Meta Culpa

Early last year, Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, had a clear message for his staff. "You should quit if you feel that way," he told one employee who said workers were being treated poorly. "You should consider working elsewhere," he told another person who questioned controversial changes at the business. He was reinforcing the company Meta had spent the last few years trying to become: a lean, fast, high-pressure organization that no longer had the patience for internal debate. "You can leave," Bosworth said, "or disagree and commit."

But this month, in a memo and a meeting with employees, Bosworth sounded like a different person. Morale is "probably one of the worst it's ever been," he said, adding that the business had done "an atrocious job" with its recent restructuring. "We've undermined the trust you have that your specific expertise and contribution will be valued."

Since 2022, Meta has remade itself around a ruthless management playbook that helped define a new era in Silicon Valley. Through relentless layoffs and many other unpopular decisions, executives charged ahead, emboldened by record profits and apparently immune to the building discontent. Bosworth's comments last week were different — an acknowledgement that Meta's leadership may finally be confronting the costs of its actions.

Meta's workforce is at a breaking point. Employees in the UK are trying to form a labor union, decrying executives' "cruel and shortsighted behaviors." More than 1,600 workers have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop tracking employees' keystrokes to improve its AI models. As Wired reported this month, things have gotten so bad that one frustrated employee hijacked a livestreamed meeting with a profanity-laced outburst directed at an executive. Another compared working in a new AI-training unit to the gulag. Others are so dejected they're actually praying to get laid off so they can leave with at least some severance.

Against this backdrop, Bosworth was one of several executives in recent weeks scrambling to do damage control. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox acknowledged the "insanity of this company" that created a "difficult" and "brutal" environment. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted "we've made mistakes."

"It's a classic example of chickens coming home to roost," says Sandra Sucher, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. "They have almost systematically destroyed trust. They are trying to figure out how to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug."

The digging started with a mass layoff of 11,000 people in late 2022, which Zuckerberg was at least apologetic about. The company then slashed another 10,000 jobs the next spring in what Zuckerberg hailed as a "year of efficiency," and then another 3,600 in 2025 that he said was to get rid of "low performers," effectively torpedoing some workers' job searches (many of them, it turned out, had received good performance reviews). In March this year, news leaked that the company was about to ax even more jobs, but it didn't confirm the cuts for weeks and didn't notify those affected until May, sending everyone into a nauseating, two-month purgatory. In April, amid the limbo, Meta announced it would start tracking employees' keystrokes, stoking fears that the company wanted to automate their work. And in May, as it laid off 8,000 employees, it reassigned another 7,000, many of them to menial jobs that involve training AI. Meta declined to comment on this story. [...]

For employees caught in the hailstorm, it must have felt validating for an executive to empathize with their situation. But surely he and the rest of Meta's leadership knew all these things would make employees unhappy, and yet they did them anyway. So why the sudden mea culpa?

Perhaps all the anger, dissatisfaction, and open rebellion was harming productivity. Or the particularly public nature of Meta's dysfunction, with the crescendo of news reports, had become a liability for its reputation with investors. Or maybe executives finally realized what had become patently obvious to everyone else — that whatever Meta was doing just wasn't working. The whole point of adopting this hard-charging management style was to get employees to innovate faster and catch up to competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the all-consuming battle over AI. Instead, Meta has been falling farther and farther behind.

by Aki Ito, Business Insider |  Read more:

Image: Wally Skalij/Getty; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
[ed. Why anyone would want Facebook/Meta on their business resume is beyond me. The money might be good, but working for a company like that would just be burning life years. See also: The Internet Has Become Too American to Trust (The Walrus).]

What If It All Came Out?

The nightmare began with an annoyance as benign and commonplace as a housefly. “Hi there Matt,” the July 11, 2024, email read. “We received a message from you earlier today through our support page related to a changed password on your account … If you didn’t make a support request,” the sender asked politely, “please let us know.”

Matthew Van Andel, 44, who goes by the nickname Dutch, had never heard of “nullbulge.se,” the domain name that sent the message. It appeared to be a classic phishing attempt, a prompt to get him to reply to the email with personal information. So he marked it as spam, swatting it away with a near-automatic series of clicks. Van Andel worked in technology at Disney corporate in Burbank. He loved his job at “the Happiest Place on Earth”; over his seven years at the company, he and his wife, Nicole, had become Disney adults, taking advantage of discounted park tickets with their two kids. Their house in La Crescenta, where Van Andel was working remotely when he got the email, was filled with Mickey and Star Wars and Marvel memorabilia.

Fifteen minutes later, another message arrived from the same sender. This one took a different tack. “Hi Matt. We regret to inform you we have gained access to certain sensitive information related to your personal life.” Van Andel would have deleted this, too, but he had received exactly the same message on Discord, a platform he used to chat about gaming. And it contained specific information that only a few people could, or should, know. “We noticed you had a conversation with Aadya and Shawn about being at Granville for ‘$veg && $keto,’” it read. That was strange. Aadya and Shawn were Van Andel’s co-workers; “$veg && $keto” was a joke about lunch that Van Andel had made while chatting to them on Slack, the internal-messaging system Disney used, a few days earlier.

Seeing his own private words on the screen, Van Andel messaged Disney’s information-security department. The emails had been sent to his personal account, which he was reading on his personal gaming PC in his home office. Info-sec told him his Slack account and work laptop appeared to be operating normally. Still disturbed, Van Andel deleted the second email. Immediately a third arrived: “You think we didn’t see you mark our first test as spam? Then our actual attempt [at] contact went right in the trash.” Van Andel felt his stomach drop. Someone had live access to his account and was watching him use it.

As an engineer, Van Andel thought he had above-average personal op-sec. He ran anti-virus software on his computer. He used Proton Mail, which encrypts messages between users. He turned on multifactor authentication for serious stuff like iCloud. For the past decade, he depended on a password manager called 1Password, which generates random, long, and complex passwords; stores them; and automatically remembers them whenever a user needs to sign in. For Van Andel, 1Password even managed his multifactor-authentication codes. But his diligent, longtime use of his password manager turned out to be Van Andel’s vulnerability. Having all that information in one handy place meant that once someone else was inside, they had a master key to every aspect of his life: his iCloud, iMessage, emails, photos, PayPal, financial information, medical records, social media, his parents’ financials. Over 1,000 accounts. The only way someone could have gotten into his email was if they had cracked his 1Password; when Van Andel realized they must have access to everything, the room began to spin.

He had no idea why the hackers had targeted him or what their plan was, whether they would drain his family’s finances or stalk his home. Eventually, after running another anti-virus program, he found a piece of malware hidden in a plug-in he had downloaded from GitHub, the open-source coding site, one day in February when he was messing around with an AI image generator. He had checked the code himself, it had looked legitimate, and others had reviewed it positively. But it seems it contained a Trojan-horse virus that gave the hackers free rein of his PC. Once inside, they just had to wait for Van Andel to log in to 1Password. From there, they were able to steal all his credentials, plus many of his multifactor-authentication codes, so every time Van Andel logged in to an app, a website, or an account, they could follow behind him. They’d had access for months.

