Design:
- A critique of Google's attempt to create a pervasive design language across the internet, and how such universalist approaches can quash the smaller, weirder, aesthetic subcultures and trends that bubble up from the micro-community level.
- High fashion seems to be moving on from casually slick, dandy-like styles of recent years to more baroque, indulgent, and arguably garish forms and patterns. Call it the rise of the fugly.
Body/Image:
On Screen:
- Filmmakers are returning to the practice of using "practical effects" or physical props and puppets for movie magic, finding that computer generated graphics (in certain scenarios, at least) fail to capture the same feeling of fluid physicality that old-fashioned techniques are capable of.
Mapping Markets:
- The Trump administration is planning to roll out new tariffs up to 25% on certain goods from China come early July. The plan is ratcheting up the stakes in a rapidly deteriorating trade relationship, with China suggesting their own counter tariffs on goods imported from U.S. producers. There's a real possibility that gigantic multinational corporations will find ways to slip through loopholes, while smaller enterprises and startups are likely to be pushed to even greater disadvantage.
Archiving:
- Digital communication (texts, voicemails, video clips) allows us to carry around a pocket archive of communications with those we've lost. Never before has the average person had such a dense, high-fidelity collection of memories almost always within arm's reach. Even if we choose not to actively peruse those personal archives (due to sadness, anger, or something else) many social media platforms are designed so sloppily when it comes to death that we are pushed to remember by their crude mechanisms to maximize engagement.
Material Culture: