💭Weekend Links 10/22
Frasier looking at video games & more: CONTEXT COLLAPSE! 109
Content for humans, selected by a human. Mass communications-focused with a universal lens. Mid-week is for the articles, weekend is for the links. Not your thing? Unsubscribe below.
New Futures:
Census data shows that America is diversifying the most in small midwestern towns.1 (John McCormick & Paul Overberg/Wall Street Journal)
The American shopping mall real estate crisis. (Sapna Maheshwari/New York Times)
Saks Fifth Avenue is turning some of their retail RE into Saks-branded coworking spaces. (Steff Yotka/Vogue)
Google employees opting into long-term work-from-home facing pay cuts.2 (Danielle Kaye/Reuters)
Why US grocery stores still have ethnic aisles. (Priya Krishna/New York Times)
The COVID pandemic’s long-term legacy includes new tools against colds and the flu. (Sarah Zhang/The Atlantic)
Why public health messaging around COVID was so damn bad. (David Leonhardt/New York Times)
The USPS is slowly but smartly moving towards offering basic banking services. (Jacob Bogage/Washington Post)
Well before the current employee shortage, there was the early-20th century “maid problem.”3 (Erin Blakemore/JSTOR Daily)
Affinity vs. experience, fandom, and web-based identities. (Katherine Dee)
Sen. Bill Cassidy suggests annual cognition tests for Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, and executive branch leaders over the age of 80.4 (Mike Allen/Axios)
Advertising/Marketing/PR:
The complicated race to become Facebook’s new media agency. (Garett Sloane/AdAge)
The genius—and importance—of movie and television key art. (Rex Sorgatz/Why Is This Interesting?)
A guide to Instagram influencers for people who just don’t care. (Cintra Wilson)
How Mars rebranded Uncle Ben’s into Ben’s Original. (Stephen Lepitak/AdWeek)
Why Cheez-Its wants your personal data. (Paul Hiebert/AdWeek)
Inside HP’s in-house magazine.5 (Stephanie Walden/The Content Strategist)
All you ever wanted to know about pumpkin spice marketing. (Ethan Jakob Kraft/AdAge)
Searching through 125 years of supermarket product design with the Sainsbury’s Archive.
Edelman leaving their iconic Chicago skyscraper headquarters6. (Robert Channick/Chicago Tribune)
When Jerry from Rick & Morty becomes a creative director. (Dalia Al-Dujaili/It’s Nice That)
The Atlantic on how stores trick you into buying more things. (Via Josh Spector)
Media:
Cory Doctorow on what the Chicago Tribune’s decline means for Chicago (and journalism).
I wrote this week about how legacy publications will keep launching Substack-style newsletters for their roster, and now The Atlantic’s doing it. Curious to see how this will turn out IRL. (Peter Kafka/Recode)
China’s newest TikTok star is a pomegranate farmer going all-in on Farmer TikTok. (Selina Xu/Bloomberg Wealth)
Benjamin Wallace on the culture catfight between tech CEOs and VCs + tech journalists. 7
Genius, formerly Rap Genius, sells assets for $80 million.
How to break internet TOSes with scientific discussion of DIY fecal transplants.
Tim Ferriss deep dives into the details of building his podcast to 700 million downloads.
Ozy’s analytics were a massive bowl of WTF.
Crazy Days and Nights, Hollywood gossip, and conspiracy theories.
Lincoln Michel on how to be a professional writer.
Inside influencer database F**k You Pay Me. (via REDEF)
Transitioning from journalism to marketing.
Google for Creators. (via Product Hunt)
Tech:
All websites are just digital movie theaters now. (Ryan Broderick/Garbage Day)
How computer graphics were built on reference images of white people. (Theodore Kim)
Riot Games’ internal anti-latency projects.
Airtable, the Roblox of the enterprise. (Jan-Erik Asplund)
Kruze: Tech startups now spend more on Airbnb than on office rent.
How biometrics screwed over the Afghan people post-US withdrawal.
