The mass proliferance of these celeb look-alike contests is….hmmm. On one hand: heartening to observe a new tradition-in-the-making of spontaneous, positive gathering IRL in the culture (the Chicago JAW one looked very successful!)…….. On the other hand, are celeb adjacency (via visage?) and viral content opportunity the only connective tissue we’ve got to work with right now? HMM.

So, should you finally get on Bluesky or suck it up and commit to Threads? Ryan Broderick and Jon Herrman more or less advise on the former. At least we know it’s probably not gonna be Mastodon! OR (my current social media strategy): continue moving toward total distribution of all various bon mots/petty remarks via an intricate ecosystem of 3-person group chats. It’s safer there… (Twitter drama is so dead that Semafor is taking up the private Stories exposé beat!) 

See, here at Deez Links we strive to bring you the kind of stuff we would have talked about at a Digiday mixer of yore…

Well speaking of Ed Yong, you won’t regret watching this speech he gave a month ago at XOXO Festival, where he spoke about the personal toll that all that Pulitzer-winning pandemic coverage took on him, and why he’s pretty much off the grid now. (Though you should subscribe to his newsletter; it’s free and mostly birding photography). 

I liked 19:40, where he spoke about the cascade networks of one’s journalism—thinking about how the information you provide moving through social networks seems a much more gratifying way to consider “impact” and “reach” instead of the soulless numerical value of “views.” If you don’t have the time, catch the last few minutes, where Ed gets real about taking what many would describe as a “step back” in his career to 1) focus on another book and 2) generally carve a sensical life out of some grueling years—maybe a point of personal inspiration if you’re thinking about how to do the same in the coming new year: 

I still wrestle with the guilt of all of this. There’s a voice in my head all the time that says you should be doing more. You should be helping. You are wasting your skills your chances you’re not seizing the moment you will disappear you will be irrelevant. But I have listened to those instincts for many many years and i 

I have achieved every professional accolade that I have ever dreamed of and more, and it completely broke me. So I am trying something new and I am taking a little bit of a leap.

Congrats to Natasha Stagg for the most welllllll-sure-makes-you-think quote in this Substack party report (and congrats to Substack for getting good with their NYT contacts apparently, landing not one but two writeups in four days last week!).

Finally, from the minute mine eyes raked over this quote, I knew this San Francisco Standard story on the private chef of Silicon Valley would deliver the goods:

One chef said a client loved the first sip of an ice-cold can of Coca-Cola. But just the first.

“They opened the Coke, took a sip of the Coke, put it down, and left,” the chef said. “Once they took a sip and put it down, they were done.” 

This piece made me also think about how cleverly the Netflix show You nailed the various regional neuroses of its settings: setting Season 1 in New York to make fun of the literary/book store-obsessed set, doing Season 2 in LA, basically against the backdrop of Erewhonian excess; putting Season 3 in a SF suburb, where opening a cupcake bakery and hanging out with the optimization-obsessed CrossFit class exposed us all to yet another specific kind of crazy. 

(Season 4 in London tried to do private club culture and old money, but it wasn’t as sharp imo…But Season 5 apparently will be back in New York. Maybe they will set their sights on downtown creative director culture!)

Do you love fashion and pop culture but hate losing endless hours to the algorithm trying to keep up? Capsule is the newsletter for you. Published every Friday, Holly Beddingfield does the scrolling for you and shares her hottest recs every week.

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