Inside Charlotte Lawrence’s Radio City tour diary; Diesel taps Måneskin’s Damiano David as its first-ever global male ambassador; Tom Cruise’s daughter Suri ditches his last name for her graduation; and there’s a Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce-inspired romcom in the works (sure would be awkward if they broke up).
TIKTOK, SNAP, AND YOUTUBE ARE ALL-IN ON THE 2024 OLYMPICS, WITH NBC’S HELP, wapo
Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, and the Gen Z sports company Overtime are sending 27 creators to the Olympics next month as part of NBCUniversal’s “Paris Creator Collective.” In the past, NBC giving Olympic media credentials to TikTokers and YouTubers would have been “unthinkable.” But times have changed: “If we don’t put it [on the social platforms], they will watch less Olympics, so we are putting it there,” said Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics. (I can’t stop thinking about this recent Times piece about the young people in Paris pleading on TikTok not to come to the Olympics.)
FOR GEN Z, MUSIC IS ITS OWN SOCIAL MEDIA, fastcompany
As TikTok has become central to music sharing (a recent study found 45% of 18-24 year olds use the platform for music discovery), new apps have popped up “to turn music into social fodder.” Receiptify, a web service that turns a user’s APIs into a receipt-style listing, was created by a student for a college club application and then went viral; similarly, Nirmal Patel of Obscurify, which allows users to see how obscure their music taste is compared to the average listener, blew up on TikTok
INSPIRED BY GEN Z, PINTEREST USERS CAN NOW TURN BOARDS INTO VIDEOS FOR SHARING ON INSTAGRAM AND TIKTOK, techcrunch
The platform announced a new feature that allows users to create short videos of their Pinterest boards, designed to be shared across social media. Gen Z is, as you probably know by now, obsessed with Pinterest, and though they’ve found all sorts of creative ways to share their boards manually, this tool is going to be very good for Pinterest’s growth across platforms.
SOCIAL MEDIA BROKE SLANG. NOW WE ALL SPEAK PHONE., theatlantic
Social media has transformed language, making it more universal and standardized, but in the absence of distinctive subcultural expressions, platforms have become full of empty slang (see: the ubiquity of “tea” or “vibes"). “In real life, I do not learn how teenagers talk, because whenever I drift by, they fall silent and glare at me,” explains Dan Brooks. “On social media, there is no such exclusion.”
WHY MEN ARE ‘RAWDOGGING’ FLIGHTS, gq
Hardy young men — “the gender that brought you frat hazing and Logan Paul,” writes Kate Lindsay — are forgoing music and movies to spend the length of long flights quietly starring at the real-time flight map on the screen in front of them (and often, crucially, bragging about it on social media). They’ve “come to see rawdogging flights as a kind of challenge, like the Tough Mudder or No Nut November.”
“I don't think men have the same ‘treat culture’ that women do, which is frankly a shame,” says Luke Winkie, 33, who has used the flight map as his only in-flight entertainment for years. “A long flight, for women, is the perfect venue to organize an entire itinerary of treats, and I do think men tend to be more stoic and weird about the spaces in which they allow themselves to receive pleasure.”
HOPING FOR A GLIMPSE OF HAILEY BIEBER, HUNDREDS TURN OUT FOR HER MAKEUP, nyt
Fans waited for hours in a line that snaked around the block for a chance to swatch shades of the new pocket blushes — and to hopefully see Hailey Bieber in the flesh — at the beauty brand’s pocket-size pop-up in Soho. Alas, the founder did not show, but that didn’t stop shoppers from buying up all of the products. My favorite quote: “It is very tween makeup,” said Stella DiStasio, 17. (“Tween makeup!!!” The ultimate teen diss.) “It’s more minimalistic, and all of the packaging is just very … aesthetic.”
One last thought:
The first time I heard about Maneskin was from a semi-viral TikTok of Angelina Jolie and a 16 year old Shiloh Jolie Pitt singing ‘I Wanna Be Your Slave’ in the crowd of their 2022 concert in Rome. That doesn’t mean anything, but it felt…of a piece to mention.
I also wanted to say, re: your point about designer colognes becoming more popular with Gen Z and Alpha boys, that Lynx (the British name for Axe) have a new ad campaign with the tagline “smell finer than most fine fragrances” and are have made a lot of buys on channels women are most likely to watch, notably ones dedicated to true crime.