can they make "groupcore" happen?

Plus the perfect gift for the "A Little Life" obsessive in your life... I guess?

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Some more veteran Substack heavy hitters are absconding the platform for…Patreon? Count Anne Helen Petersen, Virginia Sole-Smith (both of whom put their “reasons I’m leaving New York Substack” post under a paywall, canny) and Lyz Lenz amongst the latest wave of departures. Recall that Throwing Fits did the same last month (after coming to Substack from Patreon originally during summer 2024). Recall, too, how TF’s move was fêted like the return of a prodigal son (Times Square billboard, dinner at the verrrry swank Bridges (home of New York’s favorite $37 comte tart). Sounds like some monnnnnney is sitting pretty on some tables! Ye olde Substack Pro model lives on…

If it’s me reading the signs……. the newsletter platform talent wars (talent rebellion?) have only just begun…

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Meanwhile, Kickstarter co-founder/former CEO Yancey Strickler (who also co-founded craft interview fave The Creative Independent) is getting back in the tech-media-culture discourse with his latest project, Metalabel, which builds “groupcore software for creative people.” Mozilla’s viral “post-naive internet era” report referred to it as a “release platform;” Mindy Seu’s latest book, for example, is deploying a new profit-distribution model that Metalabel is helping to implement. So far, what’s most impressive to me is Metalabel’s clear grasp of contemporary internet aesthetics (compare to that Claude nonsense, for example) and Strickler’s (somewhat Linkedin-brained) push to make “groupcore” happen as both a term and ethos. But considering his success rate with the “dark forest theory of the internet” he proposed in 2019, which is now online canon, Strickler continues to hold our attention as an Internet Ideas Guy.

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Nicholas Thompson, the former Wired editor, now Atlantic CEO and notorious sicko for long-distance running (Deez interviewed him in 2019 about what he listened to on his running commute to Condé) finally published his running memoir this week, though apparently it’s also a son-of-a-father memoir per this moving excerpt. How does he have the time!

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There now exists a “collector’s edition box set” for Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life on the occasion of that cursed (complimentary) novel’s 10th anniversary, which you can purchase for $60. Honestly cracks me up that they not only split a perfectly respectably-sized book into four little books to make this set—illustrated with a portrait of each character on the cover for maximum Sex & The City vibes, but also the publisher got original art from Salman Toor for Jude, which I think is a very interesting choice since Toor’s depictions of queer life tend to be pretty intimate and inviting and like…positive.

Images courtesy of Penguin Random House

Still, I wish they’d at least commit to a Toor interpretation for all four covers, because the Willem one …………….is frankly a different vibe entirely:

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In other news, learned that babies (or at least, the ones you’d want to cast in Gerber commercials) in the U.S. are unionized, per this Dirt article by Gillian Goodman about marketing baby food, a sense of comfort, and the American dream:

The frictions between fantasy and reality remain carefully contained on set. There is always a woman (technically, this could be someone of any gender, but I only ever saw a woman in the role) who is called the baby wrangler. Her job, above all, is to be someone whom babies are innately drawn to. Then, she uses an arsenal of toys, keys, feather dusters, and laser pointers to stand behind the scenes and grab the attention of the on-camera baby to get them to smile. The baby’s real parents are also on set, but it is usually the baby wrangler who does the dirty work of getting that golden look and avoiding meltdowns. In the world of baby marketing, the sweaty labor of mothering is outsourced to the baby wrangler.

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If you’re in New York this week, I can’t recommend seeing Sasha Gordon’s show at David Zwirner, “Haze,” enough. I’ve had mixed feelings about Gordon’s self portraiture in the past; sometimes her figures’ faces come across as garish, almost corpse-like. But this new show is amazing; Gordon has figured out how to paint faces in a way that makes them look aglow, and I was astonished by her rendering of so many long, individual strands of hair as well as the mesh weave of some basketball shorts. Delicate work. And Dua Lipa loved it too!

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she looks like this!