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hello friends! i had a very good week this week; iām working on a new initiative at work to support local businesses that iām really excited about, and our trivia team, āzaddy issuesā is currently in 20th place out of 984 teams! we actually qualify for the tournament on may 16th so depending on if we can get enough people to commit to it...stay tuned for that. i also got an overwhelmingly positive response to my tiktok deck and am in the research process of another similar one. hit me up if you or anyone you know was (or is) an unironic fan of high school musical. five things i loved this week: this time tomorrow, a fashion blog by this woman named krystal bick (this is the only fashion blog iāve ever found that i really like; her photography is gorgeous and unparalleled and sheās so incredibly creative, even in quarantine)
never have i ever on netflix (this was so goodāi finished the entire season in two days. i really love the emotional depth they gave the characters and iām impressed with the diversity of the cast. it was extolled for being a shining example of representation, but of course it also got a fair bit of criticism for its attempts. which makes me think about this piece from the atlantic about the demand for more diverse emojis, and the shift in purpose from ideographic to illustrative. and the question is, do we ask too much from singular instances of representation in media? thereās a plot point about a psychosomatic injury that some have called ableist, but it was taken from the real-life story of the creatorās brother, so i donāt really think thatās fair. and iām not conflating emoji with marginalized communities, but i do think thereās a certain point at which weāre so concerned with representation that it becomes the plot itself. i absolutely think we should demand more from hollywood in general, and i do think these diverse stories should be given space to exist, but in a show about a specific indian family processing its own intergenerational trauma, i donāt think itās necessarily productive to point out its shortcomings in representing the entire asian-american/lgbtq/disabled community. itās just one story; it does notāand should notāmean everything to everyone, which is exactly why i was wary of people both effusively praising and harshly criticizing crazy rich asians)
five things i read this week: the porn we seeāand sex we haveāis influenced by the adult industryās biggest spenders, vox (i actually think the economics of porn are fascinating, because itās essentially a question of what people secretly desire and how many other people also secretly desire the same thing. i questioned in one of my minute thoughts whether pornhub stats reflected actual preferences or if it was a just a form of āvoyeuristic dominance,ā and unfortunately like most things, sexual demand can be traced back to capitalism, which is crazy! because we assume that sexual preference is innate, but in reality, itās so heavily affected by media consumption and your environment. i was also intrigued by the mention of āimpromptu cam consumer psychology,ā because it just shows how industries grow more sophisticated and more structured over time, even unintentionally; in this case, trying to manipulate or conform to the demands of the highest tippers)
algorithmic pricing and the price of rice, the markup (i always assumed that price fluctuations were due to supply and demand, but itās actually much more nefariousāthird-party sellers compete to be the default ābuy nowā option on amazon, and when they use algorithmic pricing to beat each other out, it can automatically and artificially drive up prices to absurd amounts)
āthey were connedā: how reckless loans devastated a generation of taxi drivers, the new york times (admittedly very long, but if you only have time to read one thing this week, it should be this. this was a truly spectacular piece of journalism; it was so beautifully told and so humanizing and well-researched, and itās a piece that has haunted me ever since i read it a year ago. we think that ridesharing killed the taxi industry, but the false promises of the american dream and the predatory taxi medallion industry are equally to blame. it absolutely deserves the recognition and its pulitzer prize)
have you ever tried to sell a diamond?, the atlantic (my director at work asked us all to submit our favorite marketing campaigns, and de beersā āa diamond is foreverā has always been mine. i canāt think of anything that had the equivalent of its cultural impactāit literally changed the way we think about marriage as an institution, and even now that we know diamond mining is unethical and diamonds arenāt actually rare, they still connote luxury status; it was a brilliant manipulation of not only supply but psychological demand)
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