📰 Weekend Links 12/12
Bro culture + No more Ikea catalog + MySpace design legacy: The Neal Ungerleider Newsletter #64
It’s the weekend. That means links.
But first a personal note: My father-in-law Armando Delgado passed away this week after being hospitalized for more than a month with COVID-19. He was a lovely man who welcomed me into his family with open arms and had an abiding love of cooking, bad science fiction movies, and spoling his grandchildren. He leaves behind three great kids and three amazing grandchildren and I’m lucky to have known him.
And because that could use a happiness chaser, congratulations to Hope For The Day. They operate Sip of Hope, which is both my neighborhood coffeeshop and the world’s first coffeeshop where 100% of profits support proactive suicide prevention and mental health education. NBC is now developing a sitcom based on Sip of Hope, Hope Café, executive produced by Mayim Bialki and Damon Wayans Jr. Congrats and support a great cause!
New Futures:
SECRET PANDEMIC HEROES: Zeynep Tufecki on how Yong-Zhen Zhang and Li Wenliang put themselves at great risk to get information out about COVID-19 in the pandemic’s very early days.
HOSPITAL CONSOLIDATION AS HEALTH THREAT: The Nation’s Susie Cagle shows (in comic strip form) how hospital consolidation threatens healthcare across the United States.
SECRET AUTHORITARIAN ECONOMICS: The leagacy of James Buchanan, the Nobel lauerate economist who argued that people are only motivated by self-interest and that altruism doesn’t exist.
BRO CULTURE & AMERICAN IDENTITY: Historian Patrick Wyman on the sociology and meaning of bro culture:
For those don’t spend a lot of time in these corners of Instagram and YouTube, or the actual physical spaces that underlie them, this specific form of American manhood might be hard to see as anything other than a parody. But if you hang out in combat sports gyms, on military bases, and at construction job sites, or if you watch Joe Rogan clips on YouTube and follow the algorithm down the rabbit hole, this type of masculinity - what it means to be a guy - is absolutely ubiquitous.
DUNKIN’ DONUTS, MEET PRIVATE EQUITY: Rob Walker argues that if you want to understand the relationship between private equity and publicly traded corporations, just look at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Advertising/Marketing:
TRUST BREEDS MAGIC: CreativeMornings founder Tina Roth Eisenberg discusses community building and putting together virtual and IRL events with Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler.
RIP IKEA CATALOG: After 70+ years, IKEA is discontinuing their iconic print catalog. Don’t mourn; look through the IKEA Museum’s collection of vintage catalogs instead.
SOCIAL MEDIA TROLL ARMY FIELD GUIDE: Tablet’s Armin Rosen on the countries and ideologies that deploy the most trolls, sockpuppets and paid cyberarmies on social media.
FLUSH THE BRIEF DOWN THE DRAIN: Copywriter Thomas Kemeny on the fine art of advertising toilet paper: “If I say this toilet paper will change your life,” the customer will ultimately be disappointed, Kemeny said. So don’t say it.”
PEPSI HEARTS BODEGAS: Pepsi’s new holiday campaign with Desus and Miro is a love letter to your local bodega.
STARTING SALARIES AT AD AGENCIES: An amazing Twitter thread on starting salaries in the advertising industry.
SEXY COLONEL SANDERS MARKETING: Lifetime’s Sexy Colonel Sanders mini-movie starring Mario Lopez recycles an old idea—marketers creating content—for the sake of generating internet buzz.
Media:
KEN JENNINGS FIRST ‘JEOPARDY’ GUEST HOST: Jeopardy will now rotate ‘interim guest hosts,’ starting with the amazing Ken Jennings.
GIPHY’S MOST VIEWED GIFS: Dive into Giphy’s top-rated GIFs of 2020.
NICK THOMPSON NEW ATLANTIC CEO: The Atlantic is hiring Nick Thompson, the widely respected editor-in-chief of Wired, as their new CEO. His first task as he switches from editorial to business: Acquire lots of new paying subscribers.
MYSPACE’S DESIGN LEGACY: Tedium’s Ernie Smith argues that MySpace’s defining feature—the ability for users to design their own online presence—is something the modern digital world solely needs.
NEW YORK TIMES COOKING TECH: Tiffany Peón of the New York Times Cooking engineering team discusses the behind-the-scenes measures they took when the pandemic caused a massive surge in usage… and made site traffic the equivalent of a Thanksgiving every day.
STAT NEWS EXPANSION: Medical news outlet STAT News grew their readership in 2020 for obvious reasons. They’re now increasing staff by roughly 40% to launch launch new data products, events and custom reports in 2021.
DAVE RAMSEY HOSTING NO-MASK-REQUIRED CHRISTMAS PARTY FOR 800 EMPLOYEES: Personal finance author and speaker Dave Ramsey is holding a no-masks-required Christmas party for 800 employees at his Tennessee corporate headquarters; Ramsey Solutions has already had 100 COVID cases among its staff and is forbidding employees from working from home while not requiring mask use in office.
DISNEY+ PLANNING NETFLIX WAR FOR 2021: Disney+ has cleared 86 million subscribers and announced plans to release more than 100 new titles on Disney+ in 2021.
Tech:
APPLE LOBBIES AGAINST ANTI-FORCED LABOR BILL: Apple is lobbying against a congressional bill taking action against Chinese companies using imprisoned labor to manufacture goods. Forced Uighur labor has allegedly been used in Apple’s supply chain.
HOW MOZILLA MAKES MONEY: Bloomberg Businessweek looks at the billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Mozilla and Apple in order to have Google’s search engine as the default in web browsers.
AIRBNB EXEC RESIGNED OVER CHINESE GOVT DATA SHARING: A Wall Street Journal investigation found Sean Joyce, Airbnb’s former Chief Trust Officer who resigned in 2019, quit over concerns Airbnb was willing to share info on millions of users with the Chinese government.
COINBASE’S RACE PROBLEM: The New York Times’ Nathaniel Popper has found that popular cryptocurrency platform Coinbase “has long struggled with its management of Black employees“ with at least 11 employees filing internal complaints.
NEUROSCIENCE AND THE KEY TO TRUE AI: A bit old (from 2018), but Wired’s Shaun Raviv has an amazing profile of neuroscientist Karl Friston’s work and how it applies to artificial intelligence.
Over a 10-day period this summer, Friston advised an astrophysicist, several philosophers, a computer engineer working on a more personable competitor to the Amazon Echo, the head of artificial intelligence for one of the world’s largest insurance companies, a neuroscientist seeking to build better hearing aids, and a psychiatrist with a startup that applies machine learning to help treat depression.
SHOPIFY’S MERCHANT-Y FUTURE: Yiren Lu writes in the New York Times Magazine about Shopify’s 2020s challenge—becoming the software retailers use to sell their products to the world without becoming a shopping destination of their own. It’s much harder than it sounds.
WHAT SALESFORCE DOES, EXACTLY: Marker’s Rob Walker performs a public service by explaining to everyone who doesn’t work in enterprise software what Salesforce does exactly and why there’s a big skyscraper named after it.
Fun:
The amazing pictures of the Florentine Codex—the very first book (1500s) ever made on the culture, religion, economy and society of the Aztecs.
The birth of modern fandom isn’t what you would expect. TLDR: Modern fandom was born with the mostly-female readership of Wild West-themed pulp fiction.
And because it’s winter here in the northern hemisphere, explore 130 chicken soup recipes from around the world.
Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately:
This article on sci-fi author Philip K. Dick and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The dirty little secret of the pandemic: Some people are saving a fortune.
YouTube treasure ContraPoints on canceling and Cancel Culture.
Rex Woodbury tackling the history of the business of fame 1920-2020 and the Kardashians as crucial pivot points from pre-social media fame business to post-social media fame business.
The Washington Post’s masterful guide to coping with COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing during the holiday season and winter.
That’s it for this issue. Email me here and please don’t hesitate to contact if I can be of assistance. Thank you for taking the time to read this damned thing.
Love and coffee,
Neal
About This Newsletter: My name is Neal Ungerleider, and I’m a strategic communications consultant working with brands and agencies on marketing/advertising/PR projects. I worked as a journalist in a previous life and now write this weekly newsletter about the comms industry and adjacent things. Thanks for taking the time to read it. For more, here's my bio, my portfolio, and current projects.
Connect on Twitter or LinkedIn and learn more about my services at nealungerleider.com. Contact me by replying to this newsletter or emailing neal@nealungerleider.com.