Kendrick’s back with a new single (and a wild deepfake video); Instagram announces NFT integration test just as the market flops; and, speaking of flops, it’s going to be the summer of the clompy, stompy, flipflop-y flatform sandal.
‘JIGGLE JIGGLE’: HOW DOCUMENTARIAN LOUIS THEROUX TOOK OVER TIKTOK WITH A NOVELTY RAP SONG, latimes
A 51-year-old British documentarian has become an unlikely TikTok star due to a rap verse he recorded for a documentary 20 years ago. The fact that this dude
has pulled off what millions of singers can only dream of doing — making a song go viral on the app — is hilarious.
Reading gingerly from a crumpled piece of paper, Theroux rhymed, in a distinctly prim English accent: “My money don’t jiggle, jiggle, it folds / I like to see you wiggle, wiggle, for sure.” Twenty-two years later, a remix of his rap has spawned a dance craze on TikTok — where everyone from Snoop Dogg to Rita Ora can be found wiggling along to “Jiggle Jiggle.”
HOW STUDS IS APPROACHING ITS EAR PIERCING STUDIO EXPANSION, modernretail
It’s been so interesting to watch Studs’ growth, especially as the pre-pandemic piercing craze lets up and as competitors like Rowan — which just opened in my neighborhood of Williamsburg — keep popping up. Studs’ superpower, imo, is their cool-girl Glossier vibes, which is not an easy strategy to implement and/or replicate.
DIRT RAISES $1.2M SEED TO BUILD THE WEB3 MEDIA ECOSYSTEM, dirt
This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever felt optimistic about a media company taking on funding. Dirt, for those that don’t know, is a Substack about entertainment by Kyle Chayka and Daisy Alioto “community-powered web3 media ecosystem.”
EVEN FISHING IS COOL NOW, esquire
Hiking is cool now, as is pottery. The latest middle-aged hobby to make it into the zeitgeist, thanks — at least in part to Aimé Leon Dore — is fishing.
MEET THE NEW OLD BOOK COLLECTORS, nyt
The young rare book collectors who look like they’re headed to a punk rock show rather than the “New York International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory.”
Back at the fair, Jesse Paris Smith, 34, and her mother, the singer-songwriter Patti Smith, were looking at a book written by Charlotte Brontë when she was 13. For the two of them, poring over texts and covers has been a source of bonding. (Patti started collecting books around the age of 9, when she purchased “A Child’s Garden of Verses” at a church bazaar for 50 cents; today, it’s worth $5,000.)
One last thought:
Same.