Inside Larry Ellison's Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics

PROLOGUE: THE ISLAND

The first sign was the orange Corvette.

In the early days of July, the residents of Lanai started seeing a C8 Stingray the color of a traffic cone tearing along the island’s switchback roads. Then other signals came. The clerk working the cigarette counter at the Pine Isle Market said her nephew, a private chef, had flown in and had been shopping for a big group.

At the Four Seasons down in Manele, the island’s pharmacist Kert Shuster was leaving brunch at Nobu when he saw a security detail he recognized moving through the lobby. It’d been a while, but Shuster knew—he’d just missed Larry Ellison.

A few years had passed, it seemed, since the man who owns all but a sliver of the Hawaiian island nine miles west of Maui had last set foot there. Now Ellison and his extended family were staying in a new compound above Manele’s steep volcanic shoreline. The cluster of houses was built by Japanese carpenters whom Ellison had once brought in and boarded in private barracks up-island.

For Lanai’s 3,000 regular residents, actually seeing Ellison is rare. His presence is more typically sensed—like a change in air pressure.

“I noticed the salad bar was really good that day,” Shuster tells me. “That’s what it’s like when Larry’s back. People step up. Things just get better.”

For the past 40 years, the people of Lanai have lived at the pleasure of one billionaire or another. Before Ellison there was David Murdock, a real estate magnate who took control of the island in 1985, when it was still a pineapple plantation. Murdock was a visible ruler who’d make his rounds in the local stores, attend community meetings, and give employees he had fired 30 minutes’ notice before sending them off in a helicopter. But Lanai had been a ­money pit for him, and the 2008 crash was the final straw. In 2012, he sold it to Ellison for a reported $300 million.

If Murdock ran the island like the plantation owner he was, Ellison runs it like a distant god. He points, and an amenity appears.

His first move was refurbishing the community pool that Murdock had closed. He answered the housing shortage with the Hokuao development, where the homes are pastel-colored and stamped everywhere with the touch of their benefactor. Each has a Tesla solar roof, a Big Green Egg in the yard, two Japanese Toto toilets, and interiors painted a custom color called Ellison White. (It’s a Benjamin Moore white base with a shot of oxide yellow and a half shot of black, your choice for sheen may vary.) Shuster, who lives in Hokuao, once told Ellison how much he loved the place. “I feel like I moved into your house,” he had said.

“Good,” his host responded. “I wanted to make it like a place that even I could live in.”

Ellison owns Lanai’s only gas station, where a sign reminds customers they’re paying “the Lowest Prices in Hawaii.” And he upgraded the movie theater that today bills itself as being “the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawai‘i.” In July it was showing Supergirl, which was produced by Warner Bros., the movie studio Ellison, along with his son, will soon control.

“Sigourney Weaver lives here part-time, and she says that this is the most beautiful theater in the world,” Gail Allen, a longtime Lanai resident, tells me. “It serves truffle-oil popcorn,” she adds.

The sense is that life is pretty good on the island since Ellison bought it. Or at least could be worse. “We could have become Molokai,” says Alberta de Jetley, another longtime resident who ran the island’s newspaper, Lanai Today, before selling it to Ellison.

At a picnic table outside Richard’s Market, the other grocery store on Lanai (this one Ellison owns), a handful of residents hold a coffee klatch de Jetley calls the Laugh Group. That morning, beneath overcast skies, the Laugh Group was discussing the island’s recently arrived proprietor.

One member, Mari Lynn Di Lullo, brought up a time she saw a Tesla straddling two stalls in a parking lot. “Jeez, look at the way they parked,” she’d uttered to members of a security detail loitering nearby. “If you didn’t know better, you would think he owned the place.”

Just then the owner of the car—and everything else—appeared, laughing.

“He’s not pretentious,” Di Lullo told her coffee group. “He’s low on the radar.”

The radar. Interesting choice of words about a man who has made a case for a mass AI-enabled surveillance system.

That afternoon a woman came through the grocery checkout line wearing a Sensei Farms sweatshirt. The company is one of Ellison’s island projects: a hydroponic greenhouse concept meant to be the Tesla of agriculture. Eight years in and ­several hundred million dollars later, Sensei Farms describes itself as “a thought ­leader in greenhouse-grown produce.” It has an endcap with boxed salad mixes at the island’s grocery stores.

I introduced myself to the woman and asked what she did for the farm. She smiled.

“They said there would be a journalist on the island today,” the employee told me before starting to walk away. “They warned us about you in our morning meeting.”

I hadn’t told anyone at Sensei Farms I was coming.

Ellison’s newest gift to Lanai is at the entrance to the Four Seasons. In a man-made lagoon surrounded by fake lava rock stands a monumental bronze he commissioned from British artist Damien Hirst. It shows a crew of Polynesian voyagers in an outrigger canoe flung skyward on a cresting wave that up close is revealed to be not water but a knot of sea monsters. A shark bursts through the swell, its mouth open wide enough to take the canoe whole. A mo‘o, the lizard spirit of Hawaiian water, coils below the hull. Amidships, a chief in a feathered cape clutches the ankle of another paddler who is facing away. A loose paddle, some cargo, and a few bronze flowers slide down a wave. And above all of it, from something beneath the surface, hang two giant octopus arms with suckers the size of dinner plates, muscular and curled and about to crash down on everyone.

It’s titled Overcoming Adversity.

PART I: THE CEPHALOPOD

Ellison has long been fixated on the octopus. Cephalopod Corp is what he named the corporate entity atop his private investments. He has another company called Octopus Holdings LP, which, with its general partner Tentacle Corp, put up the money behind Lanai. His venture capital firm that over the years has backed Netsuite, Theranos, and Sensei Farms is called Tako Ventures, tako being the Japanese word for octopus. In many of the villas he built on Lanai hang ukiyo-e prints, many with a tako.

For years it was Ellison’s quiet way to talk about himself.

“His joke is he is the octopus,” says a former executive who worked closely with Ellison. This person was one of several dozen sources I spoke to for this story, most under the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss sensitive matters.

“He loves being the éminence grise. He loves the notion that he’s so powerful, there’s nothing he can’t get into.”

The joke has become a fact in full view. At 82, the last of the founding moguls of Silicon Valley who’s still in the game has extended his grasp into a convergence of power that no other fortune could manage. Where Elon Musk built an empire that’s loud and cultish, Ellison—his mentor and close friend—has pieced together something patient, proximate, and structural. The kind whose shape is clear once you see how far it goes.

One arm of the octopus is wrapped around Oracle, the 49-year-old company he is dragging from dull database vendor into one of the essential data center providers of the AI boom. It is a damn-the-torpedoes move into infrastructure that’s risky even for an executive who nearly lost the company once before. He has saddled Oracle with $130 billion in debt, turned its free cash flow negative, and chained its fortunes to a single volatile partner, OpenAI.

A second arm has closed on American media. Larry’s son David has transformed the independent production company Skydance into the last great consolidator in Hollywood, largely with Dad’s money. Skydance has gobbled up Paramount and with it CBS News; now it has won Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110 billion deal. Ellison also has the American spin-off of TikTok, which an Oracle-led consortium pried loose from its Chinese owner.

A third appendage winds toward political power. As Silicon Valley staged its noisy migration to Trumpism, Ellison worked quietly to influence the president, establishing an effective if not always close relationship. Outside America, he bankrolls his friend Tony Blair’s nonprofit organization, which pushes governments to adopt new technologies like AI. And he has been a steadfast supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, hosting the prime minister on Lanai while the Israeli leader faced corruption charges at home.

Ellison has had a reputation as a killer in Silicon Valley for decades. In 2011, Bryan Cantrill—who quit Oracle within a year of its taking over Sun Microsystems—told a roomful of engineers not to “anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.” Instead, said Cantrill, think of him as a lawnmower: It doesn’t hate you, it just mows, and if you put your hand in, it’ll chop it off. Cantrill told me recently he hasn’t changed his mind.

by Tom Dotan, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: Yuko Shimizu; Damien Hurst

[ed. Vicious and evil.]

Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying Something On

When I meet Mark Zuckerberg, currently one of the poster boys for evil tech billionaires, a man whose products are used by about 46 percent of all living people in the world and whose company has a market cap of more than a trillion dollars, he is wearing sky-blue, cable-knit shorts that look an awful lot like bloomers.

That was just over a month ago, before what is turning out to be a style-centric period for Meta. It started this week at Connect, the company’s annual new products reveal, where Zuckerberg took to the stage wearing a T-shirt with the words “Building is my love language.”

He waxed enthusiastic about the future, including the many new styles of smart glasses, and the company’s personal A.I. assistant, Muse, which looks a lot like a customizable stuffed animal in a onesie. This was just after Vogue World kicked off Milan Fashion Week with Meta glasses as a sponsor, and around the same time W magazine produced an entire stand-alone advertorial zine devoted to a new glasses collaboration with the K-pop star Lisa.

Ahead of all of that, I had come to the compound in Lake Tahoe to try to understand the role style has come to play in the Zuckerberg saga, including the very public rebrand of 2024, when he went from robotic coder in a gray hoodie to fashion-conscious bro next door. That the latest version of Zuckerberg coincides with Meta’s push into wearables, as well as with Silicon Valley’s obsession with the idea of taste and how important a role it will play in the future, may explain why he was finally willing to talk about it.

“I want to make sure that we really immerse ourselves in what people care about,” Zuckerberg told me. It turned out he had started with himself, his own preferences, and where they took him.

Zuckerberg knows that what he does reflects on Meta. “I care about that,” he said. “I think the company is an instantiation of my values.” And, he said, he wants to “be intentional about how I program that.”

Meta is fighting on many fronts at once. Though it settled a case for $17.1 billion in August that positioned social media as the Big Tobacco of the 21st century, it is still embroiled in other lawsuits. Then there is the growing backlash against what critics call its “pervert glasses” (they have been used to secretly record video and audio), which have been banned from courts in England and New York, with organizations like the ACLU alleging that they could become a tool of the surveillance state.

And on Oct. 9, “The Social Reckoning” opens as a sequel to the “The Social Network” — the film responsible for cementing Zuckerberg’s reputation as a revenge-hungry nerd — starring Jeremy Strong as an older Zuckerberg, with a Caesar haircut to crown his march toward world domination.

Despite the push into fashion, it doesn’t add up to a great look.

But whatever Zuckerberg’s or his advisers’ agenda, the more he speaks about his life and newfound interest in outfits, the more insight he provides, sometimes inadvertently, into his otherwise highly guarded psyche. How he approaches clothes is how he approaches everything.

“A few years ago, he made this point,” said Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief of technology. “He said, ‘I’m willing to not be liked. I just want to be understood.’” [...]

“We have an off-site in Hawaii at Mark’s ranch,” Bosworth said. “I remember getting there, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’” Then his team arrived. “We’re all listening to Mark,” Bosworth said, “and on the back channel we’re all like: ‘Is this his new style? Are we commenting? Are we not commenting? How do we feel about it?’”

How Bosworth feels is, this is the authentic Zuckerberg. “He knows he’s going to be judged no matter what,” he said. So why not?

In this version of the story, Zuckerberg has been freed from the fetters of his self-imposed gray T-shirt prison. A less charitable view, however, is that his fashion glow-up has been so fortuitously timed that most people assumed it was a marketing choice created by a stylist. Rumor had it Karla Welch, who works with Tracee Ellis Ross and Sarah Paulson, was involved. This turned out to be false, though Welch sometimes works with Chan. Zuckerberg said he mostly styles himself. The multiprint Loewe shorts he wore during the Sun Valley conference? Totally his idea.

Fashion-wise, he seems to be experiencing a sort of delayed adolescence. “This is stuff we did in college, or in high school,” said the designer Mike Amiri, who helped Zuckerberg design his first high-fashion T-shirt, in 2024, with “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” embroidered across the front, Latin for “all Zuck or all nothing.”

“You’re figuring out: ‘Am I a baggy fit guy? Am I a vintage type? Who am I?’” Amiri said. It’s just that Zuckerberg is doing it in his 40s, with unlimited resources.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press; Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
[ed. Pathetic and clueless.]

Why Everybody Loves Glen Campbell

[ed. Nice tribute.]

In 1960, a country boy named Glen Campbell showed up in Los Angeles with a guitar, a pompadour hairdo, and a lean, hungry look. He was blessed by fate, and soon started playing on hit records. He was always on the radio.

But there was a catch—they weren’t his records. Campbell was just a member of the band, and the public didn’t know his name. Even so, what amazing company this young man kept: He now played guitar for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr., the Everly Brothers, Doris Day, and dozens of other superstars.

This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.

He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I'd heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.

Campbell was that good.

There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.

He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.

But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked. [...]

Was there anything left to try? Yes, there was.

 

Around this same time, Glen Campbell rebranded himself as a surf musician, and got a choice gig with the Beach Boys. That’s quite a feat for a kid from a landlocked state. For a time, he actually replaced Brian Wilson as lead singer with the band. You might think this would turn him into a superstar, but fans wanted Brian back, and had no interest in celebrating his successor.

At this point, I would have given up and gone back to Arkansas. Campbell had made enough cash from those Beach Boys gigs to lease a Gold Cadillac, and could have returned home in grand style. But he was determined to try his luck one more time, and Capitol Records—then flush with cash, due to all those Beatles hits—still had money to burn.

That’s when they finally struck gold, or a gold record, to be more precise. Gentle on My Mind, released in August 1967, not only got Campbell on the charts but earned him two Grammy awards. He was now on a rapid trajectory to stardom, and would never look back.

During the next 34 months, Campbell released twelve more albums. This staggering output not only happened while he was concertizing and touring, but Campbell was now also acting in Hollywood movies. Adding to the craziness, he launched his CBS television show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in 1969. [...]

 

Glen Campbell now saw his name in lights—as they say in show business. That was quite a change for someone who had grown up without any lights, or even electricity, in the family home. That was back in Billstown, a city so small that it didn’t show up on road maps.

His father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”

In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:

Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.

The father was a survivor, but his son was destined for greater things and, like Johnny B. Goode, that little country boy could play the guitar. He got his first instrument at age four—a three-quarter size Sears Roebuck model that cost five dollars—and was gigging and going on the road while still a child. He joined his uncle’s band and they made the move to Albuquerque when Campbell was seventeen. Six years later he came to Los Angeles. And six years after that, Glen Campbell was a superstar.

He enjoyed every bit of it. Campbell built the first million-dollar house in Laurel Canyon—a 16,500 square-foot home on seven acres. He later bragged that he had “stayed in smaller three-story hotels.” But he could afford it—he was now making $50,000 or more in a single night.

But the enjoyment soon turned sour. “There were times when I was too drunk to recall what I did or with whom I did it,” he later admitted. He sometimes got bad write-ups in the press for the times he faltered on-stage.

In his autobiography, Campbell admits his failings, but can’t resist pointing out that the same journalists who criticized him were also drinking and using drugs, although nobody called them out. But the reality was that Campbell was under the bright lights, front and center, night after night—undergoing a kind of scrutiny no music critic ever faces.

The pressure was intense. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t have a career,” he later mused. “My career had me.”

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited; publicity photo

You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits

One easy trick to make yourself smarter.

Most wisdom comes from tangible experience in our wide world. It comes from human relationships, from travel, from living and loving and fighting and falling in the dirt. There is little wisdom to be had from spending years and years reading stuff on the internet. A single hard-won lesson, though, which I have learned after wasting an embarrassing amount of time reading and writing about politics, may help to save you a good amount of angst.

You can just ignore the bad pundits. You don’t have to read them. You can just carry right on with your life.

You don’t have to talk about the bad pundits. You don’t have to engage with them. You don’t have to craft painstaking responses to their vapid arguments. You don’t have to take them seriously. Their existence creates no obligation for you. Each new piece they produce generates no appointment on your calendar. The law does not accord them any reservation on your attention. They have no inherent power over you. Instead, they get their power from you. You give it to them, for free. You, who fancy yourself their enemy, provide the fuel for their careers.

Instead of doing that, you are free not to do it.

“Ugh, the New York Times opinion page is so awful!” Don’t read it then. “I can’t stand the bullshit that Bret Stephens wrote!” Don’t read it then. “I hate the sanctimony of David Brooks! I hate the smugness of Matt Yglesias! I hate the fascists at the Wall Street Journal, the bootlickers at the Washington Post, and the clowns at the Free Press!”

Don’t read them then. Problem solved.

You may interpret this as me telling you to shelter yourself from challenging opinions. Not at all. I encourage everyone to read widely and freely. When you read widely and freely, you are able to familiarize yourself with the work of many people. What you will come to realize is that many or even most of those people are not worth reading. Some because they don’t have much to say, and others because they are consistently wrong in a way that, once you figure it out, allows you to project their opinions into the future without needing to constantly check in on them. You can move on. You gave them their audition, and they didn’t pass. Not many will! This is all as it should be. You have a limited amount of time to read and most of that time should be spent reading books and the second most time should be spent reading facts, such as news. Opinion writing that does not prove its value is crowding out other things that have a much higher chance of being worthwhile.

Why does this seem so hard for so many of us in practice? Because we are all haunted by the demons of prestige. Prestige, a false god, tells us that a person’s work is valuable because of their position, their title, rather than because of the work itself. In the case of certain powerful people, this may be true. (It’s worth knowing what Elon Musk and Donald Trump think because it may directly affect many lives, notwithstanding the fact that they are morons.) In the case of writers, however, this is always false. Good work is valuable and bad work is not. The understandable tendency of many people to use prestige as a heuristic to guide their reading often leads them down a dead end road of frustration. [...]

Writers must be taken seriously if the quality of their work demands it and if not, not. That’s it! There are many ways to be a worthwhile pundit. Some are experts on specific subjects, and some get access to very important people’s thoughts, and some are gifted at distilling many disparate ideas into a coherent whole, and some are funny, a quality which justifies itself. My point is not that famous pundits are never worth reading, but rather that they are never worth reading just because of who they are. Look at this transcript of Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat discussing their own careers. One thing you may notice is that both of these people have spent their entire adult lives doing nothing but sitting at a computer blogging. Does that mean that they don’t know anything? Not at all. Then again, does it mean they do know anything? Also no. “Winning the pundit lottery with a New York Times gig” tells you nothing about whether these people are worthy of your attention. They must earn your respect, and their right to your time, solely with the quality of their work. That’s all they have! And you can judge that for yourself. Any further temptation to check for them because of the positions they hold is an error of judgment, by you. [...]

The more subtle and substantial danger of patronizing idiot pundits is that the accumulated weight of attention that we grant them bestows them with actual influence, which they use to make the world worse, as you would expect. This is bad enough when it’s, you know, Matt Yglesias morphing into a Democratic Party power broker; it is even worse when it is a calculated political effort, of the sort that Rahm Emanuel is trying to pull off now by parlaying his stint as a monotonous Wall Street Journal columnist into a presidential campaign.

James Carville is a wheezing old coot. Why is he influential? Because we all pay attention to him! Also, Donald Trump. Think about it. Depriving this sort of person of the material benefits of having a large audience is a patriotic act.

If you are a genuine hate read connoisseur, I respect it. But if you are a regular person who finds yourself continually getting mad at the idiot pundits you continue to read—stop!

The idea that if you want to be a well informed person you are obligated to read all the stuff that certain prestigious writers and outlets publish is not much different from the idea that since McDonald’s is very popular, you are obligated to stop there and eat a Big Mac every day. To keep your finger on the pulse. This, just like the belief that you must read every Jonathan Chait story, will eventually give you a heart attack. Embrace ignorance of dreary idiocy. It is the kind of ignorance that makes you smarter.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also: Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation; and, Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses (HTW):]

***

"If you create things for the public, you will get yelled at by dumbasses. Indeed, this is the primary experience of being the sort of writer that I am. If you make a joke, they won’t get it. If you use sarcasm, they won’t detect it. If you exaggerate for effect, you will be taken literally, and if you try to be understated, you will be accused of a contemptible lack of urgency. If you make a reference, it will not be understood; if you choose one topic, they will wonder why you didn’t choose another; if you try to focus on one thing, they will ask why you didn’t focus on something else. Your high-minded arguments will be dismissed as inscrutable, your simple arguments will be dismissed as unsophisticated, and you, personally, will be dismissed as the sort of lightweight who should try getting a real job. Ever thought of that? [...]

America’s entire power structure has been taken over by the very same sort of dumbasses who have been yelling at all of us on the internet for years. Perhaps this was all foreordained from the very first day that email and message boards were invented. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no need to look upon the dull, vindictive, racist monsters running our government as a new or inexplicable sort of villain. I see in them a much more familiar identity: internet commenters.

The shoddiness of their work, their love of spectacle, their constant speechifying, their disproportionate reaction to all setbacks, their dishonesty, their prejudices, their disdain for expertise, their willingness to trust quacks, their scapegoating of the less powerful, their embrace of performative gestures at the expense of substance, their misogyny, their ill-concealed social awkwardness funneled into needless displays of aggression—yes, this is all very much in character. The good news is that it is easy to diagnose this disease. The bad news is that if we don’t get it cleared up, our nation’s 250-year history will culminate in the same sort of recriminatory meltdown as an internet comment thread that spirals from “What did you do today?” to full Nazism with stunning speed."

It's All Good, Bro

Callaway Golf Got Wrecked By YouTube Doofuses Because Everyone’s Out Of Ideas

Try this, maybe: Think of the internet as an ocean vast enough to contain a near-infinite constellation of distinct watery biomes, each populated by creatures that have evolved to suit the one in which they live—a bunch of weird creatures traveling in schools, chasing each other around, eating each other, and, in the most inhospitable depths, eating shit in the inky dark. Even to get your feet wet in this ocean is to know that it is bigger and colder than you could grasp. I don't know how to properly describe the uncanny feeling of becoming aware of how many online realities are unfolding, often in ways that draw big audiences and throw off real profits, in browser tabs I will never open, just as that hideous translucent deep-sea crapfish could not describe the experience of living in water. It would in some ways be a cruel thing to drag it up from the depths to show it a bunch of cavorting dolphins, but mostly it would be pointless. It would be too bright for it to see anything at all.

This is how I feel when confronted with the story of Good Good, which started as a golf YouTube channel and swiftly grew into a sprawling brand that sponsored PGA Tour players and a PGA event; they partnered with the brand Callaway Golf and raised $45 million from a group including the Manning brothers' Omaha Productions. This company was growing fast and lucratively, in a number of different directions, in a part of the ocean that I do not visit or really even know how to look at. Golfweek described the company's vision as "blending creator-driven entertainment, professional-caliber competition, and fan engagement into a format designed for golf's next generation of consumers." This is legible enough, but also there's a lot going on in that sentence, little pockets of vibe and affinity that are related enough to exist within the same space, but otherwise not notably in conversation. A lot of companies and a lot of YouTube are also like this.

The events that have led to the unraveling of Good Good over the past few weeks, by contrast, are easy enough to understand. As part of their partnership with Callaway, Good Good made a strange, bad ad that begins with Good Good creator and co-founder Garrett Clark violently pushing a woman, golfer and fellow Good Good creator Alexis Miestowski, to the ground when she tries to touch his Callaway driver. Clark then stands over her and says in a menacing tone, "Do not touch my new driver."

The ad, which was ostensibly a riff on the movie Obsession but otherwise too bad to parse, went over poorly. Major retailers pulled Good Good merchandise from their shelves, and Golf Galaxy took its name off a Golf Channel show it had sponsored alongside Good Good, which led the network to table the show. PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp described the ad as "concerning." In a statement in which he admitted that his company had approved the ad, which Good Good produced, Callaway CEO Chip Brewer said "that approval should never have happened. Mistakes were made and we are taking the matter very seriously."

Callaway subsequently pulled the ad, made one fulsome apology and then a second, donated $1 million to charities dedicated to preventing domestic violence, and cut ties with the brand. Good Good, for its part, duffed not one but two attempts at an apology. Co-founder and CEO Matt Kendrick posted, at 3:38 a.m. ET, a tweet which read: "Interesting that Callaway Golf asks us to make an ad then approves it then asks us to take the fall then drops us in a coordinated media blitz and covers it up by giving a million dollars away thinking everyone will be ok with it. 30 for 39 will be legendary." Last Wednesday, Kendrick and Good Good president Joe Flannery, who had started just days before the ad was released, both stepped down.

There are some extremely obvious lessons to take from this, regarding how to not market your pioneering new golf club as well as the risks of aligning your big global brand with YouTube dunces, and it seems both redundant and rude to remind Callaway of those at this moment. The other brands that have taken long positions on partnering with social media creators and influencers have surely made note of all that, too.

None of this is especially difficult to understand in the abstract. Creators like Good Good have an audience that companies like Callaway want to reach and mostly do not understand. "There's probably a stigma from like the older golf fan that 'only 12-year-olds watch that,'" Kendrick told Golfweek back in 2025. "Well, if you actually knew our demographic, you would know that it's 24-to-35 is our main demographic." In giving Good Good the benefit of the doubt, on things like this bafflingly and obviously bad ad but also in general, Callaway entrusted the brand's reputation to an outside partner that they trust to speak to that audience in a way they'll understand. That Good Good duffed it is inarguable at this point, but there is also that classic showing-dolphins-to-a-crapfish aspect inherent in this sort of thing even when it works. Ben Goren, a writer and marketer, summed those risks up well in his newsletter in late August:

For as ubiquitous as social media is, it has become almost unfathomably segmented. You can earn millions of views and millions of followers without Joe McAverage American having any clue who you are. Joe McAverage American is probably upset that you think he should know who that random TikToker is. And when someone doesn’t know who you are, they are extremely unlikely to have even a moment of hesitation before throwing you into the garbage can when you bore them, confuse them, or, in the case of Good Good, upset them.

In a second post, Goren does a good job illustrating the broader state of play in the golf influencer space, and how the big brands have approached and should approach partnerships with them. There are lessons there, too, both for brands trying to figure out how to use influencers to their advantage and a sport trying to figure out where its next generation of players will come from. As someone who is less interested in marketing or golf than Goren, what I find interesting about this story has less to do with its YouTube-damaged or golfy particulars and more to do with how likely it is to repeat itself elsewhere in the culture.

But also the golfy particulars seem instructive. The sport is in the middle of an authentic surge in popularity, and confronting the happy challenge of having to figure out how to get all those interested new golfers, many of them kids, onto actual golf courses. The brands and institutions that stand to profit from this interest—companies like Callaway, which will sell them clubs and bags for as long as they are playing golf—know where those golfers are, but not really who they are or quite what they want; this is mostly because they are brands and institutions, and as such would naturally struggle with this kind of thing.

And so they have to delegate, or just defer to what YouTube's viewer stats tell them about what those people like and want. This is how cycling's Vuelta a España winds up bringing aboard a member of the Vertical Video Community to chaotic effect, or how the previously bottomless resources of Saudi Arabia's Private Investment Fund created a new and ostentatiously "louder" golf tour that went bankrupt before it figured out what else it might have been. The institutions are guessing, and sorting rude metrics from high to low. The size of the ocean humbles even the biggest fish in it. [...]

But if the Good Good story illustrates the peril inherent in big brands trusting feral web goofs to tell their stories, the cringe and carnage of those big brands trying to tell that story themselves demonstrates why they still need to rely on influencers and creators.

It seems reasonable enough to assume that Callaway approved Good Good's awful, stupid, brand-wrecking ad because they assumed that there was something in it they didn't get; that assumption, and that sense of what they didn't understand, is why they got into business with them in the first place. Callaway's size and status meant that they could survive being wrong in a way that Good Good couldn't, but the problem that brands like Callaway bring in creators like Good Good to solve is a stubborn one, and one those companies are uniquely ill-suited to address. They know enough to know that they don't know how to find or talk to the people they need to reach, and they're right about that; they're astute enough to identify the creators that do know that, and rich enough to pay them. But that's not enough.

If these brands knew what they wanted to say—if they actually had anything in particular to say, or any real sense for the people they want to say it to—it might be easier. Goren, for instance, makes a case for selling golf not as just another backdrop for Good Good-style bits and goofs, but as a worthwhile craft and pursuit in itself. In the absence of any such commitment, institutional players—and businesses, politicians, and others with an interest in shaping and steering those people's opinions—are mostly just casting baited lines out there to see what they can catch in the places where they think they might catch them. But the ocean is the ocean, and having a map of it is very different than having a useful understanding of it. All that money and all that reach and all that work, and they still can't think of what's down there as anything but food.

by David Roth, Defector |  Read more:

Image: Kenneth Richmond/Getty Images

Dolly Parton's "Label Upgrade" Strategy

When someone patronizes you, it’s easy to feel slighted. Maybe they assumed you didn’t know what you were doing because you’re new to an organization, or you’re younger. Maybe they figured you wouldn’t be able to use new technology because you’re older.

It’s not always easy to know what to do in that situation. Their assumption about your abilities is incorrect, but you also don’t want to deny an obvious truth. Maybe you are older or younger or new to an organization. How can you stand up for yourself effectively while still owning your identity?

 

Dolly Parton knew the answer. Nearly half a century ago, she did a now-famous interview with Barbara Walters, one of the most prominent journalists on television at the time. Walters asked all of the cutting questions to Parton’s face that people had been whispering behind her back: about her clothes, her figure, and even her breasts. She also pushed on Parton’s lower-class background.

“Dolly,” she began. “Where I come from, would I have called you a hillbilly? … When I think of hillbillies, am I thinking of your kind of people?”

 
What was in Dolly Parton’s ‘powerful’ answer

I taught communication for more than a decade at Columbia Business School and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and Parton’s answer has a powerful lesson all of us can use.

“I think you probably are,” she replied. “But we were very proud people, people with a lot of class. It was country class, but it was a great deal of class. And most of my people were not that educated, but they are very, very intelligent. Good common sense — horse sense, we called it.”

I call Parton’s move the “label upgrade” strategy, and it’s a way to simultaneously maintain your dignity and disarm the person who’s talking down to you.

She’s neither denying she’s a hillbilly, nor getting mad at what could easily be seen as an insult. Instead, she claims the label and revises what it means. To Walters, “hillbilly” clearly meant “backward” or “unsophisticated.” But Parton owned it and changed the meaning: Being a hillbilly was now about being proud, practical, and wise.

The next time someone tries to talk down to you, you don’t have to argue. Instead, you can use the same strategy, redefining the label or box they’re trying to put you in. If they say, or imply, you’re “too inexperienced,” you can double down on your fresh perspective. If they try to knock you for being “over the hill,” you can emphasize your wisdom and judgment.

 
How to use the ‘label upgrade’ strategy

The label upgrade has two parts. First, you accept what they’ve said as accurate (assuming that it is — otherwise, you can dispute their premise). Then, you redefine what it means. It could sound like:

•  “You’re right, I am new here. That’s what allows me to see things that no one else notices anymore, and find the opportunities you might be overlooking.”

• “It’s true I don’t have an MBA. That means I’ve had to learn through experience and working directly with our customers. That’s why I feel so confident about the features they’ll want.”

• “You’re right, I don’t know anything about engineering. But neither do most of our customers. So if you can’t explain it to me, they’ll have a hard time understanding it, too.”

• “It’s true I’ve never worked in a large corporation before. That means I’ve had to learn not just how to do my job, but how to get results, even if that means pitching in to help another department. That’s why I feel so strongly we can’t just blame the sales department.”

Or if you’re Dolly Parton, you could say this to Barbara Walters, who questioned her “extreme clothes” and blonde wigs: “It’s certainly a choice. I don’t like to be like everybody else. I’ve often made this statement that I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable. That’s the easiest thing in the world to do.”

It’s a powerful move to own the truth — and still get to define the terms for yourself.

by Dorie Clark, CNBC |  Read more:

Image: Richard E. Aaron | Redferns | Getty Images

On The Day Dolly Died

via:

There’s Something Dangerous About Sam Rockwell

Ever since that monologue—you know the one—everyone knows who the legendary scene-stealer is. Still, his appetite for taking risks means he’ll never stop surprising us.

Have you ever had a Red Bull?” Sam Rockwell asks, apropos of nothing. “I don’t know if I’ve had a Red Bull.”

We had been talking about the tyranny of social media.

“I’ve never had an energy drink ever,” I tell him, unnecessarily proud of myself, while I try to figure out why he’s asked. I’m distracted. The reason I’m distracted is that I don’t want to be here. I don’t mean with Sam Rockwell—Sam Rockwell is delightful. I mean in this room. It’s the greenroom outside a midtown Manhattan video studio. It sucks.

“This is a nice room, actually,” Rockwell said when we first walked in. He cut himself off—he was in the midst of warning me that he might need to stretch because he’d boxed that morning—just to make the observation. He does that a lot: cuts himself off, trails unpredictably from one topic to the next. “Carlito’s Way meets, you know, some sort of industrial workspace.”

He does that a lot too. He has a movie reference for everything, even this L-shaped hall-end space with a couple mini fridges; a table with some trail mix, chips, and granola bars; and, at the other end of the L, a couch and armchairs under the lone window, outside which a tree is swaying and it’s trying to rain. We’ll talk for 145 minutes and he’ll manage to mention thirty-two movies and fifty-three actors.

Forty-five minutes into our conversation, he gets up to take a leak. Upon returning from the bathroom, he sees the tree out the window metronoming back and forth. “Is it raining?” He walks over to the window and peers down at the street, where tiny creatures have sprouted umbrellas. He’s been inside virtually all day, shooting photos and videos in closed-off rooms. He furrows his eyebrows slightly, mouth half open, that look of coy appraisal we’ve all seen a million times now.

It’s hard to believe because of the boyish face and irrepressible energy, but Rockwell’s career stretches back nearly forty years. His first film was a low-budget 1989 slasher called Clownhouse, but by 1992 he was in Light Sleeper, directed by Paul Schrader, our foremost poet of male alienation and the writer of one of Rockwell’s favorite movies, Taxi Driver. That’s his career. He’s been in a Marvel film; he’s been in a Clint Eastwood film. He’s played the Big Bad Wolf and George W. Bush and the most influential choreographer of the twentieth century. He’s natural in everything. Last year, a monologue about wanting to be an Asian woman getting railed by white men, from season 3 of The White Lotus, which starred his longtime partner, Leslie Bibb, tipped him from an actor beloved among people like him—cinephiles—to someone everybody knows.

His new film, Wild Horse Nine, comes out in November. Rockwell plays Lee, a CIA agent who, along with his partner, Chris, played by John Malkovich (one of Rockwell’s idols), is part of a CIA misadventure in Chile in the early 1970s. Lee and Chris take a weekend trip to Easter Island, where Lee seems to be keeping tabs on Chris, watching him from the window of his hotel room or out the windshield of an ancient red stick-shift sedan.

Wild Horse Nine is the fourth collaboration between Rockwell and writer/director Martin McDonagh, after 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, for which Rockwell won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor; 2012’s Seven Psychopaths; and a 2010 play with the macabre title A Behanding in Spokane. I asked McDonagh why he keeps casting Rockwell. “His danger, his truthfulness, his sense of fun, his sex appeal,” he said. “I think especially the first one—there’s always something a little dangerous about Sam in everything he does.”

There is something dangerous about Rockwell in Wild Horse Nine, but he’s playing against Malkovich, who is not known for timidity. The two of them and McDonagh rehearsed for a few weeks at the Public Theater, a legendary institution in New York City. Rockwell, who has been rather relaxed, reclining slightly with boxing shoes flat on the floor, leans in to tell me about it. “We were doing this thing where he goes off on me,” Rockwell says. After a run-through, McDonagh asked Malkovich to “turn up the anger a little bit.” “He just says [lilting], Oh yeah, sure, no problem,” Rockwell says. “He talks kind of gently. And then, just like, WHAM! Out of the gate like a monster.”

Rockwell ate it up. “I was like, I got a front-row ticket to this? I get Malkovich to yell at me?”

I point out that some people might find this intimidating. “I worked with Gene Hackman once,” he says. “And I had to yell at him, and he loved it. He loved it. Because actors are so intimidated by him. If you’re a really good tennis player, you want a good tennis player opposite you.”

Rockwell is a good tennis player. And like any good athlete, he trains. For as much as he appears to get by on natural charm and charisma, he is an actor’s actor, a true believer, in his words, an “acting nerd.” Research. Running lines. Exerci—

“Do you know what a gibbon is?” Rockwell asks.

by Kevin Dupzyk, Esquire | Read more:

Image: Florence Sullivan

[ed. See also: Keanu Reeves Knows the Secrets of the Universe (Esquire).]

Resort to Boulder

Sundance means big business for Park City. Last year, the festival’s 85,000 visitors brought almost $200 million into the town’s economy, and major sponsors like Chase, Acura, United Airlines, and Adobe took over entire restaurants and event spaces up and down Main Street. In March 2025, however, the Sundance Institute — the nonprofit that operates the festival — announced that Sundance would be moving to Boulder. Sundance officials had spoken for years about the possibility of moving the festival out of Park City. In 2022, the institute lost millions of dollars after being forced to shut down in-person screenings in response to that winter’s omicron outbreak. Now Colorado was offering more than $34 million in state tax credits to incentivize the move. The 2026 Sundance Film Festival would be the last to take place in its original home, as well as the first not overseen by Sundance’s talismanic founder, Robert Redford, who died at 89 in September 2025. [...]

Park City, it should be said, is neither a park nor a city. As a location for a festival it is, and always has been, a giant pain in the ass. Getting to Park City is pricey, and driving and parking are impossible. There are only a handful of hotels in town, and all of them jack up their usual prices by criminal orders of magnitude. Most people end up sharing cramped rooms in condos that still cost thousands of dollars. Eating and drinking are equally outrageous. Utah state law requires restaurant patrons to buy food to order a drink, and liquor-based drinks may contain only 1.5 ounces of any primary spirit, measured through a calibrated dispensing device called the Berg. This is a serious problem for bored, overworked critics who must sit through dozens of the nation’s least ambitious films every year.

Then there are the lines. Lines to corporate-sponsored events that snake up Main Street; lines to parties that take hours even when your name is on the list; lines to press screenings longer than the film’s runtime. In 2026, a single ticket to one of these films cost $35; a package of ten tickets, with the ability to reserve screenings in advance, was $920. For filmmakers it’s even worse. Sundance sometimes provides a small stipend to productions to help offset the costs of participating in the festival. This year, the payment was around $1,000, hardly enough money to fly in a director, let alone a cast and crew, to spend several days posing for photos in front of step and repeats, participating in interviews, and attending Q&As — standard but punishing procedures for selling a film at Sundance. Add in the price of hiring a publicist and throwing a party for the film’s premiere — as well as meals, hotels, and transportation — and launching a low-budget film at Sundance can quickly run up tens of thousands of dollars in expenses.

Robert Redford was an unlikely champion of independent film. As the face of polished 1970s studio filmmaking and the decade’s biggest box office star, he was the ultimate Hollywood insider. His name was listed in dictionaries under words like glamour and idol, and he was too good-looking to be anything but a leading man — a point the actor famously learned early in his career after auditioning for the lead in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser,’” Nichols later told Vanity Fair. “And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘OK, have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’”

But Redford was always ambivalent about his success. He disliked the trappings and never-ending demands of celebrity, and mistrusted the studio executives and yes-men around him. By the early 1980s, the major Hollywood studios had shut out most of the successful creative filmmakers of the previous decade and pivoted to family-friendly, cash-fueled spectacles like Star Wars, Superman, and E.T. Redford saw Sundance as the solution. The next generation of pathbreaking auteurs would come to the actor’s compound, which included a ski resort near Mount Timpanogos, to receive artistic guidance and mentorship far from the corrupting influence of the Barry Dillers and Jerry Bruckheimers of the world.

by Will Travlin, N+1 |  Read more:
Image: Chason Matthams, Untitled (Technica 3D rig, yellow). 2024

Brad Pitt’s Return to Drinking Is Not Unsafe, Experts Say, but It’s Not for Everyone

Brad Pitt went seven years without a drink. Then he started again — carefully, he said, and on his own terms.

He mentioned it almost in passing in an Esquire interview published this week: Mr. Pitt had gotten “back off the wagon” and now drinks “in a more restrained manner.” Never in large quantities, he insisted. He had gotten overconfident a couple of times and pulled back.

His comments stirred up one of the oldest and least settled arguments about sobriety: whether someone who once drank dangerously can ever drink safely again.

Mr. Pitt quit drinking in 2016, the year his marriage to the actress Angelina Jolie collapsed. After she filed for divorce, he spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous and has credited the program with getting him sober. “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he told The New York Times in 2019.

Alcoholics Anonymous focuses on abstinence-based recovery from alcoholism and does not comment publicly about members. A representative from the A.A. General Service Office said only that “members of Alcoholics Anonymous have only one purpose: to stay sober ourselves and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.”

It was his history with A.A. that touched a nerve among people who have fought to stay sober, or have friends or relatives who have struggled with recovery. People who figuratively followed Mr. Pitt into a room of folding chairs learned of his exit from it.

Experts and researchers said the reactions split along lines that had less to do with Mr. Pitt than with how the people reacting had gotten sober themselves.

Mr. Pitt, during his interview, offered himself as no one’s model for sobriety. He described where he was and claimed nothing about where he will be later.

Researchers said that account was less unusual than it sounds.

“People with an alcohol disorder show a variety of different paths through which they resolve that alcohol use disorder,” said Christopher W. Kahler, director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Some of those involve being completely abstinent, and some of them don’t.”

Dr. Melissa Weimer, an associate professor who specializes in addiction medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, said that alcohol use disorder is a chronic disease. Those who reacted strongly to Mr. Pitt’s account may have watched efforts to drink in moderation fail, in themselves or in someone they love, she added.

But treatment does not come in one size, she said. She presses instead for individualized plans, including medication such as naltrexone, which dulls the reward of a drink and helps some people cut back.

“We do recommend that people stop drinking entirely and probably continue to stop drinking once they have an alcohol use disorder,” Dr. Weimer said. “But everybody’s different, and they have to make their own personal choices.”

Dr. Alta DeRoo, the chief medical officer of the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, the largest nonprofit substance use disorder and mental health treatment facility in the United States, goes further.

Dr. DeRoo said she refuses to shame or police how anyone pursues recovery, and she rejects the idea of a single correct route. Demanding abstinence and nothing else, she said, drives away the people who are still trying to quit.

Clinicians should meet patients where they stand, whether that means abstinence, moderation or harm reduction, walking beside them rather than grading them, she said.

Even when someone relapses, or tests moderation after a severe disorder, the sober years still count, Dr. DeRoo said, contrary to some conventional wisdom on addiction. Those people gained coping skills, repaired relationships and improved physical health, she said, and none of that reverses.

She reads Mr. Pitt’s account as a useful one: sobriety, a return to drinking, a recognition that it was going badly, a correction.

“Sometimes it takes several times,” Dr. DeRoo said. “Right now it may just be harm reduction, and that’s what’s working for him, and if it gets him to a better place, I would support anything that helps a patient decrease their alcohol use and live a healthier life.”

Researchers differ on much, but not on this. Recovery, they said, confers no permanent status and has no finish line but rather what a person finds workable now, and whether it holds.

by Mark Walker, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Free Pizza Delivery

Public intrusion is a common experience for the residents of TV-famous homes. In 2015, Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, had to urge fans to stop paying homage to his show – because they were recreating a scene where an entire pizza is thrown on to the roof of the house whose exterior was featured as Walter White’s bungalow. And last year, the owner of the apartment made famous by Sex and the City’s lead character erected a gate outside it because “at any hour of the day or night, there are groups of visitors in front of the house taking flash photos, engaging in loud chatter, posting on social media, making TikTok videos or just celebrating the moment”. Eventually, the owners of the Breaking Bad house followed suit, erecting a 6ft iron fence – not that it stopped fans. “They still try to throw pizzas even though she’s got a gate, she’s got signage,” said Frank Sandoval, who runs Breaking Bad tours to the house in an RV. “They even try to climb the gate.”

‘We get 200 tourists a day’: when your house becomes a TV star (The Guardian)
Image: Walter White’s Breaking Bad home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photograph: Raisa Macouzet/Alamy

[ed. Have to admit: I once tracked down the apartment complex and courtyard in Seattle where Singles was filmed. Stood in the exact same spot as Matt Dillon and Chris Cornell. It was actually kind of fun. (hint: East Thomas somewhere).]

The Extras Are Tired

Less than a decade ago, when I was working on technology stories, my colleagues and I ran into an issue that I’m pretty sure had not occurred to the people who founded this magazine in 1857: how to style the word influencer, which was an occupation and cultural force, but one just emerging. We weren’t sure that all of our readers would know what one was, and we also didn’t know how exactly we would define the word ourselves. I spent the fall of 2018 sending a lot of emails about whether we needed to encase the word in scare quotes.

Quaint! Many—but not all that many—years later, influencer is very much a real job, no explanation required. As of 2023, 27 million Americans were paid to make online content in one form or another, at least according to one marketing consultant company. Enthusiasm from influencers can turn a random business into a sensation, while their ire can do the opposite. Donald Trump’s White House is full of influencers, but Joe Biden’s courted them too, in apparent recognition of their power. This week, Arizona State University announced that it would begin offering a bachelor’s degree in content creation—influencing by another name—through its journalism school.

In some ways, the influencer industry is more legitimate than it’s ever been. But it has always been precarious, and more than a decade into its existence, it is neither novel enough to be exciting nor established enough to have a real professional code. In an oversaturated market, rage bait is the last sure way to get attention, despite the way it alienates people over the long term. AI is swiftly becoming the dominant way many people get personal-seeming advice about how to live their life, which makes the usefulness of aspirational online content even less apparent than it ever was. And so, although influencers—especially lifestyle influencers—have never been universally respected, they lately seem to be openly reviled.

Naturally, much of the influencer backlash lives online. A few months ago, someone asked on Reddit, “What’s an industry that provides zero value to society but makes billions of dollars?” Among the 5,300-plus responses: Ticketmaster, sports-betting companies, multilevel marketing schemes, private prisons, and—several times over—influencers. A hilarious number of people have found internet fame by making content about how much they hate other people who are internet-famous for making content. (“Everyone Is Finally Turning on TONE DEAF Influencers” is the title of one recent video, made by an Australian YouTuber with nearly 300,000 subscribers and a clothing line.)

But the juiciest fights play out in the physical world, which is where influencers very literally bump up against the people who can’t stand them. A few years ago, a coffee shop in Brooklyn banned photography after too many influencers clogged the café with tripods and handheld lights; earlier this month, Indonesia indicated that it would crack down on people creating content for pay while on tourist visas.

Last week, the scene of the debate was a gift shop in Nantucket, an island that has recently been overrun by vacationing influencers, just like Bali, Iceland, and Santorini before it. The store’s operators, evidently fed up with the stream of people filming inside, had a sign made that read No Influencers, hung it up in the store, and posted a picture of it on Instagram. There, it drew the attention of thousands of people, including Paige Paul, who has about 2 million followers across platforms, is married to a famous tennis player, and has been spending time on the island since she was a child. Paul, previously known as Paige Lorenze, declared the sign a misogynistic slight against an industry that is overwhelmingly female. The store’s owner, John Sylvia, said it was meant as a joke for locals, but the sentiment clearly came from an earnest annoyance: “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” he told New York magazine.

The fight felt freighted. Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.

But influencers are unique in how they seem to be everywhere, particularly in places where people are trying to do things other than be on their phone to watch influencers. Of course we love the game and hate the player: It’s much easier to be annoyed by individuals than by concepts, especially when those individuals are, often, pretty annoying.

You’d need to be pretty clueless to not feel a little weird about the online attention economy and all it entails—the vanity; the grift; the slop; the desperation; the calculated intimacy; the endless consumption; the creeping sense that everything and everyone is actually just there to make you feel kind of bad about yourself and then sell you something. Social media can, of course, unite like-minded people, but it can also reward the kind of tribalist reactionaryism that can conflate disliking some women with disliking all women, or make an anti-consumerist folk hero out of a store that sells $2,750 baskets. The industry that Paul and her cohort belong to is unquestionably grim—but the industry isn’t walking around town with a selfie stick. There’s a reason that the sign doesn’t say no influencing, but rather no influencers.

by Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Atlantic/Getty

[ed. I'm a great fan of guitar instruction videos because they teach you something. I guess you could call that a form of influencing. Some instructors have a wide audience and are influencial because of their teaching technique.The opposite (and there are many examples) are so-called "reaction videos" where someone listens to a song and simply records their "reactions". Who cares. Talk about bottom of the barrel. Same goes for opinion influencers, foodies and tons of other niches (Mukbang videos?). If all they have to offer is distraction or entertainment they're a waste of time.]

Catching Up With Keanu

Keanu Reeves' First Original Action Movie Since 'John Wick' Is 'Groundhog Day' With Sharks

I'm sure that’s one of the reasons you guys are doing press today, to raise awareness. Before I run out of time, Keanu, I'm a big fan of Tim Miller. And I know you're getting ready to film something with him in the Dominican Republic.

REEVES: Yeah.

What can you tease about this project, and what made you say, “I need to do this?”

REEVES: Sharks. Time machine. Groundhog Day.

Everything you just said sounds fucking amazing.

REEVES: Yeah, man!

Does that mean you're spending a lot of time in the water? Is that something that you're looking forward to?

REEVES: Yes. And getting eaten by sharks.

by Tamera Jones & Steven Weintraub, Collider |  Read more:

Image: Lionsgate

[ed. All in. Maybe they're Russian sharks and he'll be blasting them left and right for eating his groundhog.]

What's Elon Worth?

[ed. Let's see, by my watch $103,000 every minute. He could own every major league sports team 2.5 times over; buy all the gold in Ft. Knox (with billions to spare)... (more).]

via:

Coastal Grandmother

Imagine Diane Keaton unpacking her farmers’ market bags. It’s all about relaxed, mature luxury, featuring pottery, hydrangeas and at least one bowl of lemons

Name: Coastal grandmother.

Age: Just incredibly well preserved?

Appearance: Easy, breezy, laid-back yet immaculate, with warm neutrals, lots of linen and coastal vibes.

“Coastal vibes” would be a terrible police photofit description. You know what I mean.

Not really, but your granny sounds nice. We’re not talking about her: she lived in a council house in Cinderford. This is about a platonic “coastal grandmother” ideal, the cinema trope turned TikTok microtrend, birthed by the influencer Lex Nicoleta. It’s about adopting the aesthetic of a type of older heroine, usually played by Diane Keaton or Meryl Streep and probably directed by Nancy Meyers, the queen of romcoms (It’s Complicated; Something’s Gotta Give), in aspirational domestic settings.

I see (I don’t). It’s easy: coastal grandmother means relaxed, mature luxury, as lightly worn as the cashmere sweater over your shoulders as you unpack your farmers’ market purchases from your Provençal shopper in a kitchen the size of the O2.

So coastal grannies are rich? It’s more about a comforting fantasy than hard cash, a leisurely, fulfilling life in a beautiful place. Imagine wandering through your bounteous garden picking “arugula” and basil (pronounced bay-sil) for the unpretentious kitchen lunch for 20 you’re hosting: that’s CG.

It doesn’t sound very seasidey: where’s the Mr Whippy and the arcades? Coastal is a state of mind. If you’re struggling, don’t worry: like a latterday Peter York, Nicoleta has spent two months and nearly 50 videos deconstructing the signifiers of coastal grandmotherhood in forensic detail, from hydrangeas to antique ginger jars. She even distinguishes between east coast (pottery and crisp white button-down shirts) and west coast (pilates and dirty martinis) CGs.

And why are we talking about it? Because #coastalgrandmother has gone viral. The hashtag has 7.6m views on TikTok and climbing. It probably doesn’t hurt that Netflix has just announced a new Nancy Meyers film, too.

Huh? Why do the youth want to emulate fictional boomers? Well, would you rather engage with the roiling chaos and existential terror of 2022, or cosplay Meryl Streep fixing a lobster salad in her sun-soaked kitchen, to the soundtrack of nearby waves, a crisp sancerre by her side, as Javier Bardem repaints her garden pottery studio? I thought so.

OK, but I’m not a grandmother and I’m nowhere near the sea. No problem. You can get the vibe anywhere with fresh flowers, “cosy” music (there’s a 79-track CG Spotify playlist), taper candles and the all-important bowl of lemons.

The what now? Nicoleta insists CGs need at least one bowl of lemons: “practical and aesthetically pleasing”.

Do say: “Get cosy in the rattan chair and I’ll fix you a bloody mary; my heirloom tomatoes are gorgeous right now.”

by The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Halfpoint Images/Getty Images
[ed. I know, I know... this microtrend is four years old already. We've probably moved on to 'Pool Hall Grandpa' or something else by now. I'd never heard of it though until I read this: ‘Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?’ How personal taste fell out of fashion', which, in reality, is a much more interesting essay than I would've expected or cared about. Give it a read.]

Wish You Were Her

INT. Deck 7, Le Cabaret Rouge, 11:37 PM

Frank Sinatra, palming a can of Sprite in one hand and the fist of his beautiful redheaded wife in the other, sat in a dark corner across from Jeff Bezos, who looked like he was waiting for him to say something. But Sinatra said nothing. He’d been mostly quiet all evening, and now in this cabaret he seemed even more distant, staring out past fog and strobe and Bezos’s strong bald head and into the large room where at least half a dozen men had basically shattered a bistro table trying to get a better look at Marilyn Monroe. Sinatra’s wife knew, as did Roy Orbison and Austin Powers, who stood nearby, that it was only minutes before he was supposed to go onstage, and that forcing any sort of conversation on him in this mood of focus would be extremely stupid.

The fact was, Sinatra had already been waiting for over an hour for his moment at the mic and at this point would have been more than fine with just heading back to his cabin. He was tired of the constant low-grade pitch in gravity under his feet. He was still annoyed that he’d nearly lost his luggage on the first day here, a fact his wife was not letting him forget; was humiliated that he never really got his onboard Wi-Fi — Wi-Fi he paid for — to work all week; had been viciously massaging his kidneys throughout the past four songs; and now, at this strangulating moment, had to sit through the noises being made by the group of veterans Monroe had just asked to join her in a conga. Sinatra, wincing, was the victim of a condition so common around here that most people accepted it as a given. But when it got to him, shot through his personal plumbing, we were looking at a man in crisis. The fact was — and he’s going to kill me for saying this — Frank Sinatra was seasick.

EXT. Deck 18, Long Island Bar, 3:08 PM

Three nights and about eight hours earlier, select members of the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators boarded a 169,000-ton cruise ship in civilian disguise. They crossed the gangplank by sandaled foot and standard wheelchair, in panama hats and Bermuda shorts, naked of the costumes, pancake makeup, and in some cases false breasts required to faithfully look like their look-alikes. Alongside an estimated four thousand other, non-impersonating passengers slated to set sail with them, these twenty professional plagiarists, under cover of normie human camouflage, slipped silently into the crush.

“LORD I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS MUCH COCONUT RUM IN MY LIFE,” yelled a man on his phone, jabbing his free hand into his free ear.

“MAN IT IS COMPLETELY SUNNY — I SAID SUNNY — YOU KNOW WHAT, I’M GETTING A CALL FROM DONNA — DONNA — YEAH LOOK I’M NOT TRYING TO HAVE HER TRY AND TEAR MY ASS IN HALF AGAIN SO I’M GONNA HAVE HER CALL YOU — ”

Welcome to the open-air bar on the eighteenth floor of the MSC Seashore, a luxury megaship with the fuel economy of an oil-tanker fire and the handling of a Marriott. That was the man seated to my left, silenced by the drink handed to him by a bartender. To my right was a woman in a shirt that read I DON’T GIVE A SHIP. And behind us, beyond the bar — which led out onto the pool deck, the pool deck’s smoking section, and two Jacuzzis — was the Atlantic Ocean, foamy and real under the sun above Port Canaveral, Florida.

I was seated smack in the center of the ship’s “embarkation party,” the Seashore’s farewell-to-land fiesta. In these last few hours of boarding, standard cruisegoers (reunioning families, couples, singles, swingers) were already loudly settling in for the top-hole amenities, pampering, and bacchanalia that the Seashore’s four-day boomerang voyage to the Bahamas had promised. They more or less knew what they were in for. What they didn’t know was that the impersonators of Sunburst walked among them, incognito, settling in for the same.

The occasion of Sunburst’s presence on the cruise was this: Time had been having its remorseless way with our look-alikes. For four days a year for the past two decades, the Sunburst Convention of Celebrity Impersonators, a three-to-five-dozen-strong troupe of doppelgangers, tribute artists, and hobbyist dead ringers, had assembled in hotels and conference centers across greater Orlando. In its heyday, Sunburst’s annual congress served as the tribute industry’s largest American sanctuary. But the average age for a Sunburster now hovered around 55. The typical status of the celebrities they impersonated was “deceased.” The digital era had swallowed demand for in-person homages to golden-age Hollywood, AI was a wallop to its people en masse, folks were retiring from the trade, aging out of plausible fidelity to their chosen doubles, or, from entirely natural causes, disappearing for good. (One of Sunburst’s most redoubtable talent agents had in fact died just a few weeks before the cruise.) This made the week’s cruise purely leisurely, a hopefully happy sunset for Sunburst’s long reign.

So here I was. Shipping out. Desperately seeking someone from Sunburst. Solitary in the ark of undoubled doubles, figuring out who around here was an impersonator impersonating a non-impersonator was becoming, as you might imagine, unimaginable. In the long mirror above the bar, every woman in the pool, drifting in and out of frame on her inflatables, now had the air of a once-fabulous mid-century minx. On floated a buzzed Garbo, a browned-out Garland. Giant televisions displaying forty-foot-wide walls of text (ƎƧIUЯƆ Ƨ’TƎ⅃, or AИƎЯAƆAM OT ƎMIT Ƨ’TI) flashed before the cabanas, where Elvises of every era groped for their towels. Here walked a plausible Oprah. In came an ayatollah. And there, lanky in her tankini: a Cher. [...]

The man flailing his arms by the bathrooms fifteen yards away was Greg, Sunburst’s founder and figurehead. The phrase ENTERTAINMENT: JUST LIKE YOU REMEMBER! blazed on his T-shirt. Also he was shouting my name.

“We’re here in the back!” he yelled.

“Where?” the guy shouted.

“The BACK BACK!” Greg yelled again.

INT. Deck 8, Uptown Lounge, 3:29 PM

The back back turned out to be a lounge space ten floors down. Rodney Dangerfield, walking in with a rum and Coke, was the first to slap Greg on the shoulder.

“Damn. Wow. Smells like someone’s grilling a raccoon in here,” Dangerfield said, looking around. “You guys just get in?”

An aerial view of the piano hall in the aft of Deck 8 — aft being the rear half of the ship, and Deck 8 being the eighth of twenty floors — would have revealed concentric circles of men and women sucked into orbit around an arrangement of microsuede sofas. In the center was now Greg, struggling with a pair of armpitted clipboards. On the far outer ring was the adjacent cantina, sizzling with orders of the Fajita ‘n’ Rita Feast ($20.95). But the energy in the room emanated from the fusion of Hollywood lovelies  , B- and C-listers, dead musicians, and a few completely imaginary characters, caught in a bubble of babble.

In came the tiny and fabulous Sharon Osbourne, fresh off a flight from London. Near the exit, with his blue eyes and sensible sandals, was Boy George, who swanned over to double-cheek kiss Sharon, then peck the forehead of Martha Stewart, and — skipping over Jeff Bezos — the tip of Fran Drescher’s nose. Sinatra (A), by the banquette, had just politely pumped the hand of Sinatra (B), when both were intercepted by Dangerfield, who seemed interested in explaining the dimensions of his cabin’s toilet. The Dude from The Big Lebowski was tearing a tortilla into pieces; over by the baby grand was Jerry Garcia; Bezos left to go to the bathroom; and Greg, who was beaming richly over his dominion, looked like he might cry with pleasure when someone’s wife started talking about closing on a new condo in Mexico.

Our model of the atom collapsed toward the inner ring, at the center of which appeared a 79-year-old man with brilliant teeth, a chin-length bob, the coconutty tan of the constantly sunned.

“Guess what I am?” he asked several newcomers.

“Dolly Parton?” one suggested.

“Santa?” said another.

“About six-one?” went one more.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Congeniality,” Greg said, coming in to knead his neck. “You’re looking at thirty-four years of Kenny Rogers.”

Every impersonator made for a convincing person. But as the gathering of celebrity doubles milled about the room, it was growing obvious just how broad the spectrum of fidelity within impersonation could get. Some were just blessed with a genuinely miraculous assembly of genetic glitches. Dangerfield, for instance, with big red eyes hot enough to boil water, and now miming his golf swing for Greg, was an amazing, near-perfect dupe, clearly put on this planet as proof of a lazy and hilarious God. (Ditto Boy George, with his stubble, his exemplary androgynous smolder — and same for Walter White of Breaking Bad, who kept pulling out a small bag of laundry beads from his shirt pocket as his prop ounce of crystal meth.)

But the lion’s share of them weren’t so finely biologically determined. The majority looked more like second or third cousins to their doubles. Staring at them yielded a whole other feeling, stranger than the vague awe you might harbor for folks obviously cashing in on their Darwinian dues. The faces of the not-quite-theres held a secret, focused serenity — kin to the quality inborn in the showman, dramatized by the spy, not far from the one on your casual adulterer. It was the flickering, only occasionally visible pact between at least two selves.

by Mina Tavakoli, N + 1 | Read more:
Image: Kate Bancroft, The Devil On My Shoulder. 2026
[ed. Feeling Gay Talese vibes from his famous essay Frank Sinatra Has a Cold; also, David Foster Wallace's Shipping Out (from "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again").]