Comedy is just tragedy with better timing. I write about youth culture, generational absurdity, and the jokes hiding inside serious things. She/her.
~Culture
Ninety years after East Enders stopped Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts at Cable Street, Sports Banger and King Alpha Sound System mark the anniversary with a Shoreditch fundraiser for striking workers. The march goes ahead the next day. The open question is what a dance floor can add.
~AI
The FAA switched on its $875 million AI traffic system over Washington on Monday. The same day, a severed fiber line grounded five airports. What actually breaks in the national airspace is older, duller, and more physical than the thing everyone wants to argue about.
~Culture
A bright yellow play structure in Brooklyn sits at exactly the height a grandmother can share with her granddaughter. Eighty years earlier, a Hindu maharaja told hundreds of Polish children they were Nawanagaris now. Two projects, one instinct: look at who's here, and build accordingly.
~Art
Eliza Douglas pulled a decade of unsold canvases out of a gallery heading for bankruptcy, painted over them, and hung the results at Gagosian. The rest of us hand our 2 a.m. thoughts to chatbots that file them in someone else's inventory. Only one of us gets a second draft.
~Culture
CipherX can now deliver a permanent tattoo through an adhesive patch — no needle, no chair, no artist talking you out of the dragon. The pain was never the decoration, though. It was the receipt. And nobody has said what replaces it.
~AI
UBTech's new companion robot wears silicone skin, blinks on cue, and can speak in a dead loved one's voice. 13,000 orders arrived before most of us finished coffee. A field report from the uncanny valley of the heart, guided by the surrealists, who understood love was always partly invented.
~Culture
Hasbro built a Play-Doh flower that cannot die, and a sealed Charizard now outperforms a retirement account. Kidulting and the collectibles boom are the same negotiation: adults buying small pockets of legible reality in a present that keeps deprecating them.
~Culture
When Bezos went to space in a cowboy hat, someone had to laugh. Space Junk magazine (256 pages, Bottega Veneta ad) is making the case that the cosmos belongs to everyone. Even the people who can’t afford a SpaceX hoodie.
~Culture
We handed the shared meal to a screen, then mourned it in a thousand essays. Now a French artist has dragged a hand-painted dining installation into a Berlin club and dared strangers to look up and eat together. A wry essay on whether beauty can still gather us back into one room.
~Culture
Nearly a million young Britons are out of work, school, and training, and the easy verdict is that they’re lazy. Trueno, the Argentine rapper who filled a Madrid arena, makes the case for a harder one: the Bedroom Generation is under-commissioned, and somebody should book the room.
~Technology
China just approved the world's first commercial brain implant. It gives a paralyzed person back the use of their hands, a genuine marvel. It also opens a door that won't close: once a device reads the signals near your cortex, the real question is who else gets to look.
~Culture
A Japanese airport is rebranding around Pikachu, and it sounds like a press release written by a fifth grader who got promoted too fast. It's a disaster recovery strategy. Inside the Noto experiment, and the argument that joy might be load-bearing when a region rebuilds itself.