Seattle Times - Pictures of the Year 2025

Bathing in the Win, Aug. 8 | We were treated to many a Gatorade bath in the Mariners’ stretch run. Every night there was a different hero. But on more than a few nights the hero was Cal Raleigh. Still, knowing that a splash bath is coming doesn’t mean it’s going to go the way you think it will. Typically the photographers in the first base well will jockey to an angle where they think the moment will happen. Often, if a player sees or senses the bucket coming, they’ll run away or turn, or possibly the bucket will just miss and hit poor broadcaster Jen Mueller. In this game against Tampa, however, Jorge Polanco took a very roundabout path to get at Raleigh — something it was apparent he’d never see coming. (Mueller, to her credit, never gave the incoming bath away; she just stood there and took it.) Raleigh absorbed the majority of the perfectly placed cooler, basking in the bath as the fans cheered. A magical moment from a magical season. — Dean Rutz / The Seattle Times

Seattle Times - Pictures of the Year 2025

via:

The Crisis, No. 5: On the Hollowing of Apple

[ed. No.5 of 17 Crisis Papers.]

I never met Steve Jobs. But I know him—or I know him as well as anyone can know a man through the historical record. I have read every book written about him. I have read everything the man said publicly. I have spoken to people who knew him, who worked with him, who loved him and were hurt by him.

And I think Steve would be disgusted by what has become of his company.

This is not hagiography. Jobs was not a saint. He was cruel to people who loved him. He denied paternity of his daughter for years. He drove employees to breakdowns. He was vain, tyrannical, and capable of extraordinary pettiness. I am not unaware of his failings, of the terrible way he treated people needlessly along the way.

But he had a conscience. He moved, later in life, to repair the damage he had done. The reconciliation with his daughter Lisa was part of a broader moral development—a man who had hurt people learning, slowly, how to stop. He examined himself. He made changes. He was not a perfect man. But he had heart. He had morals. And he was willing to admit when he was wrong.

That is a lot more than can be said for this lot of corporate leaders.

It is this Steve Jobs—the morally serious man underneath the mythology—who would be so angry at what Tim Cook has made of Apple.

⁂

Steve Jobs understood money as instrumental.

I know this sounds like a distinction without a difference. The man built the most valuable company in the world. He died a billionaire many times over. He negotiated hard, fought for his compensation, wanted Apple to be profitable. He was not indifferent to money.

But he never treated money as the goal. Money was what let him make the things he wanted to make. It was freedom—the freedom to say no to investors, to kill products that weren’t good enough, to spend years on details that no spreadsheet could justify. Money was the instrument. The thing it purchased was the ability to do what he believed was right.

This is how he acted.

Jobs got fired from his own company because he refused to compromise his vision for what the board considered financial prudence. He spent years in the wilderness, building NeXT—a company that made beautiful machines almost no one bought—because he believed in what he was making. He acquired Pixar when it was bleeding cash and kept it alive through sheer stubbornness until it revolutionized animation.

When he returned to Apple, he killed products that were profitable because they were mediocre. He could have milked the existing lines, played it safe, optimized for margin. Instead, he burned it down and rebuilt from scratch. The iMac. The iPod. The iPhone. Each one a bet that could have destroyed the company. Each one made because he believed it was right, not because a spreadsheet said it was safe...

This essay is not really about Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. It is about what happens when efficiency becomes a substitute for freedom. Jobs and Cook are case studies in a larger question: can a company—can an economy—optimize its way out of moral responsibility? The answer, I will argue, is yes. And we are living with the consequences.

⁂

Jobs understood something that most technology executives do not: culture matters more than politics.

He did not tweet. He did not issue press releases about social issues. He did not perform his values for an audience. He was not interested in shibboleths of the left or the right. [...]

This is how Jobs approached politics: through art, film, music, and design. Through the quiet curation of what got made. Through the understanding that the products we live with shape who we become.

If Jobs were alive today, I do not believe he would be posting on Twitter about fascism. That was never his mode. [...]

⁂

Tim Cook is a supply chain manager.

I do not say this as an insult. It is simply what he is. It is what he was hired to be. When Jobs brought Cook to Apple in 1998, he brought him to fix operations—to make the trains run on time, to optimize inventory, to build the manufacturing relationships that would let Apple scale.

Cook was extraordinary at this job. He is, by all accounts, one of the greatest operations executives in the history of American business. The margins, the logistics, the global supply chain that can produce millions of iPhones in weeks—that is Cook’s cathedral. He built it.

But operations is not vision. Optimization is not creation. And a supply chain manager who inherits a visionary’s company is not thereby transformed into a visionary.

Under Cook, Apple has become very good at making more of what Jobs created. The iPhone gets better cameras, faster chips, new colors. The ecosystem tightens. The services revenue grows. The stock price rises. By every metric that Wall Street cares about, Cook has been a success.

But what has Apple created under Cook that Jobs did not originate? What new thing has emerged from Cupertino that reflects a vision of the future, rather than an optimization of the past?

The Vision Pro is an expensive curiosity. The car project was canceled after a decade of drift. The television set never materialized. Apple under Cook has become a company that perfects what exists rather than inventing what doesn’t.

This is what happens when an optimizer inherits a creator’s legacy. The cathedral still stands. But no one is building new rooms.

⁂

There is a deeper problem than the absence of vision. Tim Cook has built an Apple that cannot act with moral freedom.

The supply chain that Cook constructed—his great achievement, his life’s work—runs through China. Not partially. Not incidentally. Fundamentally. The factories that build Apple‘s products are in China. The engineers who refine the manufacturing processes are in China. The workers who assemble the devices, who test the components, who pack the boxes—they are in Shenzhen and Zhengzhou and a dozen other cities that most Americans cannot find on a map.

This was a choice. It was Cook’s choice. And once made, it ceased to be a choice at all. Supply chains, like empires, do not forgive hesitation. For twenty years, it looked like genius. Chinese manufacturing was cheap, fast, and scalable. Apple could design in California and build in China, and the margins were extraordinary.

But dependency is not partnership. And Cook built a dependency so complete that Apple cannot escape it.

When Hong Kong’s democracy movement rose, Apple was silent. When the Uyghur genocide became undeniable, Apple was silent. When Beijing pressured Apple to remove apps, to store Chinese user data on Chinese servers, to make the iPhone a tool of state surveillance for Chinese citizens—Apple complied. Silently. Efficiently. As Cook’s supply chain required.

This is not a company that can stand up to authoritarianism. This is a company that has made itself a instrument of authoritarianism, because the alternative is losing access to the factories that build its products.

⁂

There is something worse than the dependency. There is what Cook gave away.

Apple did not merely use Chinese manufacturing. Apple trained it. Cook’s operations team—the best in the world—went to China and taught Chinese companies how to do what Apple does. The manufacturing techniques. The materials science. The logistics systems. The quality control processes.

This was the price of access. This was what China demanded in exchange for letting Apple build its empire in Shenzhen. And Cook paid it.

Now look at the result.

BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle company, learned battery manufacturing and supply chain management from its work with Apple. It is now the largest EV manufacturer in the world, threatening Tesla and every Western automaker.

DJI dominates the global drone market with technology and manufacturing processes refined through the Apple relationship.

Dozens of other Chinese companies—in components, in assembly, in materials—were trained by Apple‘s experts and now compete against Western firms with the skills Apple taught them.

Cook built a supply chain. And in building it, he handed the Chinese Communist Party the industrial capabilities it needed to challenge American technological supremacy. [...]

⁂

So when I see Tim Cook at Donald Trump’s inauguration, I understand what I am seeing.

When I see him at the White House on January 25th, 2026—attending a private screening of Melania, a vanity documentary about the First Lady, directed by Brett Ratner, a man credibly accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women—I understand what I am seeing.

I understand what I am seeing when I learn that this screening took place on the same night that federal agents shot Alex Pretti ten times in the back in Minneapolis. That while a nurse lay dying in the street for the crime of trying to help a woman being pepper-sprayed, Tim Cook was eating canapés and watching a film about the president’s wife.

