If this documentary about the ‘80s Vietnamese new wave scene hits your town (Berlin and Boston this week!), bring tissues like I forgot to last week :( 

Some late-breaking Condé drama: it turns out that the company’s DEI officer, Yashica Olden, likely left the company earlier this summer after internal tensions over the war in Gaza boiled over, per Semafor’s Max Tani, who snagged details such as:

“Jewish staff deserved their own employee resource groups, they argued, similar to groups set up within the company for other minority groups. They took the proposal to Olden, who said that the company would support the idea — as long as there could be similar groups for members of all religions, including Muslim staff. Some believed Olden was not taking them seriously, and filed a formal complaint accusing her of antisemitism.” 

Waded through that big NYT Mag feature on Netflix’s library, and learned some fascinating facts such as how there’s apparently ~16,000 (!) titles of content on Netflix. Want to wager a guess at how long that would take to watch if you did 3 hours a day?? Because Willy Staley did the math and it is a SCARY amount lol. 

Overall, this was a great piece mostly on what venture capital and ZIRP have done to tech and therefore culture (i.e., made it overhyped and too available and also mid); If you want the tl;dr, this was the most incisive line:

“​​What we’re paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three or 10 or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance.” 

Also this, re: the “but why have I never heard of these supposedly popular shows before?” question:

And so just as the old market signals had become obsolete, an entire meaning-making apparatus arose to take its place. New, synthetic replacements were conjured, with a constantly expanding supply of televised content to direct them at. And social media feeds made up of highly nonrepresentative samples of the public to put all of this back into, spraying the messages around this new ecosystem like light from a disco ball … Creators had little idea who was watching — in fact, access to viewer data was one of many demands made in the writers’ strike last year — but they did have TV criticism written by 26-year-old M.F.A. graduates to take in. Perhaps the shows started to reflect that input, and strange feedback loops took hold. 

An especially adept tweet from @coldhealing on the Brat remix OOH (out of home) campaign… 

Earlier today, I walked by a giant poster displayed in front of like, an empty storefront window in Bushwick, and it contained the full text of someone’s post on Substack, plus a QR code to subscribe to said Substack. The real world existing more and more as a redirect to get you back online is…interesting. 

Two more Sally links:

Emmeline Clein’s A Trapdoor of Her Own in the LARB was the perfect endcap to my personal diet of Intermezzo syllabus. Just a healthy (or maybe delicious) dose of skepticism on all the usual Rooneyisms, as well and the role of her novels within our current sTaTe of HetErO mOnAgAmY, with a final delightful escalation via a Theory of What Sally’s Really Doing, Maybe. 

Here’s a taste…

The divorcées exit and condemn the oppressive system, casting themselves as victims of an unshakable institution. They are innocents, “men are trash,” and agency is excised in an act that removes the narrators’ responsibility to analyze their own complicity in oppressive dynamics or attempt to change them, all the while ignoring the fact that only relatively privileged actors can make the choice to exit stage left. On the other end of the spectrum, Rooney’s self-made martyrs choose witticisms over whines or screams, mocking the subjugation inherent to heterosexual monogamy even as they play into it. In Rooney’s novels, characters consider heterosexual marriages and relationships like the most tolerable options in choose-your-own-adventure book … Amid the chaos of late capitalism, Rooney girls seem to prefer allying themselves with a preexisting form of suffering—one that is at least stable—over attempting to alter the oppressive contours of heterosexual romance.

And then for The Paris Review, Sally and Merve Emre did a Q&A where they discussed things like how “the sibling dyad open[s] different possibilities for relationality in the novel?” which is unfortunately the kind of shit I will eat up with a soup spoon.

TikTok Corner

• Honestly don’t we all believe the iPhone 16 can and will do this
  

• Iced matcha latte season is ending :(
  

• I’ve been consuming the Golden Bachelorette season via TikToks, and vids like this one and this one are convincing me that this may be the best Bachelor-verse concept yet (though The Bachelor Winter Games in 2018 was also an actually interesting facilitation of cultural exchange imo)
  

• “Come make some oysters with apple cider-ginger mignonette w/me on my kayak”
  

• I do wonder how Charli is actually doing
  

• Harrowing. You just don’t see as many narratives about how hard it is to be a chicken anymore.

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Middlebrow is a pseudo-intellectual comedy podcast. If you have a fake email job at an “agency” and just came back from a long weekend in Hudson, then this is the pod for you. Delia herself deemed it the only bro cast worth listening to.

What is a “winter arc”? Why is “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs back on the charts after more than 20 years? How did one particular camo sweatshirt from Abercrombie become the coolest item for back to school? After School, a daily youth culture cheat sheet, answers all these questions and more about what’s happening online. 

Asian Not Asian Podcast: The podcast with all your favorite Asian Friends! Guests include Margaret Cho, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Min Jin Lee. 

Ever seen a ballet inspired by a custom tabletop role-playing game?  How about one based on a multimedia project by a Professor of Practice at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture whose work has been exhibited at MoMA?  Or one that centers a story between a New York City Ballet principal who retires in May 2025 after 25 years with the Company—and a dancer who entered the corps de ballet there in May 2024?

BalletCollective asks not what ballet is—but what it can be. There are only 3 shows—and 1 already sold out. Get tickets here for BalletCollective’s annual season in Lower Manhattan, October 30 - November 1... while they remain.  Featuring dancers from NYCB and musicians The Westerlies, Bergamot Quartet, and Phong Tran in an intimate staging in the round.

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