Sublime

Again, I’m picking on Scott for reasons. The same is true of every other essayist I love. Sam Kriss at his best provides catharsis; at his worst, a sense of jaded superiority. Ted Gioia at his best makes me fall in love with art and music as if for the first time; at his worst, like I’m part of a small culturally-literate elite in a crumbling world... See more

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste . The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toi... See more

In the post-hipster era, you listened to what Spotify told you to listen to. If you read a book, it was because the precise pattern of blobby pastel-coloured shapes on its cover contained coded instructions to TikTok’s algorithm that sent it zooming to the top of your feed. Your tastes and preferences were decided for you by vast crystalline machin... See more

The invisible and the small is rapidly spreading as a desirable, status-signaling social experience beyond Tyler Brûlé’s world, Japanese bars, and menswear forums.

the somewhat undefinable, unstable feeling of realness, wherever it lays and however it can be expressed these days