[SIC] Sundays #7: Merch And I's

Volume 1, Number 7

Oh hi.

I mentioned in Thursday’s weekly that I’m thinking through a rejig of my approach / table of contents / ordering of the newsletter, starting with the first issue of Volume 5 in three weeks. A little push in that direction as an experiment this weekend edition. LMK what you think. And of course, if you want to share this with any / everybody, here’s a button…. have a great week, in the meantime. x Ben

Thinking of you.. I mean…

======[SIC] Sundays #7: Merch And I's======

ZEIGEIST / GESTALT:

• Is Britain tiring of the culture wars? Brexit was supposed to have left the country bitterly divided. But Henry Mance finds identity battles losing their grip on the national conversation / FT

• Gwyneth Paltrow and Naomi Watts are Giving Menopause a Makeover / Airmail

• Economist Martin Wolf on how to change your mind / FT Podcast

• In Italy, a Debate Over Pizza’s Soul / Airmail

• Manhattan rents cross $5k threshold for first time / Axios via Public Announcement

• ‘If I Miss a Deal, It’s—Whatever’: Venture Investors Throw in the Beach Towel / The Information

WORLD / ORDER?

• Peter Zeihan and Ian Bremer on the Sam Harris pod talk the end of the global order / Sam Harris

• 🤔 The White House’s BA.5 variant plan is to do everything that didn’t work before/ Quartz

• The rise and fall of the mobile (manufactured) home / Construction Physics via Marginal Revolution

MEDIA HAPPENING

• “A little more than half of the journalists surveyed (55%) say that every side does not always deserve equal coverage in the news. By contrast, 22% of Americans overall say the same.” Journalists who work in online media are the least likely to embrace “bothsidesism” / Pew Research via Nieman Lab

• From Piers Fawkes: Trends with Gen-Z repeat themselves  While utopic visions of tomorrow once preoccupied the cultural imagination, it lately seems as though the contemporary current of the zeitgeist is pointing the other way. The media Gen Z is consuming, alongside the the content they are creating and engaging with, is increasingly nostalgia-driven. Nostalgia fuels a key emotional need, and familiarity provides more than just a foot in the door for brands - it all but guarantees a warm greeting / PSFK

• Celebrating its relaunch, rock mag Creem airs trippy ad featuring iconic Boy Howdy / The Drum

THE SPECULATIVE FUTURE

• Humane’s new hype video is out. It’s got Nas and Kanye and still no substance on what the super stealthy startup’s product is going to do / Hu.ma.ne via Protocol

• Choose your own adventure: A music metaverse path finder A self-directed path finder for artists to explore the diverse set of entry points into musical metaverse experiences. / Water & Music via Music Redef

• The Internet Is a Constant Recommendations Machine — But It Needs You To Make It Work /  For anyone who's feeling the overwhelm of having so much new content being available, all the time / The Verge via Girls Night Out

• Hollywood’s best strategy for the metaverse: License freely / Protocol

CREATIVE EXPRESSIONS

• The ethics around white producers sampling Black music / Resident Advisor via The Trend Report

• Per Marina Ambramovic: “We need less artists and more heroes—and why I am creating my first NFT to help'  / The Art Newspaper

• But, but: why are NFT platforms opening up physical gallery spaces? / The Art Newspaper via Marginal Revolution

• To the game industry, NFTs are already dead - In some of the latest game releases, the industry has avoided incorporating NFTs, when this would have seemed logical based on market momentum to do so just a few months ago / Protocol via Web3 Newsletter

• A brush with... Ai Weiwei / The Art Newspaper

MARKET-ATIONS

• ESPN Believes In Lacrosse’s Future and Won’t Stop Investing / Front Office Sports

• Shoes from recycled dildos / Highsnobiety

• How a 29-year-old influencer who earns 75% of her income from Amazon prepares for Prime Day / Fortune via After School

• Luxury Brands in China Need to Take Public Scrutiny Seriously The latest fallouts experienced by Balenciaga and Gucci show that luxury brands are now under even more scrutiny from China’s young generation / Jing Daily

USEFUL:

• 🚀 Engineers need better tools to design spacecraft and robots more quickly / Quartz

• Who’s who of CEOs begging every school to teach computer science  / The Verge via Public Announcement

• The Prompt Book is a free PDF e-book that provides smart instructions, great tips, and fabulous examples of how best to prompt the AI. It was produced with DALL·E in mind, but it’s guidance can be used with any recent AI image generator / PDF via Recommendo

• Visualizing the global economy in one chart / Visual Capitlalist via 1440

• Learn how professionals email by reading leaked emails [from Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Sunny Balwani, Mark Zuckerberg, etc / Twitter via Recommendo

SUPERFICIAL INTEREST:

• Pictures of People wearing... seersucker  /OiPolloi

• Golden Goose's Pitch: Don't Toss Old Sneakers / Cobblering is so in right now. Always repair! Never throw your shit away!!!  / NYT via The Trend Report

• Whimsigothic is the fantastical and mystical fashion trend hexing TikTok with over 20 million followers. “Think Stevie Nicks meets Kate Bush, FKA Twigs, Lorde, and Florence Welch’s vibe with a dash of Morticia Addams.” / Teen Vogue via After School

• Corollary: The truth about sunscreen / Wirecutter

• The oral history of Wedding Crashers / Mel Magazine

• A Middle Eastern Party Scene Is Thriving on Brooklyn’s Dance Floors / NYT

• Counties with more turkeys than people / Marginal Revolution

======[SIC] Sundays #7: Merch And I's======