On April 14, 2024, I made the bold choice to start off the very first edition of my brand new newsletter, Sunday Bunch, with a story about the death of O.J. Simpson.

The former NFL Hall of Famer turned movie star/sideline commentator/Hertz pitch man turned murderer had just passed the previous day (without ever finding the real killer, adding to the gravity of the situation) and in that moment, it felt as just as good as any representation of the types of stories I wanted in my weekly curation and analysis of the stories both important and absurd, spanning brows high to low.

It may surprise you to learn: I did not start this newsletter with a firm plan of what it was going to be1. Or, perhaps better said: I didn’t have a strong editorial vision so much as a vibe and a mood board filled with brunch-themed iconography. I paired that with a commitment to posting once/week for a year, and off we went.

I set out to reëstablish two things that had gone missing along the way:

1. A direct, reliable connection to my personal and professional networks, not intermediated by one or more algorithmic corn mazes.

2. A regular creative practice, one that forces me to make something and put it in front of a public audience–even if it’s just a curated digest and analysis of the week’s news.

In retrospect, the couple hundred words I gave to my fellow USC alumnus probably weren’t the strongest ways to build a creative practice or high-quality connections, part of a very rough-around-the-edges first post. And yet, no one bailed.

Then I took the liberty of opting a few of you in, flaunting GDPR and piling on to what I'm sure was an already-overloaded inbox. And you all stayed.

We had an excess of brunch-themed graphics, an entire edition dedicated to lazy rivers, approximately 520,000 calories (and that was just the Texas State Fair post), way too many couch jokes, and all sorts of other headlines, ideas, trends, and absurdities, and everyone still stuck around2.

Since then, we've added a few (hundred) new friends and while some may no longer be with us, we have people lined up to get in the front door and only a few ghosting out the back. I’m forever grateful to all of you who reading this now.

Status Check

Looking at what I set out to do, this experiment has delivered in ways I didn't fully anticipate:

On the connections front, I will keep saying it: you all have been the best part. Having readers show up week after week, sending thoughtful responses, and reconnecting with folks from various chapters of my life has been genuinely rewarding. After years of algorithms deciding who sees what, there's something beautifully direct about hitting send and knowing most of you will actually receive it—the digital equivalent of someone actually answering when you knock on their door.

This whole Substack ecosystem has recreated that 2000s-era blogging community feel—the camaraderie of blogrolls, Typepad, trackbacks, and Blogebrity—that sense of fraternity that made early social media special before engagement metrics devoured everything worthwhile3.

And I'm writing again! Mission accomplished on that front, even if it sometimes feels like I'm just barely making the Sunday deadline. Perhaps the best news: the top performing posts are the ones featuring the most original writing and artwork, providing encouragement to take the time and publish more of my own creations.

But if I'm being honest...

The weekly curation portion of this takes a lot more work than it might appear from the outside. People like , , and are so prodigious, covering a lot of the same topics I do, which constantly has me questioning my time-spent-to-value-added calculus. How many different ways can the growing legion of excellent Substack curators compile and rapid-fire analyze the same tech stories and business developments each week?

Going deep to craft those original posts is challenging when you’re spreading a wide net across each week’s developments. It's one thing to be curious, it's another to let curiosity turn into consumption at the expense of creation. I've spent more Sundays than I'd like to admit feeling like a glorified RSS feed rather than adding anything truly original to the conversation.

Then there’s the weekly deadline–on a weekend, no less–which is not great. As much as I’d love to just schedule it Friday and walk out the door, me serving you lukewarm links is beneath all of us. So inevitably some portion of a weekend is spent in front of a laptop, usually writing or re-writing 30-90% of what reaches you on Sunday.

The Season Finale

52 weeks later, it’s time for a break.

Sunday Bunch will be going on summer hiatus after this edition, returning in some iteration at some point in the not-too-distant future.

It might come back in more seasonal blocks, e.g. do 8 weeks in a row and then disappear. I might just drop it back to a nice glossy monthly with more longform reading. I might wind up turning it into a weekday newsletter and call it Sunday Bunch ironically. All bets are off except that Sunday Bunch will continue on in some form and while it may not come back right away, it won't be away for long.

You can still expect more writing from me at The Preview, with more of an emphasis on deeper dives and more specific topics, at a less aggressive cadence.

In addition to getting weekends back and spending more time on original writing, the big redistribution of energy that I’m excited about is putting more time into creating apps and products, not just newsletters. After spending years building and designing in previous lives, the new wave of AI “vibecoding” tools are helping me get back out to the edge, learning by building. I have a couple of prototypes in progress for projects that have been on the back burner while I've been keeping up with the weekly cadence. It's time to bring those to life and see what sticks. I will share them with all of you as soon as they’re ready for an early sneak peek.

More from The Preview

While Sunday Bunch is on hiatus, you may see other, non-Sunday Bunch emails from me and The Preview on occasion.

I have two humble requests:

1. Give them a try. Don’t worry about high volumes, these will all be more “as new content is available” things, not an overwhelming daily or weekly cadence that keeps pounding your inbox.

2. Click manage your settings and turn off the ones you don’t like, instead of unsubscribing from all and missing the next season of Sunday Bunch:

Toggle those various newsletters on and off at your leisure. I get it, I’d mute some of the voices in my head too if I could flip that switch.

SUNDAY BUNCH

🦞🥞 April 13, 2025

Crashing the Car of Pax Americana
Putting a pin in this one for later. 4

🇺🇸

Elsewhere

Why AI Will Improve Content Quality, Not Degrade It

If quality content more effectively influences AI, and AI increasingly influences consumers, then publicly available quality content becomes more valuable, not less. 5

The Business of Influence
On the democratization of fame and the impact on the established cultural and consumer power structure. 6

Berckmans Place: Inside the Masters’ premier hospitality offering
See also: Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National by Nick Paumgarten.7

LOVB CEO Katlyn Gao Wants to Build the NBA of Volleyball
League One Volleyball (LOVB) trying to become the top pro league in the country’s most-played girls sport.8

offball

A post shared by @offball

N.B.A. Star Ja Morant Switches to Grenade Celebration After Fine for Finger Guns
If ever someone’s been Shaqtin’ a fool. 9

Bon Iver’s album listening events include a basketball tournament
Bring back Rock & Jock. 10

Rams’ new headquarters to be centerpiece of ambitious Warner Center development project
Watch out, here comes Woodland Hills. 11

How the Bolivian Capital of La Paz Successfully Implemented an Aerial Gondola Public Transit System (VIDEO) 12
C’mon Austin, let’s do this.

There’s nothing wrong with a thong made out of a keyboard
Gen Z is on Etsy buying Tamagotchi necklaces, turning circuit boards and microchips into earrings, and crocheting old floppy disks into purses. 13

Is Reacher Too Big Now? A Roundtable Discussion
What if I told you he was holding an iPhone here? 14

Liam Neeson’s ‘Naked Gun’ Reboot Reveals First Trailer — With an O.J. Simpson Joke
Sunday Bunch started with a joke about the Juice, what more fitting way to celebrate the one year anniversary?

R.I.P. Ted Kotcheff, director of First Blood and Weekend At Bernie's
I know you’re thinking it too.15

***

That’s all for this week, and for year one of Sunday Bunch. Thank you all for subscribing, and not jumping out of the plane mid-air as I continue to build while flying.

Stick around, there’s much more to come.

Cheers,
BUNCH

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Public Announcement | OffBall | | Billy Chuck

• 2001: A Space Odyssey

• Blade Runner

• The Matrix

• Her

• RoboCop

• Mad Max

Trump extends deadline to keep TikTok running in US
It sounds like a sale may have been done, but post-Liberation Day dealmaking with China is going to be a bit more complicated:

Beijing hit the brakes on a deal Thursday after Trump announced wide-ranging tariffs around the globe, including against China. ByteDance representatives called the White House to indicate that China would no longer approve the deal until there could be negotiations about trade and tariffs

The race was reportedly down to Oracle (with A16Z), Blackstone (with existing ByteDance US shareholders), Amazon, AppLovin (that’s cute), and a joint venture between a crypto foundation and OnlyFans’ founder (of course there is). If a deal was done, it’s not totally clear who was in front, and that much less is clear following the latest developments.

Let the countdown to June 19 commence.

AI 2027
A team of futurists and researchers wrote an interactive scenario about what the next three years of AI’s integration into our lives might look like.

You should give it a scroll.

The next era of psychedelics may be precision-designed states of consciousness
A startup aims to design psychedelics that produce highly tailored states of mind — transforming unpredictable trips into “precise, repeatable experiences that could help improve mental health treatments” or just way cooler nights at The Sphere. 1

Meet the MIT physicist turned Marlins coach behind the ‘torpedo’ bats used by the Yankees
You cannot escape the torpedo bat. 2

All 52 Video-Game Movies, Ranked
Apropos of today’s subject line: brother, you haven’t lived until you have seen Minecraft 3D in 4DX right after wolfing down a Minecraft Adult Happy Meal. 3

The TikTokification of The White Lotus

We’ve entered the era of second-screen television—shows you can watch while looking at your phone—and The White Lotus seems to be adapting accordingly. The editing pattern of White Lotus feels like a direct response to this phenomenon, a competitive adaptation, an early milestone in the TikTokification of TV. I just can’t shake the feeling that the third season is intentionally edited for this effect, the way Cocomelon is engineered with rapid cuts to capture the attention of children. 4

“They curdle like milk”: Warner Bros DVDs from 2006-2008 are rotting away in their cases
Nothing lasts forever, including your Fred Claus and Blood Diamond DVDs.5

GOOD MOVIE: Kill Bill
Apologies to your inbox but Shea Serrano’s new Substack, where he watches a movie and provides timecoded commentary, is another must-subscribe. 6

The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952-1967
A tale of innovation in the time of the Great Tokyo Pencil Rivalry. 7

R.I.P.

Val Kilmer, Film Star Who Played Batman and Jim Morrison, Dies at 65

Val Kilmer covered a lot of ground from the time he entered Julliard at 17 until his passing at 65. A few of the better remembrances this week:

• Oliver Stone Mourns ‘Iconoclast and Rebel’ Val Kilmer 8

• Val Kilmer Made Crazy Things Seem Normal 9

• “Bad” Val Kilmer Movies That Actually Prove He Deserves More Credit Than We Gave Him 10

• The Most Interesting Roommate in the World, by Will Forte 11

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

This week I re-published a 1907 short story from E.M. Forster (in the public domain, copyright nerds) called The Machine Stops. It’s eerily prescient and relevant to this effective accelerationist period in human history.

Take it along with you this weekend, it’s a brisk but immersive and thought-provoking read to pair with a morning cup of coffee or evening edible.

Read 'The Machine Stops'

If Anthropic Succeeds, a Nation of Benevolent AI Geniuses Could Be Born
The other big AI company gets its Wired close-up. Also, this caption: Daniela is the president. Dario, the CEO, hosts a monthly vision quest at company headquarters. 1

H&M Knows Its AI Models Will Be Controversial
The Swedish clothing giant plans to use “digital twins” of real models in AI-generated imagery. Models will own their twins and be allowed to use them with other brands. 2

NBA, FIBA to take next steps toward new European league
Adam Silver starts sharing a plan to colonize Europe and better monetize the NBA’s international fanbase. He’s got Barcelona and Madrid on the line, but Paris might be a problem. 3

MLB Opening Day 2025
The Dodgers celebrated their World Series title with a win, Baltimore mashed six homers, multiple games were decided in the ninth. We’re back, baby. 4

Nick Denton on Betting Against Elon Musk and Aligning With Peter Thiel
The Gawker Media founder emerges from self-imposed exile to talk technocracy, Cybertrucks (and how his kid wound up with Elon as a middle name), and why it was actually a good thing Hulk Hogan and Thiel wiped out his empire.5

Quarter of brands cutting senior marketing leaders
Saving money on wages (58.4%) is the main reason cited for cutting and not replacing senior marketing talent. 6

Will the Viral Morning Routine Guy Be the End of Hustle Culture?