“An engineer who thinks they’re going to be reprimanded is disincentivized to give the details necessary to get an understanding of the mechanism, pathology, and operation of the failure.” (John Allspaw/Etsy)
What today’s social apps can learn from the Web 2.0 era. (Andrew Chen)
Zoom helped the neurotypical world hear my autistic voice. (Anya Lawrence/Nature)
Sitting down with Marc Andreessen about investing and tech. (Richard Hanania)
The diet industry’s advertising model is built (like a whole bunch of industries!) around target advertising.8 (Privacy International)
Ways the SaaS industry has evolved 2013-2021. (Ravi Parikh)
Vitalik Buterin answers questions on Twitter.
PayPal in talks to buy Pinterest. (Dana Cimilluca and Cara Lombrado/Wall Street Journal)
NFTs as MLMs for tech elites. (Evan Armstrong/Every)
The decline of the open source ecosystem. (Ernie Smith/Midrange)
How OpenAI Codex will change the way we interact with tech. (Andy Baio)
Misc:
Reddit users share their favorite useful unknown websites. (Via Recomendo)
Archivist discovers the work of David Duchovny’s Yiddish journalist grandfather. (Chana Pollack/The Forward)
The auction catalog for Peter Hook’s Joy Division and New Order gear.
Sandwich scandal at the Stage Deli. (Peter Fearon/New York Post)
How MyPillow’s Mike Lindell became Mike Lindell. (Jonathan Larsen/Salon)
The magic of the spite house. (Jessica Leigh Hester/Atlas Obscura)
Frasier looking at video games.
The Wall Street Journal’s case study for a diversifying midwest was Columbus, Indiana, which was an interesting choice. I’ve been to Columbus before—it’s an economically prosperous small city very dependent on one employer (Cummins) and which has legendary architecture by 20th century masters like IM Pei, the Saarinens, and Richard Meier largely thanks to the patronage of longtime Cummins CEO J Irwin Miller. Absolutely worth a road trip if you’re a midwestern architecture geek; if you go, make sure to have a meal at Blackerby’s Hangar 5 at the airport and watch the light aircrafts take off.
Here’s the thing. In the pre-COVID years, it was an open secret that many telecommuting/remote work positions paid lower than a similar in-office job. It was an implicit trade: We let you work from home, but we pay you less. In fact, there were lots and lots of NYC/SF/etc. companies who would purposely hire remote employees in lower cost-of-living metro areas so they could pay them less. Remote workers with no mobility/financial constraints could do some geographic arbitrage to maximize their revenue, while everyone else (parents, people with health issues, people with family commitments, etc.) had a bit less leverage. COVID shook up this paradigm like it shook up a lot of other things in American society; it remains TBD to me how the hell this will turn out.
When the history books are written for our era, I suspect historians will hone in on the gig economy and, specfically, how smartphone apps democratized the outsourcing of basic household work for huge segments of the population—and not just for the “affluent.” Anyone with a Target app on their phone and a credit or debit card can hire an on-demand personal shopper. That is huge.
Allen’s rundown of leadership ages in our American gerontocracy: “President Biden, 78 ... Speaker Pelosi, 81 ... Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, 70 ... and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 79.”
Disclosure: Worked with HP before on unrelated marketing and content projects.
Disclosure: Worked with Edelman before as well.
This whole tech vs. journalism thing? Dude… OK, I’m a retired journalist, which means that I have no skin in the game but makes it clear where my cultural affinities lie. I’m also a theory geek and recognize how Twitter has made it possible for real-time discourse to take place that anybody can (theoretically) enter and participate in. I also recognize that the tech world is full of thin-skinned egomaniacs convinced their s**t don’t stink and the journalism world is full of professional Twitter warriors who don’t factcheck work rigorously enough, prioritize outrage-y linkbait over careful research, and don’t push back on editors who label inaccurate sensationalism uber alles headlines on articles (and let’s be clear, everyone reads the headlines and very few people read the articles). Both sides are filled with nerdy upper-middle-class raised folks with superiority complexes and axes to grind. Let them fight forever in a 24/7 thinkpiece hell of their own making, and let them enjoy it.
You know what’s cheap and invasive and has good-enough ROI and that we’ll never be able to stuff back into Pandora’s box? Targeted advertising, that’s what.