Alex Burns

the internet’s sprawling databases, real-time social-media networks, and globe-spanning e-commerce platforms have made almost everything immediately searchable, knowable, or purchasable—curbing the social value of sharing new things. Cultural arbitrage now happens so frequently and rapidly as to be nearly undetectable, usually with no extraordinary... See more

from the radio producer Ira Glass, on feeling disappointed by your own work:

All of us who do creative work...get into it because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making...It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but

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Part of what makes fall so accessible to Gen Z is that you can create content about it from inside your bedroom, with a string of orange LEDs, a hot beverage, and a few pumpkin throw pillows. Summer doesn’t offer the same accessibility: Conjuring summer on the feed means vacations (costly) or bathing-suit content (not everyone’s thing). Fall is a... See more

Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it... See more