By morning, Van Andel had received a call from Disney info-sec: The intruders had revealed themselves on a blog post celebrating the hack as NullBulge, an activist collective “protecting artists’ rights and ensuring fair compensation for their work,” according to their website. It was later reported that they were Russian furries. They had dumped the contents of Van Andel’s 1Password onto BitTorrent along with his full name — every personal log-in credential, his messages, his bank information, his medical diagnoses, his Amazon account. They’d also managed to access more of Disney’s data than just Van Andel’s Slack messages and published that too: employee Social Security numbers and Slack messages, budget spreadsheets and passport information for the company’s cruise-line workers. It was a massive breach. As people around the world tried to use the information NullBulge had posted, Van Andel’s iPhone began pinging every few seconds with attempts to get into his accounts. Someone logged in to his children’s Roblox profiles and began defacing them with Nazi screeds. Unknown callers left voice-mails. “Dude, your life is over, haha,” one said. “Just leave the country; that’s my advice. Good luck, have fun, and I hope your type 2 diabetes doesn’t get the best of you.” Van Andel raced around the house unplugging Ring cameras and Amazon Echos. Discovering every new potential violation was like learning he was bleeding from a limb he didn’t remember he had. Viscerally, painfully, he could feel the overwhelming breadth and permanence of everything he had ever recorded online, ephemeral and vital and intimate and stupid. Somehow it was only the first wave of exposure he would endure.

by Bridget Read, Intelligencer |  Read more:

Image: Tracy Ma

[ed. Privacy is dead. Edward Snowden is still exiled in Russia.]

America Has a Pangram Problem

AI-detection tools are getting better. But they still aren’t good enough.

Basically every recent, high-profile accusation of someone passing off AI-generated writing as their own has started in the same way: with a tool called Pangram. In March, when a horror novel from a major publishing house was pulled just days before its scheduled U.S. release date, it was in part because Pangram, an AI-detection program, had identified the text as AI-generated. Other people have fed text into Pangram to suggest that chatbots have been used to write articles in major newspapers including The New York Times, multiple short stories awarded a prestigious literary prize, and most recently, significant chunks of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical warning about the dangers of AI. The tool is also used by universities to vet student work and scientific associations to scan research papers. As panic builds over AI-generated writing, Pangram is at the foundation.

Just a few years ago, it seemed like it might never be possible to instantly and reliably determine whether a piece of text was written by a bot or a person. In 2023, one detection tool, ZeroGPT, declared the U.S. Constitution to be AI-written; the same year, OpenAI abandoned its AI detector altogether owing to a “low rate of accuracy.” And that was when the quality of ChatGPT’s writing was markedly worse than it is today. But detection tools have gotten much better of late—and Pangram, in particular, has emerged as the gold standard: Paste a chunk of text into Pangram, and the model appraises what portions were “AI Generated,” “AI Assisted,” or “Human Written.”

Yet an AI detector that is mostly reliable might in some ways be more dangerous than a broken one. While Pangram is accumulating the power to end reputations and careers, the tool does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood. In turn, AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.

Pangram says its algorithm is so accurate that it incorrectly identifies text as an AI output only about one in every 10,000 times. “There is a great responsibility, a huge weight” in saying something is AI-generated, Max Spero, Pangram’s CEO, told me. “The only reason we do so is because we’re extremely confident.” Several independent analyses have also confirmed that it is quite good. One paper, from the University of Chicago, found that Pangram had almost no false positives on some 3,000 sample texts of roughly 500 to 1,000 words.

But Pangram’s ability to guarantee something was written by a human is shakier. Spero pointed me to a test showing that Pangram’s false-negative rate, or how frequently the model incorrectly labels text as human, is closer to one-in-70 (although some other assessments say it is more accurate than that).

Part of the problem is that Pangram is in an arms race with the major AI labs, which have an interest in making the writing of ChatGPT and Claude sound as natural and human as possible. And at the same time, Pangram has to deal with AI “humanizers”—programs designed explicitly to disguise AI text as your own. Reddit users rave about a humanizer called Walter Writes AI, which I decided to test out for myself. I had ChatGPT and Claude write brief articles, then pasted them into Walter Writes AI. The program, like other humanizer tools, does some anodyne rewording, swaps one clunky transition clause for another, and introduces grammatical oddities. For instance, ChatGPT’s “The numbers are no longer small enough to ignore” became “The sheer size of these usage figures can no longer be ignored.” When I pasted any output from Walter Writes AI into Pangram, it invariably told me that the twice-baked AI article was human-written. (It’s worth mentioning that The Atlantic forbids using AI-generated text unless labeled as such, and that I do not use AI for research.) [...]

Further complicating matters are the opaque ways in which Pangram and similar tools are designed. The model was trained by feeding it mountains of examples written by a human and by a bot—a book review in an actual magazine, then a review about the same book in the style of the same magazine, but produced by ChatGPT—until it can tell the two apart. This is akin to feeding millions of photos of cats and dogs into an image-recognition algorithm until it learns to spot the differences. Pangram cannot point to much specific evidence or patterns in diction, phrasing, or punctuation to support why it deems something AI or human. (I do not, for instance, understand why “these usage figures” was more human than “the numbers.”) Moreover, while Pangram distinguishes between “lightly” and “moderately AI-assisted,” these broad categories can mean just about anything short of copy-pasting from Claude—using AI for research, coming up with counterarguments, as a thesaurus, for a grammar check. The algorithm’s inner workings are “pretty uninterpretable,” Spero said, and although he wants to make Pangram’s “AI-assisted” label more granular, he is also “still not sure how possible it is.” Amid concerns of overreliance on AI chatbots, we risk simply layering on dependence on yet another black-box algorithm.

Spero told me that Pangram should “never be the ending arbiter” but instead a starting point for a more thorough investigation, and that the company looks into every reported error its model makes. He also noted that all sorts of detection technology we rely on—smoke detectors, TSA scanners—have base error rates too. On some level, in all these cases the biggest problems lie not in the technologies themselves but in what they’re trying to detect. It’s a problem that buildings catch on fire. It’s a problem that AI is seeping haphazardly into every facet of written communication.

by Matteo Wong, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Atlantic/Getty
[ed. This seems like a transient issue to me. If AI is eventually able to write something (or create art) that's undetectable from what a human would produce, who cares? (except for writers and artists, obviously). You don't see this controversy in coding. See also: AI-Writing Scandals Are Getting Very Confusing (Atlantic). Also via DWAtV:

***

Again, we learn not that AI is a good writer, or that humans are bad writers, but that the literary prize judgment processes are worthless.

Jack: That which can be won with undisclosed AI output should be

Nabeel S. Qureshi: *Another* apparently AI-generated story wins a literary prize, this time judged by a panel including the novelist Ruth Ozeki.

Literary prizes need to start including Pangram checks in their process, or else change the rules to make AI writing ok. It’s very simple! [...]

How should we think about ‘witch hunts’ where people identify writing as AI?

Shashank Joshi: One of the worst trends of recent months: pseudoscientific witch-hunts using AI detection tools

The hunts are fully scientific. The detection tools work, at least for now. I have yet to see a case where Pangram said something was AI, and the piece was neither written using AI nor crafted intentionally to fool Pangram. There are some cases of heavy copyediting that trigger Pangram, but if it’s heavy enough to trigger Pangram then I consider that to be on you.

Bridesmaid Boxes - the Influencer-ification of the Bridal Party

Bachelorette parties and bridesmaid proposal boxes look increasingly like brand trips and PR mailers.

It had started with four words — “Will you marry me?” — which led Alaina to make a proposal of her own. About three months after her fiancé got down on one knee, a “complete surprise on an otherwise regular Sunday afternoon,” holding an elongated cushion-cut diamond, Alaina posed a question of her own. Five words this time, and six gift bags.

Each bag was tied together with a personalized silk ribbon that read each bridesmaid-to-be’s name and was filled with custom-monogrammed makeup, toiletries, travel perfumes (Kilian Paris’s Love, Don’t Be Shy), and other goodies you’d find stocked at Sephora — and some you wouldn’t, like mini-shooters and Crate & Barrel glasses. Inside, a note on beautiful cardstock made the same request, verbalized to her lifelong friends: “Will you be my bridesmaid?”

They had taken her only about three hours to complete. And about $345 — per box.

For Alaina, it was a reasonable price “given that these women have been with me for my whole life, and they’ll be spending a similar amount to attend the wedding festivities,” the 28-year-old says. Her inspiration for these ceremonial boxes, and what to include inside, was “Instagram, of course.”

The internet is awash with these so-called bridesmaid proposal boxes, a now-ceremonial way of asking the person who loved you through every season of life, through every bad ex and bad haircut, to stand beside you on your big day — wrapped in tissue paper or embossed with a custom monogram. Each bag is seeded with photogenic products like full-size Nécessaire bodywashes, expensive lip oils, and silk pillowcases. Sometimes, during a scroll, you’ll even catch a box with Maison Margiela Replica candles ($72) that match the scent, or vibe, of the wedding each of the girls is enlisted to participate in.

It stretches beyond the proposal box, too, as bachelorette parties now have welcome bags and curated itineraries. It all feels like a sliver of influencer culture unsurprisingly encroaching on the wedding universe: These moments are looking more sponsored than bridal.

Charissa, a 36-year-old New York–based bride-to-be, says that’s exactly the point: for these gift bags to feel like a brand present or mailer. Charissa gave her six bridesmaids Moët & Chandon and handwritten notes (done by an Etsy calligrapher for $30 per note, wax seal and all) during such pre-wedding events because she wanted the experience to feel elevated, like something you’d get at a luxury hotel. Like something you’d see brides doing for their girls on Instagram.

“I never felt like I had to do it — I wanted to,” she says, adding that if her friends are spending money to celebrate her, she wants to spoil them in return with a curated experience.

For some brides, the bridesmaid proposal box is simply the first installment in a fully branded wedding universe, one that begins long before invitations go out. What starts with a proposal to join the bride at the altar often extends into the destination bachelorette party, where trips come with themes (“Palms and Prosecco,” “Million-Dollar Cowgirl”) because it’s no longer enough to just go to Palm Springs or Jackson Hole. You now have to play into the larger concept, too.

That often means a chunk of the cost quietly falls to the bridesmaids. Sometimes it’s buying entirely new outfits to dress for the theme; other times it’s funding it outright. “There’s, like, a fully cohesive aesthetic rollout before a trip even begins,” says Mallory, 28, a Chicago-based attendee of four weddings this year — three of which she’s in. As a result, she’s become “deeply” familiar with personalization sites like Minted and Zazzle, where bridesmaids create custom branding for the weekend. “Custom logos are printed on everything: Champagne bottles, menus, posters, itineraries,” she says, which can sometimes total anywhere from $250 to $300 for a bride who is all in. “And the other times when the brides pay for it, we’re still expected to match the theme.”

Kate, 31, says she had “already shelled out thousands for the bride’s plane ticket to St. Pete for her bachelorette, plus meals and a chartered boat,” but what really sent her over the edge was the “$80 Venmo request from the maid of honor for matching ‘Bride Tribe’ sunglasses, T-shirts, and palm-tree earrings.” She adds that she never agreed to the Amazon and Shein orders but was charged anyway.

At least the bride is expected to reward such falling in line. At a bachelorette party’s rented Airbnb, you can expect balloons and matching PJs she’s laid on the bed for her girls; L.L.Bean totes stuffed with costly lip balm or eye masks. Mason Pearson brushes are in the bathroom — or, if the budget doesn’t stretch that far, Wet Brushes will do. An embroidered cowboy hat for their arrival in Aspen; matching Alo sets for a group workout no one particularly asked for. “That’s $397.90 per girl,” one TikTok commenter points out in a video of one of these tote bags with similar-style products. [...]

If you can’t charter a private plane to St. Barts like influencer Danielle Pheloung, better known as @acquiredstyle, for her “Acquired a Husband” bachelorette, the very least you can do, according to TikTok, is DM brands for freebies. This usually looks like brides or bridesmaids directly messaging businesses or PR contacts on Instagram with a quick pitch (“We’re planning a bachelorette trip — would love to try your product”) in hopes of getting gifted items in exchange for tags or social posts. “I reached out to 425 companies to ask for PR,” says @endo.adeno.girlie in one of many viral videos explaining how to do it, telling her followers which specific brands will send free products. Videos like hers follow a simple logic: The more products you can get for free, the less likely anyone is to get hit with a moan-inducing post-bachelorette Venmo request. Michelle, 29, calls herself a “failed maid of honor” because her group didn’t cold-email enough brands for freebies after watching TikToks that explained how to score sponsored Liquid IV packets and hangover kits in exchange for social-media exposure. [...]

Lindsay, 28, a Michigan-based bride who is getting married in August, says she “understands” how it’s easy to get carried away; when you’re freshly engaged, you want every moment to feel as big as the proposal or the wedding. “I don’t regret it, no,” she says, looking back at the Dutch chocolates and silk pillowcases that she gifted to each bridesmaid. The bridesmaid proposal is something she will remember forever, because she was able to present the boxes at a girls’ lunch, with a table reserved for the most important people in her life. “But it does add up fast. And now, with hindsight, I realize I could’ve maybe budgeted it differently.”

by Morgan Sullivan, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: The Cut/Getty

[ed. Influencer-ification. How to take a nice ceremony and turn it into a (more) stress-filled nightmare.]

Meta’s New AI Unit Is a Total Mess

Someone interrupted a livestreamed, employee-only presentation at Meta earlier this week with an expletive-filled outburst about “being the company’s bitch,” according to a recording heard by WIRED. The individual then asked the people leading the call to write to a specific Meta AI executive and "tell him that he's a piece of shit."

One of the presenters covered their face with their hands, according to a witness. (The speaker could not be reached for comment, and the meeting’s two leaders moved on with their technical talk after asking everyone to mute, though employees commented on the stream about the “spicy” start.)

The incident, which took place on a call open to thousands of employees, reflects growing frustration inside the company’s Applied AI team, which was formed in March to support the work of AI researchers at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Three current employees tell WIRED there is widespread dissatisfaction with how Meta assembled the unit of about 6,500 engineers and product managers and the drudgework they allege they have been assigned to improve AI models. Each spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

“It's literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week."

Another employee describes some of the tasks—generating puzzles to test how reliably AI models from Meta and other companies can solve them—as easy compared to the software development work they had been doing previously. But the new projects feel menial, and “almost all” employees seem unhappy, they say. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” the third employee says.

Meta declined to comment for this story.