Tim Cook’s Twitter bio contains a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

What was Tim Cook doing for others on the night of January 25th?

He was doing what efficiency requires. He was maintaining relationships with power. He was protecting the supply chain, the margins, the tariff exemptions. He was being a good middleman.

I am seeing a man who cannot say no.

This is what efficiency looks like when it runs out of room to hide.

He cannot say no to Beijing, because his supply chain depends on Beijing’s favor. He cannot say no to Trump, because his company needs regulatory forbearance and tariff exemptions. He is trapped between two authoritarian powers, serving both, challenging neither.

This is not leadership. This is middleman management. This is a man whose great achievement—the supply chain, the operations excellence, the margins—has become the very thing that prevents him from acting with moral courage.

Cook has more money than Jobs ever had. Apple has more cash, more leverage, more market power than at any point in its history. If anyone in American business could afford to say no—to Trump, to Xi, to anyone—it is Tim Cook.

And he says yes. To everyone. To anything. Because he built a company that cannot afford to say no. [...]

⁂

I believe that Steve Jobs built Apple to be something more than a company. He built it to be a statement about what technology could be—beautiful, humane, built for people rather than against them. He believed that the things we make reflect who we are. He believed that how we make them matters.

Tim Cook has betrayed that vision—not through malice, but by excelling in a system that rewards efficiency over freedom and calls it leadership. Through the replacement of values with optimization. Through the construction of a machine so efficient that it cannot afford to be moral.

Apple is not unique in this. It is exemplary.

This is what happens to institutions that mistake scale for strength, efficiency for freedom, optimization for wisdom. They become powerful enough to dominate markets—and too constrained to resist power. Look at Google, training AI for Beijing while preaching openness. Look at Amazon, building surveillance infrastructure for any government that pays. Look at every Fortune 500 company that issued statements about democracy while writing checks to the politicians dismantling it.

Apple is simply the cleanest case, because it once knew the difference. Because Jobs built it to know the difference. And because we can see, with unusual clarity, the precise moment when knowing the difference stopped mattering.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Image: Steve Jobs/uncredited

[ed. Part seventeen of a series titled The Crisis Papers. Check them all out and jump in anywhere. A+ effort.]

Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse

Nagoro, a depopulated village in Japan where residents are replaced by dolls.

In 1960, Yubari, a former coal-mining city on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, had roughly 110,000 residents. Today, fewer than 7,000 remain. The share of those over 65 is 54%. The local train stopped running in 2019. Seven elementary schools and four junior high schools have been consolidated into just two buildings. Public swimming pools have closed. Parks are not maintained. Even the public toilets at the train station were shut down to save money.

Much has been written about the economic consequences of aging and shrinking populations. Fewer workers supporting more retirees will make pension systems buckle. Living standards will decline. Healthcare will get harder to provide. But that’s dry theory. A numbers game. It doesn’t tell you what life actually looks like at ground zero.

And it’s not all straightforward. Consider water pipes. Abandoned houses are photogenic. It’s the first image that comes to mind when you picture a shrinking city. But as the population declines, ever fewer people live in the same housing stock and water consumption declines. The water sits in oversized pipes. It stagnates and chlorine dissipates. Bacteria move in, creating health risks. You can tear down an abandoned house in a week. But you cannot easily downsize a city’s pipe network. The infrastructure is buried under streets and buildings. The cost of ripping it out and replacing it with smaller pipes would bankrupt a city that is already bleeding residents and tax revenue. As the population shrinks, problems like this become ubiquitous.

The common instinct is to fight decline with growth. Launch a tourism campaign. Build a theme park or a tech incubator. Offer subsidies and tax breaks to young families willing to move in. Subsidize childcare. Sell houses for €1, as some Italian towns do.

Well, Yubari tried this. After the coal mines closed, the city pivoted to tourism, opening a coal-themed amusement park, a fossil museum, and a ski resort. They organized a film festival. Celebrities came and left. None of it worked. By 2007 the city went bankrupt. The festival was canceled and the winners from years past never got their prize money.

Or, to get a different perspective, consider someone who moved to a shrinking Italian town, lured by a €1 house offer: They are about to retire. They want to live in the country. So they buy the house, go through all the paperwork. Then they renovate it. More paperwork. They don't speak Italian. That sucks. But finally everything works out. They move in. The house is nice. There's grapevine climbing the front wall. Out of the window they see the rolling hills of Sicily. In the evenings, they hears dogs barking in the distance. It looks exactly like the paradise they'd imagined. But then they start noticing their elderly neighbors getting sick and being taken away to hospital, never to return. They see them dying alone in their half-abandoned houses. And as the night closes in, they can't escape the thought: "When's my turn?" Maybe they shouldn't have come at all.

***

The instinctive approach, that vain attempt to grow and repopulate, is often counterproductive. It leads to building infrastructure, literal bridges to nowhere, waiting for people that will never come. Subsidies quietly fizzle out, leaving behind nothing but dilapidated billboards advertising the amazing attractions of the town, attractions that closed their gates a decade ago.

The alternative is not to fight the decline, but to manage it. To accept that the population is not coming back and ask a different question: how do you make a smaller city livable for those who remain? In Yubari, the current mayor has stopped talking about attracting new residents. The new goal is consolidation. Relocating the remaining population closer to the city center, where services can be still delivered, where the pipes are still the right size, where neighbors are close enough to check on each other.

Germany took a similar approach with its Stadtumbau Ost, a federal program launched after reunification to address the exodus from East to West, as young people moved west for work, leaving behind more than a million vacant apartments. It paid to demolish nearly 300,000 housing units. The idea was not to lure people back but to stabilize what was left: reduce the housing surplus, concentrate investment in viable neighborhoods, and stop the downward spiral of vacancy breeding more vacancy. It was not a happy solution, but it was a workable one.

Yet this approach is politically toxic. Try campaigning not on an optimistic message of turning the tide and making the future as bright as it once used to be, but rather by telling voters that their neighborhood is going to be abandoned, that the bus won’t run anymore and that all the investment is going to go to a different district. Try telling the few remaining inhabitants of a valley that you can’t justify spending money on their flood defenses. [...]

*** So what is being done about these problems?

Take the case of infrastructure and services degradation. The solution is obvious: manage the decline by concentrating the population.

In 2014, the Japanese government initiated Location Normalization Plans to designate areas for concentrating hospitals, government offices, and commerce in walkable downtown cores. Tax incentives and housing subsidies were offered to attract residents. By 2020, dozens of Tokyo-area municipalities had adopted these plans.

Cities like Toyama built light rail transit and tried to concentrate development along the line, offering housing subsidies within 500 meters of stations. The results are modest: between 2005 and 2013, the percentage of Toyama residents living in the city center increased from 28% to 32%. Meanwhile, the city’s overall population continued to decline, and suburban sprawl persisted beyond the plan’s reach.

What about the water pipes? In theory, they can be decommissioned and consolidated, when people move out of some neighborhoods. At places, they can possibly be replaced with smaller-diameter pipes. Engineers can even open hydrants periodically to keep water flowing. But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.

***

And then there’s the problem of abandoned houses.

The arithmetic is brutal: you inherit a rural house valued at ¥5 million on the cadastral registry and pay inheritance tax of 55%, only to discover that the actual market value is ¥0. Nobody wants property in a village hemorrhaging population. But wait! If the municipality formally designates it a “vacant house,” your property tax increases sixfold. Now you face half a million yen in fines for non-compliance, and administrative demolition costs that average ¥2 million. You are now over ¥5 million in debt for a property you never wanted and cannot sell.

It gets more bizarre: When you renounce the inheritance, it passes to the next tier of relatives. If children renounce, it goes to parents. If parents renounce, it goes to siblings. If siblings renounce, it goes to nieces and nephews. By renouncing a property, you create an unpleasant surprise for your relatives.

Finally, when every possible relative renounces, the family court appoints an administrator to manage the estate. Their task is to search for other potential heirs, such as "persons with special connection," i.e. those who cared for the deceased, worked closely with them and so on. Lucky them, the friends and colleagues!

Obviously, this gets tricky and that’s exactly the reason why a new system was introduced to allows a property to be passed to the state. But there are many limitations placed on the property — essentially, the state will only accept land that has some value.

In the end, it's a hot potato problem. The legal system was designed in the era when all property had value and implicitly assumed that people wanted it. Now that many properties have negative value, the framework misfires, creates misaligned incentives and recent fixes all too often make the problem worse.

by Martin Sustrik, Less Wrong |  Read more:
Image:Vimeo/uncredited

The Century of the Maxxer

Most people, being average, do not understand what maxxing really means. Look at me! they squeal. I’m sleepmaxxing! They mean that they’re trying to get eight hours a night. Or they’re proteinmaxxing, which means they’ve bought a big tub of whey powder. I’m such a houseplantmaxxer, they tell the fiddle-leaf fig they ordered online. It’s fun to play around with a new word. But sleepmaxxing does not mean getting a red light and taping your mouth shut; it means putting yourself in a medically induced coma. There is only one way of proteinmaxxing, which is to get one hundred percent of your daily calories from lean protein. Anything else would, by definition, be less than fully maxxed. Doctors will tell you that eating only protein causes something called ‘rabbit starvation,’ and if you keep at it you’ll experience vomiting, seizures, and death in fairly short order. They’re right, but the proteinmaxxer accepts his fate. Meanwhile the houseplantmaxxer has thick mats of algae sliming over every surface, the walls, the ceilings, swallowing the sofa, digesting the bookshelf and all its contents, blobbing and dribbling, wet in the middle of the bed, green on the windowpanes, covering everything except the UV lights and the massive pans of water left on a constant boil in every room, so the air stays oppressively, Cretaceously thick.

This is what it means to be a maxxer. We are a long way away from the optimisation of the self; to maxx is an intense form of asceticism. The maxxer is the person who willingly sacrifices every aspect of their lives except one, the maxximand, which is extended to infinity until it begins to develop the distance and vastness of a god.

Probably the world’s most prominent maxxer is a man called Braden Peters, who calls himself Clavicular. Clavicular is a looksmaxxer; his austerity is to make himself as beautiful as possible. If you’re good looking enough, you can ascend, break out of your genetic destiny and into a new order of being, where the subhumans will crawl after you with lolling tongues. Clavicular started looksmaxxing at the age of fourteen, injecting himself with testosterone. He also shoots anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, peptides, botox, and crystal meth. He’s had multiple plastic surgeries. His other secret is bonesmashing, which is exactly what it sounds like: he smashes his own cheekbones with a hammer so they grow back bigger. It’s impossible to know what he would have looked like if he hadn’t done all this, since his ‘before’ pictures all show a prepubescent child, but it’s hard not to conclude that he’s utterly ruined his body. He didn’t go through a normal puberty; his glands are completely incapable of producing testosterone by themselves, and if he ever stops taking the hormones he’ll rapidly decompose into a genderless lump. The various injections have also left him totally sterile; his balls are almost certainly fucked up in ways we can barely imagine. He is a meth addict. And while he really does have legions of lesser beings crawling after him with lolling tongues, they do all seem to be men.

Clavicular lives in a sort of nightmare clown world, where he is constantly being approached in ordinary shopping centres by small, strange, awkward men who say things like ‘I’m known in Orlando as the Asian Mogger. I would have the honour if you could verify me as the Orlando Asian Mogger.’ There are various misshapen freaks of nature, men with shoulders wider than they’re tall, sinister stalking giants on artificially lengthened legs, who travel across the country to stand next to him and compare physiques. Like a mythical gunslinger, the great mogger needs to constantly watch the horizon for whoever’s coming to mog him. Other men adore him in more nakedly eroticised ways. In one video, he’s live-streaming a fun casual hangout with Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, a bunch of other people sitting in silence looking at their phones, and menial staff vacuuming in the background. One of the men is berating a woman sat in Clavicular’s lap. ‘You are not an 8. You’re not an 8. You’re a thirsty 7, you’re asking for validation, and you’re sitting in a 10’s lap.’ ‘That’s kinda rude,’ she says. ‘That’s kinda rude,’ agrees Tristan Tate. ‘Clavicular’s at least an 11.’ Clavicular doesn’t say anything. What gives the scene its particularly haunting resonance is that throughout this exchange, he seems to be eating soup.

In all his interactions with women that aren’t directly supervised by a Tate brother, Clavicular is painfully passive and awkward. The women who like him are all of a type: hot but autistic beyond belief, brainrotted, barfing up a constant stream of overenthusiastic tryhard 4chan nazi jargon that he seems to find deeply embarrassing. Normal women treat him with undisguised contempt. He is constantly having his cortisol spiked by foids. It turns out that being maximally beautiful is not actually the same as maximising your chances of getting laid. Clavicular will never be a female sex symbol; that role goes to men like Slavoj Žižek and Danny DeVito. But maxxing is not optimisation. The maxxer is not trying to have an enjoyable life. He’s trying to reduce himself to a single principle.

Things get confused when the maxximand is also a generally upheld value like beauty. But every maxxer has his shadow, the person maxxing the opposite principle. Clavicular’s shadow is someone who calls himself The Crooked Man. The Crooked Man is a looksminimiser, which is another way of saying he’s an uglymaxxer. His strategy has been to spend a year working out only one side of his body, which has left him with an enormous bulging trap on one shoulder and nothing at all on the other. He looks like a cartoon monster. He stands around shirtless in his empty millennial-grey house, adrift in some suburb somewhere, grey walls, grey carpet, no decorations except cables snaking around on the floor, making video content. He is a kind of Platonic ideal of the maxxer, far more than Clavicular. The Crooked Man’s house appears to get zero natural light. All his gym equipment is at home; you can see him benching 225 on one side only in one of its many large and empty rooms. Plastic Venetian blinds. It’s night outside. It’s always night outside. The sun never shines on The Crooked Man. Incredible things are happening in America.

There’s a reason Clavicular has become the media’s go-to symbol for maxxing, even though The Crooked Man is a much better exemplar. He keeps things on a very comfortable terrain. Maxxing, the line goes, is an outgrowth of incel culture. It’s about men, the problem with men, the crisis of masculinity; it’s about how men are now facing the kind of toxic body politics that women have had to deal with forever, and how they’re developing their own hysterias in response; it’s about online extremism, it’s about the harmful narratives that seduce young men into various forms of misogyny; before long it’s about how we all need to put the kettle on and have a proper talk about our men’s mental health. They’re not entirely wrong; there really is a crisis of masculinity, it really is expressing itself through the mainstreaming of misogyny and the proliferation of a diseased relation to the self. It’s just that maxxing comes from something else entirely.

Despite what you might have heard, the word maxxing is not originally incel slang. Incels might have appropriated it, but it began with another kind of loser altogether, the tabletop role-playing gamer.

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: Cassidy Araiza for The New York Times
[ed. See also: Handsome at Any Cost (NYT); and, From “Mar-a-Lago face” to uncanny AI art: MAGA loves ugly in submission to Trump (Salon).]

The Jim Irsay Collection: Auction

Eric Clapton: The Martin 000-42 Acoustic Guitar Used For His Acclaimed Appearance on MTV Unplugged, 1992.
C.F. Martin & Company, Nazareth, Pennsylvannia, 1939

via: Christies Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame

[ed. Insane music memorabilia auction.]

The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

In 2026, Ro is running our first Super Bowl ad. It will feature Serena Williams and her amazing journey on Ro — her weight loss, her improved blood sugar levels, her reduction in knee pain, and the overall improvement in her health.

As I’ve shared the news with friends and family, the first question they ask, after “Is Serena as cool in person?” (the answer is unequivocally yes), is “How much did it cost?”.

$233,000 per second, minimum, for the air time — excluding all other costs. When you first hear that a Super Bowl ad costs at least $233,000 per second, it’s completely reasonable to pause and question whether that could ever be a good use of money. On its face, the price sounds extravagant — even irrational. And without context, it often is.

