Culture

Last year, the Archive lost an appeal in its ebook lending case, and now it has settled the lawsuit over its Great 78 Project:

But she won’t get the editor-in-chief title that Anna Wintour held for decades — the role is officially called the “Head of Editorial Content.” Editor of Vogue.com Chloe Malle was named to the position this morning.

Your collection of artworks looted by the Nazis could end up in the news. A Dutch newspaper recently spotted what appears to be a missing painting that belonged to a Jewish art dealer during World War II — in an online real estate listing for a home in Argentina. A second missing painting was reportedly seen in a social media post by one of the daughters of a Nazi official.

Raphaël Graven, a 46-year-old French influencer known by his streaming handle, Jeanpormanove, died in his sleep during a live broadcast on Kick earlier this week after being “humiliated and mistreated for months” on the platform, according to French technology minister Clara Chappaz. A judicial investigation into his death is underway.

Actor Sydney Sweeney is currently embroiled in a days-long “discourse” cycle about a campaign she shot with American Eagle. The ad — and whether it’s a eugenics dog whistle — is one thing. But I liked this Atlantic piece that zoomed out and put the outrage and online content cycle into perspective. Chat, is discourse cooked?

Or would you? The weird little toys are a nightmare to buy so we took matters into our own hands.

We’ve talked before about the funhouse-mirror-alternative-reality that Trump (and Musk) have built. JP Brammer, who watches much more YouTube than I do, notes something weird is going on in content land — it seems Donald Trump has lost control of the plot. NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny, writing from a more anxious angle, seems to agree. Content has now outpaced reality. I guess we’re going to find out by how much.

Kyle Chayka, who wrote for this website about the “airspace” aesthetic created by social media, is now looking into how LLM models affect creativity. He suggests that if Silicon Valley once homogenized decor — and, to some degree, created beige influencers — it may now be making LLM users less original, too.

No? Well, let Rusty Foster fix that for you. I promise the quick progression of headlines in this newsletter will leave you feeling, if not concussed, then certainly different.

The company that owns the biggest sewing pattern brands — Simplicity, Butterick, McCalls, and Vogue — has been sold to a liquidator, per the Craft Industry Alliance. That’s troubling news for those of us that sew and prefer physical patterns, but there’s also a concerning knock-on effect: the company owns the last large-scale tissue printers in the country.

If you’re a celebrity promoting a new movie or your latest album, you used to follow a standard playbook of late night shows, magazine cover stories, or daytime talk shows. Now you have to do all that and eat chicken wings with YouTubers or give your hottest take while riding the subway. The New Media Circuit is a powerful driver of views, likes, and comments — but does it actually sell anything?

The Atlantic has a fascinating deep dive into khipus — long cords that the Inca tied knots into to preserve information. Few know how to read the knots, which are hundreds of years old and fragile. But researchers are slowly learning to understand them:

IEEE Spectrum wrote about running an old-school bulletin-board system (BBS) from a Raspberry Pi 3 over LoRa, using the off-grid mesh-networking capabilities of Meshtastic, and it sounds like a very fun, nerdy project.

In a 1,000 person survey of 20–29 year olds by a major Japanese bank, nearly 20 percent admitted: they once spent so much money on in-game purchases that they couldn’t cover living expenses.

Google recently showed off “a cinematic vision so surreal, so ahead of its time, that it proved impossible to produce.” Giraffes on Horseback Salad was originally conceived by Salvador Dalí for the Marx Brothers, but was too weird (and not funny enough) to be actually made. Using Veo 2 and Imagen 3, an ad agency and a museum were “finally capable of transforming surrealism into film.” (Unlike... Luis Buñuel? David Lynch?)

Kottke directed me toward a website posing a question I have never, ever asked myself: which of two chickens is more frolicsome? Which is more optimistic? More aberrant? Creator Erika Hall will take suggestions for new adjectives, too.

Whatever the opposite of coolhunting is, Max Read’s analytical prediction of an accursed new internet trend does it:

In the new season of the HBO show, Jason Isaacs’ character sulks around the luxury resort in a shirt from his alma mater. One scene in particular (warning: spoilers!) has become something of a meme. Duke says it didn’t approve of its logo being so prominent, telling Bloomberg that the imagery is “troubling” and “goes too far.”

The New York Times reported in 2023 that Keita Takahashi gets no royalties from his quirky roll-up-the-world’s-objects-into-a-blob game series — which wouldn’t terribly surprise me. Royalties aren’t common in an industry that doesn’t treat workers well in general. But I imagine he’s getting something from cute licensed products with his name on them, right? Right?

Ahh MySpace. A website from simpler times when the worst you had to worry about from social media was falling out with the friend that didn’t make your Top 8. It has since puttered along morphing into something completely unrecognizable...until now. Game designer Ste Curran has created SkySpace, a website that’ll take your Bluesky profile and make it into a MySpace page complete with a customizable background, a Top 8 you can set, and even a music plugin.