#732: Online accents and fast fashion frontiers

Plus: The rise of “lore” and “oneshotted”

Hi, hello!, and happy weekend. Today I’m embracing these small, pleasant signs that the arc of the universe bends toward comeuppance. Mark Zuckerberg, having groveled to Trump, still faces a full-blown federal investigation. Elon Musk, having wrongly put many innocent people on blast, now himself bears the shame of the gossip pages. And both men, despite their power and wealth, are more or less hated by most Americans. Gather ye racist wunderkinds while ye may; Old Time will soon (?) displace them.

A brief programming note: I’m taking some extra time to research/write the next midweek edition, because it’s (ahhh!!) a pretty big one. Accordingly, there will be no mid-week Links this coming week. See you next weekend!

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If you read anything this weekend

“Buy All This, Look Rich,” by Chantal Fernandez for The Cut. Quince, the amorphous online non-brand brand, always had something of the slightly-too-good-to-be-true about it. Based on my first and only purchases — one of them, a jersey jumpsuit, long since returned — I thought that related to its uneven quality. But the game goes deeper, I have now learned (!). Quince essentially deploys all the tricks and trades of modern online retail to copy and undercut its competition: white-labeling, greenwashing, duping, data-scraping, the Trump-imperiled de minimis tax exemption … it’s honestly a riveting master class in the evolving frontiers of fast fashion.

“The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians,” by Evan Ratliff for Wired. I almost never share links I haven’t already read myself, but this one came over the transom at the last minute and has all the markers of a classic (dizzying novella length; Evan Ratliff authorship). I thought we’d have to wait much longer for the definitive magazine deep-dive on “the world’s first AI-inflected death cult,” but this would appear to be it. If you finish before I do — likely, as my mother-in-law is visiting and I am squeezing in this send before making a late brunch — plz let me know what you think of it!

“Is Linguistic Neutrality Possible?,” by

Eleanor Stern

for Wicked Tongue. I first encountered Stern, a writer and trained linguist, through this essay she published on algospeak. Her newsletter — which covers topics from reading in public to make-up trends — is also consistently high/lowbrow and *deeply* fascinating. This dispatch concerned internet-native accents, language change and the assumptions that people bring to most any online discourse; I’m especially intrigued by the notion that the internet has created and disseminated novel accents, even as people speak more similarly in different geographic places.

“The Second Trump Administration’s New Forms of Distraction,” by Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker. “Distressed-but-disaffected Trump opposers [are] distracting themselves with turned up other reality-TV shows including ‘Survivor’ and ‘Culinary Class Wars,’” Chayka reports. This all apparently stems from some combination of news cycle burnout and the futility of #resistance on social media. I’m not convinced that watching Netflix and opposing Trump are mutually exclusive … but I do know I’m four seasons into a British Bake-Off binge that now sounds an awful lot like a coping mechanism.

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In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this Chris Gayomali banger on high-protein food.

#731: Space rocks and soul machines

For the weekday edition, I made you a lil visual essay about the unresolvable tension between “absorbing” and “capturing” experiences, as seen at the Louvre. (Thank you to everyone who commented and emailed about your own museum photo practices; those have been really fun to read!)

The endless internal struggle of phone photography

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Postscripts

• The rise of “lore” and “oneshotted” (WSJ, The Atlantic $)

• The promise and peril of a nonprofit dating app (The Atlantic $)

• Why you might reconsider those noise-cancelling headphones (BBC)

• And why you can’t vanquish scammy texts (Vox)

• A *lot* of people are returning to the office this year (WaPo $)

• … where they’re discovering that remote work made them awkward (Business Insider)

• AI recipes as a “natural progression” in the devolution of online food media (Defector)

• Interrogating your algorithmic identity (The Etymology Nerd)

• “Memeifying” deportation (The Cut)

• Why Gen Z loves lowercase (The Guardian)

• How cross-gender Facebook friendships correlate with other stuff (NBER)

• A better way to think about grieftech (Aeon)

• A rare, good/interesting AI content trend (Fast Company)

• On the class of people who willfully disrespect delivery workers (Dirt)

• On the downsides of self-quantification (The Guardian)

Paid supporters can find unlocked links from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic below the paywall.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin