my week summarized by the best content i consumed (in no particular order)
- Time to Say Goodbye: Asians are white again, pandemic rage, what to expect from Biden, and mega free trade
- Borat directed by Larry Charles
- The Garden of Forking Memes: How Digital Media Distorts Our Sense of Time
“Digital media has done away with the very thing that created our sense of history: imperfect memory. The process of creating a historical narrative (or any story, for that matter) involves discarding an enormous amount of information. It’s like chipping away at a big block of marble until you’re left with a captivating statue. Forgetting is a feature, not a bug. It makes us feel like we’re moving forward through time, rather than standing still or running in circles. My grandmother and her ancestors knew this all too well. Artful forgetting, editing, and curation allowed them to craft narratives that helped their children understand the past and orient towards the future. The internet has undercut these time-tested practices of inter-generational knowledge transfer. It’s like an all-knowing god without any rituals of forgetting or forgiveness.”
4. Why the Success of The New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism
“The consolidation of everything from movies to news, as the media industry gets hollowed out by the same rich-get-richer, winner-take-all forces that have reshaped businesses from airlines to pharmaceuticals.
And the story of consolidation in media is a story about The Times itself.”
5. Good Collaborations are Art, Great Ones are Kitsch
“Collaborations are basically a constant brand re-contextualization: they take it from one context and put it into another one. In that sense, there isn’t a “bad” collaboration: collaborations are calculated cultural and business tests. Some contexts are more fertile than others, but just as evolution constantly mixes stuff up to see what sticks (theropods didn’t), a brand stays alive through remixes. Collaborations are the strategy of brand awareness, market expansion and its fountain of youth.”
6. Comedy Actors Roundtable: Sacha Baron Cohen, Jim Carrey, Don Cheadle & More
7. Knowing What You Are Looking For
“All of this is a relentless effort to figure out what we are looking for and then go out and find it. It is not a static thing. It is a dynamic thing. A pandemic comes along and rocks our world. Time to revisit the thesis and the deep dives. When the pandemic ends, and it will, we will factor that into our thinking too.”
