niche media ball + conversation starters

Predictably, my favorite piece from the New Museum show was a series of drawings...

I’m in Asia this week and the next, but I’ll be back and fully online soon! (with perhaps with a doc update?) xoxo D

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Some recent tidbits of interest…

• Adding a home phone line costs only around an extra $15/month, as Jeremy Rellosa found out in his attempt to try to use only a landline phone for a month, which he documented for The Strategist. Unfortunately the entire appeal of this kind of experiment, if you ask me, is waiting until the end to turn that phone back on and seeing how many texts came in while I was being terribly, totally missed. (Sometimes it’s the technology that’s the problem; sometimes it’s ya own personality…)
  

• The Dodo — yes, as in the animal news website — is still around? It’s one of the Vox Media brands that James Murdoch didn’t want, and per Adweek, it sounds like Penske Media might scoop it up alongside Eater, The Verge, SB Nation, and Popsugar. You know what, it’s not the worst fate for a feel-good website that launched in 2014!
  

• ICYMI: On the subject of the newly Murdoch-backed Vox Media properties, New York magazine editor David Haskell told us himself that the future is feeling good, adding “I don’t expect there to be any noticeable change” re: the magazine.
  

• “The Times also tries to avoid hiring freelance writers who in the past three years have participated in freebie trips for other publications.” Hmm! Something to think about if you regularly enjoy a press trip now and then, yet still harbor dreams of writing for The NYT’s travel section. (No wonder they still haven’t properly replaced the T magazine editor yet…)
  

• Extremely niche media ball: Airmail has a funny habit of crediting its photo illustrations to an entity called “Chop Choppish Shop,” and I have been wondering for a while whether this was some third-party service that they outsourced the work to. Turns out, per Airmail editor Julia Vitale, it’s just the name of their in-house illustration team. Someone close to the publication further explained that “Chop Choppish” is a bit of an inside joke for the team, which I like as a concept. More mags should have their little jokes!
  

• “It’s actually reasonably common at Meta” to take mental health leave, according to an anonymous Meta source in this San Francisco Standard piece on the general vibes at Menlo Park (coincidentally, it appears this source was laid off in last week’s reaping): in fact, “It feels like a bit of an open secret.” The disillusionment of elite tech workers continues apace!
  

• Speaking of inside jokes, Jonah Peretti is betting big on the fact that most people (kids?) just want to use generative AI as a novelty toy — “kind of like an inside joke engine,” as he described to The Verge. “We found that making AI content and posting it on Instagram or TikTok just kind of feels like slop, but making funny things with your friends that are about the specific things that you’re joking about and talking about is just a lot more fun.” Hence the launch of BF Island, a messaging app that lets you talk to friends using AI? I guess that’s not…terrible?
  

• Less of a learned fact and more of a genuine question: the SF-based singer-songwriter Trinity Ace revealed on her Perfectly Imperfect “Taste of Taste” profile that the “Shark Bowl” blue drink at the Fisherman’s Wharf Applebee’s is “thick because they grind up gummy sharks into it.” But the Applebee’s website just says you get a “signature gummy shark garnish” with the drink, which in photos appears to have a regular viscosity otherwise. Which is the truth??? Because if a gummy-thickened alcoholic blue drink actually does exist, I unfortunately would like to try it.
  

• The quarterly reading series at Nightclub 101 hosted by Viking Penguin publicist Alexis Nowicki and audio producer Maria Robins-Somerville is QUITE good. I think you and I both know that the New York readings scene can be pretty… uneven shall we say (and I think that range is a good thing, to be clear), but I left last week’s rendition of Reading 101 not only impressed, but inspired. (There’s nothing like hearing people reading fiction out loud to help you work out some thoughts about how to do dialogue yourself.) I think the best way to find out about the series is through Alexis’s and Maria’s IGs, so maybe I will see you at the next one!
  

• At the New Museum 2.0 over the weekend, I was most enchanted by the “Soft City” drawings of the Norwegian Pop artist Hariton Pushwagner, which depict mid-century office drones and housewives in absurdly regimented formations. If I could do my visit over, I would have spent way more time following the entire series down the wall where they are displayed. (Peep part of a drawing below; I love the claustrophobic effect of the buildings jutting right into each other.) I later found out that these drawings are part of an epic 2016 graphic novel of the same name and am very curious about it now…….Otherwise, most of the “New Humans” show tries to address the man vs. cyborg question in predictable uncanny valley-baiting ways, so it was interesting that a series of drawings banking on the power of a repeating image + elementary 2D perspective play nailed the eerie factor much more effectively.