. both of which I have wondered why I'm still reading/watching it. but ultimately i was glad I wasted time doing so x2” [How a Show About Truly Terrible People Became the Defining American Sitcom] / NYT
From Celeste: Can Wimbledon Survive Its Thoroughly Modern Makeover? / Tatler
Wet Leg’s Tiny Desk is a great preview to my weekend listening; their new album Moisturizer / YT

Fashions

Normalizing Shorts and Flip-Flops At The Office Is An Idea Whose Temp Has Come / Pulling Weeds
Uniqlo basks in consumers buying ‘summer all year’ clothes in hotter climate / FT
Champagne Supermarket. Where were you while we were shopping the Oasis pop-up? / Catchdini
How clothing pop-up Alfargo’s Marketplace became one of the best places in NYC to buy—and nerd out over—vintage menswear.
/ Ivy Style
From Celeste: “JW Anderson, Dior and Celine, the clean lines and mild normalcy is perhaps refreshing” [Are Clothes For The Sake Of Clothes So Back?] / i-D
JW Anderson’s new curated collection of his favourite things / The Guardian
The Travel Cords Edition [SIC] Talks alum Noah Brier reveals his entire on-the-go cable set-up / WITI

Marketations

Is C-beauty having a K-beauty moment? / Jing Daily
POP MART’S LABUBU CRAZE SUPERCHARGES TIKTOK SHOP SALES / Modern Retail
Gen Z is rejecting the life stages brands still sell / Ad Age
From Iolanda: On Brand [What is a Brand? And what is it not?] / Frontier Magazine
From Ben Pruess: The Meta Grevy train of dollars just keeps finding ways to grow [Instagram content becomes searchable on google on July 10th] PPC
Corollary: YouTube, the company is eager for creators to share more data with brands and advertisers / Tubefilter
Wait, Genesis Runs Golf Now?! The Car Brand That’s Betting Big on Golf’s Future / Hypebeast
From Iolanda: Half year recap [7 successful marketing campaigns that met 2025’s chaos with determination] / Marketing Dive
Syracuse lands Upstate New York’s first Ikea store / Chain Store Age

Foods Drinks

Coffee prices climb after Donald Trump threatens 50% tariffs on Brazil / FT
MATCHA LOVERS ARE TURNING AGAINST EACH OTHER OVER GLOBAL SHORTAGE / WSJ
From Iolanda: GLP-1ing adaptations…[Downsized Dining] / VML
From Celeste TikTok Chefs Have Upstaged Their Clients / Grub Street
And finally, also from Celeste: “…no one in Australia is touching a mushroom following this case”We All Became Detectives In Erin Patterson's Trial. But As A Crime Writer, I Can't Help But Wonder At What Cost?] / The Guardian

[SIC] 352: Semi Centenarian

[SIC] 352: Semi Centenarian

Vol. 7, No. 42. Birthday Reflections, HIP REPLACEMENT Ep. 17 Amani Hope.

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