All Caught Up: Bill Nye, Boy Rooms, $52 plastic surgery
I do not trust it
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Onto the good stuff…
This week's picks are about Dr. Miami, Made in America and life-ruining Glow Ups.
Christina’s weekly scroll –
BILL NYE THE FASHION GUY!!! Nye sat down with Time Out New York to talk about the total solar eclipse on April 8th and his next project: planetary defense.
Christina note: The next solar eclipse isn’t for another 20 years so make sure you grab a pair of ISO-certified solar eclipse glasses if you want to be able to experience it! btw Warby Parker is giving out free glasses at all of their stores, while supplies last.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall at a (branded?) Questlove game night…
The good, the bad, and the ugly of April Fools' Day. Somehow, Duolingo On Ice is not a prank.
Pamela Anderson is releasing a plant-based cookbook!
Travis Scott has joined forces with several universities to introduce exclusive apparel collections. To kick things off, he and Michael Rubin led a session on Business and Entrepreneurship 101 at the University of Texas yesterday…
For his 52nd birthday, Dr. Miami is giving away a $52 surgery. You can enter if you follow him on all his social media platforms, including Telegram (where he shares procedures in detail).
Nikita note: $52 surgery… I do not trust it.
On the topic of birthdays, Jane Goodall is collaborating with Flamingo Estate on a limited-edition batch of Miombo Honeydew Honey for her 90th.
Bad news for the environment: Shein is exploring SCaaS.
Chance the Rapper is getting divorced! BRING BACK ACID RAP CHANCE!
For the second year in a row, organizers have canceled Jay-Z's Made in America festival. Fans think it's a wrap... or maybe they'll move the festival to another location altogether? That would be weird considering Philadelphia *is* the birthplace of America…
FOX5 Vegas got away with a copyright strike and forcibly removed Channel 5's Vegas Tunnels documentary on YouTube. Can someone smarter than me explain how this is not fair use?
Christina note: If you’d like to watch the doc (which benefits Shine A Light, a 501(c)3 non-profit that helps hundreds of people living in the underground flood channels of Las Vegas), you can find it on Patreon.
Nikita’s weekly scroll –
Ok, I have been thinking about menswear for a long time, I remember #menswear from 2012 long. Deez Links pop-up newsletter Hate Read got into it this week about dudes wearing (and maybe not) wearing clothes. I mean you have to click after I tell you that “Menswear is … a spindly glory hole that, if you dare jam your dick in, tickles for a second but mostly makes you feel broke and sad”. This shit feels personal. They also dropped a take about media parties, lol. I expected braver takes given it’s all #anon but…here we are.
I’m technically cheating because this podcast episode with
came out in March, but it feels ever-so-relevant. When you notice most of the internet (including those damn essays from The Cut) is rage-baiting you, you cannot unsee it.So much of the internet is dedicated to glow-ups, how old do I look, that whole genre of content… I was scrolling TikTok and was served a video reviewing this creator’s Vlog about how Glowing Up Ruined (Her) Life. It felt like a sobering reminder of how feeble the inclusivity wins of the last few years have been, and how the cultural landscape is undoing that presently. Heavy CW for ED thoughts and self-harm.
Chamberlain Coffee dropped an oops collection and I am sorry but while I enjoy a poopoopeepee joke like anyone else it’s kind of giving me fetish content vibes.
Erewhon smoothie, SKIMS campaign, it’s all the new press tour for a certain vibe of celebrity.
I enjoyed this breakdown of the stats versus the vibes from Quick Study. (cc:
)Amazon’s AI checkout was just 1,000 people in India. Not quite. h/t
“Amazon had more than 1,000 people in India working on Just Walk Out as of mid-2022 whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out’s machine learning model,” The Information reported, quoting an unnamed source who had worked on the tech that powered the service. “The reliance on backup humans explains in part why it can take hours for customers to receive receipts after walking out of a store.”
Brands and Coachella… what’s going on here? Anecdotally, I feel like I’ve heard way less buzz about Coachella this year? Our friend Gregory Littley asked people on his IG story if they know even one artist playing at Coachella this year to a solid 25 no’s. Maybe I am old or it’s just oversaturated.
A founder of a young brand DM’d me to talk about it and net-net – too much money for questionable ROI and there are better growth opportunities for her.
Coachella saw the slowest ticket sales in about a decade and that sounds about right. Way back when I started my marketing career felt like the beginning of the brands at Coachella moment.
“For years, the process of snatching up a Coachella weekend pass was like panning for gold: part patience, part savvy and part dumb luck. Despite steep ticket prices, fans waited for hours in virtual ticket queues, only to learn that they had missed their chance at a wristband. From 2014 to 2022, tickets sold out in a window ranging from just 40 minutes in 2015 to slightly more than 4 hours in 2022.”
Adam Faze’s new media company launched Boy Room… a TikTok series about men’s bedrooms. Horrific stuff. And the worst part is, the most beautiful woman you know is agonizing over one of these… men who don’t even have a duvet cover.
There’s some drama going on with the Olipop Dream Job – turns out they selected a video from December – before the contest launched, and now people are really mad about it. See here.
The WSJ went long on inflation and what $100 gets you at the grocery store. I am so, so tired.
Le grand pivot to video… Seeing a lot of results on my own TikTok and in general that carousels are the it girl on TikTok. Rachel Karten talked about it on LinkedIn too.
This piece goes even deeper into the whole infamous pivot to video thing that has been a personal hell for most of us… the last decade?
“The importance of YouTube as a cable TV replacement and Netflix competitor is why Mr. Beast, the platform’s biggest star, is spending between $3-$5 million per video right now, up from around $200,000 a video just a few years ago. To put that absolutely outrageous number in perspective, a MrBeast video is roughly the same cost per video as any episode from the first five seasons of Game Of Thrones.
But it’s not just YouTube that is tweaked for retention editing. It’s happening on TikTok, as well. Guides last year were saying you had to capture viewers in the first three seconds. I’ve read a few guides from this year that are now saying hooking a TikTok user has to happen in the first 1.5 seconds. There’s an oft-quoted “shoeshine boy” theory of markets, usually attributed to Joe Kennedy in the late 1920s, who said that when the boy shining his shoes had stock tips, he knew the market was about to collapse. Well, here’s a similar rule for digital video: If you’re trying to optimize your video in microseconds, the video pivot is probably already over.”
˚₊‧꒰ა ☆ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚Little Treat Corner ˚₊‧꒰ა ☆ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚
Christina’s weekly report:
READING: Waterproof: Evidence of a Miami Worth Remembering.
EATING: Konscious Plant-Based Roasted Corn + Poblano Onigiri from Sprouts! 🍙
PLAYING: I’m back on Texas Chain Saw Massacre desperately trying to main Virginia. There's no need for me to criticize the developers/launch rollout since the entire internet already has (lmao) but this game is fun when it works!
OBSESSING: IS ANYONE ELSE WATCHING TOKYO VICE? CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE SEASON TWO FINALE?????
RECOMMENDING: The Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. It’s like a “self-Truman Show” which is a crazy concept in and of itself… and I’m hooked!
TREATING: I lost a lot of hair immediately after using the am*ka N*rmcore Signature Shampoo + Conditioner (you’ve been warned) so I’ve been treating my hair with the Act+Acre Restorative Deep Conditioning Hair Mask. Godsend.
Nikita’s weekly report:
READING: Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.
EATING: I’ve been making a larb-y ground turkey situation lately and I am very into it.
PLAYING: I am working on an essay about the grand unified theory of brand universes… hmu if you wanna chat lol
OBSESSING: Over my new nails. Every once in a while I go rogue and do not bring in inspo that is nail-based. A Dries men’s trench inspired my latest set.
RECOMMENDING: Going outside for a walk. Do it. (oh and also selfishly I spoke to Inc. Magazine this week about April Fools’ and I spoke to AUFI about setting up an agency relationship for success)
TREATING: I’ve been really into putting vanilla pudding mix into Greek yogurt lately and whipping it up into an almost whipped cream-like consistency and having it with strawberries 🙂
If you enjoyed this (very long) dispatch, we’ve got many more coming your way. Sound off in the comments on what you want to see more of.
Keep em coming. Love a good news roundup 😉
the tokyo vice finale!!!! hoping they bring it back for S3 😩🙏🏻