“Most of us aren’t trying to live a lifestyle so devoid of fun, excitement, and joy, but the proliferation of this approach to life has made some of us feel guilty about not doing enough. I am not saying that we should all be out drinking and doing cocaine without a care in the world, but what happened to balance?”7

We can’t look away from our split and severed selves
The Substance, A Different Man, Severance…why are we currently so entranced by the idea of pulling ourselves apart? 8

Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress
How AI, volatility, and changing institutions are shaping young people's economic reality. 9

Edible Brands, Home of Fancy Fruit Bouquets, Enters the THC Space
Edible Arrangements now selling gummies, amongst other cannabis products. 10

Shelby Houlihan earns silver medal in return from burrito ban
The distance runner tested positive for a PED (nandralone), claimed it came from a tainted pork burrito. No indication on carnitas or al pastor, but stay away from the Chipotle Carnitas Cinema to be safe. 11

***

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

| | | | | | | | | | |

Nvidia CEO Says AI Computing Needs to Surge 100-Fold
Man who sells AI hardware says we more AI chips and servers, during developer conference dubbed “the Super Bowl of AI.”1

Klarna lands buy now, pay later deal with DoorDash
Is people financing taxis for their burritos a positive economic indicator?2

Six Takeaways From the Record $6.1 Billion Celtics Sale
Tech investor Bill Chisholm pays a record price for a professional sports team, but people have questions about the unconventional deal and what comes next.3

What Does Apple Really Want From Hollywood?
As The Studio premieres, non-fictional movie execs worry about how long they get to ride the Cupertino money train.4

Conversations are the new unit of culture
We crave interactivity and multi-sided discussions in the podcast era.5

Inside the Shadowy World of the Erectile Dysfunction Pill Black Market
Men are playing “Russian Roulette” with bootleg boner pills.6

Unrelated, I promise:

Going Soft
Winning friends and influencing people in the year 2025.7

Michigan Baseball Player Sorry For Doing The Cocaine Thing
Pretty harmless stuff, though doing it against USC is a bit too on the nose.8

1979 Cadillac Seville by Gucci
Speaking of cocaine, this ride came with an 🎱 standard.9

And don’t fret, if you can’t get yourself a vintage Guccimobile, there’s always this cheesy Tesla:

***

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

| | | | | | | | | |

First published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review, November 1909.

1. The Air-Ship

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk — that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

An electric bell rang.
The woman touched a switch and the music was silent.

“I suppose I must see who it is,” she thought, and set her chair in motion. The chair, like the music, was worked by machinery and it rolled her to the other side of the room where the bell still rang importunately.

“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.

But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said:

“Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes — for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno. Then I must deliver my lecture on ‘Music during the Australian Period’.”

She touched the isolation knob, so that no one else could speak to her. Then she touched the lighting apparatus, and the little room was plunged into darkness.

“Be quick!” she called, her irritation returning. “Be quick, Kuno; here I am in the dark wasting my time.”

But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.

“Kuno, how slow you are.”
He smiled gravely.
“I really believe you enjoy dawdling.”

“I have called you before, mother, but you were always busy or isolated. I have something particular to say.”

“What is it, dearest boy? Be quick. Why could you not send it by pneumatic post?”

“Because I prefer saying such a thing. I want —”

“Well?”

“I want you to come and see me.”

Vashti watched his face in the blue plate.

“But I can see you!” she exclaimed. “What more do you want?”

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”

“Why not?”

“One mustn’t.”

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

She replied that she could scarcely spare the time for a visit.

“The air-ship barely takes two days to fly between me and you.”

“I dislike air-ships.”

“Why?”

“I dislike seeing the horrible brown earth, and the sea, and the stars when it is dark. I get no ideas in an air-ship.”

“I do not get them anywhere else.”

“What kind of ideas can the air give you?”

He paused for an instant.

“Do you not know four big stars that form an oblong, and three stars close together in the middle of the oblong, and hanging from these stars, three other stars?”

“No, I do not. I dislike the stars. But did they give you an idea? How interesting; tell me.”

“I had an idea that they were like a man.”

“I do not understand.”

“The four big stars are the man’s shoulders and his knees. The three stars in the middle are like the belts that men wore once, and the three stars hanging are like a sword.”

“A sword?”

“Men carried swords about with them, to kill animals and other men.”

“It does not strike me as a very good idea, but it is certainly original. When did it come to you first?”

“In the air-ship —” He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people — an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something “good enough” had long since been accepted by our race.

“The truth is,” he continued, “that I want to see these stars again. They are curious stars. I want to see them not from the air-ship, but from the surface of the earth, as our ancestors did, thousands of years ago. I want to visit the surface of the earth.”

She was shocked again.

“Mother, you must come, if only to explain to me what is the harm of visiting the surface of the earth.”

“No harm,” she replied, controlling herself. “But no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies immediately in the outer air.”

“I know; of course I shall take all precautions.”

“And besides —”

“Well?”

She considered, and chose her words with care. Her son had a queer temper, and she wished to dissuade him from the expedition.

“It is contrary to the spirit of the age,” she asserted.

“Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?”

“In a sense, but —”

His image in the blue plate faded.

“Kuno!”

He had isolated himself.

For a moment Vashti felt lonely. Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere — buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were, of course, the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? — say this day month.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation — a growing quality in that accelerated age. She said that the new food was horrible. That she could not visit the public nurseries through press of engagements. That she had no ideas of her own but had just been told one — that four stars and three in the middle were like a man: she doubted there was much in it. Then she switched off her correspondents, for it was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music.

The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well. She opened with a humorous account of music in the pre-Mongolian epoch, and went on to describe the great outburst of song that followed the Chinese conquest. Remote and primeval as were the methods of I-San-So and the Brisbane school, she yet felt (she said) that study of them might repay the musicians of today: they had freshness; they had, above all, ideas.

Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes, was well received, and at its conclusion she and many of her audience listened to a lecture on the sea; there were ideas to be got from the sea; the speaker had donned a respirator and visited it lately. Then she fed, talked to many friends, had a bath, talked again, and summoned her bed.

The bed was not to her liking. It was too large, and she had a feeling for a small bed. Complaint was useless, for beds were of the same dimension all over the world, and to have had an alternative size would have involved vast alterations in the Machine. Vashti isolated herself — it was necessary, for neither day nor night existed under the ground — and reviewed all that had happened since she had summoned the bed last. Ideas? Scarcely any. Events — was Kuno’s invitation an event?

By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the Book of the Machine. In it were instructions against every possible contingency. If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word, she went to the book, and it told her which button to press. The Central Committee published it. In accordance with a growing habit, it was richly bound.

Sitting up in the bed, she took it reverently in her hands. She glanced round the glowing room as if someone might be watching her. Then, half ashamed, half joyful, she murmured “O Machine! O Machine!” and raised the volume to her lips. Thrice she kissed it, thrice inclined her head, thrice she felt the delirium of acquiescence. Her ritual performed, she turned to page 1367, which gave the times of the departure of the air-ships from the island in the southern hemisphere, under whose soil she lived, to the island in the northern hemisphere, whereunder lived her son.

She thought, “I have not the time.” She made the room dark and slept; she awoke and made the room light; she ate and exchanged ideas with her friends, and listened to music and attended lectures; she made the room dark and slept. Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears. The earth, carrying her, hummed as it sped through silence, turning her now to the invisible sun, now to the invisible stars. She awoke and made the room light.

“Kuno!”

“I will not talk to you,” he answered, “until you come.”

“Have you been on the surface of the earth since we spoke last?”

His image faded.

Again she consulted the book. She became very nervous and lay back in her chair palpitating. Think of her as without teeth or hair. Presently she directed the chair to the wall, and pressed an unfamiliar button. The wall swung apart slowly. Through the opening she saw a tunnel that curved slightly, so that its goal was not visible. Should she go to see her son, here was the beginning of the journey.

Of course she knew all about the communication-system. There was nothing mysterious in it. She would summon a car and it would fly with her down the tunnel until it reached the lift that communicated with the air-ship station: the system had been in use for many, many years, long before the universal establishment of the Machine. And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own — the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms! And yet — she was frightened of the tunnel: she had not seen it since her last child was born. It curved — but not quite as she remembered; it was brilliant — but not quite as brilliant as a lecturer had suggested. Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.

“Kuno,” she said, “I cannot come to see you. I am not well.”

Immediately an enormous apparatus fell on to her out of the ceiling, a thermometer was automatically laid upon her heart. She lay powerless. Cool pads soothed her forehead. Kuno had telegraphed to her doctor.

So the human passions still blundered up and down in the Machine. Vashti drank the medicine that the doctor projected into her mouth, and the machinery retired into the ceiling. The voice of Kuno was heard asking how she felt.

“Better.” Then with irritation: “But why do you not come to me instead?”

“Because I cannot leave this place.”

“Why?”

“Because, any moment, something tremendous may happen.”

“Have you been on the surface of the earth yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Then what is it?”

“I will not tell you through the Machine.”

She resumed her life. But she thought of Kuno as a baby, his birth, his removal to the public nurseries, her own visit to him there, his visits to her — visits which stopped when the Machine had assigned him a room on the other side of the earth. “Parents, duties of,” said the Book of the Machine, “cease at the moment of birth. P.422327483.” True, but there was something special about Kuno — indeed there had been something special about all her children — and, after all, she must brave the journey if he desired it. And “something tremendous might happen.” What did that mean? The nonsense of a youthful man, no doubt, but she must go. Again she pressed the unfamiliar button, again the wall swung back, and she saw the tunnel that curves out of sight. Clasping the Book, she rose, tottered on to the platform, and summoned the car. Her room closed behind her: the journey to the northern hemisphere had begun.

Of course it was perfectly easy. The car approached and in it she found armchairs exactly like her own. When she signalled, it stopped, and she tottered into the lift. One other passenger was in the lift, the first fellow creature she had seen face to face for months. Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Pekin when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Pekin? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

The air-ship service was a relic from the former age. It was kept up, because it was easier to keep it up than to stop it or to diminish it, but it now far exceeded the wants of the population. Vessel after vessel would rise from the vomitories of Rye or of Christchurch (I use the antique names), would sail into the crowded sky, and would draw up at the wharves of the south — empty. So nicely adjusted was the system, so independent of meteorology, that the sky, whether calm or cloudy, resembled a vast kaleidoscope whereon the same patterns periodically recurred. The ship on which Vashti sailed started now at sunset, now at dawn. But always, as it passed above Rheims, it would neighbour the ship that served between Helsingfors and the Brazils, and, every third time it surmounted the Alps, the fleet of Palermo would cross its track behind. Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.

Yet as Vashti saw the vast flank of the ship, stained with exposure to the outer air, her horror of direct experience returned. It was not quite like the air-ship in the cinematophote. For one thing it smelt — not strongly or unpleasantly, but it did smell, and with her eyes shut she should have known that a new thing was close to her. Then she had to walk to it from the lift, had to submit to glances from the other passengers. The man in front dropped his Book — no great matter, but it disquieted them all. In the rooms, if the Book was dropped, the floor raised it mechanically, but the gangway to the air-ship was not so prepared, and the sacred volume lay motionless. They stopped — the thing was unforeseen — and the man, instead of picking up his property, felt the muscles of his arm to see how they had failed him. Then some one actually said with direct utterance: “We shall be late” — and they trooped on board, Vashti treading on the pages as she did so.

Inside, her anxiety increased. The arrangements were old-fashioned and rough. There was even a female attendant, to whom she would have to announce her wants during the voyage. Of course a revolving platform ran the length of the boat, but she was expected to walk from it to her cabin. Some cabins were better than others, and she did not get the best. She thought the attendant had been unfair, and spasms of rage shook her. The glass valves had closed, she could not go back. She saw, at the end of the vestibule, the lift in which she had ascended going quietly up and down, empty. Beneath those corridors of shining tiles were rooms, tier below tier, reaching far into the earth, and in each room there sat a human being, eating, or sleeping, or producing ideas. And buried deep in the hive was her own room. Vashti was afraid.

“O Machine!” she murmured, and caressed her Book, and was comforted.

Then the sides of the vestibule seemed to melt together, as do the passages that we see in dreams, the lift vanished, the Book that had been dropped slid to the left and vanished, polished tiles rushed by like a stream of water, there was a slight jar, and the air-ship, issuing from its tunnel, soared above the waters of a tropical ocean.

It was night. For a moment she saw the coast of Sumatra edged by the phosphorescence of waves, and crowned by lighthouses, still sending forth their disregarded beams. These also vanished, and only the stars distracted her. They were not motionless, but swayed to and fro above her head, thronging out of one skylight into another, as if the universe and not the air-ship was careening. And, as often happens on clear nights, they seemed now to be in perspective, now on a plane; now piled tier beyond tier into the infinite heavens, now concealing infinity, a roof limiting for ever the visions of men. In either case they seemed intolerable. “Are we to travel in the dark?” called the passengers angrily, and the attendant, who had been careless, generated the light, and pulled down the blinds of pliable metal. When the air-ships had been built, the desire to look direct at things still lingered in the world. Hence the extraordinary number of skylights and windows, and the proportionate discomfort to those who were civilized and refined. Even in Vashti’s cabin one star peeped through a flaw in the blind, and after a few hours’ uneasy slumber, she was disturbed by an unfamiliar glow, which was the dawn.

Quick as the ship had sped westwards, the earth had rolled eastwards quicker still, and had dragged back Vashti and her companions towards the sun. Science could prolong the night, but only for a little, and those high hopes of neutralizing the earth’s diurnal revolution had passed, together with hopes that were possibly higher. To “keep pace with the sun,” or even to outstrip it, had been the aim of the civilization preceding this. Racing aeroplanes had been built for the purpose, capable of enormous speed, and steered by the greatest intellects of the epoch. Round the globe they went, round and round, westward, westward, round and round, amidst humanity’s applause. In vain. The globe went eastward quicker still, horrible accidents occurred, and the Committee of the Machine, at the time rising into prominence, declared the pursuit illegal, unmechanical, and punishable by Homelessness.

Of Homelessness more will be said later.
Doubtless the Committee was right. Yet the attempt to “defeat the sun” aroused the last common interest that our race experienced about the heavenly bodies, or indeed about anything. It was the last time that men were compacted by thinking of a power outside the world. The sun had conquered, yet it was the end of his spiritual dominion. Dawn, midday, twilight, the zodiacal path, touched neither men’s lives nor their hearts, and science retreated into the ground, to concentrate herself upon problems that she was certain of solving.

So when Vashti found her cabin invaded by a rosy finger of light, she was annoyed, and tried to adjust the blind. But the blind flew up altogether, and she saw through the skylight small pink clouds, swaying against a background of blue, and as the sun crept higher, its radiance entered direct, brimming down the wall, like a golden sea. It rose and fell with the air-ship’s motion, just as waves rise and fall, but it advanced steadily, as a tide advances. Unless she was careful, it would strike her face. A spasm of horror shook her and she rang for the attendant. The attendant too was horrified, but she could do nothing; it was not her place to mend the blind. She could only suggest that the lady should change her cabin, which she accordingly prepared to do.

People were almost exactly alike all over the world, but the attendant of the air-ship, perhaps owing to her exceptional duties, had grown a little out of the common. She had often to address passengers with direct speech, and this had given her a certain roughness and originality of manner. When Vashti swerved away from the sunbeams with a cry, she behaved barbarically — she put out her hand to steady her.

“How dare you!” exclaimed the passenger. “You forget yourself!”

The woman was confused, and apologized for not having let her fall. People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.

“Where are we now?” asked Vashti haughtily.

“We are over Asia,” said the attendant, anxious to be polite.

“Asia?”

“You must excuse my common way of speaking. I have got into the habit of calling places over which I pass by their unmechanical names.”

“Oh, I remember Asia. The Mongols came from it.”

“Beneath us, in the open air, stood a city that was once called Simla.”

“Have you ever heard of the Mongols and of the Brisbane school?”

“No.”

“Brisbane also stood in the open air.”

“Those mountains to the right — let me show you them.” She pushed back a metal blind. The main chain of the Himalayas was revealed. “They were once called the Roof of the World, those mountains.”

“What a foolish name!”

“You must remember that, before the dawn of civilization, they seemed to be an impenetrable wall that touched the stars. It was supposed that no one but the gods could exist above their summits. How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!”

“How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!” said Vashti.

“How we have advanced, thanks to the Machine!” echoed the passenger who had dropped his Book the night before, and who was standing in the passage.

“And that white stuff in the cracks? — what is it?”

“I have forgotten its name.”

“Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas.”

The northern aspect of the Himalayas was in deep shadow: on the Indian slope the sun had just prevailed. The forests had been destroyed during the literature epoch for the purpose of making newspaper-pulp, but the snows were awakening to their morning glory, and clouds still hung on the breasts of Kinchinjunga. In the plain were seen the ruins of cities, with diminished rivers creeping by their walls, and by the sides of these were sometimes the signs of vomitories, marking the cities of to-day. Over the whole prospect air-ships rushed, crossing the inter-crossing with incredible aplomb, and rising nonchalantly when they desired to escape the perturbations of the lower atmosphere and to traverse the Roof of the World.

“We have indeed advanced, thanks to the Machine,” repeated the attendant, and hid the Himalayas behind a metal blind.

The day dragged wearily forward. The passengers sat each in his cabin, avoiding one another with an almost physical repulsion and longing to be once more under the surface of the earth. There were eight or ten of them, mostly young males, sent out from the public nurseries to inhabit the rooms of those who had died in various parts of the earth. The man who had dropped his Book was on the homeward journey. He had been sent to Sumatra for the purpose of propagating the race. Vashti alone was travelling by her private will.

At midday she took a second glance at the earth. The air-ship was crossing another range of mountains, but she could see little, owing to clouds. Masses of black rock hovered below her, and merged indistinctly into grey. Their shapes were fantastic; one of them resembled a prostrate man.

“No ideas here,” murmured Vashti, and hid the Caucasus behind a metal blind.

In the evening she looked again. They were crossing a golden sea, in which lay many small islands and one peninsula. She repeated, “No ideas here,” and hid Greece behind a metal blind.

2. The Mending Apparatus

By a vestibule, by a lift, by a tubular railway, by a platform, by a sliding door — by reversing all the steps of her departure did Vashti arrive at her son’s room, which exactly resembled her own. She might well declare that the visit was superfluous. The buttons, the knobs, the reading-desk with the Book, the temperature, the atmosphere, the illumination — all were exactly the same. And if Kuno himself, flesh of her flesh, stood close beside her at last, what profit was there in that? She was too well-bred to shake him by the hand.

Averting her eyes, she spoke as follows:

“Here I am. I have had the most terrible journey and greatly retarded the development of my soul. It is not worth it, Kuno, it is not worth it. My time is too precious. The sunlight almost touched me, and I have met with the rudest people. I can only stop a few minutes. Say what you want to say, and then I must return.”

“I have been threatened with Homelessness,” said Kuno.

She looked at him now.

“I have been threatened with Homelessness, and I could not tell you such a thing through the Machine.”

Homelessness means death. The victim is exposed to the air, which kills him.

“I have been outside since I spoke to you last. The tremendous thing has happened, and they have discovered me.”

“But why shouldn’t you go outside?” she exclaimed, “It is perfectly legal, perfectly mechanical, to visit the surface of the earth. I have lately been to a lecture on the sea; there is no objection to that; one simply summons a respirator and gets an Egression-permit. It is not the kind of thing that spiritually minded people do, and I begged you not to do it, but there is no legal objection to it.”

“I did not get an Egression-permit.”

“Then how did you get out?”

“I found out a way of my own.”

The phrase conveyed no meaning to her, and he had to repeat it.

“A way of your own?” she whispered. “But that would be wrong.”

“Why?”

The question shocked her beyond measure.

“You are beginning to worship the Machine,” he said coldly. “You think it irreligious of me to have found out a way of my own. It was just what the Committee thought, when they threatened me with Homelessness.”

At this she grew angry. “I worship nothing!” she cried. “I am most advanced. I don’t think you irreligious, for there is no such thing as religion left. All the fear and the superstition that existed once have been destroyed by the Machine. I only meant that to find out a way of your own was— Besides, there is no new way out.”

“So it is always supposed.”

“Except through the vomitories, for which one must have an Egression-permit, it is impossible to get out. The Book says so.”

“Well, the Book’s wrong, for I have been out on my feet.”

For Kuno was possessed of a certain physical strength. By these days it was a demerit to be muscular. Each infant was examined at birth, and all who promised undue strength were destroyed. Humanitarians may protest, but it would have been no true kindness to let an athlete live; he would never have been happy in that state of life to which the Machine had called him; he would have yearned for trees to climb, rivers to bathe in, meadows and hills against which he might measure his body. Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not? In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.

“You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say ‘space is annihilated,’ but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of ‘Near’ and ‘Far.’ ‘Near’ is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. ‘Far’ is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is ‘far,’ though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong. Then I went further: it was then that I called to you for the first time, and you would not come.

“This city, as you know, is built deep beneath the surface of the earth, with only the vomitories protruding. Having paced the platform outside my own room, I took the lift to the next platform and paced that also, and so with each in turn, until I came to the topmost, above which begins the earth. All the platforms were exactly alike, and all that I gained by visiting them was to develop my sense of space and my muscles. I think I should have been content with this — it is not a little thing — but as I walked and brooded, it occurred to me that our cities had been built in the days when men still breathed the outer air, and that there had been ventilation shafts for the workmen. I could think of nothing but these ventilation shafts. Had they been destroyed by all the food-tubes and medicine-tubes and music-tubes that the Machine has evolved lately? Or did traces of them remain? One thing was certain. If I came upon them anywhere, it would be in the railway-tunnels of the topmost story. Everywhere else, all space was accounted for.

“I am telling my story quickly, but don’t think that I was not a coward or that your answers never depressed me. It is not the proper thing, it is not mechanical, it is not decent to walk along a railway-tunnel. I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible — doing what was not contemplated by the Machine. Then I said to myself, ‘Man is the measure,’ and I went, and after many visits I found an opening.

“The tunnels, of course, were lighted. Everything is light, artificial light; darkness is the exception. So when I saw a black gap in the tiles, I knew that it was an exception, and rejoiced. I put in my arm — I could put in no more at first — and waved it round and round in ecstasy. I loosened another tile, and put in my head, and shouted into the darkness: ‘I am coming, I shall do it yet,’ and my voice reverberated down endless passages. I seemed to hear the spirits of those dead workmen who had returned each evening to the starlight and to their wives, and all the generations who had lived in the open air called back to me, ‘You will do it yet, you are coming.’”

He paused, and, absurd as he was, his last words moved her. For Kuno had lately asked to be a father, and his request had been refused by the Committee. His was not a type that the Machine desired to hand on.

“Then a train passed. It brushed by me, but I thrust my head and arms into the hole. I had done enough for one day, so I crawled back to the platform, went down in the lift, and summoned my bed. Ah what dreams! And again I called you, and again you refused.”

She shook her head and said:

“Don’t. Don’t talk of these terrible things. You make me miserable. You are throwing civilization away.”

“But I had got back the sense of space and a man cannot rest then. I determined to get in at the hole and climb the shaft. And so I exercised my arms. Day after day I went through ridiculous movements, until my flesh ached, and I could hang by my hands and hold the pillow of my bed outstretched for many minutes. Then I summoned a respirator, and started.

“It was easy at first. The mortar had somehow rotted, and I soon pushed some more tiles in, and clambered after them into the darkness, and the spirits of the dead comforted me. I don’t know what I mean by that. I just say what I felt. I felt, for the first time, that a protest had been lodged against corruption, and that even as the dead were comforting me, so I was comforting the unborn. I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here. Had I been strong, I would have torn off every garment I had, and gone out into the outer air unswaddled. But this is not for me, nor perhaps for my generation. I climbed with my respirator and my hygienic clothes and my dietetic tabloids! Better thus than not at all.

“There was a ladder, made of some primeval metal. The light from the railway fell upon its lowest rungs, and I saw that it led straight upwards out of the rubble at the bottom of the shaft. Perhaps our ancestors ran up and down it a dozen times daily, in their building. As I climbed, the rough edges cut through my gloves so that my hands bled. The light helped me for a little, and then came darkness and, worse still, silence which pierced my ears like a sword. The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts. Who knows! I was getting beyond its power. Then I thought: ‘This silence means that I am doing wrong.’ But I heard voices in the silence, and again they strengthened me.” He laughed. “I had need of them. The next moment I cracked my head against something.”

She sighed.

“I had reached one of those pneumatic stoppers that defend us from the outer air. You may have noticed them on the air-ship. Pitch dark, my feet on the rungs of an invisible ladder, my hands cut; I cannot explain how I lived through this part, but the voices still comforted me, and I felt for fastenings. The stopper, I suppose, was about eight feet across. I passed my hand over it as far as I could reach. It was perfectly smooth. I felt it almost to the centre. Not quite to the centre, for my arm was too short. Then the voice said: ‘Jump. It is worth it. There may be a handle in the centre, and you may catch hold of it and so come to us your own way. And if there is no handle, so that you may fall and are dashed to pieces — it is still worth it: you will still come to us your own way.’ So I jumped. There was a handle, and —”

He paused. Tears gathered in his mother’s eyes. She knew that he was fated. If he did not die today he would die tomorrow. There was not room for such a person in the world. And with her pity disgust mingled. She was ashamed at having borne such a son, she who had always been so respectable and so full of ideas. Was he really the little boy to whom she had taught the use of his stops and buttons, and to whom she had given his first lessons in the Book? The very hair that disfigured his lip showed that he was reverting to some savage type. On atavism the Machine can have no mercy.

“There was a handle, and I did catch it. I hung tranced over the darkness and heard the hum of these workings as the last whisper in a dying dream. All the things I had cared about and all the people I had spoken to through tubes appeared infinitely little. Meanwhile the handle revolved. My weight had set something in motion and I span slowly, and then—

“I cannot describe it. I was lying with my face to the sunshine. Blood poured from my nose and ears and I heard a tremendous roaring. The stopper, with me clinging to it, had simply been blown out of the earth, and the air that we make down here was escaping through the vent into the air above. It burst up like a fountain. I crawled back to it — for the upper air hurts — and, as it were, I took great sips from the edge. My respirator had flown goodness knows where, my clothes were torn. I just lay with my lips close to the hole, and I sipped until the bleeding stopped. You can imagine nothing so curious. This hollow in the grass — I will speak of it in a minute, — the sun shining into it, not brilliantly but through marbled clouds, — the peace, the nonchalance, the sense of space, and, brushing my cheek, the roaring fountain of our artificial air! Soon I spied my respirator, bobbing up and down in the current high above my head, and higher still were many air-ships. But no one ever looks out of air-ships, and in any case they could not have picked me up. There I was, stranded. The sun shone a little way down the shaft, and revealed the topmost rung of the ladder, but it was hopeless trying to reach it. I should either have been tossed up again by the escape, or else have fallen in, and died. I could only lie on the grass, sipping and sipping, and from time to time glancing around me.

“I knew that I was in Wessex, for I had taken care to go to a lecture on the subject before starting. Wessex lies above the room in which we are talking now. It was once an important state. Its kings held all the southern coast from the Andredswald to Cornwall, while the Wansdyke protected them on the north, running over the high ground. The lecturer was only concerned with the rise of Wessex, so I do not know how long it remained an international power, nor would the knowledge have assisted me. To tell the truth I could do nothing but laugh, during this part. There was I, with a pneumatic stopper by my side and a respirator bobbing over my head, imprisoned, all three of us, in a grass-grown hollow that was edged with fern.

“Then a train passed. … (He continues telling his mother how he saw the hills and the outer air, was recaptured by the Mending Apparatus, and returned underground. He begs her again to understand that the Machine is not all-powerful, and that something tremendous is coming…)

He finished this part of his story, and Vashti turned to go.

“It will end in Homelessness,” she said quietly.
“I wish it would,” retorted Kuno.
“The Machine has been most merciful.”
“I prefer the mercy of God.”
“By that superstitious phrase, do you mean that you could live in the outer air?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen, round the vomitories, the bones of those who were extruded after the Great Rebellion?”
“Yes.”
“They were left where they perished for our edification. A few crawled away, but they perished, too — who can doubt it? And so with the Homeless of our own day. The surface of the earth supports life no longer.”
“Indeed.”
“Ferns and a little grass may survive, but all higher forms have perished. Has any air-ship detected them?”
“No.”
“Has any lecturer dealt with them?”
“No.”
“Then why this obstinacy?”
“Because I have seen them,” he exploded.
“Seen what?”
“Because I have seen her in the twilight — because she came to my help when I called — because she, too, was entangled by the worms, and, luckier than I, was killed by one of them piercing her throat.”

He was mad. Vashti departed, nor, in the troubles that followed, did she ever see his face again.

3. The Homeless

During the years that followed Kuno’s escapade, two important developments took place in the Machine. On the surface they were revolutionary, but in either case men’s minds had been prepared beforehand, and they did but express tendencies that were latent already.

The first of these was the abolition of respirators.
Advanced thinkers, like Vashti, had always held it foolish to visit the surface of the earth. Air-ships might be necessary, but what was the good of going out for mere curiosity and crawling along for a mile or two in a terrestrial motor? The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper: it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits that really mattered. So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the terrestrial motors, and except for a few lecturers, who complained that they were debarred access to their subject-matter, the development was accepted quietly. Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. “Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. …” (He continues, describing how humanity grows more dependent on the Machine for “ideas,” losing all direct experience.)

The second great development was the re-establishment of religion.
This, too, had been voiced in the celebrated lecture. No one could mistake the reverent tone in which the peroration had concluded, and it awakened a responsive echo in the heart of each. Those who had long worshipped silently, now began to talk. They described the strange feeling of peace that came over them when they handled the Book of the Machine, the pleasure that it was to repeat certain numerals out of it… (Humanity, in short, begins to worship the Machine outright. Yet the Machine is breaking down.)

… And then there came a day when, without the slightest warning, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended.

Vashti was lecturing at the time. … Somewhat displeased, she called to a friend who was a specialist in sympathy. No sound. And so with the next friend, and the next, until she remembered Kuno’s cryptic remark: “The Machine stops.” The phrase still conveyed nothing. If Eternity was stopping it would of course be set going shortly. For example, there was still a little light and air — the atmosphere had improved a few hours previously. There was still the Book, and while there was the Book there was security.

Then she broke down, for with the cessation of activity came an unexpected terror — silence. She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her. … (She opens the door of her cell and sees the tunnels full of panicked people. Chaos ensues. Everything is failing. She retreats into the corridor, and eventually finds Kuno.)

Tears answered her.
They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. … And Kuno whispers to her that some men are still alive on the surface:
“I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the mist and the ferns until our civilization stops. To-day they are the Homeless — to-morrow—”
“Oh, to-morrow — some fool will start the Machine again, to-morrow.”
“Never,” said Kuno, “never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.”

As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An air-ship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.

The Case Against Streaming TV Shows
A 20-30 hour time commitment, much of which is done alone, with only a loose promise of a pay-off. Why do we do this to ourselves?1

How I turned an Instagram page into a $30 Million Dollar Business
Emily Oberg, founder of Sporty & Rich, shares her “no rich parents, no investors” entrepreneurial journey as she prepares to launch her new sexual wellness brand.2

inside the hot girl economy
“what they didn’t yet understand is that young women like them are the foundation of new york’s nightlife economy, and that without their enthusiastic buy-in, the system would completely unravel.”3

Adam Neumann quietly builds new media startup
The WeWork founder bought Whalebone Magazine last year, launched a new magazine called The Flow Trip, and has claims to have amassed 13,000 subscribers.4

The End of the Subscription Era is Coming

At a basic level the cost per journalist, cost per editor, cost per photographer, cost per columnist, commentator, critic, contrarian…etc is going up in journalism, not down. Just as OnlyFans is, in fact, an extremely expensive way of consuming pornography (I don’t want to give away the secrets of the internet, but you can, in fact, acquire pornography for free), so too is the current trend of Substackification an extremely expensive way of consuming journalism.5

The J. Peterman Edition
On cinematic universes, Seinfeld, and physical catalogs.6

The 100 Best Sports Moments of the Quarter Century
The Ringer staff delivers an exhaustive–even by their standards–highlight reel from 25 years worth of sports history.7

'He's got it': An oral history of the NBA's COVID-19 shutdown -- and how it changed sports forever
Behind-the-scenes at the NBA in the weeks leading up to Rudy Gobert becoming pro sports’ patient zero.8

British Artist George Townley's Illustrations are a Love Letter to L.A.
If you love L.A., you should check out George’s new book.9

Still hungry for more? Check out the rest of this week’s best over at The Preview.

Read more at The Preview

This week, I tried something new. Rather than sending one long email of curated links that obviously has A LOT of meat on the bone (and probably some gristle), I'm breaking Sunday Bunch into two parts:

First, you've likely already seen the tighter set of links delivered to your inbox—no pleasantries, just a calm list of things worth reading between Sunday delivery and the end of Monday's commute.

Second is what you're reading now: this companion piece posted on The Preview. Free from inbox constraints and knowing our casual readers might not venture beyond the email digest, this gives us room to experiment.

Some weeks, like this one, you'll get an extended list of links—both what would normally make the cut and those that wouldn't for one reason or another1. Other weeks, I might try something different. And sometimes, the email digest might be all there is.

I'm excited to hear what you think about this new format. The goal remains the same: delivering quality content worth your time, just packaged differently to better serve both casual readers and dedicated followers.

INTERMEDIATED

YouTube at 20: How the Video Colossus Launched the Creator Economy and Turned From Hollywood Foe to Friend (Variety)

Casual Viewing (N+1)

YouTube and Netflix: the present and foreseeable future of what and how we watch2.

**

TMZ’s scoop on Michael Jackson’s death marked the moment digital news overtook legacy media3 (Poynter)

The Future of News Looks Niche (NY Times)

From Harvey Levin to Jessica Lessin.

**

AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Brand Strategy (Catalyst Strategy)

Speaking things into existence (One Useful Thing)

The History and Future of Memeing Things Into Reality (Contraptions)

Three related meditations ‘expertise in a vibe-filled world of work.’

**

Inside the Biggest Brand Activations at SXSW (Adweek)

Marketers don’t know what an insight actually is and consumers don’t care (The Drum)

Vibe-filled and ad-pilled.

**

Too Many Trends! (NY Times)

Even the youths are exhausted. But then again:

THE SHIFTING HABITS OF THE LEISURE CLASS

‘Eiffel Tower of the north’? Manchester United unveil 100,000-seat new stadium project (The Guardian)

2026 World Cup final to host Super Bowl-style halftime show (ESPN)

Let there be spectacle.

**

A New Model for Sports Media? Boardroom Bets Big on Membership (Hollywood Reporter)

What comes first subscription fatigue or membership club fatigue?

**

Never Mind the Tariffs. Mexico City’s Art Scene Is Thriving—And Growing (Artnet)

Spain Is the Latest Country to Have Caught the Texas Barbecue Bug (Texas Monthly)

Japan’s Ski Slopes Have Too Much of a Good Thing: Snow (NY Times)

Editor’s Note: If you need someone to be your guide through the most powdery of slopes in Japan, look no further than Stealth Backcountry. 🇯🇵🏂

Learn More

LUXURY AND ALL ITS TRAPPINGS

The great American classic we’ve been misreading for 100 years (Vox)
The Great Gatsby is more than cocktail parties and color symbolism.

Man Posing as NBA Player Representative Swallows $769,000 in Stolen Tiffany Jewelry, Police Say (CBS News)

I Am Trapped in the Criterion Closet (McSweeney’s)

As I drink, something approaches. My blood runs cold. I turn and see Isabella Rossellini. She is wrapped in a floor-length elkskin jacket, crowfeather hat, and a necklace fashioned from fish bones. (These were what she was wearing when she came in.)

Brought to you by Globo-Chem

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

‡

SXSW—basically the same thing but for brands—is also in full swing all weekend and into next week. I’ll have some more in-depth thoughts there after the festivities wrap, it’s definitely an interesting vibe shift down here. Slowly, then all at once.

All of that plus trying to sneak out on spring break next weekend, my time is limited (as is yours, I’m sure).

Let’s get this show on the road.

The future is already here…

(And these three are just the ones happening in Texas1, in the last week alone)

Company Seeking to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth Creates a ‘Woolly Mouse’ (Scientific American)

ICON and Michael Hsu to create 3D-printed houses in Austin (dezeen)

Waymo is now available exclusively on Uber in Austin (The Verge)

…but there are admittedly distribution challenges

Why crashed cars are increasingly totaled (Axios)

TL;DR: More electronics, more expensive parts, more expensive servicing needed. We’ve made it easier to just throw it away than fix it.

How Plastics in the Brain Connect to the Wider Debate over Petroleum (Scientific American)

What Went Wrong at Saudi Arabia’s Futuristic Metropolis in the Desert (WSJ)

Australians lose more money to gambling in a year than government spends on aged care, report finds (The Guardian)

A New App Lets You Hire Your Own Bodyguards (The Supersonic)

Denmark's postal service to stop delivering letters (BBC News)

Even Our Sex Scandals Are Sexless (Magdalene Taylor)

From Y2K to here

W. David Marx is one of my favorite living writers, his book Status & Culture is a masterclass charting the long history of objects, symbols, and other items conspicuously consumed in pursuit of cultural status.

This week, he announced his next book, Blank Space, an ambitious history of culture in the 21st century. He talked about the challenge of trying to create a snapshot of a period as frenetic as the current moment:

When researching 20th century European art, very little in the news cycle affects your work: Picasso is dead. By contrast, writing about present times means that every single morning begins with encountering at least four news stories and essays to consider for inclusion. And the news cycle forced me to continually update the text.

For example, the Hawk Tuah Girl:

• “There’s a new thing on the internet — the Hawk Tuah Girl.” → I write a few sentences on Haliey Welch (and get really good at spelling it "Haliey")
• “Oh, the Hawk Tuah Girl went to a crypto conference.” → The sentences become a short paragraph
• “The Hawk Tuah Girl now has the #3 podcast in America.” → The paragraph becomes a section-opener
• “The Hawk Tuah Girl launched a memecoin.” → Haliey Welch now embodies the economic aspirations of her entire generation
• “The memecoin was a rugpull, and she’s in hiding.” → More furious edits, uplifting Welch to the greatest possible embodiment of culture in our times (after DJ D-Sol)
• “The Hawk Tuah Girl disappeared and maybe wasn’t anything at all.” → Anxiety, doubt, fear

The book comes out November 18, 2025. Pre-order yours today.

Pre-order Blank Space today

And if you haven’t already read Status & Culture, or his first book Ametora, you should read both of those while we wait for Blank Space.

What this week taught me about B2B sales

This major ad agency for Google, Samsung, and Nike just bought back its independence (Fast Company)

The Return of Digg, a Star of Web 2.0 (NY Times)

It’s About Aura, Not Content (o32c)

Sul sul! How The Sims influenced a generation of creatives (It’s Nice That)

Abrdn adds back vowels after widely mocked rebrand (BBC News)

The Leisure Class

31-21-22. (ESPN)

Fanatics Launches Ticket Strategy in Two-Way Deal With Ticketmaster (Sportico)

This is the start of something bigger. Whether it’s a JV, some portion of spun-off Live Nation assets finding their way into Fanatics in exchange for a chunk of pre-IPO shares, or a straight-up merger, these two were made for each other. Great news for fans!

(Narrator: It is not great news for fans.)

White’s Snowboard League Debuting with Billion Dollar Aspirations (JohnWallStreet)

• UPDATE: Sena Tomita, Yuto Totsuka win first Snow League snowboard halfpipe titles

How NBA legends Steve Nash, Steve Kerr and USMNT great Stu Holden helped resurrect Mallorca (Goal.com)

College Baseball: The Spring Sport of Kings (Channel 6)

Adam Sandler Doesn’t Give a F*ck – and Neither Should You (Hypebeast)

Inside Four Loko’s plan to reinvent itself for Gen Z (ModernRetail)

The 18 Best Restaurants in Dayton, Ohio (Eater)

Burbank’s ‘Pocket Burger’ Just Unlocked a Crazy New Cheeseburger Variation (L.A. TACO)

The London Restaurant the Yellow Bittern Serves Up Stews and Controversy (The New York Times)

The Future of 007 Edition (Why is this interesting?)

The Man Who Spent Forty-two Years at the Beverly Hills Hotel Pool (The New Yorker)

SOURCES + SHOUT-OUTS

| | | | | | | |

I can’t say that I remember the bluffs in Santa Monica having a scene exactly like what I saw yesterday at Barton Springs, but whatever mix of the South Austin vibe and my own diverse brain topography snapped me back to 2003. The pier off in the distance. Beck’s Sea Change on the iPod. My first real grown-up apartment at 6th and Wilshire, where I was working at one of the earliest digital marketing agencies, while tinkering and building random internet experiments on the side.

Los Angeles in the early 2000s was still a nascent market from a tech standpoint. People who’d go on to found billion-dollar companies would host community-driven events like BarCamp LA.

With no million-dollar jobs out there for industry rockstars, incredibly capable designers and developers were available for next to nothing, and often down to participate in experiments and hackathons pro bono.

The tools to experiment and build were also becoming much more broadly available. Open-source software continued to mature, barriers to adoption lowered. Launching a website went from something requiring many months of bespoke design and coding to something you could spin up through a hosted service provider.

By 2003, I was able to find a guy named Rusty Foster, who had written software called Scoop to power his site Kuro5hin, and with only the most basic of programming skills, I launched a social platform called The Edge City Chronicle that let users post, share, comment, and all from the comfort of an algorithm-free homepage. The site didn’t change the world, but it ran as a moderately-successful two-person operation for several years, something that would have required a team 5-10x as large just a few years prior.

It’s a long way from ‘00s-era Santa Monica back to Austin and the worlds of tech and creativity today, but I do see connective threads from those early days to what lies directly in front of us. AI actually offers both talent and tools to try new things like we did back then. No need for a business plan or a seed round or a proper analysis of the TAM, just a little bit of tinkering and you can build a simple tool just for yourself, or something you might scale into a business. For the first time in a long time, the field of possibilities is looking bright.

Not a Coder? With A.I., Just Having an Idea Can Be Enough. (NY Times)

The term ‘vibecoding’ feels a bit wonky, but I can attest that with tools like v0 from Vercel, you can sit down and in a few minutes build something. Roose’s own list is good inspiration:

• A tool that transcribes and summarizes long podcasts

• A tool to organize my social media bookmarks into a searchable database

• A website that tells me whether a piece of furniture will fit in my car’s trunk

• An app called LunchBox Buddy, which analyzes the contents of my fridge and helps me decide what to pack for my son’s school lunch

Don’t take Roose’s (or my) word for it, you should read the article and start messing around with some of the tools yourself. I’ll be tinkering away here, Beck on in the background, and will share some of my early work here soon.

FROM SMALL THINGS…

The ChatGPT Prompts That Can Be $1B+ Companies ()

We create new products and services. We bundle them up. Then we unbundle and rebundle3, and motion continues whether or not progress is made. Cable and streaming are the first one that comes to mind today, but for years everyone’s favorite digital example was Craigslist4:

ChatGPT and the other big LLMs like Claude to feel like the next one-stop shop primed for unbundling.

The ability to build simple tools and services with little more than some structured prompts creates an ideal environment for low-risk experimentation, not unlike the early 2000s with the cloud and early 2010s with iOS and Android.

My hope is not that we build yet another layer of websites and apps, but that tools like OpenAI and its APIs are the VC-subsidized new building blocks that we can use to build the infrastructure that finally connects the platforms across which all of our digital lives are scattered.

FEED THE BEAST

All of the above is possible in a world measured not in years, but NVIDIA earnings reports. Where natural resources and old nuclear power plants alike are summoned to feed the almighty lord Compute. But will it ever be enough?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the company is ‘out of GPUs’ (TechCrunch)

Altman’s statement came in a post on X as he announced the launch of GPT-4.5, its new (and much more expensive) model:

Giant Corporations Are Hoarding the World's AI Talent (Wired)

It’s not just the raw computing power, the need for engineering brains has made “the cost of acquiring a top AI researcher is comparable to the cost of acquiring an NFL quarterback.”

BUY LAND OR BUY SEA

Blackstone Buys Superyacht and Marina Servicer for $5.65 Billion (Bloomberg)

Knowing the company you started had the right idea is at least some measure of success:

While boat sales tend to ebb and flow with consumer sentiment, storage slips tend to be in short supply in all economies, creating opportunities for marina owners to modernize properties and drive higher rents. A trend toward larger superyachts with richer owners has also created opportunities for marinas to sell more services.

Why does Walmart want a shopping mall? (RetailDive)

Walmart is working with Texas-based Cypress Equities to lead the redevelopment process, which includes the mall proper and an annex building of additional retail stores. Beyond that, Walmart isn’t offering many details on its plans.

What Hotelier Ari Heckman thinks about building brand worlds IRL (The Case)

I’m a child of former Disneyland cast members, I will always be a sucker for the center of the brand world and hospitality venn diagram.

The Neighborhood Spat That Went Nuclear (Texas Monthly)

Perhaps things could’ve ended there: with some bad blood and hurt feelings. But then Shanda decided to run for office.

You should read the whole thing, it takes some twists and turns involving angry neighborhood Facebook rants, contentious school board campaigns, all the way up to a bill being brought to the Texas state legislature addressing the pressing issues surrounding the legality of backyard swimming lessons. Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the pettiness.

Editor’s Note: This story pairs well with the story about Diana and Scott Anderson, the couple who got kicked out of Disneyland’s Club 33 and then tried (unsuccessfully) to sue Disney.

Generation X is ready for senior living. Here’s what they want. (MarketWatch)

I know a significant percentage of our readers are Gen X (like me). Does this sound like any of you?

They’re seeking communities that offer both tranquil spaces for outdoor recreation and physical and mental well-being, alongside casual indoor venues for socializing on their own terms. This generation that grew up exploring neighborhoods unsupervised isn’t looking for rigid social calendars. They want welcoming environments that foster organic connections and preserve their independence, all in the backdrop of the resort-style, vibrant and luxury communities.

My first impulse was to make a joke, or share with the millennial and Gen Z readers what it feels like when your generation and “senior living” start being mentioned in the same sentence5.

But if I’m being honest: if they built a community where I could ride my bike (and eventually Rascal) down to Chicago Chicago Pizza and sit in the half-price table underneath the Steve McMichael poster for a thin-crust6, then roll on to the Edwards Cinemas MarketPlace 6 to see the 1:30pm showing of T2 and then sneaking into Point Break7 after, I’d at least look at the brochure.

THE PHONE LINES ARE OPEN

Have a tip or a story you want to share? Want to contribute to The Preview?

BALLERS NETWORK

25 Sneaker Releases to Look Forward to in 2025 (Hypebeast)

A lot to look forward to for the remaining heads out there, especially because it’s Jordan’s 40th anniversary. But there’s only one drop that matters to me.

Meet the tallest player in the NBA to have never dunked in a game (The Athletic)

The New York Times: We want to do a feature on you.

Caleb Houstan: Me, really? That’s incredible.

NYT: It’s about how you are 6’8” and have still never dunked in an NBA game.

Inside the Spectacular Rise and Fall (… and Rise Again?) of NBA Top Shot (The Ringer)

We’re back baby. You should hurry up and make an offer on my collection before the prices go any higher.

Gene Hackman (1930-2025)

SOURCES

Public Announcement | Today in Tabs | | | | | | |

As I told those of you there at the time, I didn’t have what my old boss (and noted Art Brut collector) Bob Greenberg would call a singular vision for what I was trying to accomplish as I got started2.

There was a lot going on across business and technology and culture and I needed a place to make sense of it like I used to when I was regularly in an office with hundreds of smart people. After months of paralysis by analysis, I decided to stop sniffing whiteboard markers3 and just sit down, write, and see where curiosity and expertise start to converge. I told myself (and my family) that I would give it a year4 and then see where we ended up.

We are now months and 85% of the way to that goal. If you’re reading this, it means:

1. You’re still here. 7 out of 10 of you are reading (or at least opening the email) every week5. I appreciate all of you more than I should say in public with other people watching.

2. You’ve been along for most, if not all of the ride. We’ve steadily grown to almost 500 subscribers, but the majority of you have been here for at least half of the ride so far.

I am sure you have your own take on how it’s going6 but from my perspective, the experiment accomplished everything I could have hoped for. It has been great to write; to get my brain working on ideas that fall outside of the scope of my day job; and perhaps what I am most grateful for, it has helped me reconnect with a lot of people.

As I considered where we are now, it started to feel like the time has come to open the aperture of possibilities just a bit. To expand beyond the confines of our weekly playdate and start going further down a few world-shaping rabbit holes than we have room to do with Sunday Bunch.

Introducing

The Preview expands on what you’ve seen from Sunday Bunch, going further to connect the dots between the stories and trends of today, both their immediate impact, and the potential second-order implications.

The aspirational core value is optimism, balanced by the pragmatism required by the relentless absurdity of modern society.

What does it mean for you, the subscriber? In short, not a ton. Sunday Bunch becomes part of The Preview, the website and URLs are different, but otherwise you might not notice if I didn’t say something.

You don’t have to do anything, Sunday Bunch should still arrive as scheduled7, straight to your inbox via email or Substack. (If you notice any issues, please let me know.)

In the coming weeks, you will see some additional articles—outside of Sunday Bunch—published under The Preview banner.

Later this year, expect new newsletters and feeds, applying the lens of The Preview to specific topics and industries. I also plan to explore new formats, looking for ways to connect and share information that aren’t always 2,000+ words sent over email.

(Don’t worry, I’m not going to blow up your inbox, you’ll be able to opt in for and opt out of new publications as you please.)

Most importantly, The Preview makes space for friends. I’m very deliberately evolving past an eponymous newsletter with the goal of welcoming additional contributors and host conversations with some awesome people. My goal was always about making sense of a rapidly-changing world, it only makes sense to add well-informed perspectives from our community and beyond. If you’re interested in being part of it, please reply or reach out.

I hope you’ll stay with me as I continue to roll out The Preview in the coming weeks. This whole thing is about making sense of increasingly unprecedented and fast-moving times, and that can’t be a solo endeavor.

LFG,
Bunch

And while we’re FGing, what better time to bring some friends along for the ride?

Share The Preview

The emerging paradox of modern knowledge

A timely example of the threads I plan to follow further with The Preview, courtesy of my friend :

I would encourage you to read the whole thread, but for a TL;DR thought exercise:

1. Picture in your head all of the publications you encounter each week, the ones that want you to login or pay before you can read the article or watch the video. Think about all of the good stuff contained behind the walls of those gardens, annoyingly requiring your email address or a credit card to unlock the door.

2. Now think of those sites you visit, the ones with 37 banner ads and Taboola recommended articles littered throughout whatever you are trying to read. They are everything from mid-market newspapers to AI slop farms to individuals saying whatever it will take to move memecoins, supplements, or Sunday parlays.

Imagine a world in which people are turning to AI for answers, and almost all of them come from #2, not #1.

As Noah says, the popularization of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude create a potential shift in incentives. In the future, who will allow their information out there to be indexed and assimilated into the models? With every other innovation related to media and entertainment, there has been a growing caution about leaving any money on the table locking into deals too early or, god forbid, giving something away for free.

What might this mean as people turn to AI for what they trust to be credible answers, but they’re not informed by the companies who would have been at the top of those old Google searches?

How do media organizations fighting for their life to profitably produce high quality, well-researched and produced content get properly incentivized to share their knowledge into the collective?

How might we avoid the answers that AI blends together becoming an opaque mix of thinktanks, clickbait, branded content and #sponcon, and countless others who—free of the increasingly zero-sum media industry—can focus on societal impact and influence, for better or worse?

Much more to come here, there aren’t many issues bigger than this one.

The Future Childless Cat Guys

The difference between the childless cat ladies who defined the prior paradigm we’ve come to know and the childless cat men of the future is that the childless cat ladies often became such as an intentional shirking of expectations — avoiding the “what happens” that has long pushed women toward marriage and motherhood. The childless cat men will become such as a matter of ease. They are not defying expectations, but existing exactly according to the structural isolation and anomie society is bending toward.

(I encourage you to check out more of ’s work at Many Such Cases, as I said this week, her’s has quickly become one of my favorite Substacks.)

Elsewhere

The META Trending Trends: 02025 (ZINE / Matt Klein)

• If you only read one trend report this year, make it this one. Shout-out to former R/GAer Matt Klein, the trendgod.

Returning to the umami theory of value (Nemesis)

Showtime! Why Every Brand Needs a Show (NESS)

The Starbucks reboot (One Thing)

• Related: Starbucks CEO Tells Us His Plan to Turn Around the Company (WSJ)

The Ketamine-Fueled ‘Psychedelic Slumber Parties’ That Get Tech Execs Back on Track (Wired)

Meet Helix, our in-house AI that reasons like a human (Figure on X)

Workers in Japan Can’t Quit Their Jobs. They Use Resignation Agencies to Help. (CNN)

This is How We Fall Out of Love with the World (Culture Study)

America’s “First Car-Free Neighborhood” Is Going Pretty Good, Actually? (dwell)

Egg Prices Are Soaring. Are Backyard Chickens the Answer? (Civil Eats)

The Case for Posting Less8 (Link in Bio)

50 Years of Travel Tips (Kevin Kelly 🐐)

🤖 The NBA Just Tricked Millions of Fans, and No One Seemed to Notice (Bottom of the Ninth)

Sport and swearing: It’s ****ing complicated (The Athletic)

Exclusive: Amazon's new James Bond script (Read Max)

Prophet, playboy, and provocateur: How meeting Peter Beard changed my life (Country Life)

The hardest working font in Manhattan (Aresluna)

SNL 50 Reminded Us Why Saturday Night Live Still Matters (Chris Black / GQ)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

/ / Chris Black / (🎂) / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / Billy Chuck

I had most of this week’s edition finished up and ready for a full table read by the weekend, but I left this opening upfront to ensure we had a fresh monologue, and to figure out what I wanted to say about Saturday Night Live before Sunday’s prime time celebration of the show’s 50th season2.

I–along with help from Claude–did some rough math: I think I’ve watched around 700 of the show’s 980 episodes. That adds up to around 1,000 hours3, or around 65 days of my waking life that I’ve spent with SNL.

I remember my parents introducing me to the show (around the SNL 15th Anniversary Special) and my ensuing fascination with live sketch and stand-up comedy, complete with stacks of VHS tapes to prove it; now, I’ve introduced both of my kids to the show and staying up to watch is already a codified weekly routine. And one of my core memories will always be getting into a live taping, just a few days after moving from LA to New York, when Jamie managed to score us two floor seats to see Rainn Wilson and Arcade Fire4 and we wound up in a drum circle with cast members as the band played for 30 minutes after the show wrapped.

(If you watch the monologue, you can see me in the back row around the 0:16 mark.)

The Buku Abel is hitting and I could go on, but as I read all of the SNL retrospectives and thought about my own, I realized that for any of us to talk about the show at length, it inevitably turns biographical. Whether it has remained appointment viewing for decades, or your only exposure is the cultural reverberations of its sketches and performances, Lorne Michaels’ 90-minute weekly block has been one of the only enduring cultural forces in our lives over the last half a century. We have seen entire formats and genres come and go, we’ve witnessed the “death of the great American newsman,” but Saturday Night Live’s take on whatever happens in the world has remained woven into our lives and the cultural conversation.

As we live through whatever you call the transition point we’re going through, facing the start of our own country’s 250th season, looking back on fifty years of SNL offers an interesting lens on how we got to where we are, and perhaps a note of optimism (or at least a sense of humor) about what we’ll wake up to tomorrow.

I couldn’t possibly read everything out there, but I fell deep into the Studio 8H rabbit hole and these are a few highlights I would recommend if you are feeling nostalgic around tonight’s celebration:

• SNL’s Legacy at 50, As Told by 65 Cast Members and Writers

• ‘S.N.L.’ Weekend Update: An Oral History of 50 Seasons

• Where SNL has found 50 seasons of funny people, and why it matters

• ‘Saturday Night Live’ is more than a show, it’s a world.

• The ‘Saturday Night Live’ machine grinds on

• How do you create 200 costumes a week? ‘SNL’ designer Tom Broecker takes us behind the scenes

• When the Athletes Come to ‘Saturday Night Live’

• The Story of How ‘Saturday Night Live’ Made the “Stevie Nicks’ Fajita Roundup” Sketch

• The Intertwining History of the ‘Avatar’ Papyrus Font and the ‘SNL’ Sketch That Spoofed It

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

How deep does the Luka rabbit hole go?

Did the Adelsons actually force the Luka deal not because they were hesitant to pay a supermax deal to the young Slovenian superstar, but because they have inside information that a new Saudi Arabian, LIV Golf-style, rival league is in the works?

There is a seven-layer dip of problems with the comparison to LIV’s entry into golf and the prospect of an upstart league that would be in any position to sign Luka in the next five years5, but thankfully live perpetually online and hyperconnected, so we still had an economist weigh in with his analysis. TL;DR: The long-term threat of Saudi money to the NBA might make the Luka deal look like a savvy one when all is said and done:

The entire market value of NBA assets is predicated on the pre-existing property rights surrounding contracts and draft status. The calculus underlying those values is made astonishingly complex by the byzantine rules of the NBA salary cap.

What happens if a rival shows up with no regard for the pre-existing institutions of the NBA cartel?

Every NBA institution would be up for grabs. The salary cap? It threatens the ability to retain the top talent. The draft? Why would rookies accept pennies on the dollar and a single possible employer?

Mavs fans, you’re not alone. February has also been an emotional rollercoaster for beavers everywhere 🦫.

Tuesday, February 3

The government had been planning it for 7 years, beavers built the dam in two days and saved them $1 million

"The beavers saved us 30 million Czech crowns. They built the dams without any project documentation and for free," said the head of the nature reserve administration.

Wednesday, February 4

MN senator wants to make it legal to eat beavers again

Redditors on /r/hunting in a 2022 thread also compared the taste of beaver to beef. However, on the Senate floor last year, Senator Justin Eichorn (R-Grand Rapids) mentioned that beavers are referred to as "nature's chicken nuggets."

Real ones know the only acceptable beaver nuggets are anything but natural. Let Uncle Buc-ee handle the nuggs so the other guys can get back to fixing our infrastructure.

Portland studio launches the ‘Netflix of Maine,’ a streaming platform for and about the state (Portland Press Herald)

The Texas Surf Museum Pays Tribute to Our State’s Most Overlooked Sport (Texas Monthly)

When your town becomes a Nike brand (Fast Company)

Related:

Nike’s turnaround has begun – but it will take a long time (Marketing Week)

Inside Nike's Cultural Comeback (SportsVerse)

Nike’s Huge Super Bowl: From Jalen Hurts to Kendrick and Serena (Front Office Sports)

P.S., I told you 🦅

See also: Can Sports Fandom Be a Religious Experience? (Penn Arts & Sciences)

Fox’s New Scorebug Graphic Design, and Our Innate Resistance to Change (Daring Fireball)

The NBA Has Fallen Into an Efficiency Trap. (Bloomberg)

Are we optimizing ourselves to death?6

Permanent Decline. Leif Weatherby on the long, slow end of Aaron Rodgers:

The story that follows is about knowing, really knowing, that what you’ve done is not a fluke. It’s about the second act of life, and the struggle to accept the beginning of the end, the permanent decline that affects us all, but that men grieve in a peculiar way. It’s about knowing too much, and walling yourself off from the world with that knowledge. It’s about trying desperately not to know too much, and failing.

Why are so many unusual skyscrapers being built in Tirana? (dezeen)

see also: Eight unusual skyscrapers set to transform the skyline of Tirana

Around the Horn

Is Netflix bringing us together, or is its personalisation pushing us apart? (shots)

How to start a great conversation no matter whom you're with ()

Why Bars Matter ()

The Bop House Is an OnlyFans Paradise That Pulls Millions Per Month (Vice)

OnlyFans Sticky Business Model (Trung Phan)

OnlyFans is my least favorite form of sex work. I am net grateful for it - obviously it’s fulfilling an important need, and I like that men have graduated from “prerecorded, untouchable porn” to “slightly more interactive porn with a facsimile of a slightly realer girl”. I also like that it gave so many women greater financial hope for the future, more independence, no freedom. I think this is better than it not existing.

But it’s still not great. It’s designed, whether intentionally or by fortunate accident, to scale connection in a way that deeply degrades the quality of that connection. I hope we one day figure out a way to scale connection without losing so much humanity.

Doctor faces inquiry after giving his cat a Cat scan at Italian hospital (The Guardian)

This Week’s Sources

Public Announcement | | | | Kottke | Channel 6 / | | OffBall | Today in Tabs / Trung Phan

Greetings from Culver City, at the nexus of the universe where Erewhon meets Trader Joe’s.

I’m writing this en route to LAX on my way back to Austin, having spent a whirlwind 2½ days out in Hollywood and adjacent neighborhoods visiting the We Are Social offices, taking meetings, and attending the BRXND AI conference on Thursday.

Finding Intelligence in Hollywood

As I mentioned last week, I came into the event in need of a reset around AI1, my brain starting the year toggling between cynicism about real near-term impact and dread over the negative second-order consequences waiting down the line. Either this trip would help reframe my thinking to be more sustainably positive or I’d just confirm my worst fears about the career destruction ahead, go home and start preparing for my next career as a woodworker.

You do not have to worry about my newsletter-typing digits falling prey to a band saw, at least for the foreseeable future. In fact, the vibes and conversations (and even many attendees) took me back to the mid-2000s, when everyone was experimenting and we weren’t all suffocating under a weighted blanket of best practices.

I had three takeaways from the day (and happy hour the night before), which have me more excited professionally for the rest of 2025 than I have been in some time…

This full article continues in The Preview’s new section, Artificial Intel.

Read the Full Post

What else happened this week?

As regular subscribers know, most weeks I spend a good deal of time (some might say ‘too much’) curating the important links from past few days.

To make it happen, I have a long list of sources I read all week, including a few outstanding fellow curators who make the job easier by bubbling up the best stuff all in one place. I can usually hit a few of those, some of my more unique sources, and we’ve got our link rundown for each edition of Sunday Bunch.

This week , one of my top sources who is as hot as anyone in the curation game right now, turned in a double-overtime, 62-point performance over at [SIC] Weekly that’s so good, I’m taking the week off.

