'Superman' PR, urban textscapes, a new way to think of Theo Von

From the desk of someone struggling through their second cold of the summer...

Recently every day has become a negotiation between my jaw pain (just clenching too much, nothing interesting) and me. Acupuncture helps though! So do “buccal massage facials,” though it is of course $$$ to get another person to pry open and rub your skull from new angles. Open to other suggestions…

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Max Tani had the inside scoop on how insiders at the NYT landed on the “right” image of a malnourished child + the resulting editor’s note for a recent story about Gazans being starved to death, and I appreciated his zoom out into how it’s representative of how mainstream media has been turning the corner, narrative-wise, on the genocide. The other headline that’s sticking: “With No Food, Gazan Mother Feeds Toddler Mixture of Salt and Water.”

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This Stuart Heritage piece from The Guardian analyzing the press junket for Superman—or rather, the lack of one—to help introduce actor David Corenswet and the summer blockbuster was astute. I love movie publicity criticism almost as much as film criticism itself! My view on the phenom Heritage is describing is that it’s probably not that terrible, actually, if we reduce most of movie marketing to vibe-based clips rather than pretending that we’re actually “getting to know” actors via journalistic profile cross-examination that ends up being heavily filtered anyway. If we want our favorite celebs to not burn out immediately, we should let them cultivate actual mystique!

(Also, you really have to read this, if only for Heritage’s wild anecdote about meeting Reese Witherspoon at a particularly poorly-timed junket…).

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Been a while since we’ve had a nice scrollsperience on our hands, but here’s one: The media artist Yufeng Zhao fed Google Street View panoramas into a text transcription program, and then The Pudding (which is incredibly still around, we interviewed the founder back in 2019??) turned it into a package on New York’s “urban textscape.” An interesting tidbit in there on “Fedders,” the A/C unit brand whose logo you see on a lot of apartment buildings that have the units built into the wall, as well as one about Yodock, which is apparently the brand of those orange/white traffic barriers. Nice to actually learn something once in a while…

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And finally, here are some simply amazing lines that I’ve read recently, highlighted (at least in the mind) and chuckled over:

• “Theo Von, a dog that got turned into a human via a magic spell and is now the world’s third-biggest podcaster…” (Garbage Day)
  

• “My body is a machine that turns money into posts and the machine needs to stay fueled…” (Today in Tabs)
  

• But the Yglesias profile’s very existence reminds us of an important rule of thumb for navigating the content economy in the 21st century: Under the present regime, there is no real downside risk to posting.” (Read Max)
  

• “When I go to the gym now, I don’t even change. I just work out in what I’m wearing. At a certain point, it doesn’t matter. I’m in jeans and a T-shirt, but I can still work on my bench press. It feels super sick.” (Magasin ← disclaimer, I edited Louis on this, but I still can’t stop lol’ing at this model’s answer)
  

• “Stories, which essentially deaded Snapchat in the water when it was added in 2016, operates on a similar philosophy.” (Heavies ← you should read Chris’ whole thing on how “link in bio” ruined our brains, but I just really appreciate this use of “deaded” as an active verb. But also, the observation that “smoother, less literate brains are just better for business” is right on the money.)
  

• “The restaurant (which charges £12 for a plate of broccoli) was a no-go, and the bench outside was occupied by a group of fintech Gracie Abramses, so we opted to stand.” (VICE)