Applied AI isn’t the only unit where tensions are boiling over and contributing to what workers describe as record-low morale. The company’s AI-focused restructuring, which included 10 percent of the company, or 8,000 employees, being let go last month has generated extra work and stress throughout several divisions, including data center engineering and Instagram, several current and former employees tell WIRED.

Across the company, more than 1,600 employees have signed a petition demanding that Meta stop a recently launched initiative to monitor US employees’ clicks and keystrokes to generate AI training data. (The company has scaled back the program slightly, allowing employees to pause data collection for up to 30 minutes and request specific exemptions).

During a meeting this week open to all employees at Instagram, Meta chief product officer Chris Cox addressed the “difficult” and “brutal” environment created by the “insanity of this company” in the past few months, according to a recording heard by WIRED. Cox applauded Instagram employees for launching features and serving around 2 billion users amid what he compared to “running a marathon in the middle of a hailstorm and then, like, your teammate gets replaced and then we’re recording you.”

“It’s like what the fuck,” he said, drawing laughs, before repeating himself. “It is like what the fuck.” [...]

In an internal memo on Friday seen by WIRED, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that recent organizational changes had caused distress across Meta. “Given the complexity of these changes, we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more,” he wrote. “As we navigate this period, I’m also focused on providing as much stability going forward as possible.” [...]

“Talented People”

Zuckerberg’s memo also addressed the allegedly dismal situation in Applied AI directly, referring to the unit by its acronym. He suggested the team was a waypoint, not a destination. “Work like AAI is critical to advancing our models and it lets very talented people contribute to those efforts while we create other roles they can contribute to around Meta over the coming months as well,” he wrote.

Engineers selected for the unit have no choice but to join or leave the company, an unusual requirement for highly valued technical employees in Silicon Valley. That’s led some members of Applied AI to describe themselves as “draftees.”

The organization has grown in batches since early April. “It’s crazy to watch people experience the shock of it as each wave comes in,” an early member of Applied AI says.

Some employees are being asked to finish two tasks per week. These involve generating complex software coding problems to help AI scientists better train and evaluate the performance of the latest frontier models. Some of the work is meant to help develop AI agents that generate software or other outputs.

One worker describes the assignment as “mechanical and not creative,” and certainly “not using their full skill set and knowledge.” They feel they were hired to develop social media apps for billions of people, but now find themselves assembling data for hundreds of AI scientists to feed to computer chips.

Meta released pioneering open-weight AI models three years ago, but has had mixed results with subsequent releases. Applied AI is among several expensive initiatives Zuckerberg has spun up in hopes that the company can better compete in the growing market for AI services.

Zuckerberg noted in his memo that, unlike some other AI labs, “automating work” was not Meta’s primary focus. “The products we’ll build will range from much more personalized Instagram and Facebook experiences and glasses that help you throughout the day to better tools for small businesses to thrive and create jobs, and personal superintelligence agents that understand your goals and work 24/7 on your behalf to help in the ways you want,” he wrote.

by Paresh Dave; Zoë Schiffer, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Grillot/Getty Images
[ed. Dead company walking. Seems pretty clear (to me, anyway) that they don't have a clue what the company will look like in the future, just that they need to be in the AI space somehow - this after the dismal (and expensive) failure of the company's 'Metaverse' makeover.]

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.]

Don't Feed the Ducks

Don’t Feed the Ducks! A Zany Animation Predicts the Absurd Outcomes of Ignoring the Rules (Vimeo)

How many people actually heed the warnings about not feeding ducks waddling around public parks? If you’ve taken a flippant approach to these guidelines in the past, we recommend you watch AJ Jeffries’ new animation, “DUCKS.” What opens as an innocuous jaunt around a pond quickly turns into a dark comedy full of strange contortions and feathered villains sure to pop into your head the next time you throw a chunk of bread.

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AI Infiltration in Media and Business

[ed. A few links.]

Roughly one-third of new websites are generated by AI, as are 40 percent of podcasts. It’s probably not even possible to quantify the other AI miscellanea you encounter every day: in Yelp reviews, in Instagram captions, in newsletters, in stories by the New York Times’ obscenely well-compensated Canada bureau chief, for chrissake, in messages from your coworkers.

I am coming around to the conclusion that AI writing has saturated not only most of the capital-c content I consume, but also many of my interpersonal communications. And on multiple levels, I’m increasingly unsure what to do with that information. There is a part of me that feels ridiculous to be a writer in this particular moment, but also ridiculous to be a person? — like if we’re outsourcing Mother’s Day cards to AI now, truly what is the point of existence? [Wired, Bloomberg, User Mag, Karyn Pugliese, 404 Media, Futurism]

A network of 17 shady, AI-generated local news sites is actually the work of a reputation-management firm that helps disgraced executives get their good names (or at least, their good Google results) back after prison. [The Florida Trib]

“Output-competence decoupling” is a term for a very modern and maddening phenomenon: the quality of someone’s work is no longer a reliable signal of their competence. People who can barely string three words together can spin up entire local “news” ventures. People who don’t know the first thing about programming vibe code entire apps. The problem is that the process of acquiring competence is also the process of acquiring judgment and common sense.

I’m reminded of that immortal Ira Glass quote addressed to beginners at the start of their careers: “It is only by going through a volume of work that … your work will be as good as your ambitions.” [No One’s Happy]

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Jumping Jacks For Clicks

There’s been a lot of discussion this month about what it takes to be heard as a musician in 2026. Eliza McLamb’s article on digital marketing agency Chaotic Good went viral, drawing commentary from musicians about the wider implications of their “fake fans” marketing strategy. Hiroki Tanaka’s Reddit post about his album’s failed PR campaign was picked up by Stereogum, stimulating further debate. We’re about to embark on our own DIY PR campaign for our forthcoming album and it’s hard to know what, if anything, will make anyone actually listen to it. The PR landscape for musicians has changed radically in recent years, how should artists approach music marketing in 2026?

Fandom as contagion

When Eliza McLamb heard this interview with the founders of Chaotic Good Projects on Billboard, she was shocked to discover that an artist and track she thought was her own “perfect, beautiful little secret” actually came from them as a part of a “narrative campaign”.

“I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass-market, commercial pop... But [Chaotic Good’s] roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect... Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.”

Chaotic Good works by, in their own words, “controlling the discourse”.

“I think in the past, let’s say like a label and a management team do a great job. They get their artists on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J or something like that. Then they post it and then they kind of wait for the comments […] what we do at Chaotic and with our management clients is, the second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”

Chaotic Good doesn’t just share content, it creates accounts to respond to that content and simulate trends, which will ideally snowball into real, organic users jumping on the trend and amplifying it. They’re simulating until the simulation becomes real.

It’s different from the traditional method of “the waterfall” release and media saturation. Share music incrementally over a long period of time through as many channels as possible, get articles written, pay for plays, do tours, be omnipresent. But people aren’t using traditional media to find music anymore, they use social media. And they don’t even watch the content themselves, they read the comments to gauge the value of something. Chaotic Good point this out in their interview:

“I think most people see a video or see something about an album that came out and it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”

In behavioural psychology this is known as social proof. Part of what made Eliza McLamb’s article go viral is the way it exposes how our behaviour is manipulated by the marketing machine. We know about propaganda but for some reason assume social media is immune to this kind of manipulation. We think we’re interacting with real people online, people we subconsciously infer guidance from, but we’re not. Much of what we see has been infiltrated by external agents to shape a particular opinion.

