Things of the week

• Keith McNally’s gadabout son is opening his own NYC French restaurant.

• Beautiful abstract paintings and installations drawn from the I Ching.

• Flying ultra first class means you never have to interact with another human being. Total privacy (aka isolation) is the new luxury!

• Great literary nonfiction essay from n+1: Finding the Cattle Queen. Stick with it all the way through.

• Tokyo’s duct-tape typographer subway employee helped to design an extremely stylish ad in Shinjuku Station for a new Nike store.

• What is the “influencer novel”? (Acute criticism, but a genre we do not want to read.)

Acquired Taste

by Clara Malley

Brands are chasing a sense of good taste online, but that leads to a dead end if there’s nothing else behind it. Is “character” the new taste? (Excerpted from Side Projects.)

If for every year in Brand World you received a new buzzword badge for your Brownie sash — a “community” badge in 2023-2024, a “worldbuilding” badge in 2023-2022, a “purpose” badge for 2021-2020 — the 2025-2026 badge is “taste.” Some of the same brands once clamoring to prove their digital literacy via TikTok and brainrot are now eager to communicate their taste via Jacquemus- style “filmic” video.

Perhaps this desire for prestige social was brought about by the realization that social-native (memes, lo-fi everything) is ugly, or by the rise of slop and the diminishing returns of competing with bots to be the most unhinged, or because it’s counterproductive for brands to latch their kisser onto the human centipede of brand accounts commenting under a viral video (it is).

I’m pro-“brands looking to have a creative opinion again,” especially compared to the alternative in which even organic advertising — as opposed to only the paid, hyper-targeted, terrifying stuff — mirrors slop. I also agree with the popular thinkpiece thesis that pursuing taste and elevating expertise is an important bulwark against AI and human-engineered content that’s generated to engage eyeballs and not enrich life. But when the pursuit of taste is diminished to the pursuit of “better” content, it stops being a defense against the worst effects of algorithmic recommendations and can instead be another kind of entrapment.

It’s easy to harp on social media for propagating “bad” taste; that could, to you, mean basic West Village girlie-pop; bland and beige interiors; meathead grindset DIL videos, etc. But algorithms throw seeds of good taste into the wind as well. These Jacquemus-type videos are the social marketing equivalent of Scandinavian furniture; of a big and healthy monstera plant; of the tasteful yet pervasive; and hollow, sophistication that Vincenzo Latronico describes in his novel Perfection. The repetitiveness of this “good taste” content on social is striking. All roads lead to a carousel post of the Fallen Angels tunnel scene. To Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. To Madonna leaving a gym in London (#mood). To 90s Playstation ads. To the Oasis vs. Blur charity match.

These kernels of good taste get melted down to scrap in the algorithm and turned into a mimetic version of “good” taste which has come to shape the slop-free corners of social media. It’s given rise to quote-unquote creative entrepreneur professions like tablescaping. It feeds the churn of viral aesthetics. It’s responsible in part for the proliferation of mood accounts and curator accounts that repost each other and themselves. It’s also a factor in the feeling of hollowness via deja vu that being on social media increasingly inspires. The rise of filmic brand vignettes is a kind of culmination, the entrance of mass consumer brands to the fray signaling here, as always, that the sharp edges of culture — and of tastemaking brands — need to get sharper.

We’re seeing the salient dividing line shift from being about demonstrating good taste via content to proving that you’ve earned your stripes; recent writing about the “death of cool” by Anu Lingala and Charli XCX has a version of this problem at its center. I expect we’ll see a shift in emphasis from taste to character, in which the premium is placed on contradiction over cohesion and the specificity of one’s interests over generalized cultural fluency. I’m thinking: incongruous hobbies (ex. Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men), niche and unprestigious collections (stamps? pennies?), and prickliness toward commercial fluency and palatability. Not driven by a desire to be cool or interesting per se but by a desire to be free of the pasteurized good taste, the style without substance, that the algorithm often encourages.

Brands and creatives must prioritize the idea over the image. The shift toward Substack is an early indication. It’s harder to fake your “taste credentials” in a 1000+ word article than in an IG Carousel. A migration away from short-form platforms toward digital and physical surfaces allows for higher concept, more time-consuming work that extends beyond a single TikTok or a single retail season. And while I don’t believe a mass exodus is in the cards, I do think more rising creatives and brands will decide that the effort to cultivate a social media presence is simply not worth the reward. And rather than waiting to hit 200k followers — or be ripped off by the masses — they will take their creative output far beyond the reaches of Mark Zuckerberg’s limp rhymes-with-stick.

Clara Malley is a senior director at the studio and podcast Side Projects. Order a copy of Side Projects Issue 01 here.

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Best of One Thing

Look back through the archives for OT’s greatest hits. We send out weekly bulletins of culture news and original commentary.

• An Asian grocery store for anywhere Get your boutique soy sauces and frozen dumplings through ecommerce.

• This is not a small plates restaurant Diners are getting tired of tiny sharing plates and the cliche natty wine bar.

• Our camera rolls, our selves Phone camera rolls store every moment of our lives. What does this infinity of photography mean?

• Aggregation theory Big media companies and tiny Substacks alike are competing to offer authoritative viewpoints.

• The disappearing Insta grid Why we don’t like posting to Instagram’s main feed anymore.

Things of the week

• Sparkling Haribo for sale: One Thing contributor Emily Chang has launched Worlds, which is both a beautiful web design & branding project and an ecommerce operation for niche international candy, including blueberry cheesecake-flavored KitKats. “In most stores, foreign candy is displayed like a cheap grocery commodity rather than a special object of taste,” Emily said. The site’s elegant, animated photo shoots show off the products like an art gallery. Part of the inspiration came from Emily’s work trips for Uniqlo: “At the end of the day, we would go down to the 7-11 inside Uniqlo’s headquarters and spend the rest of our per diem. Needless to say, I spent it all on candy.” Check out the site, and maybe buy some grape-flavored Vineyard Jellybeans.

• NYC is poised for a pub boom: Jess Shadbolt, of hip NYC restaurant King, opens Dean’s, a nostalgic riff on a British pub, serving Cornwall’s most photogenic dish: a seafood pie with fish heads poking through the crust. Recession indicator??

• New dream chore coat: In a Paris suburb, New Zealand designer Oliver Church aka Singular Garments makes shirts and jackets one at a time from vintage French textiles sourced at flea markets — say, kelsch linen from Alsace trousseaus. One shirt takes up to 35 hours. “The best way to make money is not the best way to make clothes,” he says. Be warned: they cost €700, but you’ll want one. Follow on Insta.

• Don’t overexpose your swag: Buenos Aires musician Estratosfera on how the stock-like imagery she made for her debut single went so viral it lost its origin, which made her turn against it. Good interview on the latest internet aesthetics.

• Pierre Hardy has designed shoes for Hermès for 35 years straight.

• Artists are creating handmade, animated No AI Used disclaimers.

• If you collect enough Vivienne Westwood they might ask you to curate an exhibition of it.

• Are we still trying to look “old money”?: Guy Trebay takes on the rich fashion aesthetic — no logos, monochrome, nice textures — and the coaches who try to teach it online. Trebay is too much of a legend to be accused of being late, but I feel like there’s a new, more maximalist style looming.

• In a piece for Monocle, the estimable Colin Nagy argues that media should focus on building understanding instead of providing iterative news updates.

• The swankiest property in Brooklyn is a Crown Heights carriage house renovated by an architect couple who carefully assembled vintage materials. The cedar soaking tub is the star of the show. Only $5.895 million.

What was the publication?

by Kyle Chayka

As media consumption pivots toward singular personalities and multimedia platforms, the stars take power while institutional voices fade.

Two big things are happening right now in the relatively dry world of media business mergers and acquisitions. The first is that Vox Media, the parent company of Vox, The Verge, SBNation, and other publications you might know, is working to sell off its Vox Media podcast network, which produces shows for its own brands as well as with many celebrity-y partners, ranging from Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway to Megan Rapinoe and Esther Perel. Semafor covered the potential sale first, then NYT reported that Versant, a huge media conglomerate that owns CNBC and MS Now, is the likely buyer. Then, OpenAI bought TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network), a livestreaming, internet-TV tech talk show starring two bro-y entrepreneurs that gained traction on X. The price is reported to be in the low hundreds of millions of dollars — nearly the price Jeff Bezos paid for the entire Washington Post.

On the surface these are very different deals. OpenAI is buying the livestreamed-video-podcast because it wants to improve its corporate communication strategies, developing what sounds like AI-friendly media messaging, though they have pledged not to interfere with TBPN’s editorial process. TBPN’s advertising, which netted some $30 million in annual sales, immediately disappeared on the announcement of the acquisition, meaning that its primary business model (and the theoretical basis of its price) is totally undermined by its new owner. Vox Media sees its podcast division as a valuable asset that it would make money from by divesting it at a moment in which its price is at a peak (though it’s probably cheaper than TBPN’s hyped value), and it will likely sell to another corporate media production house. Both entities are selling on the way up, taking the money while it’s there, and both are valued based on their charismatic personalities who broadcast themselves on microphone and camera. “Vox Media is a creator collective,” the media reporter Mark Stenberg wrote after SXSW. That’s certainly not how we would have described it six years ago.

Faces and voices are how digital content is consumed now, and it’s where the highest ad rates are. I think consumers are gravitating toward markers of authenticity in the age of AI (livestreaming can’t be generated, for now), and multimedia is also simply an easier, more passive format to consume than text. It’s more believable and it’s less work — which doesn’t mean it’s better journalism; usually, it’s the opposite. This all makes me wonder about the fate of the “publication” or “magazine,” the media institutions that actually generate the journalism that podcasters reference and commodify. Publications are collective brands that provide an umbrella identity for many different people: journalists, editors, designers, fact checkers, social media producers. They are not just one or two celebrity voices. We love publications in theory, but we actually don’t have that many surviving with coherent identities and editorial outlooks. The Verge has that, as does my employer The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine, among others. Then there are much smaller indie publications like Defector or Aftermath, which have strong voices and devoted fanbases. Many other titles are defunct or lost in some vague middle ground, unable to compete in a Joe Rogan universe.

Institutional brands are less appealing and seemingly less valuable at the moment. Vox Media apparently tried to sell its publications as well as its podcasts, but did not get a good enough offer. Many of the most successful journalists are now building out independent companies under their own names (Joanna Stern, the former WSJ tech columnist, is one of the latest). Emerging freelance writers are focusing as much on their Substacks than their magazine commissions (Jasmine Sun, who recently became a contributor at The Atlantic, is a great example of the new model). Kylie Robison went from Wired to working for Ashlee Vance’s YouTube channel / newsletter. Institutions are hustling to find multimedia stars in their own newsrooms. The NYT hired a “video training” editor to develop talent. Is every magazine destined to become a daily livestreamed video show starring its editor-in-chief ensconced in some cozy library-esque study, like a fireside chat? I could see it. The “show” is the new magazine.

It makes me nostalgic for the early days of n+1 or The Awl, when you read an article (text!) as much for where it came from as who wrote it. The new, hot media brands lack the infrastructure as well as the identity of an umbrella publication — which also means they’re much more vulnerable when the individual voices burn out or leave. An institution can scale; an individual cannot. If you don’t have charisma in-house, you can try to buy it, a la OpenAI and TBPN, or maybe try to grow it, as this job listing for The Strategist seems to do (a criminally low salary for “hosting” shortform video). But there’s always the risk the talent will just run away from your publication and start their own.

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🟧 Most popular links from the previous edition

• Buy LL Bean’s Japan-only designs

• Why you hate your weather app

• Play Wind Waker in your browser

• Hosting a midnight omelette party

• NYC “microscenes”

🟧 More Media Thoughtz from One Thing:

• Should you write a Substack instead of a book?: On the new ways knowledge is monetized online.

• Gathering attention: How to re-organize audiences and focus their attention on the fragmented internet.

• Conversations are the new unit of culture: Why people talking to each other and the performance of expertise have become so important.

• The new rules of media: 20 guidelines for digital media during the video-podcast age, aka, why you need a personality cult.

• What makes a good newsletter?: An expert roundtable about newsletter strategy. Are there too many!? Does good writing matter!?

Things of the week

• Morandi’s force field: The photographer Joel Meyerowitz spent time in the legendary 20th-century Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi’s preserved Bologna studio documenting its contents: cracked ceramic vases, dusty glass bottles, anonymous model cylinders. Meyerowitz’s newly reissued book collects the images. Morandi was “assembling a force field of geometric objects,” the photographer told Hyperallergic. If you don’t know Morandi, you should, and you’ll like him.

• Reality TV is kind of dying: The annual number of unscripted series being produced has dropped a third since 2022. "There are fewer channels greenlighting fewer shows, and it all seems to be moving unstoppably to the bottom," says Mark Cronin, a producer on the Below Deck franchise. Maybe reality is just user-generated on TikTok now.

• There’s a new weather app in town, from the founder of Dark Sky.

• “Microscenes”: T Magazine maps New York’s creative subcultures and their niche gathering spots, including such highlights as the Midtown subway and a Chinese restaurant. Prompts the question: Is doing absolutely anything in NYC a “scene”? Is my bathroom a microscene??

• An heirloom calculator: Casio’s new S100X calculator costs $624 and has glossy black finish from a month of hand-applied lacquer by a Japanese lacquerware house founded in 1930. Only 650 will be made.

• Parisian slop bowls: A Sweetgreen-style restaurant called Elle & Dee’s is getting buzz in Paris, where shrinking lunch breaks and creeping wellness culture have made giant “influencer lunch” salads suddenly aspirational.

• Do some Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker sailing in your browser. IYKYK.

• There’s going to be a Labubu movie, duh.

• If you were on Tumblr in 2014 you might recognize the “art hoe” discourse. Here’s another specimen.

• Silicon Valley AI companies are showing off by hosting private dinners in clubby rooms, forgoing big parties and flashy seafood towers.

• LL Bean is allowing U.S. shoppers to buy its Japanese designs for a limited time, including an amazing field coat.

• Best thing we read this week: The FT throws a midnight omelette party as described (theorized?) by Martha Stewart and documents it in exhausting detail, including super fun party photos in an actually normal-sized apartment. Why don’t more publications do lifestyle projects like this??

The best anchovies on the internet

by Kyle Chayka

It’s kind of a commitment to spend $30 on anchovies. They don’t have the reputation of a luxury fish, at least to Americans. They tend to be packed into pungent tins, little bricks of flavor to be wholly dissolved into something else. Still, I find myself using them more and more often in home cooking, blended into a caesar dressing or chopped up with garlic to toss with radicchio. That mounting enthusiasm is why I took a chance on Nettuno’s alici salate, a large jar of salt-cured anchovies in water from Cetara in southwestern Italy, right near Amalfi. These are ANCHOVIES, unignorable. They are finger-sized, full-bodied, with a skeleton you must extract before cooking. The salt is rock sugar-sized and must be rinsed off. They are also the most delicious little fishies I have ever eaten, with an almost fruity oceanic flavor and bouncy texture, slightly closer to Spanish-style boquerones, albeit much funkier.

I first bought a Nettuno jar from a provisions store in Kent, Connecticut, at the urging of the proprietor, who assured me it would be worth it — she imported them herself. The jar lasted for many months, deployed a few anchovies at a time. But when it was empty I mourned its absence. So I hunted down a way to buy them online, which was offered by the Italian importer Gustiamo. We are living through a renaissance of specialty groceries delivered via ecommerce. The anchovies shipped wrapped in bubble wrap and brown paper, heavily insulated. I cracked them open and the scent of the Tyrrhenian Sea filled the kitchen. (Thankfully the seal contains the smell in your fridge, where you’ll store these fishies.) My most frequent use of the ingredient is to chop up the meaty filets and add them to vegetable-heavy pasta so that the briny fish oil helps coat the pasta and thickens any sauce. Below, a quick recipe.

Anchovy midnight pasta (thx to Rachel Roddy)

• ~5+ cloves garlic

• ~3+ anchovies

• 1 dry Italian chili pepper or pinch of flakes

• 1 lb spaghetti, ideally thick and bronze-die

• 1 bunch of parsley

• parmesan cheese

Filet the anchovies and chop them up into small, but not tiny, chunks — as large as you might want to get in a bite of pasta. Slice the garlic cloves. Chop the parsley stems into bits and separate the leaves. Boil salted water and add the pasta. Meanwhile, saute the garlic and chili in a generous amount of olive oil (our recommendation is Mr. Papou’s) on very low for 5 minutes until soft. Then, add the parsley stem bits and anchovy chunks and keep sauteing. Some will dissolve. Throw in a 1/4 cup of the boiling pasta water into the saute pan, keep on a low simmer. Then transfer the (very) al dente pasta into the garlic / anchovy / oil / water mixture. Keep cooking while stirring & flipping (use tongs) until the pasta is a desired texture and the sauce coheres and thickens, adding more oil or pasta water to complete. Toss in grated parmesan cheese and parsley leaves at the end while still hot before serving, so that the cheese melts and the parsley wilts a little.

Buy Nettuno alici salate

🟧 One Thing on groceries

• An Asian grocery store for anywhere,

• Good bulk olive oil is a life hack

• RIP millennial groceries

• Hype olive-oil chips

• Light roast vs. dark roast coffee

🟧 Most popular links from the previous edition

• Death of a creative agency

• Japanese weekly planners

• Why tech bros are obsessed with “taste”

• Jony Ive’s post-Apple designs

• A new glossy international magazine

Things of the week

• TikTok amateur architecture: DIY cabin-builders are amassing followers posting daily construction updates for their ramshackle structures. Social media might dictate the future of architecture, as with every other industry: “Whoever’s the most visible gets to get the most work.”

• Matthieu Blazy’s debut Chanel collection saw buyers richer and poorer lining up for hours for $1,500 shoes. It might be the highlight of the recent carousel of designers switching brands.

• New New Museum: After a two-year closure, the New Museum reopened with a new OMA-designed building expansion. In this fun conversation Hyperallergic editors complain that the stairs are too slippery. Jason Farago covered it in NYT: It’s a “not-quite-finished new building.” (Unsurprising since it was supposed to open last December.)

• NA apocalypse: Only 54% of Americans drink now, which is bad for restaurants’ bottom lines.

• Kyle’s latest New Yorker column is on the wanton abuse of the word “taste” by tech bros, who want to claim human creativity and decision-making in an era of AI.

• Since 2019, ex-Apple designer Jony Ive’s new firm LoveFrom has designed a Christie’s rostrum, Moncler outerwear, a Balmuda lantern, and Ferrari’s first EV interior. All of it is pretty cool tbh.

• Glossy international magazine: Now Voyager is a new print magazine that promises six issues a year, big-name contributors, and the kind of global, culture-forward coverage that has been the province of Monocle. Are we due for a renaissance in foreign bureaux?? Browse the debut stories on its site.

• The 2026 World Happiness Report ranks Finland happiest for the ninth year running. No English-speaking country made the top ten.

• Creative agency death spiral: Madison Utendahl shut down her award-winning Brooklyn branding studio. Here she reflects on the vicious cycle of low-margin work, over-hiring, and hustling for new clients. Rare honest writing on the business of commercial culture.

Japanese calendar drop

by Nate Gallant

For those who missed the rush to buy Japanese-branded calendars/planners from the few shops that ship to the US these days, the “April-start” line recently dropped on Jetpens, the most reliable and well-stocked online shop for Japanese pens and stationary. They have an amazingly detailed guide for which version might best fit wherever you fall on the planning spectrum: from hour-by-hour grids or an entirely blank day/week format. I recommend the Hobonichi Techo Weeks, personally, for the weekly-panorama view with plenty of room for notes on the side, and a high-enough grade paper to withstand most fountain pen ink.

Diner goth mania

by Kyle Chayka

Ohhh boy!! Online controversy. The most discourse-generating piece of the week by far was “American Diner Gothic,” an essay in the conservative journal The New Atlantis, by Robert Mariani, a conservative-ish writer who also happens to be the founder of an AI dating coach startup. As an amateur anthropologist Mariani observes the way previously niche digital cultures — anime, Discord, Tumblr, extremely online identities — have taken root in the American hinterland of non-coastal suburbs. Mariani ties it to economic exhaustion and the flattening force of corporate aesthetics. If you over look certain problematic elements (never put a breakup in your Americana travelogue essay), the writing is fun, lively, and stakes claims in a way that feels rare these days:

The story goes like this. The great stagnation desacralizes local America through the homogeneous efficiency-machine of national private equity, and everything flattens. Gen Z is disinherited by Boomer policy that culminates but never crests, rationing the good life in generational warfare. Regional accents and identities and cultures are vanishing. Liquid Internet flows into this void as a mass-vision event, the mythic power of fandom and content overflowing from and washing over millions of minds in placeless America, the new soul of a soulless world. Subcultures and nerd cultures disappear into simply culture, self-oblivious and technicolor and sincere in a way that postmodernism could never permit. Instead: a riot of myth and meaning in the fandom-noosphere that bootstraps itself from and then forgets the North American provinces.

It’s a provocation rather than an authoritative statement. The furor with which the essay has been met on social media is proof of its incendiary quality. The critic must also be a troll these days. I read it like I read Rem Koolhaas’s architectural criticism — The Generic City, say. It’s cartoonish polemic, and that’s the point. To address Mariani’s argument: There have been nerds in suburbia forever, and young people hide in whatever subculture they can find and meaningfully participate in (I should know!). That might be ‘80s goth or it might be Tumblr vaporwave Serial Experiments Lain-core. What’s new here, as always, are the scale and speed at which niche subculture becomes universal reference point. And, I think, the sensory weirdness of the overall lifestyle, which I might compare to my description of “IRL brain rot.”

Streaming anime - vape shop - Vtuber - Discord - hair dye - American suburbia is, if nothing else, an extremely powerful aesthetic, and one that will probably become even more dominant, in a quiet, pervasive way. After all, when economic mobility seems impossible and the hyper-wealthy ascend into a realm of Ozempic and Aman Resorts, delving deep into your own abject aesthetic is one of the few escape routes available to your psyche. Become as alienating to the “normal” as possible.

ARC Raiders: Hyper-aesthetic gaming

by Emily Chang

As the world outside feels increasingly volatile, everyone seems to be opting in to a different one: ARC Raiders. Everything I have learned about this PS5 game is against my will — and tempting me to join. Several friends — VPs of Creative at large fashion houses, creative directors, and fashion photographers — have all been getting happily lost in this charismatic and cinematic extraction shooter game set in a future lethal Earth. The game is as much a social experiment as it is a survival trial. It’s gorgeous. It’s social. It’s inventive. And apparently, it’s notorious for taking over your life. Because it’s heavily mic/sound-based, online interactions feel startingly IRL. You can even blast music through your “speaker” in the game. The aesthetic pull is so strong that there’s even a Reddit dedicated to in-game photography, while a videographer has already made three short films within the game by recruiting and live-directing players as his cast. Even the downtime is curated: If you find instruments and play them with other people, the game syncs you all up together to create a musical ensemble.

(European) football menswear update

by Nate Gallant

Football’s most famous current coach, Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola, has been long admired/teased by the British media’s quasi-lad-o-sphere (and well beyond) for “avant-garde” knitwear and designer cargo pants. Tuesday night, he showed up to a UEFA champion’s league second leg, in which Manchester City were staring down a 3-0 deficit from the first leg, in this green-gray, plaid-ish overshirt. His look was read on social media from irreverent to “geography teacher,” which I found interesting given that the apparently confusing novelty of his outerwear—slightly updated, slightly gorpier/knitty 90’s nostalgia-fits—are fairly old now in runway terms. They do generate a lot of conversation, and not just from GB News, but he’s inarguably late to the game in terms of wearing an over-shirt to tell people you could care less about what they think of you.

The winners of critical theory

by Nate Gallant

For the hardcore dialectical materialists out there, who have potentially heard quite a bit now about the new biography of Walter Benjamin, The Pearl Diver, here’s another recommendation: Gabriel Rockill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, out as of December 2025 from Monthly Review Press. The book has been received controversially by intellectual historians of the 20th-century, as it challenges fundamental beats in the narrative of the “new left” in Europe. Rockhill, a philosopher, academic, and contributor to several notable critical outlets in French and English, examines who stood to and did benefit, institutionally and financially, from the enthronement of a certain reading of Frankfurt School as “theory” and the subsequent, interrelated emergence of “French theory” in the 1960s (this latter point is more explicitly elaborated elsewhere, too). If anything, I can very well imagine the polemic category he marshals in this book, “the compatible left,” getting swallowed and repurposed by social media moralizing voices sooner rather than later.

Things of the week

• A great, throwback magazine-style piece on writing about drinking cocktails right before the financial crisis, with an update on the grand hotel bars of Paris. Voicey af!!

• The creator of Wordle launched his new word game, Parseword, which teaches us the niche activity of cryptic crosswords.

• Nigo, the major international tastemaker and founder of the pivotal Japanese streetwear brand Bape and the newer brand Humanmade, is now obsessed with making ceramics.

• Another Gaze is a feminist online film journal that just relaunched with a stack of great essays. Talk about building better cultural discourse.

• We enjoyed Elvia Wilk’s interview of Andrew Martin, the millennial novelist who has a new novel out, Down Time, about millennial writers. Wilk, a great critic and novelist herself, inquires into the underbelly of making fiction.

• Pitchfork goes very long on a single synth-heavy track from the soundtrack of Donkey Kong Country 2, in case you thought music criticism was dead.

The difference between Substacks and books

by Kyle Chayka

If you want to sustain a career as a creator of culture, you have to make money. Different kinds of artists do this in different ways. Painters sell a bunch paintings once every few years and split the prices with their dealers. Musicians get minuscule streaming checks and sell concert tickets and t-shirts. Comedians go on tour and sell rights to their streaming specials. Writers sell books — kind of. Only one out of five books, and probably far fewer than that, earn more money in sales than the author was paid as an advance, so real income from royalties is quite rare. Enough books hit it big that the longterm economics still work out for publishers, at least. Meanwhile, less-than-bestselling authors have to survive any way they can: teaching classes, hosting writing retreats, selling their clothes on Depop — or charging subscriptions for a newsletter.

Substack newsletters have been an economic lifeline for any number of writers who don’t quite fit in to a slot with an institutional salary. I see art journalists and radical novelists and longform magazine writers (among other semi-extinct breeds) paywalling their latest dashed-off dispatches. That’s because in business terms — and we are all businesses in the end — the subscription newsletter works extremely well. There’s a business concept called “lifetime value”, LTV, that refers to the amount of money a business can expect to make from a new customer on average over the duration of the relationship. For a writer, the LTV of a Substack subscriber is many times higher than the LTV of a book buyer. A Substack subscriber pays monthly at a rate of $5-$10ish, the price that seems to have been found acceptable for some emails by the internet marketplace. That amounts to perhaps $100 a year, and many subscribers, like many gym members, hang on to subscriptions for far longer than they use them, out of loyalty or laziness. An author could make $300 in LTV from a single new subscriber, while a single book sale could net $5, or maybe $20 if you write enough books in a career.1 It’s a quirk of digital consumer habits that right now knowledge (or storytelling) is better monetized in an email than a book. Maybe we can say that newsletters better monetize an individual’s fandom, while a book better monetizes fandom at scale, hundreds of thousands of people at once, for the already famous.

I will get to the differences between the two formats and the many caveats to this thesis later on. But as they presumably teach you in MBA school, it makes sense for a business to try harder to market and sell the product that makes more money. For many authors, particularly those with a pre-existing platform to work from, hustling to convert a new newsletter subscriber is likely much more profitable (again, on a single-customer basis) than working on a new book. That could be viewed as a good thing, because the labor that goes into writing a book should be valued much higher than it is. A reader doesn’t pay a higher price for a physical book just because she wants it more, or because the book was harder to create; prices are relatively flat, whether it’s by a niche poet, an abstruse historian, or a big-idea blogger. A print book is also not necessarily the ideal container for the kinds of knowledge- or culture-production that happen in our video / audio / image-dominated digital environment. Email newsletters with multimedia embeds might make more sense for contemporary consumers, who in turn pay more money for them. Radically more money.

I think this underrecognized phenomenon was behind the shock at a “Fashion Substacker” highlighted in New York Magazine who made an annual $127,000 from Substack subscriptions and $148,300 from brand partnerships (that is, sponsored content presumably in their newsletter and social accounts). “I am making more than I ever could as a journalist,” the person said. That’s because their individual writing, and the scope of their influence, is valued much more highly by subscribers and brands than, say, the salary for a full-time job at NYmag’s The Strategist. In a way, larger media companies have lost track of the true value of unique content and aren’t particularly good at capturing the value of unique voices. Add to that the decline of institutional credibility — audiences may rather follow a single influencer / creator than subscribe to a magazine’s curated collection of voices — and there’s a real quandary.

So should a writer just embark on a Substack rather than a book and scramble to accumulate any paid subscribers she can? The whole idea is kind of facetious — you don’t have to choose, because newsletters and books are mutually reinforcing. A Substack audience is more likely to buy your eventual book and satisfied book readers are more likely to pay for a newsletter. (The writer Casey Johnston very successfully transformed her fitness column Ask a Swole Woman into paid newsletters, courses, digital community, and a book all at once.) A newsletter can be a kind of iterative book manuscript, a way to broadcast and test material and find out what resonates with audiences, the way a business might carry out focus groups or market testing. A book can also transform the inherent value of a trove of newsletters into a new form and reach new audiences out in the real world, on bookstore shelves. Books are meant to be evergreen and portable, while newsletter archives don’t get much attention. (There’s a ton of value to be extracted from evergreen newsletter archives. The click-through rates to old One Thing editions are huge.)

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The downside of the new, paywalled Substack Ecosystem of Knowledge Monetization is that no one is going to help you succeed. No publisher is going to pay you an advance, though I dream of Simon & Schuster subsidizing a new writer’s Substack in exchange for royalties forever. No one is going to edit your newsletter unless you pay them to do it, no one is going to design you a beautiful cover, no one is going to line up bookstore launches for you. There’s no clout to starting a newsletter, unlike publishing a book, precisely because there’s no gatekeepers. Like all forms of social media, newsletters are also quicksand. You start out with high aims, promising literary reviews; deep-reading or watching projects; feature reporting dug from the far reaches of the internet or the real world. But soon you’re paywalling your breakfast habits, capsule winter wardrobe, and Mallorcan hotel recommendations (nothing wrong with that). Everything devolves into recslop. As Emily Sundberg wrote in a major critique of the Substack platform in 2024, it’s a great place for people to “monetize their diary entries — lists, random thoughts, and (easy to write) roundups of ‘what I’ve been doing’ do really well on this site.” When your diary entries are so profitable, why write anything else?

The iterative, ongoing, and intimate nature of a newsletter feeds the online demand for parasocial content, content that encourages audiences to imagine they know its creator personally in a kind of one-sided digital friendship. A book commodifies one carefully composed edifice of knowledge, while a newsletter commodifies the patter of someone’s internal monologue. A book might be read in a century or two’s time; a newsletter will not be. (The only blogs / newsletters that should be remembered by posterity are Patrick Tsai and Madi Ju’s My Dead Little Dick and Tsai’s Talking Barnacles.) Books are not the most parasocial medium, but they are the best form we’ve invented for a reader drawing close in a sustained way to the consciousness of another human being. So if you’re trying to construct a monument to your own genius, a book is probably your best bet. Just ask Proust.

That said, as this essay began, creating culture takes resources, and when everyone is an influencer, you might as well commodify yourself as an influencer does. They make way more money.

More Media Thoughtz from One Thing:

• Gathering attention: How to re-organize audiences and focus their attention on the fragmented internet.

• Conversations are the new unit of culture: Why people talking to each other and the performance of expertise have become so important.

• The new rules of media: 20 guidelines for digital media during the video-podcast age, aka, why you need a personality cult.

• What makes a good newsletter?: An expert roundtable about newsletter strategy. Are there too many!? Does good writing matter!?

• Aggregation theory: More writers and publications are focusing on creating valuable aggregation because social media sucks so much.

• Voice, taste, trust, scarcity: The values that publications need to keep in mind while competing for readers in the new, messy ecosystem.

Everyone is an (unintentional) influencer: Instagram is using AI to attach ecommerce links to your content, whether you want it or not. That’s bad if you’re an influencer, because Meta is stealing your business, and it’s unutterably cringe for a normal person who may not want to digitally commodify every aspect of their lives.

A new way to do performative reading: Coach is producing bag charms that are miniature versions of recent popular novels, including Welcome To The Hyunam-Dong Bookshop and Little Fires Everywhere. You can signal having read something without even needing a full book — though these charms do indeed contain the full text of the novels, the literal book as fashion accessory.

Apartment porn: Back in the 70s you could buy a full Soho loft on the salary of a newspaper music critic, eventually fill it with your CD collection, and then sell it for $4.5 million. No generation will ever be so lucky again.

Fall of the fourth wave

The booming Chinese coffee brand Luckin (rapidly expanding in NYC and around the world) just bought Blue Bottle, the flagship brand of bougie fourth-wave coffee roasters. The once-indie brand was acquired by Nestle in 2017, so it hasn’t been “authentic” for a long time. But real heads remember the steampunk location in Williamsburg and the novelty of watching a mustachioed barista make three pourovers at once. Blue Bottle pioneered the 21^st-century high-end aestheticizing of coffee, going beyond Starbucks or Stumptown to a kind of Japanese-Scandinavian utopian minimalism that has flourished in international cities. Who else installed flower arrangements next to their cold brew tanks? However, its artisanship looks less relevant in an era of matcha, customizable boba, and flavored protein cold foam. Plus, if we’re honest, Blue Bottle’s cafes were looking a little threadbare and haphazardly managed already. The brand lost its grip on integrity while spinning out into a slew of CPG products. Time for a new wave?

• Robinhood now makes swag, including bomber jackets and watches, if you want to dress like an anonymous X account.

• A digital museum of Chinese cigarette brands.

The Rose Wylie Renaissance

The 91-year-old British painter Rose Wylie is one of my favorite contemporary artists, and she’s having a moment around her current solo exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, the first solo show of a woman artist at that institution. Her style is somewhat indescribable, but imagine Basquiat if he grew up in post-war England, or Jean Dubuffet riffing with more elegance and prettiness on outsider art. Her artworks can be childlike and visually grating, trailing off into blank canvas or scrawled words. Yet they are instantly unforgettable and inimitable. Sure, you probably think you could paint like this — but you didn’t for the last century. Wylie brings a deep art-historical vocabulary and a mania for any kind of imagery, including a red-carpet photo of Nicole Kidman, which she turned into a kind of 21^st century history painting. Join in the Rose-aissance by exploring the show or read fascinating profiles of her — she gives great quotes — in BBC or The Guardian. David Zwirner has a show of her new paintings opening in Paris next month.

I asked my painter friend Tatiana Berg, who probably introduced me to her, what makes Wylie’s work so good. Here’s what she texted:

Artist shoes: I love these slip-on leather shoes from the highly philosophical Belgian brand An Irrational Element. I can just picture padding around my paint-spattered loft studio in them. Too bad they’re $520.

Best of One Thing

If you’re a new subscriber, look back through the archives for our greatest hits.

• The Starbucks reboot: The company’s new CEO is trying to turn it back into a “third space” with friendlier baristas.

• “Cutre”: On the special Spanish word for tacky roughness that can also be desirable, like a dive bar or a grumpy waiter.

• Chore coat shopping in Paris: Kyle buys a Vetra double-breasted chore coat at an historic workwear store.

• The new Storm King: The sprawling sculpture park is played out; go to Magazzino for some Italian postmodernism.

• Our camera rolls, our selves: Phone camera rolls store every moment of our lives. What does this infinity of photography mean?

Department store androgyny and Seongsu leather

by Nate Gallant

When I last traveled to Tokyo this past spring, the vintage stores were stuffed with cowboy boots in window displays, plentiful tassels, and clusters of rhinestones, unmissable across Shimokitazawa. I’ve been noticing an overall shift toward Western-wear: fashion that references cowpoke Americana, all-denim-everything. This Western moment, which seemed to hit saturation with Cowboy Carter, is dovetailing with peak designer-workwear of the Carhartt WIP mode, at least in menswear. We seem to have hit maximum chorecoat; the only place left to go is the open prairie. It veers into class-touristy fetishism if not outright Americana cringe.

Yet on a recent stop through Seoul this winter, I saw nothing of this neo-Westernism. As someone new to the Korean menswear scene, I came away with a sense of an alternative menswear proposition.The prep was slouchy, the clean lines of most outerwear cut through fluffy wools and visibly-textured merinos. The reference points I was used to seeing were jumbled, up and down the market. More than anything, I was intrigued by what seemed like very different but equally interesting approaches to menswear “basics” across the standard array of price points, rather than varying levels of quality for the same runway ripoffs, which then turn classic staples into runway-priced items: see Doc Martins or any denim jacket. What’s more, Korean fashion is more accessible in the United States than ever before, so it’s worth investigating even from abroad.

Un-basic basics

Musinsa is the mid-range aggregator supreme for trendy Korean brands. The website is a bit overwhelming–teeming with potential social media integration and personalization, overlapping categories, influencer recommendations, and lots of seasonal curation. The price points are, I think, fairly competitive for what they’re offering, especially in the cuts and the quality I’ve found thus far. The downside is international shipping and tariffs, though if you find yourself in East Asia, the actual stores are very fun. The chaotic curation is reproduced in-store, which had a way of encouraging androgynous fashion forward. You had to look at everything to look at anything, and there was little to tell you where to look based on fashion’s ideas about sex and gender – possibly apart from the somewhat ungenerous sizing. Musinsa stores dot Seoul and many other big cities, and are now moving into the domestic Chinese and Japanese markets.

The retailer’s offerings overall are a bit more creative than the instant runway ripoffs of, say, Zara or the glut of fast-fashion retail to be found in the US, and there is much more range for the level of quality and trendiness in the basics to be found compared to those slightly nicer but still mass produced and imported brands like Muji or Massimo Dutti. As a late winter, early spring cut, and a demonstration of the variety, check out their nice slouchy zip-ups and cardigans, as well as the super clean lines of their in-house brand Musinsa suede coat. There are relaxed preppy styles and also a good amount of lowish-priced vegan leather. As an American, I might stay away from the pants unless your desired pant cut veers very trendy, but you can also fit into a fairly skinny waist size (a quick look even at the larger sizes shows a very un-generous “seat” in the pants if you have wider hips). There is a general lack of sizing diversity on the website (I would in general size up unless you know how Korean menswear fits you), but this is especially true for the available inseam-to-waist ratios.

Cinematic fashion

At a similar price point is perhaps my favorite of the brands I encountered on a recent visit, if only for the conceptual gambit and variety. Kijun varies the styles of its clothing “seasons” into film concepts, for which all their clothing and accessories are the wardrobe. The sheer novelty of the idea is interesting, and the designs ask some playful questions about film as an enduring site for fashion and design influence. There’s nothing effortless about the bodies and their adornments in cinema, but their apparent effortlessness often speaks to the class and fitness aspiration of culture’s attitude towards any historical moment’s aesthetics of self-presentation. In that sense, making costuming the actual gambit of a fashion label, inviting the act of consumption into the site of this usually hidden labor and tastemaking, is a fun twist, and maybe even a twist away from the infinite reproduction of sameness and slop that comes with the expression of identity in clothing becoming an echo of social media dynamics.What kind of character might wear this faux-seersucker, button-up hoodie? What story are you a part of if you put on their Portofino hat? Something feels different about that narrative scaffolding, something a little more than a brand story, though less than “art,” as such. (Kijun’s flannels are very good and Western-revival adjacent, though.)

While Musinsa has sheer volume, if not overwhelming options, and Kijun a very functional English language website, at the higher end, it’s a bit more difficult to get a lay of the land or to access a curated selection of items outside of the bottleneck of traditional designer fashion aggregators (although Ssense has a very good roundup of Korean brands). There are certainly staples like Andersson Bell and Solid Homme, both of which have the requisite museum-wall white website and international ordering options, and whose outerwear I find to be second to none. Beyond this, the US, at least, I’m not sure where to find K-fashion boutiques in the way that there are for, say, Japanese, French, or Italian designers of various levels that department stores might not stock. Ssense and Mr. Porter will carry some higher end Korean designers, but brick-and-mortar specialty shops that have developed particularly around Japanese denim like Blue Owl Workshop or Blue in Green don’t, to my knowledge, exist (tell us if you know of a specialty Korean fashion store!).

Curated retail

The best boutique I visited while in Seoul was in Seongsu, a decent walk from the main shopping streets, a store called Central Post. It was a fascinating curated collection unto itself, carrying some British and Scandinavian outerwear (I was there in December), a sparse but impressive collection of blazers, along with a few of their own, very well tailored pants and shirts, and some eye-catching, locally handmade accessories. The highlight was their “Postman” branded shoes, on display at their website (unfortunately, only in Korean as far as I can tell). Without a doubt, the softest leather on which I have ever stood in an out-of-the-box shoe, but with incredible structure. In classic, trendy, and admittedly avant-garde styles. Seongsu, now casually described on fashion blogs as the “Brooklyn of Seoul,” still retains some remnants of its history as a leatherworking and shoemaking district – and this store was clearly keeping some part of this heritage alive.

Nate Gallant is a writer and translator based in DC.

One Thing is a weekly newsletter on high quality in culture: design, art, fashion, travel, and digital media. Subscribe here.

Tech design is too boring

by Emily Chang

I miss when tech was fun. When our devices felt like proper accessories in and of themselves — not just wacky cases, loud charms, and fat rings on our fingers that measure our heart rates in 14K gold. Listen, I just want to feel like the gadget I’m holding makes life a little dreamier or a little more exciting. Like the Holo from Manual Photo, a mini neo-digital camera with fun, transparent cases. Or the Polaroid iZone, the old-school pocket Polaroid.

Even the word “gadget” was more fun than what we have today, because it alluded to a world of possibilities, mischief, decadent design, and secret little everyday pleasures. Clear materials, a real variety of colors (why does the MacBook Air come in “navy” that’s basically black, but not completely black? and two different silvers don’t count), and buttons in non-functional shapes, just because. Teenage Engineering, the Swedish music equipment brand, is cool but is it really fun if you’re not a producer or don’t use the word audiophile? Not everyone needs a medieval sound sampler, no matter how much you might want one.

I don’t want the new iPhone. Thankfully, the dominant aesthetic might be shifting. I want Nothing, the transparency-forward indie smartphone maker that embraces a vintage tech aesthetic, a little more Gundam than Jony Ive minimalism. Nothing is launching a new midrange phone that will help you stand out in a sea sameness. What I’m really looking for is something that looks like the jewel-tone clear plastic of the 90s and feels like a club lounge — in fact, the emulator manufacturer Analogue is releasing new, transparent N64 machines. Or how about the ‘70s office designed by Gérard Grandval’s for Cacharel, with bare metal textures and curvilinear cubes? Let’s embrace weirdness.

Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.

Trust & Gardening in Kirishima

by Emily Chang

Last week, I was in Kirishima, a city in Kagoshima prefecture in Japan. Kagoshima is lovingly called “land of the gods” for its shrines and mythological history rooted in the Sakurajima volcano that lies just across the bay, which erupts multiple times a day. To me, it sounded like something out of a Zelda game, and their small-scale farming and famous black pigs (kurobuta, the “wagyu” of pork) only heightened this feeling for me. Of course, I was not there because of any of this; in fact, I didn’t even really know about it until I did a bit more research just before visiting my friend, the director Emily Okuda-Overhoff, who is typically based in London but had rented out an Airbnb for a month in Kirishima.

While there, I surprised myself by becoming particularly intrigued by Kirishima’s roadside farms. They are many different sizes — some feel like actual working farms, just on a smaller scale, but the ones I loved were the ones that were literally on the edge of sidewalks and no larger than a square yard. They presented neat little rows of turnips, cabbage, and other vegetables, terraced above sidewalks and local roads. Often, these small plots were in front of houses that were just along the road — any spare yard these families had, they turned into mini farms. I hesitate to use the word “garden” when describing them, because they felt too obsessive and precise to be gardens — they clearly did not exist for any decorative reasons — they were there to grow food and to nourish us.

Nothing gave me more peace than taking the electric bike down the mountain to find these small plots of land abutting sidewalks. There was never a fence around them. If someone wanted to, they could steal a few heads of lettuce, ignore the trusting wooden boxes that were labeled “One turnip 200 yen,” or destroy the perfect plotting. But of course, they wouldn’t. “It’s not the Japanese mind,” Emily told me. I imagined what an American suburb might look like if it had these on every block instead of perfectly manicured lawns (for what purpose?), or if New York City’s neighborhood gardens took this approach instead of the chaotic, hodge-podged shrubbery and poorly-maintained beds that so often populate its fenced-off gardens.

The roadside farms in Kirishima are made and maintained by people who care. A lot. Riding down these country roads, surrounded by small reminders of things people care so much about, surprised me because of how deeply happy it made me. It wasn’t the kind of joy I was expecting or usually looking for. It didn’t feel aspirational or glamorous, exactly. Instead, it felt sufficient. Maybe what we need isn’t so much constant progress and newness, but proximity and care to the things that sustain us. In Kirishima, care is measured in turnips, time, and trust, even in just a few feet of leftover space.

Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.

Substack or Be Substacked

by Kyle Chayka

As probably every reader of this newsletter already knows, the Washington Post just laid off more than three hundred journalists, gutting or eliminating many departments including sports, metro, international bureaus, and the book review. It’s a tragedy for its employees and its readers as well as a gut punch to the city where I live, which merits much more local coverage than it gets. The problem is, the Post under owner Jeff Bezos and executive editor Matt Murray doesn’t really see covering DC as its job. Beyond that, the publication’s leadership doesn’t know what its job is: there’s no clear brand, goal, or purpose. Without that, it’s impossible to have a business plan or even a message to sell to paying subscribers, who are leaving the paper in droves.

A handful of publications are doing general-interest journalism, covering the news at large, and surviving. The Guardian is doing it; the New York Times is thriving, and increasingly consolidating its authority. But what readers and media consumers (not to mention investors or prospective acquirers) are looking for now are tight focus areas and personal connections among anchor voices (“creators”) and readers / consumers. It’s easier to pay $10 a month for the Substack of one person you’re obsessed with than $10 a month for an anonymous newsroom that’s hard to connect with. Personality cults work. Small newsrooms work, too. Semafor has eaten part of WaPo’s lunch in DC, hosting high-power political and business events and offering a digestible, global news perspective, with a tiny fraction of the staff, and is thus already profitable. Other operations are YouTube channels, solo or duo podcasts, and low-weight Substacks (see the highly efficient Feed Me).

The journalists laid off from WaPo face a difficult, bifurcated choice between attempting to cling to the ever-smaller number of surviving journalism institutions or striking out on there own, alone or in small groups, to try to build more efficient and specific publications that don’t look like the newspapers of yore. Broadly, that’s a good and exciting thing, even though a thousand separate Substacks won’t replace an enormous newspaper. Another dilemma is that the longer you wait to go indie, the harder it is, because there’s more competition. There are already a bunch of different Defectors, group food blogs, and digital alt weekly-style city newsletters. I hope to see more and more indie launches, but I also think we’ll see more consolidation as cast-away journalists gravitate toward these small collectives. Eventually, new, larger publications will emerge. Only the coherent will survive.

More media commentary from One Thing:

• Gathering attention: Publications must now reorganize audiences and intentionally focus their attention.

• Conversations are the new unit of culture: Why people talking to each other and the performance of expertise have become so important.

• The new rules of media: 20 guidelines for digital media during the video-podcast age, aka, why you need a personality cult.

• What makes a good newsletter?: An expert roundtable about newsletter strategy. Are there too many!? Does good writing matter!?

• Aggregation theory: More writers and publications are focusing on creating valuable aggregation because social media sucks so much.

• Voice, taste, trust, scarcity: The values that publications need to keep in mind while competing for readers in the new, messy ecosystem.

When I try to write about what’s happening in Minneapolis, I feel an emergency brake turning on in my mind. The words come out slow. My brain operates at half speed, maybe slower. Why? Maybe because I haven’t lived there in nearly ten years, that it feels like I don’t have the right to publicly “comment” on anything, even though my family still lives there, and my brother has witnessed unfathomable grief on our familiar streets. I grew up in Woodbury, Minnesota, twenty minutes away from Minneapolis’ rumbling soul, for twenty years and studied neuroscience and communications at the University of Minnesota, in the heart of where the major protests are happening. This is the state my parents immigrated to from Taiwan. It’s the state that raised me, and a state that I know well to stand up for strangers and fight for warmth when it’s dead cold. Especially on days like today.

But this isn’t a public “comment,” this is a report of numerous stories I have heard from close family and friends — a few out of thousands of stories, which now need to be told.

Beyond even the protests, shootings, vigils, and government messaging, this moment in the city is a living nightmare. Hundreds of legal minority immigrants are disappearing, and our local communities are bending over backwards to support each other. ICE is operating in what seems like a completely rogue manner, going after anyone who looks “foreign” and putting trackers under their cars, detaining legal citizens without waiting to see their IDs, taking families away in school parking lots, and shooting people in cold blood, including but by no means limited to Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

What this means is that you get a new generation of kids who aren’t white that are staying home from school because they’re afraid to go to school. It doesn’t matter if they’re citizens or not, because immigration is evidently not the primary concern of ICE. Legal citizens who have been detained are being dropped off miles away from home in below freezing weather, often without personal belongings, a phone, or an ID. Many have not returned home. It reminds me of the recent horror film Weapons, in which an entire class of elementary school children disappear one day, as the film follows the grief and aftermath of the events. It may be a horror movie about a witch, but it’s far tamer than the real-life horror experienced today.

My brother in Minneapolis sees immigrant businesses brandishing their legal paperwork on their storefront windows, begging ICE to stay away. He witnesses teachers rising up to take care of parentless children. Farmers, city people, parents, grandparents, children arriving at protests with all of their hearts. Minnesota is famously blue amidst a very red Midwest, largely due to Twin Cities voters. Rural and suburban areas are generally very conservative, and when ICE entered the town of Willmar, Minnesota, their people stood up, too. This is beyond liberalism and conservatism; ICE is a moral failure.

The world has seen how Minnesotans show up for each other in that stunning image of the protest by the US Bank Stadium. In -8 degree weather, we Minnesotans fought for ourselves with non-violent force, drowning the street with our voices and no-nonsense spirit. Minnesotans see evil and they act accordingly. It’s really that simple. The protest photo made me cry. I haven’t lived in the city in nearly ten years, but when I saw the sheer size of the crowd, I just thought to myself: Of course. That’s us. Why should I have feared anything different, that the entire country was hopeless? The Trumpian ideology wants to tell us that, that society is a struggle to dominate and the only strength is oppression. But we know otherwise.

The crowd was so large that, as Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic, it “proves MAGA wrong… the federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible…” Serwer writes that the Twin Cities’ residents “do not share the narcissism of being capable of loving only those who are exactly like them.” What I find so ironic about ICE is just how un-American they are, when they are meant to be defending some mistaken idea of American identity.

I love the American spirit. It is optimism, forwardness, bravery, confidence, and spunk. Americans are loud. Minnesotans have an ineffable sense of integrity. It is baked into the culture. Combine those two things and you get a concoction ICE cannot defeat. Watching this from afar has clarified something that will stay with me long after the news cycle moves on. It won’t be the statements or articles or more chatter about protests. It will be the people who kept showing up for each other, without needing to be seen.

Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.

More One Thing by Emily Chang

• AI is Deadening Our Imaginations

• Extreme Trends and Private Channels: An interview with Tony Wang

• Our Camera Rolls, Our Selves

Explore the One Thing archive and subscribe!

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✏️ Brandi Veloria, Clothing Curator

My husband and I work together pretty non stop for our business, so we often gift each other something that will force us to relax. Since being in LA more, we’ve been loving doing day trips to places like Joshua Tree or Ojai. Our current favorite retreat is going to Two Bunch Palms in Desert Hot Springs. The property is very peaceful, with natural hot springs, yoga classes, and treatments like facials and massages. It’s the perfect treat to walk around in robes all day sipping fresh juices, and even through we’re probably sending work emails; we’re doing it from a mineral bath. Brandi Veloria is the co-founder of James Veloria.

✏️ Shawn Seymour, Musician

Pilot Dr. Grip pen: The “Champagne Gold” version is especially nice. With 4 pen colors, a mechanical pencil and a built-in eraser, no other pen is as versatile at color-coding your to-do list or underlining notes in whatever you have to edit. And, at right around $10 it is nice enough to feel special when you use it, but not so much that you’d ever regret lending it to a friend who never gives stuff back. 10/10. I use mine every day! Shawn James Seymour is one half of Lullatone, a band in Japan who made music for many things you might have heard, including Uniqlo commercials. Lullatone’s new, lovely ambient album “Music for My Friend’s Flower Shop” is out now.

✏️ Andrew Helms, Documentarian

Give the gift of travel: The best trip I’ve been on lately was hiking the Camino dos Faros, a 120-mile trail along the Galician coastline. It’s similar to the Camino de Santiago in that you hike from town to town, but instead of walking crowded roads with pseudo-spiritual pilgrims, you hike up and down rocky cliffs and beaches populated only by the rare vanlife surf couple. It’s not easy — expect 15+ mile days — but abandoned beach swims and grilled sardines make the trek worth it. Bonus points if you can befriend three recently retired Spanish men who share their jamon with you. Andrew Helms is a documentary producer in Brooklyn. He recently worked on The Alabama Solution currently streaming on HBOMax (though maybe soon Netflix/Paramount. Who knows).

✏️ Tara Downs, Gallerist

I’m a big believer in including at least one gag gift in your Christmas offering for a significant other. The holidays can get so serious, and it feels necessary to undercut all that earnestness with a little twisted humor. I’m currently obsessed with Rachel Simon’s exhibition “You & Me” at Market Gallery in Two Bridges, which dives into Spiderman erotic fan fiction with total deadpan brilliance. You can even pick up a zine of these hilariously deranged fantasies for $20—truly the perfect stocking stuffer. Tara Downs is the owner of Tara Downs Gallery.

✏️ Alexa Van Abbema, Style Eye

Gohar Lemon Squeezer Swan: The kind of object you spot once and immediately think, okay, I need this on my counter for absolutely no practical reason. It’s a tiny stainless-steel swan that squeezes lemons, yes, but mostly it just sits there looking smug and elegant, like it’s judging your produce. It adds this strange, charming drama to anything citrus-related — oysters, cocktails, late-night salads, etc. Alexa Van Abbema is a womenswear buyer at SSENSE.

✏️ Marisa Jamerson, Internet Researcher

This is the “if you know, you know” altar starter pack. The Cierge Bordeaux taper is not just a candle, it’s a personality transplant: A tall, bordeaux taper straight out of an old-money chapel, for people who host dinner for two (you and your intrusive thoughts). Light it with intent. The Camee Madurai cameo: Give them a scented cameo like a secret handshake. Madurai smells like jasmine at midnight: rich, floral, a little dangerous if you stay too long. Hides in drawers and suitcases, perfuming clothes and your secrets. Marisa Jamerson is an excellent home host as well as audience insights manager at Amazon.

✏️ Robert Khederian, Realtor & Creator

• Havana Martini Glasses: If you were to get one martini in NYC, make it the martini “our way” at Le Veau d’Or on East 60th Street. It’s made with Old Raj gin (laced with saffron and 110 proof) and served in the most elegant low-slung glass by UK-based glassware brand John Jenkins. I have searched, and it seems these glasses are only available to people in the trade, which means they’re an even better gift considering how unexpected they’d be to unwrap on the 25th! It’s time to tap those friends in the restaurant industry. They’re worth it. Robert Khederian is a NYC broker with Compass who is obsessed with prewar apartments. Robert shares his love of old houses on Substack’s Second Story and on his Instagram and Tiktok accounts @notenoughangers.

• The perfect lampshade: The only thing worse than an LED lightbulb with a cool-white glare is a bad lampshade. The orange card lampshade from King Charles’s darling architect Ben Pentreath is the exact opposite of that. Casting the most nostalgic, warm glow, these shades are worth whatever tariffs are in effect the day your order is placed.

✏️ Sarah Belfort, London Resident

The first thing that comes to mind is a subscription from John Sandoe, a quaint and exceedingly well-stocked bookshop in Chelsea. The service is bespoke (they promise ‘no one receives the same books as another’) and about as far away from an algorithm as you can get. It starts with a conversation with one of their booksellers – you could describe your recipient’s predilections, or they can call the shop themselves. Speedy readers might warrant a monthly subscription, or you can go for a quarterly delivery. Then throughout the year mystery books arrive wrapped in brown paper and tied with a ribbon. The subscription page has these marvellous illustrations for different book categories, the mark of a trustworthy sensibility. (Another good sign: one category is just WODEHOUSE.) I should mention they ship all over the world! A more off-the-shelf recommendation is this exceptional teapot (described as a ‘Japanese brown Betty’) with a box of oolong from a 100-year-old tree. Sarah Belfort is a very tasteful person, excellent on Instagram, and brand manager at the boutique printer Newspaper Club.

✏️ Andy Adams, Photography Curator

If you’re like me, you love gifting books. Here’s a little twist for the art folks in your life: a Hotshoe Magazine subscription! This UK-based photography journal arrives twice a year, brimming with interviews and essays from established and emerging imagemakers. Every edition is themed, which makes for fun reading — recent publications include “A West African Portrait,” “To Be Young,” and “At Home.” Each issue is collectible, cute, and beautifully printed — an annual subscription is just $28. I’ll leave you with this link: Hotshoe editor-in-chief Melissa DeWitt on why print matters. Happy Christmas! Andy Adams is the Curator + Director at FlakPhoto Projects, a community hub for photography people.

✏️ Mark Costello, Video Designer

• For the music lover in your life: Temporary Residence is reissuing William Basinski’s 2002/3 album series The Disintegration Loops in a newly remastered limited edition box set of 8 platinum colored LPs. It comes with a 4 CD set if you don’t want to flip your record 15 times, a booklet with a forward written by Laurie Anderson, and is signed by Billy himself. $200 kinda seems like a steal? Unfortunately, the ship date was moved from November to January, but it comes with mp3s they can get lost in til then. If you don’t know the Disintegration Loops, it’ll change your life, I swear.

• For the hostess in your life: I recently visited the Hillwood Estate in DC, the form home-turned-museum of Marjorie Merriweather Post, of General Foods/Mar-a-Lago/Animal Collective fame. All the bedrooms in her home had a custom “Do Not Disturb” placard for her guests. Flaps open and close to display the message. They struck me as whimsical and funny and considered and just the right amount of delusional. Mark Costello is a DC-based video designer and theater maker.

✏️ Eli Williams, Podcast Host

MHZ Choice subscription: Yes, “MHZ Choice” sounds like a seating tier for a budget airline, but au contraire. This streaming service houses a real treasure trove of foreign language crime/police dramas, specifically in the dark, brooding “Nordic Noir” canon. Perfect for the cold winter months. I’m a fan because your arm is twisted into paying attention by virtue of having to read the subtitles. More importantly, it’s also quality stuff! If you’re looking for a place to start, I’d recommend The Bridge (Bron || Broen). Eli Williams is the co-host of the Day One FM podcast.

✏️ Nate Gallant, Scholar

I am always on the hunt for better “basics” that retain some sense of personality when it’s time to replace an over-shirt or well-loved pair of pants. We’ve recommended a few outlets over the years at various price points, but I’ll highlight a new one I particularly enjoy these days: Indi + Ash. Very lush feeling fabric, nicely structured fits, and interestingly textured patterns for basic outerwear, in particular, distinguish the stuff for me. I in particular love this “study coat,” whose shape sits well on the torso in between the ersatz “hakata” or “kimono” tailoring of many casual blazers and the very standard take on the “chore-coat”. Nate Gallant is a scholar, of Japanese literature, translator, and co-founder of One Thing.

✏️ Will Mayer, High Priest

AIAIAI x Blood Orange Headphones: My daily control panel. Studio-grade but minimal. Modular. Precise. They make everything sound like it has direction. *** Stay at Deplar Farm in Iceland: A turf-roof lodge in the middle of Northern Iceland. Heli-skiing, geothermal pools, and those landscapes that make your phone feel pointless. *** Matt McCormick “Moonlit Confidence”: Matt’s a close friend and one of my favorite artists. We have a few of his pieces in the office. This one keeps pulling my attention for reasons I can’t explain. *** A Vintage Scientology E-Meter: What cult is complete without your very own e-meter? Will Mayer is the High Priest at Cult Holdings, a studio that turns ideas and enterprises into cults by engineering the rituals, language, and symbols that create conviction.

✏️ Bastien Grisolet, Creative Director

A subscription to AWOL, an independent NYC newspaper: If your life is 87% Substack and 13% screenshots, gift yourself a subscription to AWOL so at least one thing you read this year won’t involve a scroll bar. AWOL is a small indie newspaper, edited by my dear friends Victoire Coyon and Adrien Menard of Edition Studio, made with a loose collective of writers and artists. It’s published four times a year, on real newsprint – no digital version. It feels like a Parisian quartier paper that somehow woke up in New York. It is art, information, observation, and small-scale civic romance, it’s a portrait of the city at sidewalk height and a gentle reminder that the most interesting things are still happening outside feeds and timelines. Bastien Grisolet is a creative director, current working at Tiffany&Co, and a compulsive collector of images, references, and half-ideas.

So really this quirkily curated list is a look at the world of Friends of One Thing, as badgered for blurbs by me and Emily Chang. Respondents include Ben Smith, Julio Morales, Becca Rothfeld, and Richard Kern. There are no influencers here, no one who would publish their own gift guide. It’s IRL pals and lower-key tastemakers, a map of personal relationships and appreciations. The headings and bios include some editorializing from yours truly. — Kyle Chayka

This is volume one of the One Thing Gift Guide; stay tuned Monday for the equally deep volume two, including Tara Downs, Lullatone, Nate Gallant, Brandi Veloria, Sarah Belfort, and many others. Subscribe here for that and more emails about quality in culture.

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✏️ Emily Chang, Visual Writer

I’ve had this wallet from Thin King for over a decade, which in New York years is basically heirloom status. It was first gifted to me by Rose Apodaca, the co-founder of A+R, a design store I interned at in LA. It has a bizarre suction technology inside that unbelievably grips 6 cards like a vise—place even one inside and it won’t fall out. It’s the easiest, sleekest wallet in the world, and it’s indestructible. I’m surprised it’s not a cultural phenomenon. Sadly, they don’t seem to make the gold version anymore, but a quick Google might turn up other colors if you’re lucky. Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan and has a Substack. She is the contributing writer of One Thing.

✏️ Ben Smith, Editor

The UK edition of The Spectator remains the best magazine in print and a wonderful gift for Anglophiles (and who isn’t?). That’s despite rightish but eclectic politics that will occasionally infuriate everyone, and onionskin paper that doesn’t make as good a coaster as those lovely matte quarterlies. Ben Smith is the editor and founder of Semafor, co-hosting the Mixed Signals podcast.

✏️ Elizabeth Dias, Sweden Devotee

I am obsessed with vintage Swedish tableware, in honor of my late grandmother Maj-Britt from Stockholm. She was a watercolor artist who loved painting birds and flowers, and every Christmas our Julbord table was laid out with the beautiful golds and pinks and creams of her mother’s porcelain. Finding the old Rörstrand or Gustavsberg patterns usually requires a trip to thrift stores in Sweden. But Svenskt Tenn, the storied interior design store on Strandvägen 5, has a new “Oiseaux de Paradis” collection, and I am utterly charmed, even though it is French! A plate with a whimsical bird of paradise design, delivered to a friend piled high with homemade pepparkakor? What a delight. Elizabeth Dias, a talented baker & host, writes about religion for The New York Times and is the co-author of The Fall of Roe.

✏️ Athena Wilson, Model

A drill: this is my most recent gift to myself, and I delayed for years. If it were a gift I would probably bedazzle it for a personal touch. *** Mike Gigliotti pottery: hand painted ceramics from LA based artist Mike Gigliotti. My favorite pieces are the crow motif dishes. You could get something small like a match striking dish or something huge like a bowl for gorgeous salads. @mike_lottie on Instagram *** Blackbark Mushi charm: little articulated 18k gold gem-set beetles, roly polys, and ladybugs (are those all technically beetles?). Their wings open and close revealing their gemstones. Magical! *** Silver tama: Say a little prayer - this is if someone’s kind of had a hard year. tamata are votives that correspond images to prayers. You can get a small silver tama of a heart for someone’s love life; specific body parts for physical maladies; or a little shop for a business to thrive. You can find them vintage on Etsy or Hydra-based artist Elena Votsi has some beautiful silver ones as well — she designed the Olympic medal. Athena Wilson is on Instagram.

✏️ Sadie Gurman, Reporter & Civil War Buff

A couple of guys in Maryland made these portable bonfires during the pandemic, which is when I stumbled on them. Around that time, we were desperately looking for things we could do with friends, which meant being outside in the cold. With these, we could get together to roast marshmallows on the patio or meet up in a park and still stay warm. On New Year’s Eve a few years ago, my very good friend had covid, but we still wanted to be together, so we lit a little bonfire in my parking lot and had champagne. It was magical! These are still a great gift for us city dwellers who want the warmth and fellowship that a fire pit brings but don’t have a backyard or much outdoor space. Sadie Gurman is a reporter on the Justice Department for the Wall Street Journal and the mother of Charley the shih-tzu.

✏️ Oliver Munday, Designer & Author

The only thing that can make the morning ritual of drinking a hot mug of coffee or tea more rewarding, is doing so from a vessel you’ve painted yourself. With this lovely little kit, you’ll be surprised by what you can bring to life: a pattern or color scheme or phrase as absurd or soothing as you see fit. Personally, I’ve found this craft (which I’ve done repeatedly) satisfying enough to have undertaken light research into building a home kiln, but even if it’s one-and-done situation, it’s a joy to cup something you’ve created in two hands. And just think: if it ends up sucking, it will still ably hold your caffeine. Oliver Munday is a designer and writer in Brooklyn. His debut collection of stories, Head of Household, comes out in February 2026. (Oliver designed the cover of Filterworld and is amazing.)

✏️ Julio Morales, Pizza Slinger

In SF, I happened to catch Alejandro Cartagena’s Ground Rules exhibit and I think it changed my life. I’ve rarely seen an artist see what I see so differently. If you’re around, GO! *** I’ve gotten into photography recently and I picked up a Canon Sure Shot Owl film camera on eBay for $40 and the colors are so beautiful and it’s fool-proof to use. *** Lastly, I bought a charge cord from Magic John shop on Tiktok. I swear it charges my phone 80% faster- it’s a game changer. Julio Morales is Director of Operations at Scarr’s Pizza on the Lower East Side.

✏️ Mia Radic, Intermittent Camper

If you love a person who camps (and has ample storage space for their gear), get them the Kelty Love Seat or, even better, the three-seater Lowdown Couch. My partner and I get to camp with my brother’s family every summer, so we recently gifted my brother the couch and he was delighted. Selfishly, I look forward to using this gift for years to come (and then not having to store it). If you love a person who camps (and has minimal storage space for their gear), consider getting them a hammock that weighs about a pound and takes up barely any space when packed up. My brother got me two (!) of these, and they work in a city park just as well as in the woods. Mia Radic is a friend of One Thing, cool person, and supply chain manager.

✏️ Katy Waldman, Critic

BEAGLE OR BAGEL? I know what you’re thinking: this is a “narcissism of small differences” situation. And, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t ever actually played the game -- I just keep the unopened box on my desk like a good luck charm. Still, you never know when you might be called upon to discern between a rolled up dog and a rolled up ball of dough! Help your loved ones develop an important skill this holiday season. Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

✏️ Richard Kern, Photographer

That cup or mug that you grab first thing in the morning is akin to a religious relic. You fill it with your choice of meditative liquid then move to what is essentially an alter like space to begin your day. For months I’d been looking for new cups to replace the chipped 20 year old mugs I’d brought in the Polish mountains. Everything I saw seemed clunky, mass produced or too cute for my taste. An artist friend suggested I look at RCeramics, where I found unique one of a kind mugs hand painted by Ryan Chang. He takes commissions so I was able to get him to make me a few safety pin themed cups. He does small runs and they sell out fast. Richard Kern is a photographer.

✏️ Becca Rothfeld, Critic

I’m not a big collector of beautiful objects. I wish I were, but I’m not. Despite my best attempts to aestheticize my life, my apartment is full of cheap furniture I bought on a graduate student budget and have yet to update. Accordingly, I am an uninspired and predictable giver of gifts. I always get everyone books or subscriptions to magazines. I continue to believe that these are in fact the best gifts, for me and for everyone else. But in the interest of saying something surprising, I will recommend the one object in my home that I cherish (besides artworks friends have made for me and copies of books rendered irreplaceable by my copious annotations): the Williams Sonoma Popcorn Maker, which doubles as a pleasingly anachronistic curiosity and a convenience for someone who is terrible at cooking. Airpopped Amish popcorn drenched in butter is an unsurpassable delicacy. Becca Rothfeld is an author and the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post.

✏️ Diana Perez, Creative Director

The tradwife community would have my head on a spike for this, but, this egg-cooking device is a godsend for people who don’t have time for breakfast in the mornings. It makes perfectly soft boiled eggs in under 4 minutes by hitting one button. Or poached, if that’s your thing. And much like those Samsung washing machines, it sings a chirpy tune to let you know your eggs are ready. Bon appetit. Diana Perez is a writer and associate creative director at Apple.

✏️ Andrew McGill, Creative Technologist

I’m an extremely recent convertee to Analog, a productivity system by designer Jeff Sheldon. Task apps don’t work for me, and I wanted to stop cluttering my Leuchtturm journal with to-do lists. Analog is simple: three stacks of silky notecards (for lists of things to do now, soon, or someday) and a beautifully machined wooden case to hold them. You prop up today’s to-do list in a little notch so it stares at you while you work. So far, it’s working. Andrew McGill invents things, often for media companies but sometimes not, and co-hosts Product Fridays.

✏️ Emir Eralp, Film Director

I would recommend Mother Tongue magazine. Edited by Natalia Rachlin and Melissa Goldstein, it is an interesting, cool, well designed, well curated bi-annual magazine. It talks about motherhood / parenting without falling into cliches or sentimentality. It features great art and great photography. It makes you look cool. Emir Eralp is a London and Stockholm-based photographer and film director.

✏️ Foster Kamer, Editor & Fostertalker

At the end of this year, in the fittingly immortal words of Billy Corgan: Emptiness is loneliness, and loneliness is cleanliness, and cleanliness is godliness! And yes, sure — God is empty, just like me — but if you want your friends to feel godly, and clean, enter: The Kamenoko Tawashi Scrubber. This absolute freak of a brush was invented a century ago, shaped like a baby turtle inspired by the inventor’s son’s pet, is made with palm fibers that get soft under water and scrub everything beautifully. It also comes in a lovely package. I’ve been gifting it for years, and people love it. Even more, this year, I discovered their sponges, which also clean like nothing else I’ve ever owned, and also come in wonderful packages, and incredible colors, like this beautiful orange. Or the Sakura season sponges. If there’s one of these ridiculous collector-types in your life, here, here’s the collaboration sponge with Beams Japan. Most importantly, they meet my standard for a truly great present: something that’ll demonstrably improve someone’s life, and also, make them think of you at least once a day. Foster Kamer runs Futurism and publishes the best media gossip newsletter of whenever it deigns to publish, Fostertalk.

✏️ Kyle Chayka, Proprietor

If you’re in the market for a last-minute Christmas or otherwise gift, allow me to recommend dried pasta. It ships fast, for one thing, and it feels special. Artisanal Italian pasta boxes have become incredibly elaborate in recent years, so the packaging feels like a fancy gift in itself, and each unusual pasta shape offers an opportunity to have a different kind of meal. I almost think of them as different kinds of foods?? Tirrena is a really lovely pasta brand from the Tuscan estate of the Frescobaldi family. You can order it shipped from various sites. The funky shapes are inspiring to any level of home chef and for a bigger gift you could pair a few boxes with Rachel Roddy’s absolutely must-have cookbook An A-Z of Pasta. Kyle Chayka still has a lot of Christmas shopping to do.

Very brief links

• Chris Black of How Long Gone is launching a refined-normcore made in America menswear brand called Hanover.

• Industry season 4 trailer dropped!!! Melodramatic as always and we can’t wait.

• The British publisher Fitzcarraldo is selling individual copies of its hardback First Decade Collection, beautifully bound editions of some of the best books of the 21st century.

• Poketto is a new web app replacement for Pocket, a place to build your own digital archive of articles and PDFs.

• The former Vanity Fair film critic Richard Lawson is striking out on his own with a movie-focused newsletter called Premiere Party and a logo that looks a lot like old Gawker.

• Kyle wrote a New Yorker column on Landman, a tastemaker guilty pleasure that is the best new show on TV with its voyeuristic view of conservatives and Texas oil fields.

Extreme trends with Tony Wang

by Emily Chang

Last week, I met up with Tony Wang, the founder of The Office of Applied Strategy, to talk about their second cultural dossier, titled “The New Pantheon.” The dossier dissects the emergence of a social phenomenon they call “horseshoe maximalism”, which is about the collapse of progress narratives and how both sides of cultural and political polarization essentially loop back to the same belief systems.

*To read the dossier in full, use the code “ONETHINGOAS” here and OAS will ship you a copy. Only 25 available to our readers!*

The Office of Applied Strategy as a business has three independent arms: a consulting firm, a think tank, and a venture fund. About a third of the team at OAS comes from business consulting backgrounds. They also work with creative directors; design thinkers from places like Bjarke Ingels Group and IDEO; and artists who are actual creatives working in cultural industries. Tony himself started out at McKinsey and then worked at Google, IDEO, and most notably, SSENSE, where he oversaw branded content.

I met Tony several years ago through mutual friends and collaborators. Tony’s an incredibly smart guy and such a joy to be around. We always have really interesting conversations, everything from inspired travel recs, video games, and food research to his work on corporate merch as a market indicator, which OAS wrote about for Real Review earlier this year.

EMILY CHANG: Tell me a bit about the dossier and how this came about.

TONY WANG: The dossier is an outlet for us to be able to better explore things that we all collectively at OAS have been observing or working on throughout the past year. Over the past 12 months, we’ve worked with some really interesting clients and we touched on some really interesting topics. But in the parameters of a commercial engagement, you’re pretty limited in how abstract or theoretical or academic you can be about that because you need to be really commercially minded. We want to use the research as a way to process and unpack that. One of the key ideas in that research is horseshoe maximalism.

EMILY CHANG: So tell me about horseshoe maximalism. What is it?

TONY WANG: Horseshoe maximalism is this term that we coined to explain a lot of the different cultural phenomena and trends that we were seeing in the world at large. It reflects a cultural logic that pervades consumer culture and explains why so much of culture today feels so extreme and embodies seemingly contradictory values that actually still stack and make sense, and how it brings people together from different values and ideologies. The theory of horseshoe maximalism started emerging as we increasingly realized that the common thread through a lot of these cultural phenomena is that they rejected establishment knowledge or institutional wisdom, or that they were almost like ways of breaking down establishment structures.

When The New Yorker featured us earlier in the year, André Wheeler, the writer, joined for our first brainstorm session. What emerged from that initial meeting was this recognition that the impact that politics was having on culture was higher than ever, but we noticed that a lot of these cultural trends were A, very extreme, and B, they brought in people from the far left and the far right together to a degree.

EMILY CHANG: So how does that actually play out in daily life?

TONY WANG: If the establishment systems that we reject are trying their best to maintain control, and we can’t use traditional mechanisms for reform, like civil advocacy, activism, voting, or economic mobility, then we turn to these extremes in consumer culture as a way to sublimate those frustrations and anxieties. And so consumer culture becomes the battleground.

EMILY CHANG: What was one of the most unexpected connections that you made through this process?

TONY WANG: We were looking at doomsday prepping and noticed something. In the Industrial Revolution, you had the industrialists who were obviously the capitalists who control the means of production, were all in on industrialization and were very pro innovation. And then you had the Luddites, who were the craftspeople who—it’s too reductive to say they were anti-technology, but rather, they were very pro human labor.

For every major wave of innovation, there’s always been people who are really optimistic and people who are really cynical or cautious about it. But they’ve always been separate camps. But now, what’s really unique about AI is that the biggest proponents of AI who are the biggest techno optimists are also the biggest doomers. They’re also the ones who are building the doomsday bunkers and preparing for the end times. And so it’s very horseshoe maxi. We talk about the doomer techno optimist and how, for them, they win either way, because either the AI bubble pans out and they win big, or it doesn’t pan out, society collapses, but then they can prepare for that accordingly. They can rebuild society from the ground up through their network states.

EMILY CHANG: You also start to see this logic outside of tech.

TONY WANG: Health and wellness is a great example of that, where you have a whole MAHA movement. You have a lot of people on the far right who are really into alternative wellness, and people on the left were really into it as well.

I think the Polymarket example, or the prediction markets, is another great example of that, where a lot of investment banks predicted that the feds would not cut rates during the summer, but Polymarket users overwhelmingly believed that it would. Polymarket was correct in the end. Like, the feds did slash the rates, and they had this whole thing about how prediction markets are actually the new form of truth consensus.

Horseshoe maximalism for us is this, like, social temperament and cultural logic that we think will dominate consumer industries for the next five to ten years. It’s what the 2000s or the mid-2020s feel like—this collective realization that we no longer trust our institutions, and the death of establishment narratives, especially of progress, which is what we really anchored the dossier around. It gives way to this sense of both exhilaration and dread. It’s very Kierkegaard, in which freedom is both terrifying but also incredibly exciting.

EMILY CHANG: How do you see horseshoe maximalism’s role in history?

TONY WANG: Only about 36% of people globally believe that the world will be better for the next generation. That’s astoundingly low. So if the narrative of progress is that societies will always get better over time and that there’s never been a better time than now to be alive… only 36% of people believe that. It’s almost like we, as a society, feel like we peaked in the early 2000s or 2010s, and now we’re in this steady decline.

Society has always gone through peaks and lulls. And I certainly think we’re entering a bit of a lull period. So for me, it’s not to say that horseshoe maximalism will be the flavor of society or culture forever, but rather, as we enter this lull period, it is the cultural logic that will dominate. We are collectively trying to figure out where the fuck we want to go, but we have no real centralized means of doing that anymore. And entrenched, establishment interests really resist change and reform.

Kyla Scanlon wrote this phenomenal article on the three economies of America. If you look at wage appreciation, it’s only been 10%, whereas the stock market grew over 150%, also adjusted for inflation. The point being, that for the average person, there’s no economic mobility anymore. The only way you can basically gain wealth or grow wealth is by investing and through speculation. I think that’s why we’ve oriented so much of our economy around speculation, the AI bubble notwithstanding.

So if we’re all trying to reimagine what progress is in a post-2025 world, but we feel like we’re really constrained, economic mobility is difficult, and voting feels less effective than ever, because we’re stuck with a two-party system that we don’t really believe in.

Then the only way to mediate these collective frustrations is through the one thing we can control, which is what we consume. It also reflects in this decentralized collective process of using consumer culture as a way to surface new narratives, new social configurations, or even new communities of people who would typically not interact together.

EMILY CHANG: We see this playing out a lot on social media, in which the variety of platforms we can engage on now — and all the different levels of engagement within those platforms — allow us a larger amount of opportunities to form new structures. There are simply more layers to work with, it’s like going from 8-bit to 4K or from a low to a much higher frame rate.

TONY WANG: With the rise of TikTok and other platforms like Discord and Telegram, the algorithm has shifted more towards interests and micro communities. It doesn’t matter if you’re popular or not. It’s like, if the content’s interesting, the algorithm will surface it. So it’s actually bringing people together in new configurations, because the algorithm no longer works based on the social graph, or at least it doesn’t prioritize it as much.

So it’s interesting, because the thing that created the polarization of society, the algorithm that created a sense of disconnection in the first place, is potentially also the thing that might bring us back together in new configurations and micro communities of people who wouldn’t otherwise interact, based on shared interests. If those interests represent a convergence of contradictions and extremities, then might polarization also be the thing that brings us back together in a new middle?

EMILY CHANG: It’s ironic, because those systems that end up bringing us back together are also the ones that we have tried to reject any reliance on. But ultimately, those are the establishments that are still there, and those are the systems to live within. How much of this do you think is actually recognized by people and is there rejection happening yet?

TONY WANG: I don’t think our reliance on the algorithm or social media or these dominant structures will go away. But I think people are finding much more clever ways of hacking the system or getting around it, or like playing with it.

In the real world, we have our public Instagram and LinkedIn presences, but then we also have our private identities on Discord or Telegram. Some of my commercial clients have asked, what’s our channel strategy? Should we be on this platform or this one? It’s not that people are choosing one side or the other. It’s more of a spectrum where people’s identities fragment and they have reasons for being on one tool versus another.

EMILY CHANG: Once companies start infiltrating those spaces, people aren’t necessarily going to want to interact with them in the same way because it does break some spell, you know. When you’re in it, it feels private and intimate, because it does feel like you’re escaping the quote unquote establishment. As soon as a brand tries to enter that space and become a native speaker, it’s not the same anymore.

TONY WANG: Cultural marketing has been this really big trend in consumer culture over the past three, four years. In our entertainment chapter, we talk a bit about how everyone out of entertainment is trying to become an entertainment company. Like Chik Fil A launched an entertainment studio. Dick’s Sporting Goods also launched an entertainment studio. LVMH launched 22 Montaigne. Saint Laurent produced films for the Cannes Film Festival. Everyone is trying to enter this game.

What’s interesting is that as more and more companies try to become, like, cultural benefactors or be active in culture, I think it creates this Schroedinger’s Cat situation where they really want to break into these private spaces. But the second they do, to your point, then it shifts. So it’s like, is this space A or B? It embodies these cultural extremities. Is it plus or minus? Is it far left or far right? And it’s both. But it reflects very real social anxieties around where we’re headed and what progress really means as a society.

