VICE Magazine is coming back (and is presumably no longer bankrupt?); Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi will soon star in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights; watch NewJeans in their first-ever Calvin Klein campaign (there’s a pun to be made there…); and the Dare shared everything he can’t live without, from headphones (wired) to cologne (Comme des Garçons).
INSPIRED BY A CHILDREN’S BOOK, THEY’RE HAVING A ‘STREGA NONA SEPTEMBER’, nyt
Brat summer is over, and young people are back to being homebodies. Zillennials like Margaret Duncan, 29, find themselves reaching for characters like Strega Nona — the title character of a 1975 children’s book of the same name by Tomie dePaola — every autumn, when nostalgia “swells with the back-to-school season.” “I think that there’s a longing for simplicity,” she said. “Her biggest problem is that this young man who helps her made too much pasta.”
WHY BRO CULTURE IS INVADING POLITICS, fastco
“Hey, white dudes,” the narrator opens over an electronic beat. “I think we’re all pretty sick of hearing how much we suck.” White men get a bad rap, the narrator continues, which he blames on guys like Trump and his “MAGA buddies,” who are “shouting nonsense in their stupid red hats and acting like they speak for us when they don’t.” This is the language used as part of a $10 million ad buy that was designed to get young white men excited about voting for Harris. This particular ad does not make me excited to vote for Harris, but I’m aware that I am not the target audience here, and that this is, in fact, how a lot of young white men are used to being communicated to on social media.
‘IT’S NOT A SOLUTION FOR TEEN GIRLS LIKE ME’: INSTAGRAM’S NEW UNDER-18 RULES MET WITH SKEPTICISM, theguardian
I’ve been very curious to know how young people feel about Instagram’s new teen restrictions, and now we have our answer. “There is a huge part of me that wishes social media did not exist,” said Sevey Morton, 16. She thinks the new teen accounts “are very positive in a lot of ways, especially because they’re restricting sensitive content” but it’s not enough. “Especially for teen girls, if you ask them what the main problem with Instagram is, they would say body image stuff.”
Morton added that she would “love” to have a phone with no social media, only her contacts, iMessage app and camera. “That would be a dream,” she said. “People ask me, ‘why can’t you just delete social media?’ But it’s not that easy. It’s where all my friends are. I’d miss out on parties and hangouts. If I deleted it, I guarantee I would have it back within 24 hours.”
STARFACE'S COFOUNDER TACKLES HARM REDUCTION NEXT, vogue
Today, Brian Bordainick is launching Overdrive, a harm reduction brand using the Starface content playbook — colorful product design, hip meme-y copy — to sell fentanyl test kits. “Our brand is intentionally trying to feel more like an energy drink brand and less like a sterile, medical brand,” says Ryan Weaver, Overdrive’s executive producer and creative lead, a goal you can see in action on their Instagram page, which is full of motorcycle stunts and in-action DJs with an overall aesthetic that’s very MTV circa 2004.
TIKTOK IS ABANDONING ITS PLAN TO TAKE ON SPOTIFY IN MUSIC STREAMING, businessinsider
The app, a Spotify competitor that blended social features with music streaming, first launched in July 2023 in Indonesia and Brazil, later expanding into Singapore, Australia, and Mexico a couple of weeks later, but never launched in the US, despite the company filing a trademark application for the name. Spotify, meanwhile, has fully won over Gen Z with their popular Daylist feature, which brings “immaculate vibes”; I don’t think young people — known AI skeptics — will be too interested in their new AI Playlist tool, which launched today, but I’d love to be wrong!
One last thought:
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