However, the underlying issue is not just the fact that the opinions we thought were our own have been subtly shaped by an expensive machine, it’s that if artists today can’t afford to pay for that expensive machine, no one will hear their music.

The False Promise Of The Social Media Democracy

Once upon a time there was a social media platform called MySpace. It gave everyone their own web page connected to other MySpace users. They could customize it to look however they wanted, people could comment, and send messages to each other. There were no ads. There was no algorithm. Just the free flow of information.

Many bands in the ‘00s blew up because of MySpace. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Calvin Harris, to name a few. Our very own Chris Black’s previous band Katsen landed record deals through MySpace. The early days of social media are responsible for the persistent myth of going viral then making lots of money. The two halves of that equation have never been more disconnected.

MySpace succumbed to algorithm-driven platforms and the gatekeeping emerged again, this time with the tech titans controlling the interactions between musicians and fans. I remember discovering for the first time that even though we had a few hundred followers on Facebook, they wouldn’t see our posts unless we paid to “boost” them. That was just the beginning.

As the algorithms evolved, the content that rose to the top was not just the most liked and shared but the most consistently and frequently posted. To be seen on social media one has to spend hours, daily, posting and engaging in other people’s content. Most artists don’t want that job and moreover, don’t have the capacity. Kamola Atajanova of Tape Wounds articulates it perfectly in their response to the Chaotic Good furore:

“Not every artist is built for social media. Not every artist wants to make their life into a performance. Some people are better at writing songs than posting clips. Some people’s work comes from privacy, patience, or introspection. That should not make them less valid. But this system does make them less visible. It filters them out before the music even has a chance. So when people say “it’s just marketing,” what they really mean is: this is the cost of entry now. And that’s exactly what makes it feel so hostile. Not everyone can afford that cost. Not financially, not creatively, not psychologically.”

Hiroki Tanaka’s candid Reddit post about the failure of his “by the book” album PR campaign sparked a wave of recognition across the music world. After two decades in music and awards with his previous band he decided to release his solo album, his “last hurrah”, with management, a label, and a professional PR campaign. He even started a TikTok account posting show videos, behind the scenes and goofy memes all around managing a job and family life.

Tanaka watched the release arrive after eight months of promotion to little more than “a weak trickle” of attention. For most musicians, Tanaka’s story didn’t feel exceptional, it felt familiar.

“I was told, under no uncertain terms, that my lack of a social media presence and streaming metrics meant that certain media outlets that had reviewed my work (highly, I might add) in the past could no longer spend money on paying a writer and editor to review my work… I would have preferred if they had said they didn’t like my album. Being rejected because of my metrics is a slap in the face for art.”

Social media has become the driving force behind a release, and while it is accessible to anyone, there’s actually a huge price to pay in both time and mental health. The volume of content required to feed it is beyond most musicians, who are generally holding down full time jobs to survive. The underlying purpose of all this extra content is to feed a machine, and it doesn’t feel good dedicating your precious little free time to feeding a machine.

Jumping Jacks For Clicks

Soon after reading Tanaka’s post, we got an email from YouTube Creators prompting us to “Get Creative With Goals” on our livestreams.

They’re encouraging us to “set goals that encourage your community to collaborate,” and suggest celebrating those goals by “doing something unexpected – whether that’s jumping jacks, making up a song, or playing a prank.”

Yes, you read that correctly. YouTube is telling artists that the path to success involves performing arbitrary physical tasks to generate engagement.

It’s sad how often life imitates an episode of Black Mirror these days but this is almost exactly the scenario in season seven’s episode “Common People”. A man who needs money for an enshittified service ends up performing increasingly degrading stunts on a streaming platform for money. What was meant as dystopian satire has become platform policy. [...]

What Comes Next?

We may be reaching an inflection point. As McLamb notes, the more ubiquitous manufactured virality becomes, the more artists will resist it entirely, pulling back from streaming and social media in favour of hyper-local, scene-based growth. A return to the tangible, the real, the unmediated.

While this sounds good in theory, it’s probably not going to work for unusual artists in small towns. They’d have to go to a city to have more of a chance of finding their people, and with the cost of living, moving to a city isn’t possible for everyone. By the time I left London in 2009 all the artists I knew were leaving, it just wasn’t sustainable anymore.

The problem is systemic. Musicians don’t typically make a living from their music. This means their time is diverted to day jobs. Their dwindling leisure time is necessary for making and performing music. There isn’t time to also produce a volume of “content” for social media. On top of that the mental health cost of interacting with addictive apps as a performing monkey is not appetising. This creates a class system in the music industry. There are those who can afford to pay to be heard and those who can’t. And those who can’t are either paying with their souls, or they’re opting out altogether and not being heard at all.

by Battery Operated Orchestra and Brigitte Rose, Bandmade |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/YouTube 

[ed. Works for some, not for others. Which, I guess is the point. The algorithm is selecting for a certain type of musician - not necessarily the best. That YouTube email really says everything you need to know about their business model, doesn't it?]

Adventures With Words

Typos are good now?

“Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them.” (“The Typo Vibe Shift,” by Michael Waters for The Atlantic; gift link)

That one baby name

The fastest-rising baby name of the year in the U.S. for two consecutive years is … Ailany? News to me, but three of the experts I follow were on it: Laura Wattenberg (Namerology), Hannah Emery, PhD (Janus Name Journeys), and Clare Green (Nameberry). Green writes: “Fun, bright, and melodic, Ailany is a modern Hispanic name with multicultural influences. It broke into the US top 1000 for the first time in 2023 and by 2024, it had risen over 750 places to sit just outside the Top 100.” [...]

Tolkien vs. the tech right

“J.R.R. Tolkien was famously anti-tech and anti-government … If he were alive in the age of Palantir, he might not be thrilled that a tech company with lucrative government contracts is name-checking his creations.” And it’s not just Palantir, notorious for its alliance with ICE: Tech companies called Mithril, Anduril, Erebor, and Narya all took their names from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Benjamin Stephen for Vox video, via Kottke.org, which offers some additional data points)

Enduring coolth

Why “cool” is still cool. “Most slang words come and go, but there’s one undisputed king that’s over 100 years old and still as relevant as ever.” (Laughing Squid)

by Nancy Friedman, Fritinancy | Read more:

[ed. Ailany... um, ok.]

How to Find YouTube Success With Music Theory

[ed. As Ted Gioia writes:

"I’d never seen Rick Beato’s breakout video before—where he tests his young son’s musical ear. But he included highlights in his latest YouTube upload, and it is worth watching, especially if you know anything about music theory.

People need to see this if they think there are no objective standards in music, and everything is just opinion and personal preference.

The reality is that you can actually measure a person’s musical aptitude, and those who have this demonstrable gift possess a huge advantage in making music. Some people are so creative that they can thrive despite this gap, but the gap exists nonetheless."

[ed. Beato is of course, ten years later, one of YouTube's most successful personalities in the category of 'all things Music'.] 

Gen Z and Men Who Yearn

The internet is abuzz with talk of male yearning. Of course, there’s no reason the phrase should mean anything to you unless you’re chronically online. But as a woman born in 1997—right on the cusp of the Millennial/Zoomer generational divide—who writes about culture for a living, I’ve not been able to overlook the latest cultural trend: men who yearn.

