Alex Burns

In early interviews with Whaley, he often talked about the internet being the magic ingredient to MSCHF: “Life is too short and the internet is too big to not make what you want.”

Also, I'm tired of the bland minimalist aesthetic that's polluted the contemporary Internet. If that's your shtick, I respect it, but it's not my vibe. I'm much more inspired by styles like Rococo, Baroque, and Art Nouveau; artists like Pissarro, Monet, and Cézanne; the interior design of châteaus in France and the exterior design of Disneyland.

Lore is valuable online currency these days. A finalist for Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year (it lost to “brain rot”), this Old English word for knowledge has become slang for dramatic, and often traumatic, details that define a person’s existence. Driven by the impulse to self-mythologize and spin yarns, young people are enshrining even... See more

one of my favorite Ken Liushort stories reflects on the narrator’s attempt to remember his departed wife. He writes:

I can’t remember the dress she wore or what she had bought; I can’t remember what we did for the rest of that afternoon; I can’t re-create the exact timbre of her voice or the precise shapes of her features, the lines at the corners

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Neo-cities : When do people start new cities vs. reforming existing ones? Is Singapore an urbanist paradise or technofascist dystopia? What can the US learn from Special Economic Zones? Can you do urban renewal right? What’s the difference between Esmeralda and California Forever? Why do most charter cities fail? How might they succeed?

Read the newspaper

To that last point, consider getting a newspaper subscription, even just for one day a week (I’d go with Sunday, personally). It’s a slower and more resonant way to process the week’s headlines. No clicking away. Also, if I might submit some superficial rationale here: sitting in the kitchen reading a newspaper looks and feels... See more

These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter.