taste
People love to post about how they’re “obsessed” with a pair of jeans, or with Flossie the world’s oldest cat (respect), or with something else they will forget exists within minutes of posting about it. They love to pretend they “can’t stop thinking about” Bolivian neo-Andean... See more
Bring back real obsession
Jan 08, 2026
Link
And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room that left their house to experience something.
Streaming is an affront to God
And so, when people valorize these kinds of outmoded media, and outmoded acts of endurance and devotion, I don’t think it’s just about empty nostalgia. Because these are touchstones and processes — precisely in their inefficiency — by which people can open themselves up to transformative experience, and honor the depth and fullness of what art means to us.
W. David Marx • Only Fads: A Culture (And Economy) of Labubu
intentionality
The New Yorker Roundup
As a general strategy for cultural consumption, omnivorism was very smart: Erecting artificial barriers against “low”... See more
The New Yorker Roundup
It’s easy to forget that we used to find music, movies, photography, and books entirely offline. You’re more likely to discover something truly serendipitous and surprising flipping through vintage magazines at your local public library than endlessly scrolling an Instagram feed that’s already tailored to your taste. Stroll through an... See more
Escape the algorithm | Dirt
Joanne McNeil • where do my legs go
Where I care about this stuff is, well, I wish there would be more good readers. That more people would turn to work with a sense of expansiveness rather than moral accounting. Art is created with work but our enjoyment and appreciation of it isn’t work. Well, it doesn’t have to be.
Joanne McNeil
It’s hard to explain, but it was very easy to be new at that... See more
Article
We celebrate the fact that most artists today have a huge portion of humankind’s output at their fingertips at any given moment, but we rarely think about the fact that exposure and abundance can also become a paralytic. Eno said he wanted to hear a certain kind of music, so he had to invent it for himself. Who feels the need to make new music, when you can almost always call up music that is completely new to your ears?
Sometimes when I watch my 8-year-old making music, I note how unencumbered he is by musical history and how free he is of any need to be original. He is happy, for now, to make music that is a parody of what he’s heard, and in the parodying, he comes up with his own thing. It’s new to him and that’s what’s important.
In fact, this is the great gift of children: everything is new to them, and so it can become new to you, if you let it.