EMILY CHANG: These brands are going to have to rely on what are basically spies to go into these private or intimate spaces and influence. And the more obvious an influencer is, the less appealing it is.

TONY WANG: We are all forced to be spies, but there are different degrees of spies or different degrees of espionage. I always say that, like, when you work in the cultural industries, whether as a creative or like as a strategist, you know, you’re in this position where your role is to help companies make money by understanding culture and by participating in it. We are, I guess, spies in that sense?

EMILY CHANG: OAS has a venture fund focused on consumer tech and goods that works with young founders and entrepreneurs. I’d love to know whether you’ve noticed horseshoe maximalism and this general rejection of the establishment manifesting itself in the way that founders act?

TONY WANG: I would say that the willingness to do kind of extreme things has always been endemic to founder culture. Growth hacking is what it’s typically called in Silicon Valley. But growth hacking means that you’re willing to do anything, like whether it’s clickbaity or even a little exploitative.

One thing that I have seen emerge, which we talk about in the research, is the rise of nonsecularism within very rational fields. Some of the most seemingly objective and rational fields are actually the most fertile territory for spirituality to really gain a foothold. Which is very horseshoe maxi. In the research, we chart the rise of AI religions, many of which are founded by prominent tech people.

But also the rise of spirituality amongst the tech class. There’s a new incubator called HF0, a monastery where founders meditate on code and profit. There’s also the Monastic Academy, which is basically trying to build a religion for cyborgs. Which sounds really woowoo and like, what the fuck? But they actually do workshops and programming for tech founders and leaders, and they try to instill them with a sense of spirituality. Increasingly, people are treating code as a very sacred calling. Which is fascinating.

I think the reality of it is just, to be a successful founder, you need insane support structures. Whether that’s kind of being a psychopath or being self-delusional, or just having a great social network around you. And I think faith acts as an amazing support structure.

EMILY CHANG: I just want to end with a few rapid fire questions for you for One Thing. What is one item in your home that makes you happy right now?

TONY WANG: I was in Japan earlier this year and I went to an antique shop in Kyoto. I got this insane shirt [ed: a sculpture of a folded oxford shirt] that is made from stone and it’s all one piece. It’s insane and so beautiful. I love it.

EMILY CHANG: What is one picture in your phone that makes you happy right now?

TONY WANG: Ooh, that’s probably me playing with Hana, my roommate’s shiba inu. My parents came to surprise me for my birthday, and they came to my apartment, ambushed me, and then they wanted to take a photo. So it’s a photo of me holding flowers they got me and then Hana on the other arm. I’m like squeezing them both. So that one’s really cute, because it was nice that they flew all the way to surprise me.

EMILY CHANG: And lastly, what is one place that makes you happy right now?

TONY WANG: Let me give a shout out to a new tea place I went to recently. It’s called Tera at 41 Essex in the Lower East Side. They have rare teas from Korea that I’ve never seen in any other tea shop in the city. They also do co-fermented coffee, which I’ve never had in my life. But it’s really cool. It’s almost like coffee that’s been brewed with herbal tea. Co-fermentation is basically fermenting the coffee with cherry and some fruits. So it’s infused with this great fruit flavor. It’s crazy. They had one that was like watermelon and it basically tasted like watermelon tea with coffee. It’s hard to explain. You just have to try it.

The Office of Applied Strategy, Dossier 2: The New Pantheon contributors are Tony Wang, Helen Yin Chen, Chloé Desaulles, Chris Gayomali, Victoria Massey, Serena Wang. Copy Editor: Ross Scarano, Design: Matt Tsang, Studio Director: Dianne Kim.

Today in One Thing, a bunch of culture links (don’t miss the twisty moka pot) and film criticism on Die My Love and Frankenstein from Emily Chang — Kyle Chayka

• In Los Angeles, everyone loves enormous front doors. (Worth it for the photos alone.)

• In the AI industry, everyone loves serif typefaces for branding, presumably because they imply the literariness and high, human quality that AI entirely lacks. That’s why you’re seeing Baskerville everywhere from Perplexity to David bars and Anthropic baseball caps.

• ART INVESTORS BEWARE: Did you ever wonder what the deal was with Masterworks, that company that let you buy shares in blue-chip art? The one that was advertising everywhere a few years ago? NYT finally has the investigation. There’s no big crime or scandal, but buyers have to cherry pick which works they invest in — bet on the Basquiat — and they have no control over when the work is actually sold by Masterworks, so there’s no guarantee your Basquiat shares will be liquidated when the market is hot. Art is a notoriously illiquid commodity and its valuations are notoriously fictional until someone pays the sticker price. So I’d treat this more like sports gambling than investing, but the matches take a decade.

• Charli xcx has her own Substack, which is yet another high-water mark in newsletter culture. A newsletter is just table stakes for online audience-gathering now, like having a Twitter account used to be. Charli’s ratio of 10k likes on her debut post (which happens to be a heartfelt and worthwhile meditation on the creative process) to 22k subscribers might be a record.

• TURBO MOKA: Returning to a classic One Thing theme, check out this bizarro stovetop espresso pot designed by Matteo Frontini that looks like a Salvador Dali painting. Its swirling, melting design, modeled after plane turbines, is meant to bring more water in contact with heat faster.

• UPSTATE FANTASIA: Audrey Gelman, of The Wing fame, opened an upstate New York hotel spinoff of her kitschy, bucolic ecommerce brand Six Bells, which sells knick knacks (quilts, candles, napkins, like a highway-side shed in New England) under the guise of a fictional village. J Lee, the perhaps familiar food critic of Feed Me, reviewed the Six Bells Inn for Interview magazine with hilarious harshness.

  “It’s rare to get to spend the night in someone else’s personality disorder, but it’s not as scary as it sounds. It’s mostly boring. There’s nothing to do in the hotel, no pool, no spa, no massage, the rooms don’t even have televisions (they’d ruin the aesthetic), and the restaurant stays closed till five. There’s a children’s playroom with the most beautiful mural, and no games in sight.”

Life, death, and mental health on film

by Emily Chang

Director Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein are really running the PR circuit right now, and after seeing them I can’t stop thinking about both of them, for reasons that surprise me. I became a big fan of Lynne Ramsay’s work after We Need To Talk About Kevin, and the starring actors Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence are both masterful performers who are always a joy to watch. And yet I found Die My Love insufferable to sit through.

Most of the PR around the film has been around the fact that it’s about postpartum depression, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s more of a visceral, violent turning of the inside outwards and seems to be almost made for no audience at all. You feel as if you are a voyeur in the young couple’s life, the days blurring together into one, like a slow Sunday that aches with anxiety. It’s no spoiler to say that their personal disasters deepen.

But what I find interesting is that, despite feeling disappointed and antsy as I sat in the theater, I am actually considering seeing it again. My expectations of what the film would be are not as important as the real estate it’s been occupying in my head and the nagging feeling that Grace, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, is all of us, in a way. That is, if we acted out exactly what we felt internally when we’re at our worst, in moments when nobody around you can really quite see you. Her freak out is relatable.

Guillermo del Toro’s epic Frankenstein, starring Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac, and Mia Goth, is arguably a better film on the surface. It has much better reviews, is freakishly, gorgeously composed, and has a storyline that takes you through the emotional journey of watching creation bend into death and re-emerge into the harshness of life. Yet it hasn’t stuck in my head the same way that Die My Love has (though its screencaps have stuck around in my feeds for sure). Perhaps that’s because it’s simply a more literal movie, complex in story but less so in the psychology of the self.

Most clicked links from last issue

• Ella Emhoff’s romantic travails

• The New Yorker’s new word game, Shuffalo

• AI company hiring human writers

• New trend-forecasting dossier just dropped

• What was the niche media blog Young Manhattanite?

The AI company Anthropic is hiring in-house writers to document and explain what they’re doing. I thought that’s what the AI was for?

Alltogether is a new ad ring for high-end newsletters launched by media ad exec AJ Frucci; the clients include Alex Heath’s Sources, Alex Kantrowitz’s Big Technology, Casey Newton’s Platformer, according to Axios. Sell the same fancy banner ads across a bunch of influential journalists’ work — it’s a great business idea that will probably make lots but not a huge amount of money. Very reminiscent of The Deck, a blog ad ring that finally shut down in 2017.

Collab of the week: Pop Mart, aka the maker of Labubus, is launching a graphic clothing line with Uniqlo, sporting little furry monsters everywhere.

The New Yorker launched a new word game called Shuffalo, which has a very cute mascot and involves building longer and longer anagrams — very fun, quite difficult! I had to use hints.

Dating diaries: Former political daughter current model and fiber artist Ella Emhoff recounts her romantic history and the troubles of trying to maintain the Bushwick romance while having a secret service detail. (From Sex Happens, a sponsored blog published by the D2C health brand Julie.)

Timothee Chalamet’s new Vogue cover looks the fever dream of a Tumblr teen, with bedazzled jeans, white turtleneck, and vaporwave galactic backdrop. Final Fantasy villain vibes tbh.

What do Labubus, raw milk, and prediction markets all have in common? The Office of Applied Strategy, led by Tony Wang and a team of cultural strategists, launches their second dossier today, titled The New Pantheon. The new issue dissects the emergence of a social phenomenon they call “horseshoe maximalism”, which is about the collapse of progress narratives and how both sides of cultural and political polarization essentially loop back to the same belief systems.

“It explains why so many cultural trends today, from new age spirituality to prediction markets to alternative financial assets, bring together audiences from the extremes of different social and political ideologies together. These extremes don’t necessarily oppose each other in consumer culture. They can converge, creating new centers from contradiction, giving way to new social configurations of exchange that offer the possibility of building new cultural narratives.”

Political polarization has given way to new cultural hybrids: wellness influencers quoting Nietzsche, doomer tech founders preaching transcendence. The dossier argues that as our old ideas of “progress” fall apart, we’re piecing together new belief systems from the wreckage of myths, memes, and consumer culture. It’s big-brain stuff, but written with the conviction of someone who’s seen the future and decided to print it on paper. Only 1,000 print copies exist, and they won’t live online (naturally). You’ll need an NFC-embedded “research badge” to read it digitally — or a friend with one. (One Thing will run a conversation with Tony soon.) — Emily Chang

The internet’s local media

Start thinking about yourself as the solo newsroom of a small town.

by Kyle Chayka

I’ve been doing down a little bit of a media memory hole lately, perhaps kicked off by the folding of Teen Vogue into regular Vogue and by the very NYC coverage of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral election victory. The Substack newsletter Feed Me’s woman-on-the-street party coverage of election night, and Hell Gate’s live stream commentary, reminded me of vintage Gawker and The Awl, NYC blogs of the peak blog era that published stories about scene-y things happening IRL. Who can forget David Shapiro aka Pitchfork Reviews Reviews’s gnomic depictions of nights out for The Awl? Like this one, “DJing a New Year’s Party for One of the Richest Men in America.” You could read this one, “Young Manhattanite is Beacon on New York Shabbos Scene” and say Mike Crumplar who? JK, everyone has forgotten them except for me and several sad people who still like my posts on X.

What was so compelling at the time about these publishing endeavors was that they addressed a very specific, often geographically bounded audience and space. Plenty of it was only legible if you lived in New York (Brooklyn) and were very online; gradually, you just had to be extremely online enough to care. Such was Young Manhattanite, a tiny Tumblr where a coterie of media figures (there were no “influencers” then) posted about the minutiae of their aging hipster lives. I was obsessed with it; the off-the-cuff post of a single writer could rock Twitter for days. (Not to say it was a golden age, that crew was kind of the last shreds of the legacy media industry outcompeted by VC money and falling into the trough that preceded the creator economy.) Is there anything like Young Manhattanite now? Certain Substacks, maybe Kaitlin Phillips’s, are kind of similar but don’t traffic as much in scene documentation or in-fighting. Plus group newsletters are rare, and you kind of need a crew.

These are iterations of local media, but addressed toward a digital audience, and with enough glamour and insiderhood (drawn from the NYC vibes) to be appealing to a wider crowd that’s waiting online. Such content is so compelling because it’s intended for a small audience and you have to kind of puzzle it out to get the joke. Business models are hard, but I really want that kind of deep meaning-building now, even if it’s about frivolous stuff. Please point out more examples!

Andrea from Snaxshot posted this surreal billboard, which is not just a Old Westernized green tea powder, but an influencer-y brand of matcha-flavored colostrum powder (that is, the first milk a cow gives after giving birth) that you whisk into your frothed alternative milks. I think this fits in to my Labubu theory that all culture is hybridized and chemical now — just smash together MAHA wellness and Japanese beverages.

Spicy Carhartt collab: The British designer Nicholas Daley launched a collaboration with Carhartt’s higher-fashion Work in Progress line, pulling together Jamaican, Scottish, and workwear influences into attention-grabbing chore coats, T-shirts, and bags. I’ll take the tartan-printed, quilt-lined Modular Jacket ($398).

Girls in cities streaming TV updates

• 5Emily 5Paris: Everyone’s favorite ambient television show is back in December for its fifth season, or, as I like to think of it, the first “Emily in Paris” of the second Trump administration. Its first trailer is out, and once again the show looks better in Rome than in Paris. Will its utter brainlessness be able to soothe the chaos of our times? I hope so. Will Gabriel the annoying, inarticulate French chef be able to compete with the suave Roman scion of fake Brunello Cucinelli? I hope not! Mark your calendars for December 18.

• Rachel Sennott’s rise to the top: I have to say it — this girl is bringing personality back to Hollywood. It’s been so fun to see Rachel Sennott, or @treaclychild, as she’s known on Instagram, go from NYC stand-up comedy darling to launching her own show with HBO, “I Love L.A.”, debuting this Sunday. Variety’s Alison Herman writes in a review:

  It’s a finer piece of sociology about the influencer era than it is a joke- or even character-driven sitcom. Which is to say, watching “I Love L.A.” made this Angeleno of nearly a decade want to stare at a wall for several hours in numbed-out despair — and I suspect that may be the intended effect.

  — Emily Chang

Battle of the aural algorithms: I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that Spotify Discover Weekly has completely fallen off. I used to genuinely look forward to it every Monday, queueing it up as I walk towards the subway on my morning commute. But these songs are melody-agnostic and shockingly unlistenable — anyone else? TikTok is delivering better music in the background of its videos. I don’t mean brainrot dance bops, I mean real good music, spanning eras, genres, and incredible atmospheres. I’ve already found a few gems this week. The good thing about the immediacy of the TikTok algorithm is that you can train it pretty quickly to give you what you want. I’ve been swiping that app like I skip songs on Spotify. It works. Below are my latest fav TikTok song finds. — Emily Chang

• Hearing Damage — Thom Yorke

• And One More Time — Galatée

• I Cry (Night After Night) — The Egyptian Lover

• Be Like A Woman — Chris Rainbow

“a bit ryokan-chalet”: NYmag’s review of Kiko, a new Japanese-ish restaurant in Hudson Square, highlights the boundaries of the Japandi aesthetic, which is kind of like wabi-sabi meets hygge.

Maximum Turkish coffee: Over at the Why is This Interesting newsletter, man of the world Colin James Nagy has a nice review of “sand coffee,” which is Turkish coffee made by means of the pot with water and grounds in it being buried in hot sand. I’ve never had this preparation before but I’ve always wanted to:

The coffee isn’t boiled, per se — it’s more accurately cooked, like a very small, very careful soup. The sand heats to a consistent high temperature, and the tiny copper pot, or cezve, can be positioned deeper for more heat or shallower for less.

The resulting brew is simultaneously strong and smooth, with texture from the ultra-fine grounds that remain suspended throughout the drink.

Its flavor profile is earthy and intense, often with nutty or slightly sweet undertones of sugar, if it’s added. (In my case, it was not.)

Danish modernist trash can hotels: The Danish brand Vipp began as a line of now-ubiquitous trash bins. As this extremely elegant profile in the FT recounts, under the family business’s second generation it is expanding into rental residences, a series of international guesthouses, showing off the metal, minimalist furnishings:

Though each guesthouse is generously equipped, Vipp’s approach to service is hands-off (the in-room instruction sheets are as minimalist as the interiors). What guests experience is a degree of privacy that still somehow feels personal. “These projects are like children,” says Kasper, who cites Vipp Cold Hawaii, an isolated retreat restored in Thy National Park on Denmark’s north-western coast — a local surfing destination — as a favourite.

Literary discourse building of the week award: goes to Thomas Meaney, editor of the literary journal Granta and devoted Marxist, who gave a serious and polemic interview with the Nation, which is worth reading if you want to think about thinking and the production of book culture:

…Granta is above all a literary magazine, with an ambition to show our readers what we think is most alive in contemporary fiction, poetry, memoir, and reportage. Like any instrument of culture, it operates through an alternating process of attention and neglect. We pay attention to writers whose work displays a sense of control and a mastery with language, to prose that simply gives us pleasure. But at the same time, in order to husband our resources, we avoid what we think has been falsely raised up, what we think has been exhausted, what we think is inert on the page.

How does work on a political journal help with any of this? Because it provides a set of antennae about the nature of the time we’re living in, and about where the fault lines of conflicts and interests lie, as well as what fresh alibis the status quo is wrapped up in. To have a strong idea of these things is to have a better sense of where the art you are seeing is coming from and where it sits in the wider culture. Almost all literary movements and styles have some kind of relation to politics, whether acknowledged or not.

During the peak social media era, media companies had a huge problem. They lost track of their audiences, scattered as they were across different feeds and algorithms and platforms. Facebook and Google had more control over who saw publications’ content than they did themselves. General-interest stories were pushed out for anyone who happened to come across them in a strategy of “distributed” or “off-platform” editorial content. This largely failed, unless you developed a strong enough core audience on a stable enough platform that shared ad revenue, such as YouTube. Otherwise, media companies faced the fate of BuzzFeed, disintegrating into a haze of vaguely familiar brand names.

I think we’re now entering a phase of re-organizing audiences as digital media companies understand that they have to own their relationships to their audience or die. A publication has to be able to gather and focus readers’ (and watchers’ and listeners’) attention. The ability to point to something and say this matters and have people engage with and trust it is in some ways the core value proposition of media. The reporters and critics dig up the content, information, or analysis and the publication, with its editorial staff, shapes and delivers it. This is true whether you’re running a print magazine or an Instagram gossip page or a YouTube channel. Thus you see more publications trying to improve their own post-social media modes of delivery. That could mean launching many new, branded email newsletters — a la NYmag — or cultivating more devoted podcast listeners or developing more anchor-style public personalities who provide a face for the brand (Vox just hired Astead Herndon, formerly of the New York Times, as editorial director and host of a new multimedia politics show).

The New York Times just added a “watch” tab to its super-popular app to deliver its bespoke vertical videos, featuring NYT reporters. Basically, it’s a NYT-only version of TikTok, and it’s pretty fun and engaging from the jump (plus you feel a lot better after watching 5 minutes of it than Instagram reels). Now you can read the news, do crossword puzzles, and mindlessly consume video in the same app. We trust NYT for a few varieties of content, so why not more of it? Similarly, The Verge’s homepage now offers personalized feeds of stories and the ability to follow specific topics, along with bespoke email newsletters, turning the website into more of an interactive platform and thus more of a destination. The amped-up opportunities for engagement are good for the media companies — more time spent means a closer relationship with subscribers and better fodder for advertisers — but it’s also good for audiences, who have more of a sense of what they’re getting than in an undifferentiated social-media feed.

The media analyst Brian Morrissey, of The Rebooting, recently had Tyler Brûlé, the founder of Monocle magazine, on his podcast. It’s a deep and fascinating conversation for anyone in media. Everyone knows I’m obsessed with Monocle, but what’s even more interesting than the publication’s luggage and cardigan collabs is the fact that it has stuck with the same business playbook since it launched in 2007. Brûlé describes his goal as “proximity,” which means something like, closeness to readers, readers’ closeness with each other as a community, and a closeness with the goals of brands / corporate clients, like selling more airplane tickets or promoting a tourism destination. Monocle knows its reader-community and it has also long served its content to them in multiple formats that it owns: luxurious print products, digital radio shows, physical storefronts, and IRL events (conferences but cooler). Now, other publications are coming around to that kind of slow gathering of devoted fans and reaching them as deeply and as directly as possible.

These strategies work for the biggest media corporations as well as the smallest indie ones. The Mozilla Foundation just published an interesting essay from a crew of Berlin-based researchers titled “Welcome to the Post-Naive Internet Era.” It’s an argument for small-scale, sustainable distribution systems online: “building digital infrastructure based on a different set of values, structures and ideologies to serve their communities, and establish new conditions for how things operate, are produced and circulated.” Metalabel, a project shepherded by Yancey Strickler from Kickstarter, recently published an adjacent idea of “groupcore.” All of this feels related to “proximity” which may also be described as “coherence”: know what you’re doing and who you’re talking to, as well as who your compatriots are.

It’s hard for audiences to find voices and publications they trust right now, and it’s hard to find the one voice or publication that suits you for one flavor of content: your go-to guy(s) for fashion, for music, for art, for politics, for business. We (media creators) should be making it easier and simpler by intentionally gathering our audiences and holding them close, no matter if that’s millions of people or hundreds — developing our brand identities and sticking to them, delivering on our promises. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with One Thing, too: gather an audience who is interested in this quirky combination of high and low culture; media criticism; art and design; and quality stuff of any nature. So if you’re here, welcome, and please follow along. — Kyle Chayka

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The extremely online cult of Angelicism: The long NY Mag feature about the Angelicism01girls is a very interesting read that encapsulates a weird, mythic microcosm of subterranean scenes and post-lockdown life in New York. “I wanted to be cool, and it felt cool,” Chloe Bartlewski says in the article. “In New York, a lot of people will ask you, ‘Are you an artist?’ This gave me a reason to say ‘yes.’” Oh boy.

The four young women who circled the titular “faceless prophet” who went by the name Angelicism01 and published dense Substack essays on topics ranging from AI, extinction events, and nihilism to internet addiction and philosophy sit at the exceptional center of multiple bizarrenesses of our time. The story is about aesthetic over substance; mythic realities born out of modern anxieties; and the collapse of what’s real, the cultivation of a digital life in which physical reality is merely a side effect of what happens on the screen. (The anonymous poster behind Angelicism turns out to be a depressed British lad named Jonty Tiplady.)

The girls in the Angelicism cult know that physical reality can’t survive without an aesthetic. Case in point: Four waify women dressed in slim white tanks and tees, short skirts, and alabaster skin pose for photos that bring to mind The Virgin Suicides’ Lisbon sisters or the Manson girls. They’re playing to the camera and leaning into all the right tropes, and maybe, for them, that’s all that mattered. In the aftermath of Angelicism’s leader, they’re claiming the aesthetic narrative for themselves. — Emily Chang

Grace Wales Bonner is the new creative director of Hermès menswear: And it feels like a call to return to what’s real. She rose to superstardom through her eponymous brand and frequent Adidas collaborations, always with exceptional tailoring at the core of her designs. Hermès’s choice shouldn’t be this refreshing, but it is, given that lately, people have forgotten that so much of what luxury is is about the physical experience of it, not the way it looks on a two-dimensional screen.

People forget that you can’t really judge anything properly online, because you haven’t gone to the store, touched the pieces, seen the interior of the tailoring, felt it, worn it, lived in it. Shock value in fashion used to mean a worldview — a shift in not only how people thought, but moved through the world. So Grace Wales Bonner — the jazz musician of designers — heading the luxury brand feels like a reset: Stop designing 3D clothes solely for a 2D screen, and start designing for real identities again. — Emily Chang

Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.

More Media Thoughtz from One Thing:

• Conversations are the new unit of culture: Why people talking to each other and the performance of expertise have become so important.

• The new rules of media: 20 guidelines for digital media during the video-podcast age, aka, why you need a personality cult.

• What makes a good newsletter?: An expert roundtable about newsletter strategy. Are there too many!? Does good writing matter!?

• Aggregation theory: More writers and publications are focusing on creating valuable aggregation because social media sucks so much.

• Voice, taste, trust, scarcity: The values that publications need to keep in mind while competing for readers in the new, messy ecosystem.

The SKIMS bush thong is, to me, the Labubu of body politics: The New York Post writes: “Is [Kim Kardashian] a genius or just plain gross?” Um, neither. How long does it take the industry to revile something before they sell it back to you again? By the way, this very real product is completely sold out. (EC)

A new international magazine / movement

I’ve been saying for a while now that we’re moving into a media renaissance period, in which the traditional institutions are either consolidating power or failing and new, specialized ones are cropping up and thriving by accessing niche audiences online. (As we see more exits, which I think we will beyond The Free Press, the successes will spark even more new launches.) Equator is the latest high-profile launch (or pre-launch). It’s a publication for the post-American century, based in London, with affiliated writers including Pankaj Mishra and Mohsin Hamid and editing from Jonathan Shainin, beloved in niche media circles for editing features at The Guardian.

Equator just published its editorial manifesto on its very stylish website. It’s a strident piece of writing that positions the publication as post-Western and post-globalization, framing tolerance of the genocide in Gaza as a nail in the coffin of the old world order. “We began to imagine a new cultural venture, one that rejects the nihilistic idea that the powerful do what they please,” they write. It’s the end of an intellectual era and perhaps the start of a new one: “A legacy media whose authority to narrate the world depends on Western assumptions of omniscience is now lost in a ruin of shattered concepts.” Yet they’re not pessimistic: “For us, the widely proclaimed ‘end of the West’ is not the end of the world; the epoch ahead is ripe with the promise of fresh illuminations, of new horizons of human action and imagination.”

As with all manifestos, it’s fun and worthwhile reading. As far as what they’ll actually do: “Equator is a movement as much as a magazine. We will publish unique longform stories about politics, culture, literature and art – but our work will also encompass public events, reading groups, screenings and exhibitions.” I’m excited to see the debut batch of articles (always the proof of an editorial manifesto, but I love the embrace of being a movement!! (KC)

The Federal Reserve is now taking into account a possible AI extinction scenario event in economic forecasts. (EC)

Is it time to check the Pentagon Pizza Index again? Since Trump became President, it seems there’s been breaking headlines every hour, and The New York Times homepage lives in a constant state of fire-alarm-red “LIVE: Just now” updates. With the government officially being shut down for fifteen days, this week’s Gaza ceasefire, and the Pentagon blocking news organizations from its offices, perhaps reason, solace, and insight can only be found in the most absurd of places: a live tracker that measures global tension through the everydayness of ordering pizza in the DC area, which is a longtime folk metric and meme that indicates government action. (EC)

RIP REI SoHo: The flagship REI store in the historic Puck Building is closing next year (the store did successfully unionize in 2022). The outdoorsiness that the brand espouses has now become even more of a digital concept. REI always felt to me like one of the realest stores in SoHo: huge, hype-less, and covered in gear that was a physical reminder to touch grass and stay grounded, on Broadway, of all places. I often found myself wandering in just to get lost in the aisles, which grew quieter the deeper you ventured... (EC)

In favor of earnestness: The 26-year-old Icelandic musician Laufey has published a picture book with Penguin Random House called Mei Mei the Bunny (mei mei means little sister in Chinese), about a bunny who dreams to make the world happy with her music, overcoming mistakes, and believing in oneself. (Laufey’s recent interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air is also charmingly sincere.) (EC)

Basic income for artists succeeds: Over the last 3 years, 2,000 artists in Ireland received €325 per week to support their work — with no requirements for producing, publishing, or showing anything in return. It’s a universal basic income scheme for the arts, and the scheme has just been extended into next year because it has worked out so well, in pure economic terms. The stable income actually allowed the artists to make more money than they were given, resulting in €500 more earned per month. So obvious — invest in the arts — and yet so amazing to see it work out.

The Irish publication The Stinging Fly published a fascinating roundtable about the program a few months ago interviewing its recipients, which is worth reading. Journalist Caelainn Hogan said of the program:

It allowed me in some ways to be less productive but to make more meaningful work, giving me more freedom to write for independent publications, to reach new readers, to engage more with community.”

Now we just need it for everyone. Here’s the full report on the outcome if you’re interested. (KC)

Emily Chang (EC) is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.

Top of the newsletter today is links, lower down is a luminous essay by Emily Chang on AI’s effect on our internal worlds. —  Kyle Chayka

What kind of bro are you? Friend of the newsletter Gray Broderick wrote an extensive taxonomy of modern bros, from the Neo-Classic Bro to the Wellness Bro and the Neo-Suburban Bro. Chapman nailed it when analyzing the bro as a kind of social-cultural unit of our time:

The bro composes himself to show social status rather than as a reflection of his internal feeling – mimicry over mood. Cultural, especially sartorial, choices become signifiers of his assimilation, informed by group preference rather than bodily sensation, forgoing his personal feelings for belonging.

Maggie Nelson against her copycats: In a new Paris Review interview, the influential poet, essayist, and author says braided fragments won’t save your writing: “I think people have a hope and a prayer that if they toss in a bunch of quotes, or⁠—and I certainly did not invent the numbered form⁠—add numbers to a piece, it will all magically hang together.”

Too many amaros: My fav group-newsletter-publication Best Food Blog published a great essay on the proliferation of amaro, the Italian digestif that now kind of stands in for any kind of after-dinner drink. Unless it’s just substituting for dessert, I kind of think they’re all too dense and/or sweet and I’d personally go for espresso and grappa…

Aspirational AI swag: The AI startup Anthropic is courting cultural clout by teaming up with the newsletter Air Mail and giving away hats embroidered with “thinking” in the West Village. Over at Deez Links, Delia Cai wrote a characteristically incisive takedown of the whole culture-washing project: “Grow up and stop wasting our precious, precious attention trying to convince the rest of us that your robot thingy is cool, actually (or less evil than the others), or that Tech Company Maybe Nice.”

The triumph of modernism: The Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai just won the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature! He’s a classic candidate, a writer of knotty, swirling fiction that takes on politics, fascism, the ruinous tide of history, the transcendent power of great, shocking art… oh yeah and he doesn’t use paragraph breaks. One Thing has a running relationship with Krasznahorkai; Nate Gallant featured his most recent novel and considered his work in an essay on “brodernism,” the coinage for bro-y performative difficulty in literature. I personally recommend starting with Seiobo There Below, which is slightly more approachable as a kind of linked story collection (especially if you are interested in Japanese aesthetics).

POV: You’re inside your imagination

Generative AI videos are rendering our thoughts before we even have time to think them, making digital life even less real.

by Emily Chang

Growing up in the suburban Midwest, I was a master escapist. I attended a Christian school and went to church twice a week; on Wednesdays, we had chapel at school. All the talk of religion and symbols; heaven and hell; angels and demons; and abstract biblical concepts educated me in the art of uncanny imagination, as the canonical texts were threaded with detailed meaning. In bed each night, I visualized entire worlds. Whole cities were spun out behind my eyelids with unreal landscapes, palatial floor plans, and storylines I returned to each night like a mental video game.

As a child, imagination felt like a muscle that I had to flex. A scene I had spent time constructing could appear and disappear just as quickly. Today, it seems as though the most ordinary object in our lives, the smartphone, has quietly replaced the necessity of such early vivid imagination. The proliferation of AI-generated “POV: You’re…” videos on TikTok is the natural next step for a culture that already sees the world through a front-facing camera. A “point of view” video, as a genre, envisions a scene and places the viewer as the protagonist, the wielder of the camera — usually something IRL, like “POV: You sit next to the popular girl in class” or “POV: You’re a private chef in the Hamptons.”

But now there doesn’t have to be a human hand holding the device. Accounts like Time Traveller POV and Impossible AI create POV videos inspired by history: “POV: You’re a Roman aqueduct builder in 300 BC”, “POV: You are a kid in the Stone Age (3000 BC)”, “POV: You wake up as a peasant in 1800s England”. The videos usually begin with a shot of legs and feet stretching out from underneath a blanket as you wake up and continue through a day-in-the-life, casting you as the main character from sunrise to sunset. These videos are equally amusing and disturbing; holding your phone and watching them as a person in 2025 with modern comforts and daily showers, you now have the worn, blackened hands of a middle-aged man working as a coal miner during the Industrial Revolution, and you’ve woken up on a bed of hay underneath a burlap sack blanket — a far cry from the aspirational escapism that social media so often provides us.

Other AI POV accounts such as Not The Dark Lord, create frutiger aero dreamscapes — glassy, aquatic interiors with windows looking out onto a vivid green landscape reminiscent of the Microsoft Bliss desktop wallpaper. There are endless videos that invite you to imagine “Which bedroom are you sleeping the hardest in?” On YouTube, you can step into “The Ancient Roman Baths for nocturnal philosophers immersive experience (4K)” or submerge yourself in playlists by the creator Nobody, where “You found a lost ancient city in the depths of the ocean.” These are theaters for the mind, solo role-play experiences that are visualized for us on our screens.

These videos don’t ask us to suspend disbelief for long periods of time the way films, books, or video games do. There are no beginnings, endings, or plots. And unlike virtual reality, we don’t have to don a helmet and cut ourselves off from the world. They are sensory fragments of the daydreams we once created in our heads, or gave ourselves over to by inhabiting artists’ visions. The internet is filling with these bite-sized portals, each one designed to be entered immediately without context or commitment. And unlike the work of human writers, artists, or filmmakers, AI POVs are cheap and generative. Eventually, escapism will become less about consuming what someone else has crafted as their own self-expression and more about summoning your own private, customized micro-worlds on demand. Anyone can make them, and soon everyone will.

In 2005, I was in computer class when I stumbled upon a website called Digital Blasphemy, which was created by the artist Ryan Bliss and filled with hyper-detailed, 3D-rendered desktop wallpapers of surreal dreamscapes and planetary scenes. It was the first time I had ever seen someone create something from their own imagination digitally with that degree of detail. There was also something about the look of computer graphics at the time that made everything seem more real, even though they clearly weren’t. These images had just enough depth and detail to trigger the imagination. Their imperfections forced viewers to fill in the gaps, forgive the plasticky look and direct, unnatural brightness of early rendering technology, and subconsciously invest more of their own presence and sensation into a still that is arguably, not realistic at all. Due to its flaws, Digital Blasphemy felt real, or at least, I wanted it to be.

Now, two decades later, graphics aim for full realism and come very close — especially slickened by AI, which isn’t real but originates from what is real. Yet generative AI still falls into the uncanny valley, because it’s so inhuman. AI videos have unnaturally smooth movements, increased frame rates, and surreally exaggerated human expressions. There is no thought behind them: the machine is simply following orders. And now, that kind of empty content is set to become much more prevalent.

On September 25th, Meta launched Vibes, a new feed in the Meta AI app entirely dedicated to making, watching, and sharing AI-generated videos. “Vibes” is the perfect name for what the feed offers: A loosely-categorized horde of visual and auditory content that gobbles up anything the algorithm has an appetite for (it has a sweet tooth for #aesthetic!) and multiplies at the rate of an unidentified virus. A feed consisting only of AI-generated content seems like the ultimate echo chamber — why would people use a feature that is for AI only when part of the fun is not being able to tell if a video is AI or not? Meta’s site says that Vibes is built for “creative inspiration” and “experimentation” with AI tools. But it’s too late to sequester such experimentation; we’re already surrounded by slop, both online and off.

Five days later, OpenAI’s generative video function Sora 2 became available for invite-only access in a new social app called Sora. Its output is quite realistic, but the biggest update might be the existence of something called “cameos,” in which you can insert yourself or a friend into a Sora video after capturing your own likeness — essentially creating an AI avatar. “We think Sora is going to bring a lot of joy, creativity and connection to the world,” OpenAI’s website predicts.

But these new feeds bring me back to dwelling in my imagination as a child. The ability to easily visualize anything and consume it on a screen robs us of the necessity to render things for ourselves and expand our personal capacities. Technology is attempting to do the dreaming for us. What a child might have once envisioned for themselves can now be conjured up with commands like “amber sun rim kissing frost on scales; expression reads predatory calm / effortless power.” Maybe that’s the irony of all this. Technology can render the worlds we once imagined, but in doing so, it has taken away the quiet spaces where those worlds used to live. The more vivid our screens become, the duller our inner landscapes can get. It’s easier than ever for our imaginations to be limited by what technology can do, because we know it can do so much, instead of the other way around.

There’s a rare pleasure in recalling the worlds I once built alone. Watching AI conjure these scenes sharper and faster than ever only clarifies why imagination matters. It’s never just about the images themselves, but the discipline, curiosity, and attention we brought to them. Seeing those acts externalized reminds me that the true value of imagination has always been in the act of making it our own, however fleeting or private.

Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.

The Revenge of Elitism

by Kyle Chayka

Everywhere I look I see elites, which is to say, people who already have power (or clout, fame, and capital) leveraging their power to gain more of it and to exert authority over other people. What’s more, the top-down hierarchy has become somehow cool — desirable or at least inescapable and thus ripe for adoption and appropriation. The crackpot tech philosopher Curtis Yarvin calls for an American king, which Trump acts like anyway. The Trump family forms a royal court that is busily extracting money from their demesne like any crew of evil princes of centuries past. Hangers-on compete to get closer to the center, or they just go to Butterworth’s in DC to bask in the elitist aura. (Even as government workers, the non-elites, are forced out of their jobs and lives.)

In culture, print magazines are getting new, young editors-in-chief: see Noah Johnson at Highsnobiety, Mark Guiducci at Vanity Fair, and Chloe Malle at Vogue, who instantly become power brokers themselves. People genuinely care about Taylor Swift’s and Charli xcx’s weddings. (If you don’t get married abroad are you really elite?) Celebrities all have podcasts where they interview other, even more famous, celebrities — see Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang.” And we listen to them, reinforcing their fame. Perhaps part of it is the fossilization of audiences: it’s harder to build a crowd online organically now, so it helps if everyone knows you already. Your clout can translate from film to TV to TikTok to YouTube. Or the elites have realized you can make real money on their own from the internet, so they’re jumping on board.

In tech, AI is a vector of total elitism, with its practitioners at the top. Sam Altman already acts like king of the world, and when he decides it’s a good time to launch a feed of video slop, he does it, and millions of piggies follow. The new OpenAI video advertisements glorify living your life as ChatGPT instructs you to, in faux-grainy, Ryan McGinley-ish hipster clips. Under AI, the robot is the true elite and the next layer down are those who adjust its variables, like worshipers tweaking the corpse of a dead god. There is no longer the hope of social-media “democratization” or lowering the barrier to entry. The self-negating idea of “AI-enabled creativity” is just culture as dictated by Zuckerberg and Altman and Musk, molded into shape by the algorithm and the LLM.

You can do very well right now by catering to these elites, peddling their ideas and following the pathways they build. (Congratulations to Bari Weiss for posting her way to wealth and dictatorial power over a television channel, for some period of time.) To be anti-elitist, however, is to stop caring about attention as a metric of quality, because those who already have it will always win. It requires caring about the people who aren’t on magazine covers and don’t have hundreds of thousands of followers. It requires engaging in smaller-scale, more private, and more coherent efforts — the community of friends and collaborators, people whose opinion you respect (as opposed to the passive hoards of onlookers and bots). Newsletters are a part of this, as is throwing your own parties. Some people call for the return of “selling out”, or the public shaming of this lean in to elitism. You could go further and say: Don’t give your attention to those who you think have sold out. Elitism doesn’t need to be so aspirational.

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Wanna smash? Remember when fast food was actually good and actually fast? If you’re feeling nostalgic for the McDonald’s flavor of yesteryear, Smashy in Union Square comes pretty close in taste, speed, and style — like when McDonald’s had tiled walls and didn’t look just like Chipotle. The burgers are simple. A soft bun, a flavor rocket of a beef patty that’s slightly blackened on the ends and not too smashed, melty American cheese, pickles, and tomatoes. The fries are substantial and so crispy on the outside that you almost crunch into them. This one’s from Budapest, not San Bernardino. — Emily Chang

Scene report from the newly-renovated MoMA Design Store: Okay, so they’re playing “My Immortal” by Evanescence. Next up on the playlist: “We Fit Together” by O-Town and 2008 teen anthem “You Belong With Me” by Taylor Swift. Is this the MoMA store? If only they spent as much time architecting the mood as they did on the clarified physical space, as handled by Peterson Rich Office. Still, lots of products are worth seeing, some old, some new, but step back out onto Spring Street if you miss secondary colors. — Emily Chang

Speed round

• The FT on late-night restaurant deals, which sound amazing. Discounts on martinis after 11 PM! Reviving nightlife requires a subsidy (and probably free childcare).

• Chris Kraus, of I Love Dick fame, gives a deep interview to The New Yorker about her new novel and delves into the problems of creative career competition in relationships. What happens when you become a later-in-life literary celeb? As her interviewer says, “I think it might be hard for ambitious women who date men to read this.”

• Highlight of Substack publishing this week is an essay on life as fodder for content by Freya India: “We are now turning our lives into mindless entertainment. Not just consuming slop, but becoming it.” It’s pretty brutal:

Marketing your memories also desecrates them. You hand over your hope, your hurt, your life to be consumed, reducing it to reality TV. Your precious memories are my mindless entertainment. Your trauma becomes my background noise. Your life-shattering divorce my slop. Your children my characters; your pain my distraction; your feelings my filler episodes. I will swipe past your birth video when I get bored. I will downvote your divorce if it isn’t entertaining enough. Your life is what I clean my kitchen to, what I kill time with. And if you fail to entertain me, fine, I will scroll for another life to consume.

• Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum for 26 years and thus one of the major forces of contemporary art and culture in NYC, is stepping down next year. This is huge news, but not entirely unexpected as the museum is on the verge of reopening with a new building next door and may be looking for a fresh start.

• True tech criticism: a literary review essay on the new iPhone Air and its camera, comparing it to classic film rangefinder cameras.

Top links from the previous One Thing

• Jasmine Sun’s newsletter on AI vs NPCs

• The Caffs not Cafes Insta, underground London restaurant culture

• “a new 13 metre long table made from a 5000-year-old oak log”

• Lauren Collins’s New Yorker profile of Uniqlo

• Dwight Garner throws some shade at Patricia Lockwood

Aspirational shopkeeper life: I really enjoyed this interview in the great London newsletter Wooden City with two blokes who opened a cool, curated boutique called Perfect Lives selling basically whatever they can get their hands on: vinyl, rare books, art prints, seal furs. The writer Isaac Rangaswami also runs a perfect Instagram called Caffs not Cafes, on low-key London restaurants. Must-follow, IMO, especially if you already know what Vittles is.

Good taste can be bad, too: The Washington Post’s fashion critic Rachel Tashjian nailed a certain kind of aspirationally tasteful millennial adult lifestyle hypebeast when she started off her tirade against New York Fashion Week with this paragraph:

Too many designers are making nice trousers and sort-of-interesting tops for upper-middle-class women on the go, who find meaning through owning a few vases special enough to be called “ceramics.” Too many designers are making Fortuny-inspired skirts and dresses, blazers just oversize enough to convey “mystery” rather than “Berghain regular,” and extravagant peasant dresses for women who pine after Elsa Peretti and think of American expat and progenitor of Cotswold cool Amanda Brooks as the cognoscenti’s Gwyneth Paltrow.

Ceramics!!! I feel owned. The markers of the aesthetically “interesting” have lately become so standardized as to be boring, too — if you like Peter Hujar, I don’t care. When niche signifiers become too mainstream, the race is on to find new ones.

“🌻 are you high-agency or an NPC?” — “Omg, I’m scared,” as one friend responded to this Substack link. One of my fav forms of tech writing are dispatches straight from the source, the hive mind of the Bay Area. Once in a while, a participant in the whole tech scene just nails what’s going on right now, because they can observe it on the ground. That’s what former Substack employee Jasmine Sun does in this newsletter. Silicon Valley is in full-on gold rush mode again (see Kerry Howley’s deep report in NYmag), but the ideology is all structured on the dynamics of artificial intelligence, which are even less fun than those of, say, cryptocurrency. It’s a population of agentic hyper-optimizers, working at an inhuman pace in order to beat (and profit from) the tide of AI.

For Sun, being a “non-player character” means being irredeemably basic, even if you seem like you’re doing pretty well. The AI differentiator is attitude, not status (but, one might ask, all this achievement and disruption to what end?):

NPCs start every morning with Starbucks and the Spotify algorithm. They’ve worked the same Big Tech job for the last 7 years, collecting a 5% annual raise and spending it on a surf trip to Hawaii. The NPC always votes Democrat but doesn’t know why. Hobbies include Netflix and “trying new restaurants.” Sometimes, they scroll the app Threads.

The NPCs don’t know that AGI is coming. The NPCs will probably end up stuck in the permanent underclass. The NPCs go about their quiet lives, playing LinkedIn Games and watching Marvel movies, blissfully blind to the technological tsunami mounting behind them.

Fun artsy stuff

• “a new 13 metre long table made from a 5000-year-old oak log discovered perfectly preserved in a peat bog in 2016.”

• “This novel is a work of criticism in which life is the subject.” — Legendary NYT book critic Dwight Garner takes on Patricia Lockwood’s new novel.

• Do men even write fiction? This messy critical essay in NYmag tries to define the millennial male novelist, finds the current crop lacking, and I would say fails to point to a coherent cause, style, or complaint. Reading this, you might think that men don’t write about anything other than manhood. (See also: Nate on “brodernism.”)

• “Arrest Warrant Says Buyer of ‘Nude Emperor’ Bronze Knew It Was Looted.” I hate when I get made an example of for buying ambiguously sourced, singular antiquities and hoarding them in my house.

• The largest private collection of Rembrandts is going to do a kind of IPO, so you can invest in Rembrandt Futures long-term. Sounds like there’s also a vague crypto scheme. But who gets to look at the paintings??

• “My edge was always gonna be little tweaks here and there, and then adding this luxury element to everything I do.” Read this interview with the menswear designer and founder Todd Snyder, who for my money makes menswear at the ideal intersection of cool and accessible.

The enigma of Uniqlo

by Emily Chang

Lauren Collins recently published a sweeping profile for The New Yorker on Uniqlo’s steady rise to the top. I spent a little over four years at Uniqlo Global Creative Lab, where I was Associate Creative Director and recently left to start my own practice. It’s been gratifying to see someone finally cover the complexity of the brand in a way that goes beyond its deceptive simplicity and into the depths of what it is exactly that creates its elusive magic. Here’s a bit of the story:

I asked Conway about Uniqlo’s philosophy, and why a clothing company should aspire to improve human existence. Couldn’t it just make nice clothes? “I think, even internally, we’ve asked ourselves, What is it that’s different about us?” Conway replied. “LifeWear is the main difference.”

LifeWear is notoriously difficult to explain, but in the highest offices of the company, it’s a utility that every person has the right to access, akin to clean water or heat. Uniqlo makes clothes, and Westerners have often misread the brand as a “Japanese H&M”, but the Japanese DNA reframes everything with an ethic of respect for all people that underpins even the smallest decisions. Despite its scale and continuous growth in the midst of a turbulent economy and even more turbulent fashion retail industry, Uniqlo has an extreme and almost debilitating sense of humility. While known for its rigorous obsession with improving tiny details of the product and making high-quality, technical clothing accessible, its eight-figure donations to academic and arts institutions, scientific research, and nonprofit organizations are rarely publicized in a way that other brands of its size and stature would happily tout. This constant internal tension between understatement and conviction reminded me of a short piece of language we once developed to help express what “simple” really means at Uniqlo:

Simple is a coat that fits inside your purse.
Simple is everyone in the world having access to high-quality clothing.
It’s simple. If you’re cold, be warm. If you’re hot, be cool.
If you’re looking for the perfect T-shirt, you shouldn’t have to pay $100 for a brand’s singular vision of it.

Simple keeps its feet on the ground.
Simple breathes in the air. And wants to keep it clean.
Simple respects everybody.
Simple is never exclusive.

This ethos resurfaced in a campaign we created last fall that took the form of a question: “What Makes Life Better?” It gave a humble brand permission to actually talk about who they are through the question at the core of its philosophy. As Collins notes, answers ranged from the poetic (Waight Keller: “Inspiration.” Federer: “Kindness.”) to the technical (“electrolyte membranes” and “carbon-fibre solutions”).

This campaign was the question I imagined employees asking themselves every day as they went into work, whether they realized it or not, making a sweater 10 grams lighter, refusing to raise a price, or simply making something more beautiful. As the influential designer and Uniqlo collaborator Christophe Lemaire often says, “A beautiful color is no more expensive than a cheap color.”

So when Collins ends the article with an anecdote about how she asks the founder, Tadashi Yanai, for a concrete example of how Uniqlo makes life better, I found his response perfectly poetic. He pulls a laminated card from his jacket pocket that says, among other gnomic lines, “Uniqlo is how the future dresses. / Uniqlo is beauty in hyperpracticality.”

There was the question, and there was his answer, with no specifics, no numbers, and no corporate jargon. Just the purest expression of values. Simplicity isn’t so much the absence of complexity as it is the mastery of it — a lesson that continues to shape how I approach my work, and even how I think about what matters in life. Meanwhile, the rest of the fashion industry marches on its own way: Gwyneth Paltrow doubled down on making $725 sweaters with her brand, Gwyn, which debuted last week.

Emily Chang is a creative director, writer, and photographer in Manhattan. You can read her Substack here.

One Thing sends out culture-world updates, collecting odds and ends that are interesting and eclectic but not eclectic in a boring way.

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