 

I started noticing this increasingly often in the last couple of years. According to Google Trends analytics, I’m not the only one. In 2023, a post on X by an account with very few followers garnered 3.5 million views. It read: “What makes a man attractive is not his stupid face but his stupendous yearning and agonizing longing for one woman and one woman alone.” Searches for “male yearning” and similar terms first spiked at the end of 2024 and have been growing consistently since. Last year, many mainstream magazines with a predominantly female readership put out articles on the topic. On TikTok, the most popular social media platform among Gen Z and younger millennials, videos about #menwhoyearn consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes.

For a generation that is marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?

As I wrote for Public Discourse recently, many young women have turned to “romantasy,” a literary genre blending fantasy settings with romantic plots, as a way to express their desire for marriage. While some novels in the genre are relatively harmless, many teach women to confuse abuse with love, often romanticizing forced marriage, as well as suggesting that male violence is evidence of commitment. This is hardly surprising, since so many of us zoomers and younger millennials are children of divorce and have grown up without a model of a healthy marriage. Many of these novels also feature very graphic sex scenes; but again, this is largely unsurprising given that we live in a pornographic culture and that women largely favor written over visual forms of pornography.

The “male yearning” trend is different, so much so that it took me by surprise. It’s somehow more wholesome. The fictional male characters most often referenced in TikTok videos about male yearning may be tall, dark, and handsome, like romantasy protagonists, but unlike in the romantasy storylines they tend to exercise restraint in their longing for the female protagonist. Where male desire in romantasy is about quick consummation, this kind of “male yearning” tends to be about acts of service, patience, and a slow-burn romance instead.

The most cited examples of fictional “men who yearn” are not always obvious. Some fit the brooding stereotype that one also finds in romantasy. For example, TikTok is full of edits of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy—as played by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation—“flexing” his hand in frustration as he silently yearns for Elizabeth Bennet. And of course, the internet went absolutely crazy last year over the character of Conrad Fisher when season three of the adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty was released. Emotionally withdrawn in his longing, Conrad has often been described by fans of the show as the young adult novel version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Yet other yearning men don’t brood. Loyal to a fault and notoriously good with kids, Steve “always the babysitter” Harrington from the popular sci-fi show Stranger Things has become the object of admiration in hundreds of thousands of videos and posts made by young women.

To be clear, I’m not praising women of my generation for publicly fawning over a man, real or fictional. Some of this content borders on objectification, the very objectification of which we so often—and rightly—accuse men. This phenomenon is, nonetheless, a sign of a much healthier kind of desire than what we find in the discourse around romantasy.

The common denominator among these male characters is their willingness to accept a life of service to their loved ones...

These men exercise selflessness. They serve without expecting anything in return. They embody a healthy version of masculinity in that they use their strength not to subdue, but to support those who are more vulnerable than they are.

But how can the smutty romantasy trend coexist with this ubiquitous desire for men who respect, provide, and protect? And secondly, if data show us that young people are getting married less, why are young women consuming fiction that shows marriage, kids, and commitment as goods rather than impediments?

The first question is perhaps easier to answer. While it is overwhelmingly obvious that women—rather than men—engage with both the romantasy trend and the men-who-yearn discourse, the age range of said women overlaps only partially. Generally speaking, Gen Zers prefer to see less sex depicted in fiction than do their millennial counterparts. Romantasy reading stats, as I discussed in my previous article, point to the fact that millennials are a substantial chunk of consumers, even though the themes and plotlines of romantasy novels ostensibly target young adults.

Since I wrote that article, for example, the gay hockey romance show Heated Rivalry (yes, I’m afraid that is the title) has skyrocketed to international success. I’m given to understand that it features prolonged sex scenes, and yet most viewers are women, with millennials being a high proportion. This may seem an anomaly at first. But the book by Rachel Reid on which the show is based was released in 2019, the same year that the extremely graphic, water-cooler show par excellence Game of Thrones came to an end. By that point, millennial women had been subjected to an entire decade of adulthood of explicit content in film and TV.

I am afraid women have become somewhat desensitized. Millennial and older Gen Z women especially have, for decades, been told that they should feel no moral qualms about being both consumers and products of explicit sexual content.

Yet younger zoomers are beginning to differ from their millennial counterparts. Anecdotally, as an older zoomer myself, I’ve seen the generational divide happen right in front of my eyes. My high school peers who were just one or two years older than I have a significantly different attitude toward, and experience of, sex and relationships than my sister-in-law who is only five years younger than I. What’s surprising is not that Gen Zers are consuming smut, but that they are not consuming it at higher rates than millennials, who, now in their thirties and forties, you may expect to have progressed to a more mature view of sex and marriage.

That simply hasn’t happened. I’m hardly the first to point out that millennials are a generation marked by arrested development. They are not getting married; they’re not having kids. Some of this is explained by factors outside their control (rising house prices, etc.), but some factors are cultural. Millennials grew up engaging fully in hookup culture. Their consumption of graphic fictional content is but a reflection of their consumerist attitude toward love and relationships.

Younger Gen Z women are also not getting married, but the difference is that they are, on average, more averse than millennials to both casual sex in their own lives and depictions of sexual activity on the screen. The Marriage Foundation has spoken of a “collapse” in early marriage, “with only 4% of women and 2% of men born in 1998 marrying before age 25, marking a historical low.” But this collapse is not due exclusively or even primarily to a preference for cohabitation. The Institute for Family Studies has recently reported that Gen Z is not only marrying later and less frequently: they are also cohabiting less and having less sex overall. Essentially, zoomer women are increasingly retreating from interaction of any kind with the opposite sex, a phenomenon that is now often described as involuntary celibacy.

As well as this, recent reports suggest that Gen Z men and women want to see less explicit sexual content in films and TV shows, preferring depictions of non-sexual intimacy, whether that is deep friendship or a romantic bond. Finally, an article by Wendy Wang, also for the Institute for Family Studies, argues that, while Gen Z women are generally more egalitarian than previous generations in their attitudes toward relationships between men and women, there is one role that they still want men to play: to protect.

by Beatrice Scudeler, Public Discourse | Read more:
Image: FlixPix/Alarmy

Mary Tyler Moore

There was a scene that Robert Redford wanted for “Ordinary People” in which Beth Jarrett, played by Mary Tyler Moore, takes a cake out of the refrigerator. The cake has a circle of cherries on top, and the only action in the scene is Beth, the cold, bereaved mother, looking at the cake, adjusting the cherries, then putting the cake back in the fridge. Moore was alone in the kitchen. Redford wanted to capture Beth in an unobserved moment — what was this woman really like? How was she coping with the accidental death of her older son and the recent suicide attempt of her younger son? Had she escaped into her fastidiousness and her uptightness?

He shot it once; no good. He shot it again; no good. She tried to bring a motivation to each take: Was this cake good enough? Or, Did the cake need more cherries? And each time he’d say: “No, no, clear your mind. Let’s go again.” Every time the kitchen was set up for another scene, Redford used the opportunity to try the shot again. Moore called it “the bane of the production.” He shot it over and over, 26 times in total in front of a “mystified” crew, she wrote in her memoir.

Redford knew the role was a change from Moore’s sunny appearances as Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” so much so that he was initially worried to even approach her. But when he did, he told her that when he read the Judith Guest novel that he was adapting, he couldn’t stop picturing Moore as Beth. Redford had a home in Malibu, and sometimes he’d look out on the beach and see her taking walks. She seemed like a sad figure on those walks, so different from the spunky and triumphant walks she took in the opening credits of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He told her that it was the most important role in the film. He wanted someone to play her sympathetically. Moore agreed emphatically. Beth reminded Moore of her father. She also had a little of Beth in her herself — she would realize that eventually. She told Redford that she didn’t think of Beth as a villain but as just another victim in the story.

Moore called “Ordinary People” the “holy grail” of her career, not just because it had a remarkable script and production, or because of the Oscar nomination that she earned from it, but because it saved her from eternal typecasting just when she needed it. She had been so good in sitcoms. But what now? She was only in her early 40s, and it seemed as if she was sentenced to a life of short-lived series and celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms and game shows. Depth and mood and range weren’t things people associated with her.

When “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” debuted in 1970, no one could have predicted how iconic it would become for the way it portrayed women’s experiences in the workplace, and for the way its heroine, Mary Richards, remained plucky in the face of discrimination, both passive and aggressive. That was back when plucky seemed like a good solution to the constant insults of merely trying to function while female, when smiling with moxie at all the crap thrown in your direction seemed like the best way to survive and advance.

Mary Richards struck an exact balance of wit and intelligence with a kind of wise understanding of people’s natures. She was a perfect guide for navigating the a-wokening of the corporate American man (a project that is still ongoing, to say the least). The show’s cultural impact over its seven years was monumental. Mary Richards allowed women to ask themselves questions out loud about what exactly they were hoping for in life, why it was so important for them to marry and how the families we build for ourselves can be as important and sustaining as the families we’re born into.

Mary Richards was a hero for all she represented. But Moore wasn’t Mary Richards. She didn’t have her ease or confidence. She grew up in a house with distant parents; her mother was an alcoholic. Moore lived between her parents’ house and her grandmother and aunt’s house. When she was at her parents’ house, she slept on the couch, because there were only two bedrooms and she felt uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with her brother. She grew up to struggle with diabetes, with rejection, with alcoholism, with divorce, with another divorce, with the death of a grown, only child, with forgiveness. She left her second husband, Grant Tinker, with whom she had so little intimacy that they never undressed in front of each other except during actual sex. She moved to New York, away from him. At night, in her apartment, she made margaritas in her blender that were one-quarter drink mix, one-quarter ice and one-half tequila, so that they had the consistency of a milkshake. She got into her bed at night, next to the air-conditioner, and built a kind of fort around herself with pillows and drank until those margaritas began their work. (She would eventually marry a third time.)

People still mistook Moore for Richards, though. In 1980, Gloria Steinem asked Moore to speak at an Equal Rights Amendment rally in Washington. Moore said yes, but when the time came, she lied and said she had an ear infection and couldn’t fly. Steinem suggested she take a train instead. She told Moore that Tip O’Neill, the speaker of the House, had agreed to meet with Steinem’s group — Bella Abzug, Gloria Allred, etc. — only if Moore was in attendance. So Moore took the train, begrudgingly, now roped into a four-hour trip instead of an hourlong flight. She showed up to the meeting and submitted to the “big hug” that O’Neill demanded of her. (“Where’s that little cutie?” she remembered him saying.) But it was a waste of time. The amendment stalled, and she found the women rallying for equal rights well intentioned and intelligent but off-putting, with their shouting, like “angry children.” This, she believed, was one reason the amendment ultimately failed to become law. Yes, she saw the paradox in all this. Yes, she loved Mary Richards, too. But didn’t all the women in America know by now how exhausting it was to aspire to be Mary Richards?

So there she was, a few years after her show went off the air. She told people she ended it so that they could go out on top, but the real reason was that the producers, the writers and Tinker, who co-founded their production company, MTM Enterprises, saw so much potential in spinoffs — “Rhoda,” “Lou Grant” and others — that it seemed like the smart move. Great for the bottom line, yes, but what about Moore? She had these Maryisms, she called them — referring to the movements and speech patterns that she had absorbed into her own manner after so many years of playing Mary Richards.

She did some theater, including playing a quadriplegic who wants to end her own life, in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” for which she won raves and a special Tony. Then came Redford’s offer. But it wasn’t really an offer, in the end. After they spoke that first time, he took three months to consider if she was right for the role, auditioning just about every actress in town, from what Moore heard.

When he finally returned to her, saying, Yes, please, come be my Beth Jarrett, she nearly fell over with relief. Now she could show something of herself to as big an audience as she’d always had. She had been so afraid that people would find out that she wasn’t Mary Richards. But in the time she waited for Redford’s offer, she realized she was more afraid that they wouldn’t; she was more afraid that she’d never be seen or known or loved for who she was.

Redford continued to try to get the shot of Beth and the cake, but it was never to be. It appears nowhere in the movie. Moore said later that she believed that Redford had been looking for Beth’s soul. But Beth wasn’t the kind of person to reveal her soul. Beth was the kind of person who would rather give you a cake and a smile. She could mourn by overcoming sadness in a lifelong pursuit for perfectionism. Beth’s soul was the act of not showing her soul. How did Redford not see that? How did Redford not see that Beth’s soul was right in front of him the entire time?

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Philippe Halsman

[ed. From the series The Lives They Lived. See also: Delia Graff Fara.]

Hollywood Sausage Factory

Quentin Tarantino has criticised contemporary Hollywood, calling it “a flavourless sausage factory”.

Writing in Sight and Sound magazine, Tarantino said that “since the pandemic … it seems almost impossible for a new movie to come out that I don’t pick to death”. He added: “Flaws, implausibilities, audience pandering, miscast performers or just plain stupid shit usually torpedoes every new movie coming out of the flavourless sausage factory that used to call itself Hollywood.” [...]

In his article, Tarantino dwelled at length on one current film he enjoyed – The Rip, directed by Joe Carnahan, currently on Netflix – and mentioned Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and the Kevin Costner-directed Horizon: An American Saga Chapters 1 and 2 as recent films he liked. He went on to say that he had seen “nothing that really held me in its grip and swept me away to the magical land of enjoyment that I used to visit regularly and was the reason I loved movies above all other art forms. These days I’d rather read a book.”

by Andrew Pulver, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Noam Galai/Getty Images

[ed. Can't disagree. He's also known to have other strong opinions:]

The Loneliness of the Competitive Quizzer

Facts are funny things. It was a fact, for instance, that in the spring of 2024 I won $132,000 playing trivia. That May, I’d flown from Oxford, where I was a graduate student, across the Atlantic to a soundstage in Los Angeles, and played for eight good days on Jeopardy!

 

It was also a fact—one I liked to tastefully overlook when asked at holidays or on trips home—that I was unemployed, that I’d gone to Oxford for a master’s degree in large part to escape further unemployment. But I had been decent on Jeopardy!, and I knew that decent trivia players were often invited back for a second chance at more money. Returning to the show, however—for something like the Tournament of Champions or the Jeopardy! Invitational—meant facing tougher questions against better players. And it was a fact that, to prepare for this possibility, I would need to throw myself into the world of competitive trivia, or quiz.