But once you break down the economics, the decision starts to look very different. The Super Bowl is not just another media buy. It is a uniquely concentrated moment where attention, scale, and cultural relevance align in a way that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the media landscape. That alone changes the calculus. This leads us down a fascinating discussion of the economics behind DTC advertising, brand building, and the production of the spot.

After having the conversation a few times, my co-founder Saman and I thought it would be helpful to put together a breakdown of how we thought about both the economics of and the making of our Super Bowl ad. To check out “The making of Ro’s Super Bowl Ad,” head over to my co-founder Saman’s post here.

Of course, some brands will approach it differently, but I think this could be a helpful example for the next Ro that is considering running their first Super Bowl ad.

Let’s dive in.

WHAT MAKES A SUPER BOWL AD SO UNIQUE?

1. Ads are part of the product

For most advertising, it is an interruption. Viewers want to get back to the product (e.g., a TV show, sporting event, or even access to the wifi on a plane!). Even the best ads are still something you tolerate on the way back to the content you actually want.

There is exactly one moment each year when the incentives of advertisers and viewers are perfectly aligned. For a few hours, on a Sunday night in February, more than 100 million people sit down and are excited to watch an ad. They aren’t scrolling TikTok. They aren’t going to the bathroom. They are actively watching…ads.

People rank Super Bowl ads. They rewatch them. They critique them. They talk about them at work the next day. The Today Show plays them…during the show as content, not as ads!

That alone makes the Super Bowl fundamentally different from every other media moment in the year. It’s an opportunity, unlike any other, to capture the hearts and minds of potential (and sometimes existing) customers.

2. Opportunity to compress time

No single commercial builds a brand. Advertising alone doesn’t create a brand. The best brands are built over time. They are built by the combination of a company making a promise to a customer (e.g., an advertisement) and then delivering on that promise time and time again (i.e., the product).

Commercials are one way to make that promise. To share with the world what you’ve built and why you think it could add value to their life. To make them “aware” of what you do. This takes time. It takes repetition. It often takes multiple touch points. Again, this is why the first takeaway about people paying attention is so important — they might need fewer touch points if they are “actively” watching.

The Super Bowl can compress the time it takes for people to be “aware” of your brand. Of course, you still have to deliver on that promise with a great product. But in one night, you can move from a brand most people have never heard of to one your mom is texting you about.

There is no other single marketing opportunity that can accomplish this. With today’s algorithms, even what goes “viral” might be only in your bubble.

During the Super Bowl, we all share the same bubble.

The NFL accounted for 84 of the top 100 televised events in 2025 (including college football, it was 92). The NFL and maybe Taylor Swift are the only remaining moments of a dwindling monoculture.

Last but not least, the Super Bowl is the only moment where you can speak to ~100 million people at the same time. In 30 seconds, you can reach an audience that would otherwise take years—this is what it means to compress time.

3. There is asymmetric upside

While the decision to run a Super Bowl commercial is not for every company, for the universe of companies for which running an ad could make sense, the financial risk profile is misunderstood. This is not a moonshot. It’s a portfolio decision with a capped downside and asymmetric upside. [...]

Initial Ad Cost

On average, every 30 seconds of advertising time in the Super Bowl costs ~$7M-10M (
link) . This can increase with supply-demand dynamics. For example:

• The later in the year you buy the ad, the more expensive it can be (i.e., inventory decreases)
• The location of the spot in the game can impact the price someone is willing to pay
• Given that viewership in the Super Bowl is not even across the duration of the game, premiums may be required to be in key spots early in the game, or adjacent to the beginning of Halftime when viewership is often at its highest
• If a brand wishes to have category exclusivity (i.e., to be the only Beer brand advertising in the game), that would come at a premium
• First time or “one-off” Super Bowl advertisers may pay higher rates than large brands who are buying multiple spots, or have a substantial book of business with the broadcasting network

Note: if companies run a 60 second ad, they will have to pay at least 2x the 30-second rate - and may even pay a premium. There is typically no “bulk discount” as there is no shortage of demand. Any company that wants to pay for 60 seconds needs to buy two slots because the second 30-second slot could easily be sold at full price to another company.

Production cost

A high-level rule of thumb for production costs relative to ad spend is to allocate 10-20% of your media budget towards production. The Super Bowl, however, usually breaks that rubric for a myriad of reasons.

A typical Super Bowl will cost ~$1-4M to produce, excluding “celebrity talent.” This cost bucket would cover studio/site costs, equipment, production staff, travel, non-celeb talent, director fees and post-production editing and sound services. Again, this is a range based on the conversations I’ve had with companies that have run several Super Bowl ads. [...]

Last year, 63% of all Super Bowl ads included celebrities (link). There are a variety of factors that will influence the cost of “talent.”

• How well known and trusted is the celebrity?
• How many celebrities are included?
• What’s the product? Crypto ads now might have a risk-premium attached after FTX
• What are you asking them to do / say in the ad?

For Ro, our partnership with Serena stems far beyond one commercial. It’s a larger, multi-year partnership, to share her incredible journey over time. From a pure cost perspective, we assigned a part of the deal to the production cost to keep ourselves intellectually honest.

Based on 10+ interviews with other brands who have advertised in the Big Game, talent for a Super Bowl ad ranges from $1-5M (of course there are outliers).

by Z. Reitano, Ro, X |  Read more:

Image: Ro

$180 LX Hammer Burger

Super Bowl LX isn’t just about football, it’s about excess. And this year, nothing captures that better than the LX Hammer Burger.

Yes, it costs $180.
No, that’s not a typo.

Created by Levy Restaurants, the LX Hammer Burger is the most over-the-top menu item at Super Bowl LX, and only 200 of them are being made for the entire day.

If you manage to get one, you’re not just buying a burger — you’re buying a Super Bowl flex.

What’s on the LX Hammer Burger?

This isn’t your standard stadium cheeseburger.

The LX Hammer Burger features:

• A juicy cheeseburger patty
• Braised bone-in beef shank, slow-cooked for maximum richness
• Roasted mirepoix demi-glace, adding deep, savory flavor
• Point Reyes bleu cheese fondue, melted and dripping down the sides
• All served on a freshly baked brioche bun

Oh — and the bone stays in. Because subtlety is not the goal here...

Why Is It $180?

Three reasons:

• Scarcity – Only 200 burgers are being made
• Ingredients – Bone-in beef shank, premium bleu cheese, and demi-glace aren’t cheap
• Super Bowl Tax – This is the biggest sporting event on the planet, and exclusivity sells

At Super Bowl LX, the LX Hammer Burger isn’t about value. It’s about the experience — and the bragging rights.

The Ultimate Super Bowl Food Flex

Every Super Bowl has its viral food item. Some years it’s gold-leaf steaks. Other years it’s absurd cocktails or luxury desserts.

This year, it’s a $180 burger with a bone sticking out of it.

by Don Drysdale, Detroit Sports Nation | Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Man, that is one ugly burger. Probably a good idea to notify hospital Emergency ahead of time - incoming! No reports on how many were sold. Just stick with any old regular one, which (I'm guessing) would still probably run you $50.]

Bad Bunny Goes to the Super Bowl

Bad Bunny, Super Bowl LX
Image: ABC via (more)

[ed. What a show. Awesome (and I'm not especially a Bad Bunny fan). What did it all mean? All explained here. Meanwhile, in an effort to infuse politics into absolutely everything, there was that other competing, half-assed, halftime show:]

***

“Wear the mission. Text merch to 71776 for official TPUSA merch.”

Those were the first words greeting thousands of viewers as they joined Turning Point’s YouTube channel for the 15-minute countdown before their alternate All-American Halftime Show, as a chyron ran nonstop at the bottom of the screen, hawking merchandise and begging for text signups...

Unfortunately, the All-American Halftime Show was unable to evoke much more than a shrug, with halfhearted pop-country performances that showed the limitations of booking a big show with minimal talent. (...)