Anything I would have shared this week, Ben already got it2. Instead of links from me today, I highly recommend you go check out [SIC] this week:

[SIC]

[SIC] 332: Not Prioritized

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a year ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Ben Dietz

The Final Countdown

I am not going to tell you who to cheer for (or bet on) today, but I will offer up a few considerations in case you’re undecided or indifferent about the two teams on the field today.

First, Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson make the case for Philadelphia as a Moral Imperative:

We know that part of that complex of survival behaviors is a dedication to a healthy amount of anarchy, and also caring about a sports team to the point where you have to destroy property or drive a jeep up the steps of an art museum. You can’t and shouldn’t fear that, since a healthy dash of anarchy isn’t an indicator of trouble. Philly's people care enough to climb poles when they shouldn’t, or perhaps fashion pools out of city dumpsters.

What we're saying is: Are you, generally speaking, not throwing a battery because you don’t want to hurt anyone? Or are you not throwing a battery because you’re scared of getting in trouble, and don’t care enough to in the first place anyway? All batteries here are metaphorical only, of course. We’d never throw batteries for any reason, at anyone.

[/winks, slides a fresh pack of batteries in your direction]

At first glance, the fan column would seem to go towards Kansas City. I get it, Philly fans can be a lot. But for all of their tailgates and enthusiastic but problematic Native American revelry, can anyone in Chiefs Kingdom compare to King Gillie, Mike Jerrick, this guy, or any number of characters in the Eagles Fan Cinematic Universe?

Making the choice based on an NFL fanbase is tough for many of you because, let’s face it, most of them have a sort of angry mob thing going on.

You might consider each city’s culinary exploits, for which the tale of the tape is pretty clear:

Any expert knows that Kansas City barbecue–the city's lone culinary claim to fame–isn’t even elite.

Meanwhile, Philly has multiple dishes that it invented and/or absolutely owns, and is the obvious and undisputed king of one of them. And it’s not just the Hall of Fame tourist spots, the Philly sandwich bench slaps top-to-bottom:

feedingtimetv

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pancakes.and.protein.shakes

A post shared by @pancakes.and.protein.shakes

We all know that, like it or not, there’s a bigger contingent than ever out there choosing based on celebrity fans. I’m not going to do a full tally but I will remind you that while the Chiefs may have Taylor Swift, but the Eagles will always have Princess Diana.

Finally, when it comes to pick 'ems and parlays (particularly the latter), I won't pretend to be your man.

However, I am someone who does have experience3 prematurely making merch celebrating three straight titles, as recounted by the Washington Post this week:

In 2005, according to ESPN, a USC fan began selling T-shirts with “Three-Pete” on them in honor of Trojans football coach Pete Carroll, who was vying for his third straight national title. But the USPTO already had ruled “Three-Pete” too closely resembled the “three-peat” trademark held by Riley’s company, so the fan would have to fork over 5 percent of his sales for use of the term. The fan stopped making the shirts after the company that made them received a warning from attorneys for Riley’s company.

Mark my words: preemptively licensing “Three-Peat” from Pat Riley4 is the mother of all jinxes.

I was already feeling the Eagles’ vibe, between that defense and Saquon’s perfect season being overlooked because an RB hasn’t been MVP since 2012 and people love arguing about QBs with stats but no rings5, but the NFL and the Chiefs doing the deal with Riles & Co gives strong Patriots and their “Perfect Season” and “19-0” shirts energy. You don’t mess with the football gods by trademarking your win before kickoff.

Apologies to my friend Dr. Fuller, but I’m rolling with Steve, Don, Court, and the rest of the Philly crew today.

Go Birds 🦅,
BUNCH

As I mentioned last week, I came into the event in need of a reset around AI1, my brain starting the year toggling between cynicism about real near-term impact and dread over the negative second-order consequences waiting down the line. Either this trip would help reframe my thinking to be more sustainably positive or I’d just confirm my worst fears about the career destruction ahead, go home and start preparing for my next career as a woodworker.

You do not have to worry about my newsletter-typing digits falling prey to a band saw, at least for the foreseeable future. In fact, the vibes and conversations (and even many attendees) took me back to the mid-2000s, when everyone was experimenting and we weren’t all suffocating under a weighted blanket of best practices.

I had three takeaways from the day (and happy hour the night before), which have me more excited professionally for the rest of 2025 than I have been in some time:

AI can raise the ceiling and the floor

It’s not just that AI opens up new creative possibilities, it’s that it can also provide the types of tools that ensure that whatever expectations of speed and scale are put on a creative team, they can rise to the occasion.

Mike Houston from Amazon showed off an example of a tool his team built for in-house use, to help copywriters identify language options in context (what a thesaurus should be but never quite delivers on). The output was over 400 variations across hundreds of different consumer touchpoints. Not the sort of robotic offer messaging you’ve seen in other tailored creative examples in the past; this was exceptional copywriting and language choices, uncompromising creativity at scale.

AI can kick the doors open

Blogs in the mid-2000s meant that people like me2 could suddenly publish their own regularly-updated websites. Cloud-based software expanded that promise, allowing just about anyone to build digital infrastructure on which they could run their business. Both phases allowed for a lot more bootstrapping, but still required humans to scale the backend production and operations.

AI in the mid-2020s is starting to enable people to build more complex businesses and take them further without needing the kind of upfront investment that followed the digital and cloud-based startups of the previous two decades. On the one hand, this will indeed mean some larger companies can pare back. It will also mean that some of those displaced at larger companies will have a broader range of opportunities to build businesses at the intersection of their skills and passions, and won’t need them to scale with tens or hundreds of employees to satisfy investors’ need for perpetual growth.

AI can atone for the sins of SaaS

As someone who has spent twenty years driving organization-wise adoption of SaaS (software-as-a-service) tools inside some of the world’s largest companies, obsessing over cloud-based software solutions to power my side hustles and personal life, and building several platforms of my own, I see game-changing potential in AI as a sort of glue that can help connect and augment systems that have never quite worked like they should.

After a winner-takes-all approach to SaaS became the norm, much of our data is trapped inside solutions that are too expensive to leave, but who have little imperative to innovate having built moats that keep out the emerging barbarians at the gate with their more innovative offerings. AI is already providing tools that unlock the value of our data and investments in those legacy platforms, modernizing businesses without having to revamp a tech stack.

A Note of Thanks

Finally, a huge shout-out to Noah and James, who put on the event (and were gracious enough to invite me). BRXND AI has evolved and grown over the last two years, from an early “if we build it, will they come” experiment into the type of event you prioritize in your annual calendar, as well as a brilliant extension of their new AI-focused consultancy, Alephic.

I’ve been fortunate to know Noah since 2006 (he was one of the first people I met after moving to NYC) and James not long after. They have always had a preternatural ability to bring the best people together and create an environment for interesting thoughts and ideas to percolate3, and this was certainly no exception. Should the opportunity present itself, I highly encourage you to attend any of their upcoming events, whether it’s BRXND, or their other AI and autonomy-focused series, RIDE AI.

The headline was a lie, I am fortunate to not find myself in Pennsylvania watching a groundhog with a 40% shooting percentage over the last decade predict the weather1. I’m writing to you from Cosmic Coffee in South Austin, celebrating an overdue end to an overwhelming January with breakfast tacos and a cold brew mainline.

How are you doing? I won’t lie, I struggled to get the car into fifth gear in the first few weeks of the year. Based on my conversations with many of you over the past few weeks, I am guessing quite a few of you feel some of the same. Or, even if you’re feeling good, you’re detecting that same “the vibes are off” energy that’s been going around.

Witnessing the destruction in Los Angeles took a major toll. The political maelstrom that packed more new storylines into two weeks than the entire George H.W. Bush presidency had in four years was exhausting. I don’t use TikTok, but I’m aware of its influence in the world enough to notice a weird shift in online energy after the shutdown and ByteDance’s performative restoration act2.

All of those no doubt contribute, but after talking to a lot of people I think there’s an undercurrent of something else that’s been building for some time. Between a wave of political change and then a business future that’s now shrouded in the fog of A.I., I have distilled two pent up impulses in my head. Problems I need to solve in 2025. Let me know if you feel any of the same:

1. Waking up in the metaverse — I think we got it wrong. The metaverse isn’t a failed Zuck bet and hasty rebrand, nor a relic of the ‘web3’ blip. It’s a place that we spend too much time now that just happens to have a much lower-fidelity form factor. Holding TikTok six inches from your face is just playing a basic voyeur game, then you switch into another app on your phone to play a game with friends. People, we have a lo-fi metaverse connecting us 24/7. I can’t escape this feeling that the version of the doomsday clock that puts us inside the matrix is minutes from midnight3 if don’t recognize how far we’ve already tumbled down the rabbit hole.

2. The sea of sameness and a rising tide of A.I. — Kyle Chayka's Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture and Alex Murrell's "Age of Average" highlight how algorithms and "best practices" push everything toward a safe, predictable middle. Beth Bentley recently posed the bracing question: "Is the algorithm making us LESS stylish, LESS interesting, LESS...ourselves?" All of this at the start of an A.I. age that will create exponentially more content from the pieces of today’s algorithmically-optimized blanding. The challenge isn't just recognizing this homogenization – it's creating space for genuine creativity and distinctiveness to flourish. What changes – both cultural and technological – could help break us out of these feedback loops instead of reinforcing them?

This Week

There’s a lot to unpack there, which I’m going to leave for another day as I head out to BRXND.ai in LA this week to talk these ideas out (and find some more optimistic questions to ponder as well). I’m as big of a believer as ever in the power of technology to enhance the human experience, just spending more time thinking about the ‘how’ these days.

All of that aside, there are still plenty of good things going on in the world, and I’m going to highlight a few below. One such bright spot that I’ll start with: everyone wish a happy birthday to my brother Kevin, celebrating out in California with his new neighbor (and blockbuster Lakers acquisition) 🍻🍗🎂

🎉 Additional shout-outs this week: Happy birthdays to Shakira–also celebrating today–along with my Blogs with Balls co-founder Don Povia (Wednesday), Axl Rose and Bob Marley (Thursday), and Charles Dickens (Friday).

Thank you to this week’s sources: [SIC] / Billy Chuck / Feed Me / How Long Gone / Posting Nexus / Blackbird Spyplane / Garbage Day / Marginal Revolution / Harper’s Weekly Review / Morning Brew / OffBall / BRXND / Kottke

The End of an Era

Months after his arrival from Chipotle made headlines and drove the stock up 20%, new CEO Brian Niccol has started to put his stamp on Starbucks. First, a new ad during the Golden Globes with a decidedly different vibe, this week came a series of changes to the in-store experience:

• To-go cup Sharpie messages are back and the condiment bar are back

• Baristas are now instructed to “warmly” engage with customers, and to always ask if they’re staying or leaving

• In-store customers get ceramic mugs and free refills for iced or hot coffee and tea4

Then comes the big one: people are no longer allowed to use the restroom, get a free cup of water, or hang out without buying something.

This got employees and their labor unions up in arms5 and has sparked at least some discussion more broadly about public bathrooms. I’m not sure exactly when we agreed the expectation of public restroom availability should be on our coffee shops and fast food restaurants, but it’s one area where American business owners would be just fine with government intervention.

I don’t need to inventory the list of “this is why we can’t have nice things” that happens in the public restrooms America does have, and I can list at least five major priorities in any major city that I’d probably prioritize ahead of increasing the public toilets per capita. I concede that we’re stuck with having to wait in line and buy something being the default setting6.

Still, let me daydream about an America where we could have public bathrooms like these Tokyo:

SPREAD THE WORD

Guys, this cult newsletter isn’t going to grow itself.

Please share this email with a friend, and maybe sweeten the deal a bit for them, if you know what I mean. Together, we can live forever.

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This is Growing Up

Screens Have Taken Over Classrooms. Even Students Have Had Enough. (WSJ)

Kids Are Having Birthday Parties at Sephora Now (Business of Fashion)

How Zyn Conquered The American Mouth (GQ)

What a difference four years makes:

• 2021: “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny”

• 2025: “Everyone is horny again”

Status & Culture

Netflix to Open Restaurant in Las Vegas Next Month as Live Experiences Business Expands (Hollywood Reporter)

Why the Sundance Film Festival is becoming more important for marketers (Digiday)

The Brand That Left Social Three Years Ago (Link in Bio)

How is Fortnite's Attempt to Become the YouTube of Gaming Going? (Julia Alexander / Posting Nexus)

Louis Vuitton Becomes Official Partner of Formula 1 (Hypebeast)

The Next Big Style Brag for Men? ‘It’s Not Cashmere. It’s Yak.’ (WSJ)

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower (his only skyscraper ever built) will be Sold for $1.4 M (artnews)

Archaeologists Are Finding Dugout Canoes in the American Midwest as Old as the Great Pyramids of Egypt (Smithsonian)

What happened to Hailey Welch? Hawk Tuah girl disappears after crypto “scam” (Dexerto)

Spirit Airlines bans see-through clothing and ‘lewd’ body art (L.A. Times)

Hyundai unveils electric rickshaws "tailored to India's unique environment" (dezeen)

And finally…

As a fitting bookend to all of the questions about our relationship to technology and media posited in the upfront, Leigh Singer gathered more than 50 clips from movies that break the fourth wall:

We’ll talk again soon, hopefully without screens between us.

