Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
What the popularization of slugging on the internet represents is an ongoing, and unmistakably American, battle over ownership: the masking of cultural theft as cultural literacy. It should come as no surprise that slugging videos have garnered hundreds of millions of views. TikTok’s fabric is woven through with appropriation. Ownership is a shared... See more
Jason Parham Culture • The Age of Everything Culture Is Here
Although he was largely an observer of the technical community that created Silicon Valley, his various ideas and crusades around the Whole Earth Catalog, which he created in the fall of 1968, foreshadow and resonate with the techno-utopian culture that the Valley spawned.
John Markoff • Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
Ted Lasso is a show that’s a bit confused about whether it represents a return to the classic sitcom on a streaming platform or an opportunity to move past that form into something different and more shapeless.
Anne Helen Petersen • "Taste Hierarchies Like These Stink"
In this and other recent programming, Netflix is pioneering a genre that I’ve come to think of as ambient television. It’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” as the musician Brian Eno wrote, when he coined the term “ambient music” in the liner notes to his 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” a wash of slow melodic synth compositions.
Kyle Chayka • “Emily in Paris” and the Rise of Ambient TV
Billy Joel is also not cool in the kitschy, campy, “he’s so uncool he’s cool” sense, which also happens to be the most tired designation in popular culture. He has no intrinsic coolness, and he has no extrinsic coolness. If cool was a color, it would be black—and Billy Joel would be sort of burnt orange.
Chuck Klosterman • Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is literally about media alienation, so it can’t really be about media alienation.