It’s jarring to remember that, prior to MAGA, Kid Rock’s biggest political affiliation was stumping for Mitt Romney’s milquetoast 2012 presidential campaign. Yet in 2016 — the year after his singles last hit the Billboard Hot 100 — he rode hard for the loud-mouthed Trump. Since then, he’s been riding that wave of partisan relevancy, popping up at random functions to rap at puzzled congressmen and sing mawkish ballads to wealthy donors. Hey, the Trump family is making money off of this MAGA thing — why can’t other grifters with merch stores full of American flag gear jump on the train?

Meanwhile, while the Turning Point show screamed about patriotism, Bad Bunny’s official show was filled with highlight after highlight of things that are exciting about America: a nation full of people who came here with talent and differences worth embracing. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, the visual storytelling evoked so many people living the American dream, from the workers in the opening segment, to elderly folks, female friendships, dancing, drinks, and unabashed jubilation and unity.

Ignore the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a few guys grinding on each other, and there was even plenty that the MAGA crowd would enjoy if they bothered to watch it: A real-life wedding! Beautiful women dancing! A great, big declaration of “God Bless America”!

But there was never going to be a good-faith effort to meet Bad Bunny’s show halfway. Like clockwork, Trump sent out a long message on Truth Social minutes after it ended, slamming it as quickly as possible. (Note to Trump: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying” … he sings in Spanish, dude! Better take that cognitive test again.)

In the end, the final words shown during Bad Bunny’s performance were seen on a massive video screen: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

The final words on the Turning Point broadcast? “Get involved,” next to a QR code begging for more money.

by William Earl, Variety |  Read more:

The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet That's France's Favourite Restaurant

France's highest-grossing restaurant isn't a Michelin-starred bistro or a Parisian institution, but an all-you-can-eat buffet on the outskirts of Narbonne. Serving everything from pressed duck to truffles for just €67.50 (£58.74), Les Grands Buffets has become a national obsession and a pilgrimage for French food lovers.

As I pulled into a nondescript carpark opposite a McDonald's on the outskirts of Narbonne, in southern France, I didn't expect that in less than half an hour I would be watching one of the most revered rituals of French culinary theatre.

To the swelling soundtrack of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, a server emerged wearing a crisp white shirt and black apron, holding a whole roasted duck skewered vertically above a naked flame. He presented it to the assembled diners as if bearing the Olympic torch. Then a deep, dramatic voice rang out:

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the ritual of canard au sang, a tradition conceived in the 19th Century. The duck is roasted on the spit and then brought to the table, where the duck master uses a silver duck press to crush the carcass, extracting the blood and natural juices, which are then incorporated into the sauce."

I watched as the duck was filleted on a marble workbench; the bones placed in a silver press and crushed. A dark liquid, unmistakably blood, trickled out, was flambéed and poured back over the meat.

However queasy it made me feel, there was no doubt that this is one of the great classics of French gastronomy – and one that rarely appears menus today, let along prepared with such ceremony. In fact, there is only one restaurant in France that serves pressed duck at every lunch and dinner service. And that's exactly where I was: Les Grands Buffets.

Literally translated as "The Big Buffets", Les Grands Buffets is exactly what it sounds like: an all-you-can-eat restaurant – and the largest of its kind in the world. Yet it's about as far removed from the suburban buffets of my Australian childhood as it is possible to be. Those certainly didn't feature a seven-tiered lobster fountain, nine varieties of foie gras, more than 50 desserts or hold the world record for the most varieties of cheese commercially available in a restaurant (111, to be precise). All of this comes for a fixed price of €67.50 (£58.78/ $79.17) per person.

Founded in 1989 by Louis and Jane Privat, Les Grands Buffets has become one of France's most coveted dining experiences – a place many French people hope to visit at least once in their lives. Reservations are made months in advance, and diners willingly make the pilgrimage to Narbonne, a town of around 56,000 people near the Spanish border. The restaurant welcomes around 400,000 diners a year – 86% of them French – and receives some 3.5 million reservation requests annually. With its 2025 revenue totalling €30m (£26m/$34.8m), it's also France's highest-grossing restaurant.

"When we opened, there wasn't a single all-you-can-eat buffet in France," Louis Privat told me as we toured the restaurant before the lunch service. "The concept just didn't exist."

Others had tried, he said, but found the model financially unviable. "Yet, what was very famous at that time was Club Med and its buffet." A qualified accountant, Privat believed he could make the concept stick. "I was a real fan of the formula, and I was sure that the general public would adore it, too."

The French, after all, have long embraced all-inclusive holidays. They are also fiercely proud of their national cuisine. Les Grands Buffets sits precisely at the intersection of those two impulses. (...)

"The restaurant is genuinely done in the spirit of Auguste Escoffier," said Michel Escoffier, the chef's great-grandchild and honorary chairman of the foundation

That spirit continues to shape the menu. Late last year, Les Grands Buffets introduced truffles, making it the only all-you-can-eat buffet in the world to serve the prized and pricey ingredient, according to Privat.

"Since Escoffier presents 1,200 truffle recipes in his repertoire, we felt that if we are to continue to be recognised as the global showcase of his cuisine, we had to feature truffles," he said.

At the dedicated truffle station, I picked up a truffle and foie gras soup topped with puff pastry, as well as a plate of organic scrambled eggs finished with generous shavings of black truffle. The dish was cooked in front of me at a wide, polished wood counter.

I was struck by how very civilised it all was. There were no elbows out at the lobster fountain, and people served themselves a respectful half-dozen oysters at a time rather than piling a mountain onto their plates. They queued patiently for hot dishes made to order – an indulgent list that included poached lobster, tournedos Rossini (beef filet with truffle and foie gras) and a south-western French classic, cassoulet from nearby Castelnaudary.

Around 150 dishes are drawn directly from Le Guide Culinaire, each annotated with its original page number. I was careful to pace myself as I didn't want to miss out on cheese and dessert; luckily, diners are given time to let courses settle. For the lunch service, guests arrive in 15-minute increments from noon and can stay until 16.30. At dinner, doors open at 19:00 and close at midnight.

Beyond the food, Les Grands Buffets also celebrates the arts de la table, or the staging and setting of a meal. Privat has assembled an impressive collection of French culinary heritage, including a silver Christofle duck press from Paris' legendary La Tour d'Argent restaurant, purchased at auction for €40,000 ($46,432) in 2016, and a silver trolley from Nice's Belle Epoque icon, Le Negresco, now used to prepare crêpes Suzettes tableside.

Four dining rooms branch off from the main service area, where tables are set with white tablecloths, polished cutlery and glassware. Each has its own theme; one is named for British sculpture artist Ann Carrington, whose works hang in institutions such as London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Privat purchased one of her bouquets, made out of cutlery, from her stand at Portobello Market a decade ago; it now occupies pride of place in the room.

"He had a good eye as he chose the best piece," said Carrington. "The restaurant is also the perfect location for a sculpture made from cutlery, how fitting!"

But I couldn't leave without asking about wastage. Privat, forever the accountant, he has meticulously tracked exactly how much people eat: for instance, an average of 49g of foie gras per person. Leftovers from the buffet are kept for the team; more than 100 employees receive lunch and dinner every day. And while some waste is inevitable, it remains minimal: "We throw out 10kg a day and serve 1,000 people, so that's 10g per person wastage," Privat said. 

by Chrissie McClatchie, BBC | Read more:
Images: Adrien Privat and Chrissie McClatchie

[ed. Oui!]

In Praise of Urban Disorder

In his essay “Planning for an Unplanned City,” Jason Thorne, Toronto’s chief planner, poses a pair of provocative questions to his colleagues. “Have our rules and regulations squeezed too much of the life out of our cities?” he asks. “But also how do you plan and design a city that is safe and functional while also leaving room for spontaneity and serendipity?”

This premise — that urban planning’s efforts to impose order risk editing out the culture, character, complexity and creative friction that makes cities cities — is a guiding theme in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, a collection of essays, including Thorne’s, gathered by Toronto-based editors Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, Dylan Reid and John Lorinc. In it, they argue that “messiness is an essential element of the city.” Case studies from around the world show how imperfection can be embraced, created and preserved, from the informal street eateries of East Los Angeles to the sports facilities carved out of derelict spaces in Mumbai.

Embracing urban disorder might seem like an unlikely cause. But Woo, an urban planner and chief executive officer of the Toronto-based nonprofit CivicAction, and Reid, executive editor of Spacing magazine, offer up a series of questions that get at the heart of debates surrounding messy urbanism. In an essay about street art, they ask, “Is it ugly or creative? Does it bring disruption or diversity? Should it be left to emerge from below or be managed from above? Is it permanent or ephemeral? Does it benefit communities or just individuals? Does it create opportunity or discomfort? Are there limits around it and if so can they be effective?”

Bloomberg CityLab caught up with Woo and Ebrahim, cofounder of the public interest design studio Monumental, about why messiness in cities can be worth advocating for, and how to let the healthy kind flourish. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You intentionally don’t give a specific definition for messy urbanism in the book, making the case that to do so would be antithetical to the idea itself. But if you were to give a general overview of the qualities and attributes you’d ascribe to messy cities, what would they be?

Leslie Woo: All of the authors included in the book brought to it some form of two things — wanting to have a sense of belonging in the places they live and trying to understand how they can have agency in their community. And what comes out of that are acts of defiance that manifest both as tiny and intimate experiences and as big gestures in cities.

Zahra Ebrahim: I think of it as where institutions end and people begin. It’s about agency. So much of the “messy” defiance is people trying to live within their cultures and identities in ways that cities don’t always create space for. We’re not trying to fetishize messiness, but we do want to acknowledge that when people feel that agency, cities become more vibrant, spontaneous and delightful.

LW: I think of the story urban planning professor Nina-Marie Lister, director of Toronto’s Ecological Design Lab, tells about fighting to keep her wild front yard habitat garden after being ordered to cut it down by the city. There was a bylaw in place intended by the municipality to control what it deemed “noxious vegetation” on private property. Lister ended up doing a public advocacy campaign to get the bylaw updated.

The phrase “messy cities” could be construed negatively but it seems like a real term of affection for the editors and authors of this book. What does it represent to you?

ZE: You can see it represented in the Bloordale neighborhood of Toronto. During lockdown in 2020, a group of local residents came together and turned a large, gravel-filled site of a demolished school into an unexpected shared space for social distancing. With handmade signage, they cheekily named the site “Bloordale Beach.” Over weeks, they and others in the community organically and spontaneously brought this imagined, landlocked beach to life, adding beach chairs, “swimming guidelines” around the puddle that had formed after a storm, even a “barkour” area for local dogs. It was both a “messy” community art project and third space, but also a place for residents to demonstrate their agency and find joy in an uncertain and difficult time.

LW: The thing that is delightful about this topic is many of these efforts are exercises in reimagining cities. Individuals and groups see a space and approach it in a different way with a spirit and ingenuity that we don’t see enough of. It’s an exercise in thinking about how we want to live. I also want to make the point that we aren’t advocating for more chaos and confusion but rather showing how these groups are attempting to make sense of where they live.

ZE: Messiness has become a wedge issue — a way to pronounce and lean into existing political cleavages. Across the world we see politicians pointing to the challenges cities face — housing affordability, transit accessibility, access to employment — and wrongfully blame or attribute these urban “messes” to specific populations and groups. We see this in the rising anti-immigrant rhetoric we hear all over the world. As an editing team, I think there was a shared understanding that multicultural and diverse societies are more successful and that when we have to navigate shared social and cultural space, it’s better for society.

This is also not all about the failure of institutions to serve the needs of the public. Some of this is about groups responding to failures of the present and shaping a better future. And some of what we’re talking about is people seeing opportunities to make the type of “mess” that would support their community to thrive, like putting a pop-up market and third space in a strip mall parking lot, and creating a space for people to come together.

You and the rest of the editors are based in Toronto and the city comes up recurrently in the book. What makes the city such an interesting case study in messy urbanism?

ZE: Toronto is what a local journalist, Doug Saunders, calls an “arrival city” — one in three newcomers in Canada land in Toronto. These waves of migration are encoded in our city’s DNA. I think of a place like Kensington Market, where there have been successive arrivals of immigrants each decade, from Jewish and Eastern European and Italian immigrants in the early 1900s to Caribbean and Chinese immigrants in the 1960s and ’70s.

Kensington continues to be one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the city. You’ve got the market, food vendors, shops and semi-informal commercial activity, cultural venues and jazz bars. In so many parts of Toronto you can’t see the history on the street but in Kensington you can see the palimpsest and layers of change it’s lived through. There is development pressure in every direction and major retailers opening nearby but it remains this vibrant representation of different eras of newcomers in Toronto and what they needed — socially, culturally and commercially. It’s a great example of where the formal and informal, the planned and unplanned meet. Every nook and cranny is filled with a story, with locals making a “mess,” but really just expressing their agency.

LW: This messy urbanism can also be seen in Toronto’s apartment tower communities that were built in the 1960s. These buildings have experienced periods of neglect and changes in ownership. But today when moving from floor to floor, it feels like traveling around the entire world; you can move from the Caribbean to continental Africa to the Middle East. These are aerial cities in and of themselves. They’re a great example of people taking a place where the conditions aren’t ideal and telling their own different story — it’s everything from the music to the food to the languages.

You didn’t include any case studies or essays from Europe in the book. Why did you make that choice, and what does an overreliance on looking to cities like Copenhagen do to the way we think of and plan for cities?

LW: When I trained as an urban planner and architect, all the pedagogy was very Eurocentric — it was Spain, France and Greece. But if we want to reframe how we think about cities, we need to reframe our points of reference.

ZE: During our editorial meetings we talked about how the commonly accepted ideas about urban order that we know are Eurocentric by design, and don’t represent the multitude of people that live in cities and what “order” may mean to them. Again, it’s not to celebrate chaos but rather to say there are different mental models of what orderliness and messiness can look like.

Go to a place like Delhi and look at the way traffic roundabouts function. There are pedestrians and cars and everybody is moving in the direction they need to move in, it’s like a river of mobility. If you’re sitting in the back of a taxi coming from North America, it looks like chaos, but to the people that live there it’s just how the city moves.

In a chapter about Mexico City’s apartment architecture, Daniel Gordon talks about what it can teach us about how to create interesting streets and neighborhoods by becoming less attached to overly prescriptive planning and instead embracing a mix of ground-floor uses and buildings with varying materials and color palettes, setbacks and heights. He argues that design guidelines can negate creativity and expression in the built environment.

In another chapter, urban geography professor Andre Sorensen talks about Tokyo, which despite being perceived as a spontaneously messy city actually operates under one of the strictest zoning systems in the world. Built forms are highly regulated, but land use mix and subdivision controls aren’t. It’s yet another example of how different urban cultures and regulatory systems work to different sets of values and conceptions of order and disorder. We tried to pay closer attention to case studies that expanded the aperture of what North American urbanism typically covers.

by Rebecca Greenwald, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:Alfredo Martinez/Getty Images

[ed. Give me a messy city any day, or at least one with a few messy parts.]

Why the Future of Movies Lives on Letterboxd

Karl von Randow and Matthew Buchanan created Letterboxd in 2011, but its popularity ballooned during the pandemic. It has grown exponentially ever since: Between 2020 and 2026, it grew to 26 million users from 1.7 million, adding more than nine million users since January 2025 alone. It’s not the only movie-rating platform out there: Rotten Tomatoes has become a fixture of movie advertising, with “100% Fresh” ratings emblazoned on movie posters and TV ads. But if Rotten Tomatoes has become a tool of Hollywood’s homogenizing marketing machinery, Letterboxd is something else: a cinephilic hive buzzing with authentic enthusiasm and heterogeneous tastes.

The platform highlights audiences with appetites more varied than the industry has previously imagined, and helps them find their way to movies that are substantial. Black-and-white classics, foreign masterpieces and forgotten gems are popular darlings, while major studio releases often fail to find their footing. In an online ecosystem dominated by the short, simple and obvious, Letterboxd encourages people to engage with demanding art. Amid grim pronouncements of film-industry doom and the collapse of professional criticism, the rise of Letterboxd suggests that the industry’s crisis may be distinct from the fate of film itself. Even as Hollywood continues to circle the drain, film culture is experiencing a broad resurgence.

Letterboxd’s success rests on its simplicity. It feels like the internet of the late ’90s and early 2000s, with message boards and blogs, simple interfaces and banner ads, web-famous writers whose readership was built on the back of wit and regularity — people you might read daily and still never know what they look like. A user’s “Top 4 Films” appears at the top of their profile pages, resembling the lo-fi personalization of MySpace. The website does not allow users to send direct messages to one another, and the interactivity is limited to following another user, liking their reviews and in some cases commenting on specific posts. There is no “dislike” button. In this way, good vibes are allowed to proliferate, while bad ones mostly dissipate over time.

The result — at a time when legacy publications have reduced serious coverage of the arts — is a new, democratic form of film criticism: a mélange of jokes, close readings and earnest nerding out. Users write reviews that range from ultrashort, off-the-cuff takes to gonzo film-theory-inflected texts that combine wide-ranging historical context with in-depth analysis. As other social media platforms devolve into bogs of A.I. slop, bots and advertising, Letterboxd is one of the rare places where discourse is not driving us apart or dumbing us down.

“There’s no right way to use it, which I think is super appealing,” Slim Kolowski, once an avid Letterboxd user and now its head of community, told me. “I know plenty of people that never write a review. They don’t care about reviews. They just want to, you know, give a rating or whatever. And I think that’s a big part of it, because there’s no right way to use it, and I think we work really hard to keep it about film discovery.”

But in the end, passionate enthusiasm for movies is simply a win for cinema at large. Richard Brody, the New Yorker film critic whose greatest professional worry is that a good film will fall through the cracks without getting its due from critics or audiences, sees the rise of Letterboxd as a bulwark against this fear, as well as part of a larger trend toward the democratization of criticism. “I think that film criticism is in better shape now than it has ever been,” he tells me, “not because there’s any one critic or any small group of critics writing who are necessarily the equals of the classical greats in the field, but because there are far more people writing with far more knowledge, and I might even add far more passion, about a far wider range of films than ever.”

Many users are watching greater amounts of cinema by volume. “Letterboxd gives you these stats, and you can see how many movies you’ve watched,” Wesley Sharer, a top reviewer, told me. “And I think that, for me definitely and maybe for other people as well, contributes to this sense of, like, I’m not watching enough movies, you know, I need to bump my numbers up.” But the platform also encourages users to expand their tastes by putting independent or foreign offerings right in front of them. While Sharer built his following on reviews of buzzy new releases, he now does deep dives into specific, often niche directors like Hong Sang-soo or Tsui Hark (luminaries of Korean and Hong Kong cinema, respectively) to introduce his followers to new movies they could watch...

All this is to say that an active, evolving culture around movies exists that can be grown, if studios can let go of some of their old ideas about what will motivate audiences to show up. Letterboxd is doing the work of cultivating a younger generation of moviegoers, pushing them to define the taste and values that fuel their consumption; a cinephile renaissance means more people might be willing, for example, to see an important movie in multiple formats — IMAX, VistaVision, 70 millimeter — generating greater profit from the same audience. Engaging with these platforms, where users are actively seeking out new films to fall in love with, updates a marketing playbook that hasn’t changed significantly since the 2000s, when studios first embraced the digital landscape.

by Alexandra Kleeman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via:

Everything You Need To Know To Buy Your First Gun

A practical guide to the ins and outs of self defense for beginners.

The Constitution of the United States provides each and every American with the right to defend themselves using firearms. This right has been re-affirmed multiple times by the Supreme Court, notably in recent decisions like District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022. But, for the uninitiated, the prospect of shopping for, buying, and becoming proficient with a gun can be intimidating. Don’t worry, I’m here to help.

It’s the purpose of firearms organizations to radicalize young men into voting against their own freedom. They do this in two ways: 1) by building a cultural identity around an affinity for guns that conditions belonging on a rejection of democracy, and 2) by withholding expertise and otherwise working to prevent effective progress in gun legislation, then holding up the broken mess they themselves cause as evidence of an enemy other.

The National Rifle Association, for instance, worked against gun owners during the Heller decision. If you’re interested in learning more about that very revealing moment in history, I suggest reading “Gunfight: The Battle Over The Right To Bear Arms In America” by Adam Winkler.

If you’re interested in learning more about the NRA’s transformation from an organization that promoted marksmanship into a purely political animal, I suggest watching “The Price of Freedom”. I appear in that documentary alongside co-star Bill Clinton, and it’s available to stream on Youtube, HBO, and Apple TV.

The result is a wedge driven between Americans who hold an affinity for guns, and those who do not. Firearms organizations have successfully caused half the country to hate guns.

At the same time, it’s the purpose of Hollywood to entertain. On TV and in movies the lethal consequences of firearms are minimized, even while their ease of use is exaggerated. Silencers are presented as literally silent, magazine capacities are limitless, and heroes routinely make successful shots that would be impossible if the laws of physics were involved. Gunshot wounds are never more than a montage away from miraculous recovery.

The result of that is a vast misunderstanding of firearms informing everything from popular culture to policy. Lawmakers waste vast amounts of time and political capital trying to regulate stuff the public thinks is scary, while ignoring stuff that’s actually a problem. Firearms ownership gets concentrated largely in places and demographics that don’t experience regular persecution and government-sanctioned violence, even while the communities of Americans most likely to experience violent crime and who may currently even be experiencing risk of genocide traditionally eschew gun ownership.

Within that mess, I hope to be a voice of reality. Even if you already know all this, you can share it with friends or family who may be considering the need for self-defense for the first time, as a good source of accessible, practical guidance.

Who Can Buy A Gun?

The question of whether or not undocumented immigrants can purchase and possess firearms is an open one, and is the subject of conflicting rulings in federal district courts. I’d expect this to end up with the Supreme Court at some point.

It is not the job of a gun store to determine citizenship or immigration status. If you possess a valid driver’s license or similar state or federal identification with your current address on it, and can pass the instant background check conducted at the time of purchase, you can buy a gun. By federal law, the minimum age to purchase a handgun is 21, while buying a rifle or shotgun requires you to be at least 18. (Some states require buyers of any type of gun to be 21.)

People prohibited from purchasing firearms are convicted or indicted felons, fugitives from justice, users of controlled substances, individuals judged by a court to be mentally defective, people subject to domestic violence restraining orders or subsequent convictions, and those dishonorably discharged from the military. A background check may reveal immigration status if the person in question holds a state or federal ID.

If one of those issues pops up on your background check, your purchase will simply be denied or delayed.

Can you purchase a gun online? Yes, but it must be shipped to a gun store (often referred to as a “Federal Firearms License,” or “FFL”) which will charge you a small fee for transferring ownership of the firearm to your name. The same ID requirement applies and the background check will be conducted at that time.

Can a friend or relative simply gift you a gun? Yes, but rules vary by state. Federally, the owner of a gun can gift that gun to anyone within state lines who is eligible for firearms ownership. State laws vary, and may require you to transfer ownership at an FFL with the same ID and background check requirements. Transferring a firearm across state lines without using an FFL is a felony, as is purchasing one on behalf of someone else.

You can find state-by-state gun purchasing laws at this link.

What Should You Expect At A Gun Store?

You’re entering an environment where people get to call their favorite hobby their job. Gun store staff and owners are usually knowledgeable and friendly. They also really believe in the whole 2A thing. All that’s to say: Don’t be shy. Ask questions, listen to the answers, and feel free to make those about self-defense.

Like a lot of sectors of the economy, recent growth in sales of guns and associated stuff has concentrated in higher end, more expensive products. This is bringing change to retailers. Just a couple of years ago, my favorite gun store was full of commemorative January 6th memorabilia, LOCK HER UP bumper stickers, and stuff like that. Today, all that has been replaced with reclaimed barn wood and the owner will fix you an excellent espresso before showing you his wares.

If you don’t bring up politics, they won’t either. You can expect to be treated like a customer they want to sell stuff to. When in doubt, take the same friend you’d drag along to a car dealership, but gun shops are honestly a way better time than one of those.

When visiting one you’ll walk in, and see a bunch of guns behind a counter. Simply catch the attention of one of the members of staff, and ask for one of the guns I recommend below. They’ll place that on the counter for you, and you’re free to handle and inspect it. Just keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction while you do, then place it back as they presented it. Ask to buy it, they’ll have you fill out some paperwork by hand or on an iPad, and depending on which state you live in, you’ll either leave with the gun once your payment is processed and background check approved, or need to come back after the short waiting period.

The Four Rules Of Firearms Safety

I’ll talk more about the responsibility inherent in firearms ownership below. But let’s start with the four rules capable of ensuring you remain safe, provided they are followed at all times:

• Treat every gun as if it’s loaded.

• Keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction.

• Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.

• Be sure of your target and what’s beyond it.

What Type Of Gun Should You Buy?

Think of guns like cars. You can simply purchase a Toyota Corolla and have all of your transportation needs met at an affordable price without any need for further research, or you can dive as deep as you care to. Let’s keep this this simple, and meet all your self defense needs at affordable prices as easily as possible.

by Wes Siler, Newsletter |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: MAGA angers the NRA over Minneapolis shooting (Salon).]

Kayfabe and Boredom: Are You Not Entertained?

Pro wrestling, for all its mass appeal, cultural influence, and undeniable profitability, is still dismissed as low-brow fare for the lumpen masses; another guilty pleasure to be shelved next to soap operas and true crime dreck. This elitist dismissal rests on a cartoonish assumption that wrestling fans are rubes, incapable of recognizing the staged spectacle in front of them. In reality, fans understand perfectly well that the fights are preordained. What bothers critics is that working-class audiences knowingly embrace a form of theater more honest than the “serious” news they consume.

Once cast as the pinnacle of trash TV in the late ’90s and early 2000s, pro wrestling has not only survived the cultural sneer; it might now be the template for contemporary American politics. The aesthetics of kayfabe, of egotistical villains and manufactured feuds, now structure our public life. And nowhere is this clearer than in the figure of its most infamous graduate: Donald Trump, the two-time WrestleMania host and 2013 WWE Hall of Fame inductee who carried the psychology of the squared circle from the television studio straight into the Oval Office.

In wrestling, kayfabe refers to the unwritten rule that participants must maintain a charade of truthfulness. Whether you are allies or enemies, every association between wrestlers must unfold realistically. There are referees, who serve as avatars of fairness. We the audience understand that the outcome is choreographed and predetermined, yet we watch because the emotional drama has pulled us in.

In his own political arena, Donald Trump is not simply another participant but the conductor of the entire orchestra of kayfabe, arranging the cues, elevating the drama, and shaping the emotional cadence. Nuance dissolves into simple narratives of villains and heroes, while those who claim to deliver truth behave more like carnival barkers selling the next act. Politics has become theater, and the news that filters through our devices resembles an endless stream of storylines crafted for outrage and instant reaction. What once required substance, context, and expertise now demands spectacle, immediacy, and emotional punch.

Under Trump, politics is no longer a forum for governance but a stage where performance outranks truth, policy, and the show becomes the only reality that matters. And he learned everything he knows from the small screen.

In the pro wrestling world, one of the most important parts of the match typically happens outside of the ring and is known as the promo. An announcer with a mic, timid and small, stands there while the wrestler yells violent threats about what he’s going to do to his upcoming opponent, makes disparaging remarks about the host city, their rival’s appearance, and so on. The details don’t matter—the goal is to generate controversy and entice the viewer to buy tickets to the next staged combat. This is the most common and quick way to generate heat (attention). When you’re selling seats, no amount of audience animosity is bad business. (...)

Kayfabe is not limited to choreographed combat. It arises from the interplay of works (fully scripted events), shoots (unscripted or authentic moments), and angles (storyline devices engineered to advance a narrative). Heroes (babyfaces, or just faces) can at the drop of a dime turn heel (villain), and heels can likewise be rehabilitated into babyfaces as circumstances demand. The blood spilled is real, injuries often are, but even these unscripted outcomes are quickly woven back into the narrative machinery. In kayfabe, authenticity and contrivance are not opposites but mutually reinforcing components of a system designed to sustain attention, emotion, and belief.

by Jason Myles, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Are you not entertained? (LIWGIWWF):]

***

Forgive me for quoting the noted human trafficker Andrew Tate, but I’m stuck on something he said on a right-wing business podcast last week. Tate, you may recall, was controversially filmed at a Miami Beach nightclub last weekend, partying to the (pathologically) sick beats of Kanye’s “Heil Hitler” with a posse of young edgelords and manosphere deviants. They included the virgin white supremacist Nick Fuentes and the 20-year-old looksmaxxer Braden Peters, who has said he takes crystal meth as part of his elaborate, self-harming beauty routine and recently ran someone over on a livestream.

“Heil Hitler” is not a satirical or metaphorical song. It is very literally about supporting Nazis and samples a 1935 speech to that effect. But asked why he and his compatriots liked the song, Tate offered this incredible diagnosis: “It was played because it gets traction in a world where everybody is bored of everything all of the time, and that’s why these young people are encouraged constantly to try and do the most shocking thing possible.” Cruelty as an antidote to the ennui of youth — now there’s one I haven’t quite heard before.

But I think Tate is also onto something here, about the wider emotional valence of our era — about how widespread apathy and nihilism and boredom, most of all, enable and even fuel our degraded politics. I see this most clearly in the desperate, headlong rush to turn absolutely everything into entertainment — and to ensure that everyone is entertained at all times. Doubly entertained. Triply entertained, even.

Trump is the master of this spectacle, of course, having perfected it in his TV days. The invasion of Venezuela was like a television show, he said. ICE actively seeks out and recruits video game enthusiasts. When a Border Patrol official visited Minneapolis last week, he donned an evocative green trench coat that one historian dubbed “a bit of theater.”

On Thursday, the official White House X account posted an image of a Black female protester to make it look as if she were in distress; caught in the obvious (and possibly defamatory) lie, a 30-something-year-old deputy comms director said only that “the memes will continue.” And they have continued: On Saturday afternoon, hours after multiple Border Patrol agents shot and killed an ICU nurse in broad daylight on a Minneapolis street, the White House’s rapid response account posted a graphic that read simply — ragebaitingly — “I Stand With Border Patrol.”

Are you not entertained?

But it goes beyond Trump, beyond politics. The sudden rise of prediction markets turns everything into a game: the weather, the Oscars, the fate of Greenland. Speaking of movies, they’re now often written with the assumption that viewers are also staring at their phones — stacking entertainment on entertainment. Some men now need to put YouTube on just to get through a chore or a shower. Livestreaming took off when people couldn’t tolerate even brief disruptions to their viewing pleasure.

Ironically, of course, all these diversions just have the effect of making us bored. The bar for what breaks through has to rise higher: from merely interesting to amusing to provocative to shocking, in Tate’s words. The entertainments grow more extreme. The volume gets louder. And it’s profoundly alienating to remain at this party, where everyone says that they’re having fun, but actually, internally, you are lonely and sad and do not want to listen — or watch other people listen! — to the Kanye Nazi song.

I am here to tell you it’s okay to go home. Metaphorically speaking. Turn it off. Tune it out. Reacquaint yourself with boredom, with understimulation, with the grounding and restorative sluggishness of your own under-optimized thoughts. Then see how the world looks and feels to you — what types of things gain traction. What opportunities arise, not for entertainment — but for purpose. For action.