When did “masterclass” become such a vacant compliment?
Stand With Minnesota is a great and incredibly organized resource to keep as an open tab right now: You can literally help buy dashcams for legal observers (via an effort so grassroots that one option is mailing a check to someone’s PO Box directly) amongst many other ways to contribute $, read testimonials from locals describing their lived experience of the past week/month, and find a running list of local and indie news outlets reporting on ICE’s campaign of terror — and posting often in real time on Bluesky. It’s possible Bluesky’s time for being actually useful has finally come?
In case you missed some actually good Condé news, Mi-Anne Chan is the new head of Teen Vogue, which is fantastic news for the teens. She’s been running the video team for Teen Vogue, Them, and Glamour the past five years, and most interestingly built the Gen Z fandom-focused outlet Mixed Feelings from the ground up — which, if you know anything about the machinations at Content Tower, is indicative of her ability to will the impossible into existence. Last fall, Mixed Feelings published a medieval-themed print issue and hosted a costume competition in Manhattan that literally stunned me with the amount of effort everyone put into their looks. If what Mi-Anne has done with MF is any indication, Teen Vogue is about to get a lot more hyperspecific and excellent at throwing whimsical parties.
Elsewhere in the life of titles turned sub-brands at Condé, Pitchfork is launching a $5 subscription that “lets readers comment on reviews, rate albums themselves, and access its full archive,” per Axios. If the aim is to turn Pitchfork into a Letterboxd of music, that would be interesting — why not let everyone cosplay as a Pitchfork editor since there’s only like, one real one left? (Hi Mano.) Surely the corporation that owns Reddit can figure out how to replicate a smidge of that success via a new forum-based platform. But it must be quite the internal conundrum: Is the former domain of SI Newhouse fully committing to democratizing taste or not?
This is somewhat apropos of everything, but lately I’ve been fixating on how the use of the word “masterclass” is a dead giveaway of a Certain Type of Person who wants to score internet points for saying something is good and implying they have the professional/critical chops to say so, but without actually putting any credibility or real evaluation on the line. It’s such an obvious symptom of our current X slop LinkedIn poet grindset TikTok shaman Huberman-brained quick takeaway culture that prizes the appearance of substance — or distinction — over its actual texture, in that a piece of art or performance or even well-written email can’t simply just be excellent, it also has to be exemplary — a “class” to study and learn from, because at the end of the day, what use is any square inchage of attention if we can’t relate to it in a way that personally serves moi???
Props to the actual platform MasterClass (or what I like to call Premium Cameo) for making the term synonymous with magnificence; apologies to English teachers everywhere who tried to teach us how to form a genuinely original exclamatory statement on our own. No need for that anymore as it turns out! Culture good. Culture Masterclass. Me Masterclass Life while You NPC die.
To be honest I am a bit interested in the Brooklyn Beckham stuff particularly because, as I was saying to a friend the other day, doesn’t it feel rare and significant to witness a nepo baby rebel so publicly? One assumes most offspring of the famous have spent their lives learning how not to play with that particular fire; yet here is the firstborn of Mr. and Mrs. Ok! magazine doing IG Story battle with decades’ worth of goodwill cultivated by two of the savviest celebs alive. As always, it’s likely an all celebs suck situation, but in reading Brooklyn’s side, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Fortesa Latifi’s reporting on influencer kids who’ve started wising up to how fucked their monetized childhoods have been…in the meantime, I leave it to Trissues for keeping me looped in as selectively as possible.
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If you’re also a luddite-in-spirit who actually spends a lot of time online, mymind will be useful. It’s one place to save everything you want to remember and one place to find it (imagine google searching your own thoughts). Bonus that it’s beautifully designed.
The masterclass thing haunts me. To this day, I live to regret using it in a Substack headline 4 years ago
Masterclass call out is really good. those tweets are fried!
To me it feels really connected to the rise of comments on the strength and efficacy of marketing campaigns and a brand's marketing itself, which feels meant to signal they're consumers that pay attention and see it all a layer deeper. Every piece of art is to be viewed through the lens of self-improvement, in a way that will make you a more efficient B2B account manager and not necessarily a richer, more vivid person.
The death of the simple and straightforward "I like this".