Quiz is many things to the disciple. It is not simply trivia. It is not simply a hobby. It verges, for the believer, on a way of life. Originating out of Depression-era American radio quiz shows and really taking root in the UK in the 1970s, quiz is a species of especially rigorous trivia, with regimented online competitions and questions that tilt toward the obscure. Elite quizzers are known to prep for, at minimum, two or three hours a day, thumbing through hundreds of thousands of flashcards at rapid-fire pace. They participate in four or five leagues a week. This can be all-consuming, but it can also vault the elite quizzer into a rarefied echelon of erudition. These players have spent decades in the ceaseless memorization of facts and are nearer, maybe than anyone else in history, to the sum total of human knowledge.

Each year, the greatest quizzers from around the globe assemble at the International Quizzing Championships (IQC) to vie for glory. IQC is perhaps the most prestigious—and difficult—trivia tournament in the world. It features a battery of individual competitions, testing general and specialized knowledge, as well as an Olympic-style contest for national teams. The weekend-long event culminates with the Individual Quiz and Nations Cup finals, but also includes specialist quizzes (designed to test aptitude in specific subjects) and an Aspirational Cup (for those teams which didn’t make playoffs, but one day, perhaps, might). IQC might function as a social mecca for the obsessively curious, but it’s also armed with a caliber of brainpower that’d outgun much of the Ivy League. I wanted to meet these elite quizzers, to learn from them. And deep down, I wanted to win.

by Drew Basile, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: © Arnaud Aubry

“My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago

[ed. Mental Awareness Day. Pretty dope.] 

The Most 2020s Art Ever Made

Five years ago, Bo Burnham released Inside on Netflix to near-universal acclaim. Inside is a fantastically rich comedy special and probably the single best piece of content made about the COVID-19 pandemic in any medium.

But looking back at it five years later, Inside feels like more than just a very good comedy set, more than just a statement about the pandemic. It feels, if you’ll forgive the pun, special.

It’s always a risk to call a race before we’ve reached the finish line, but with some trepidation, I’ll take that chance: Even though the decade isn’t over yet, the 2020s already have their definitive piece of art. And we got it in 2021.

A definitive piece of art needs to embody the main trends of its time. Its strengths and flaws should be the quintessential strengths and flaws of its era. It should ideally anticipate the trajectory society is headed in. And it hopefully has something meaningful to say about the technological, social, and cultural currents people are navigating.

Inside does all of these things better than anything else produced this decade. [...]

Inside Bo Burnham

Bo Burnham catapulted to fame the way everyone catapults to fame these days: social media. In 2006, he was one of YouTube’s earliest viral creators, and his trajectory from awkward internet teen to global comedy star was essentially a straight line upward.

Hailed as a comedy prodigy, he toured internationally, appeared on Comedy Central, and released an EP all before turning 18. At 23, he released his second comedy special/album what. as an hour-long Netflix feature to widespread acclaim, then at age 25, released his third special Make Happy to even more widespread, near-universal critical praise.

But at the height of his success, Burnham began to have panic attacks on stage and for several years stopped performing live altogether.

During this time, he experimented with other work, acting in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman and directing his own film Eighth Grade. After the pandemic began in 2020, Burnham decided to work around his anxiety by upending the traditional live comedy format and creating a “comedy special” that was filmed in a single room with no audience.

Like so much art in the digital age, it’s difficult to perfectly categorize Inside. It’s a comedy special and it’s an album. It’s fictional, autobiographical, and autofictional all at once.

At times, Inside has the feel of a documentary or a behind-the-scenes making-of featurette. It was made for Netflix, but it was also clearly built for the social internet, designed to be chopped up for consumption on YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and other platforms.

Like much of today’s independent media, Inside is an auteur production where Burnham acts as the writer, director, editor, and performer all at the same time. It’s a shapeshifting, genre-bending work that challenges your expectations for what a comedy special can be.

Inside is framed around Burnham’s experiences during the COVID pandemic, the single most important event of the long 2020s. While Inside never once explicitly mentions the pandemic, it’s a film about all the ways COVID transformed our relationship with technology and one another.

Burnham is uniquely well suited to diagnose the ways in which the internet has changed us all, as someone who was raised online and whose stardom was born there. The opening number is deliberately grating as Burnham croons about “content”:

Look I made you some content
Daddy made you your favorite, open wide
Here comes the content
It’s a beautiful day to stay inside

Burnham mocks the online world where every attempt at art, commentary, humor, and dialogue is flattened into the grotesque “content,” but he also helped create that world and now finds himself trapped in it.

The word “content” appears frequently throughout the special, acting as a kind of brain-rotted leitmotif. In one unsettling interlude, Burnham appears as a YouTuber, saying “Thank you for watching my content!” while cheerily wielding a knife. “Keep watching, ‘cause there’s a lot more content where that came from.” he chirps, waving the knife at me through the screen, part promise, part threat.

The special’s first half is full of these little vivisections of online culture.

“FaceTime with My Mom (Tonight)” highlights the banal frustrations of trying to communicate with older relatives who are not digital natives.

“Sexting” captures the anxieties of someone who is stuck inside, who is still horny, and who desperately wants to be sexy through their phone, but is pathetically unable to actually make it happen.

“White Woman’s Instagram” skewers the performative femininity of female influencers, with Burnham re-creating dozens of popular Instagram shots.

“Welcome to the Internet” may be the single best encapsulation of what it’s like to exist online ever made, with its demented, demonic narrator tempting you with “A little bit of everything, all of the time.” Burnham’s internet is one where the banal is juxtaposed with the horrible — “Which Power Ranger are you? Take this quirky quiz! Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids.”

Burnham believes we’re all trapped in a hellscape of our own making precisely because it’s so difficult to segment the useful ways of being online from the poisonous parts that are tearing apart society.

Inside’s commentary is especially pointed when it comes to the people and corporations manipulating the online world. While the flashy songs about Jeff Bezos get more attention, Burnham’s sketch about cynical, socially aware brand consultants is far more cutting:

There’s no sugarcoating it. The world is… fucked up. And you’ve got a choice as a brand. You can hide and bury your head in the sand and hope it fixes itself, or you can roll up your sleeves and get to work… and sell Butterfingers.

The special also takes time to satirize the worst, laziest types of online content like self-indulgent reaction videos, monotone gaming livestreams, and influencer culture. Even the cut-for-time sketches that only made it on the extended version of Inside are sharp.

In one, Burnham mocks vapid celebrity interview practices designed to create social media clips. In another — and it is practically criminal that this sketch was left out of the completed special — he goes after the absurdity of Joe Rogan’s podcast, showcasing two comedians who insist that they are being canceled by PC culture, that the things they say are just jokes, but also, that they are modern-day philosophers and artists, while “This episode is sponsored by Manstuff’s Dick SprayTM” scrolls along the bottom.

The best parodies work because the author has a deep connection to and appreciation for the subject being parodied. Burnham’s status as a digital native is what makes the social media commentary so sharp. The New Yorker’s Rachel Syme once described Burnham as one of the “leading auteurs of the mediated mind,” an expert on the consequences of perceiving the world (and being perceived) through a black screen.

There’s a psychic cost to being so online, and Burnham has certainly paid it. That makes Inside feel less like an outsider’s rant and more like an insider’s dispatch.

by Jeremiah Johnson, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: Netflix/Instagram

[ed. Well... now I'm intrigued. Never heard of this so will have to check it out. Update: It's great! Burnham's a smart and funny guy.]