Cheers,
BUNCH

Hello from Meanwhile Brewing in Austin. Regulars, welcome back. To all of the newcomers this week, thanks for joining us.

It happened: an inch of snow fell in Austin, and we managed to keep the power on. Ted didn’t have to run away to Cancun, I didn’t have to wear a parka inside my house. You have to take those little wins, especially because winter is pretty to look at but sucks to live through and I am ready for it to be over. I am sure everyone in New York and everywhere in the country that dipped into single digits and below this week are overwhelmed with sympathy for my cause. Fortunately, it’s warmer everywhere now (though still subzero in the frost belt). Even better news: we are not here to talk about the weather.

It felt like a month’s worth of stuff packed into a compact car of a week. The kind that starts with $500 billion public/private AI partnerships named after Kurt Russell movies1 and ends with groundbreaking new DeepSeek AI model out of China that make Silicon Valley’s AI leaders question everything. Netflix announced its biggest quarterly subscriber gain in history, then raised prices by 15%, and everyone said ‘ooooh’ then gave a huge ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ which is at least better than the Oscars, whose 2025 nominations seemed to be met with the worst mix of indifference and a sort of derision in unison towards its most-nominated film that I can’t remember, even when Crash or Green Book took home the grand prize.

That’s just scratching the surface, without even digging into a full-ass inauguration and all of the trimmings; the stories and memes and Nazi salutes and Zuck staring straight into the sun. Not to mention the subsequent flurry of proclamations–some perhaps constitutional and others much less so–out of the newly-regilded Oval Office. The year’s first act opens with the subtlety of Emilia Pérez, the pacing of The Substance, and the foreboding techno-overlords of Dune.

We’ll bite off what we can today, but before we get started…

For my friends in Southern California: I will be in Los Angeles from February 4-7. I am headed to town for the BRXND.ai event in Hollywood, hosted by friend of the newsletter Noah.

The consensus on the two NY events seems to be that it was one of the best places you could go to have more practical, well-informed discussions about AI’s future in business and marketing. The type of conference where everyone comes in admitting what they don’t know, not spending the entire event trying to convince you they know more than they do. I loved this comment from an attendee:

Humility is the last thing you'd expect to find at a tech conference, but the emergence of generative AI demands it, and the humble, hopeful, even playful vibe at the BRXND conference felt like the exact right way to approach the brave-new-worldness of it all. To be at the first of what should be at least a semi-annual meetup was super energizing.

If you’re out in LA on February 7, you should join me there. Noah tells me they still have a few tickets left, get yours here:

Buy BRXND.ai Tickets

And if you’re in L.A. that week but can’t make it, drop me a line, let’s make it happen.

Oh, one more thing before we get started: everyone please wish a happy 75th birthday to my incredible Mom, who still has a lot more Instagram followers than me.

Now let’s get down to it:

Secret Agent Land

On January 5, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman made a blog post that rendered a pretty good picture of what to expect from his company this year:

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

AGI (artificial general intelligence) has been hyped for some time, it is for many the holy grail of AI and machine learning (and possibly the end of humanity, if you ask the guys building it), where AI “possesses human-like intelligence and can perform any intellectual task that a human can. It is capable of learning, reasoning, and adapting to new situations.”

Right now all the buzz is about “agents” as a major step in that direction.

In AI terms, agents are essentially automated workers who can carry out multi-step tasks, including any required reasoning, independent of human oversight. This analogy might be the easiest way to understand it:

This week, OpenAI formally introduced their first big agentic offering: Operator.

The early reviews from tech reporters were pretty tepid (or at least that $200/mo is very pricey for what it is today). It’s to be expected that this would be rough and expensive, and to be honest it may stay that way for awhile. But if you look at the amount being invested in making agents happen, and the overall velocity of innovation–the aforementioned DeepSeek emerged out of China this week, and people have already figured out to use it and open-source software to make your own agents for almost nothing–it’s reasonable to assume somewhere in the near future, an entire generation of agents will be unleashed on the internet and the rest of the connected world.

There are fundamental questions to ask: What do we do with that newly-minted free time? What if they take all of our jobs in the process? If we were worried about the TikTok algorithm, how will we feel about Chinese AI acting on our behalf across the internet? How many gallons of precious water will we use just so Skye can find just the right place for her sister’s bachelorette in Joshua Tree without having to search Airbnb herself?

Indulge me for a second and set those aside, along with your understandable skepticism about early agent examples like Operator. Let’s assume by this time next year that these agents are, like many of the early iterations of apps like Facebook or Uber that transformed our lives, good enough.

It’s 2026 and agents can carry out tasks like managing our groceries and calendars and daily lives, taking away what had been a lot of laborious2 tasks. They take off, millions of people have multiple agents doing various tasks for them. Which leads to my trillion-dollar question:

How does our world have to adapt and change, when everyone has one or more virtual counterparts doing their bidding every second of every day?

If you watch the early demos of Operator and other agents, you’ll notice that they aren’t all neatly tapping into systems intended for use by armies of automated bots. They’re pretending to be actual humans, clicking around, bypassing human limitations that we literally built the entire internet around.

What do the next few years look like if agents are brute forcing their way to automation, each of using one or more agents that dramatically increase the population of users on the internet? How do those of us who work on the corporate side, who are responsible for marketing and commerce and user experience, have to reinvent the way we work and what we make?

These are just a few of the thought exercises I’m using to develop the mental pliability needed for what lies ahead:

• What do I have to do to get a table, or concert tickets, in a world where everyone has an army of agents vying to do the same thing? Does everything just go to the highest bidder and/or agents with the most compute power?

• What does customer service look like in a world where anyone can spin up agents to bombard your call centers and help chats?

• When making online purchases on our behalf, if an agent makes a mistake, like ordering the wrong product3, accidentally booking the wrong flight, one that can’t be changed? Will companies provide the same leeway they do to individuals?

• Similarly: if my agent gets swindled and spends my money on a scam, are the bank and credit card company going to provide me the same protections?

• If my agent is handling the transactions and communications, what is my “customer experience” and relationship with any brand, beyond their ads and the product itself?

If AI is indeed the future (and as important of one as we’d be led to believe), then I’d argue it’s vital that we don’t go forward blindly but rather ask these questions upfront so they can help inform where we ought to go next.

We also need to embark on the next chapter with the humility4 to acknowledge that many of the use cases proposed currently are really just bandages to address the things we designed and built–then, in many cases, underfunded and stopped improving–in the last two waves of innovation (desktop/internet then mobile/cloud).

We went through a period of great invention and brought to market multiple world-changing technologies in the span of a decade. The spectrum of possibility seemed limitless. What happened? The relationship between human-consumer and brand-enterprise grew increasingly antagonistic in the last two decades, thanks in large part to intermediating a lot of human interactions through those magical digital interfaces that were supposed to be a portal to a better world.

Are we going to let AI become one more layer of abstraction, replacing frustrating digital interfaces with smug virtual representatives who make it just as hard (if not harder) to get what you need?

Our esteemed leaders in Silicon Valley love to talk poker5 and our options here are similar: We can double down, ignore the mistakes of previous innovation cycles, and see if we can bluff our way to better. Or we can use AI as our opportunity to explore questions like those above, and truly improve our hand6.

The Best Snyder Cut

Daniel Snyder owned the NFL’s Washington Commanders from 1999 to 2023, and is widely considered to be one of, if not the worst owner in American professional sports’ modern era. If you’re not familiar with his work, the team’s hometown Washington Post has a good chronology of Snyder’s path to being forced into selling the team by the rest of the NFL’s owners.

This week, the team Snyder owned as recently as 18 months ago, who already have as many playoff wins in one season as the team did during all 24 years of Snyder’s time at the top, will play in the NFC Championship Game with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line. It has to be fairly embarrassing to watch how quickly the team got good after you disappeared.

Enter ESPN:

Yesterday, two of ESPN’s most senior and best connected reporters, Seth Wickersham and Don Van Natta Jr., dropped a 3,000+ word box of Morton’s kosher salt in Snyder’s self-inflicted wounds with a damning and at times humiliating look at the former owner’s final chapter and epilogue with the Commanders, and the seething animosity he’s left with watching his former team and their breakup bod dancing all up in the NFL Playoffs club.

As bad as all of that is, this story about the final handover of the team paints the worst picture of all:

Suddenly, the sale's closing -- a supposed formality -- turned into an eleventh-hour drama, multiple sources with direct knowledge told ESPN. Snyder threatened to kill the deal by refusing to share his bank information, preventing Harris from wiring him the money. At 1 a.m. on July 21, Snyder and his wife were fielding phone calls from various executives and confidants, urging him to do what he'd pledged and let go of the team.

"I don't want to do this," Snyder told a confidant.

A rally celebrating Harris' ownership group was scheduled for later that day at the since-renamed FedEx Field.

But as 1 a.m. became 2 a.m., Snyder was refusing to hand over the stadium keys.

"I don't care!" Snyder said, according to sources with direct knowledge of what transpired in those hours. "It would be trespassing if anyone goes there. It's still mine!"

Hilariously, steeping even more manure in the back of Snyder’s Maybach: this isn’t even his only recent source of very public embarrassment. He also helped finance the Trump biopic The Apprentice7, thinking it would be a “flattering portrayal” of the 45th and 47th POTUS’s early days in New York City, then tried unsuccessfully to block the movie from being released.

After selling the team for a record $6 billion he’s richer than ever. That money may buy him many things, but it won’t erase the long list of public failings as an owner (and, by all accounts, a person) during his time in Washington. On the field, his story will center around his crippling inability to find a quarterback after 27 tries.

His ongoing search for dignity may prove even more elusive.

Elsewhere

Deschutes Brewery makes big bet on NA beer (Axios)

Sweden is Building the World’s Largest City Made Entirely From Timber (Time)

Taylor Swift Triggered a Tsunami of Sports Bets. Then She Stopped Turning Up (Wired)

Men In Blazers Raises $15M From Media Heavyweights as It Preps World Cup Push (Hollywood Reporter)

Shout-out to friend of the newsletter Ricky, who is working his magic over there at Maximum Effort.

The biggest branding trends coming in 2025 (Fast Company)

Why Are Airlines Struggling to Keep Up With Soaring Demand? (Skift)

Cars That Time Forgot: The Berkeley Sports (Hagerty)

Along with all of the positive feedback, I got connected to a few organizations who are working to help those impacted out in L.A. and could use our help spreading the word. I wanted to specifically shout out friends of the newsletter Loop Apparel, who have been helping families affected by the fires by providing free clothing for young kids and shared this generous offer with our readers:

If your family was impacted by the fires and need some new children’s clothing, email Loop at hello@wearloop.co. They have kids’ shirts and sweats, 18mo-7yo, to send your way for free.

We had a few weeks off, then last week’s focus on our friends in Los Angeles, so I realize this is the first time we’re catching up. I was thinking about recapping a few stories that developed while we were away, but this year’s howling at the door, so let’s start at the present.

Just this morning, after a week worth of aggressive backtracking by after both parties–who unanimously supported the bill–on the law voted into law only a few months ago, the TikTok ban went into effect late last night. Load up the app and you’ll see this:

America’s battle with China over TikTok didn’t stop cucumber shortages in Iceland, which were attributed to a TikTok craze that took off with Icelandic youth. Meanwhile, Belgium issued a food advisory against consuming Christmas trees. Kim Jong-un banned hotdogs for North Koreans and declared cooking them to be an act of treason, while a small town in Italy banned residents from getting sick and Australia had to close nine Sydney beaches as mysterious grey balls washed up on shore.

In sports, the Chiefs rode some very favorable calls Travis Kelce’s best game of the season to a win over the Texans (with Taylor Swift and Caitlin Clark looking on). The Washington Commanders1 dealt a brutal gutpunch upset to Tim Robinson, Sam Richardson, and the rest of the Detroit Lions faithful2. And finally, Los Angeles got some much-needed good news as international sensation Rōki Sasaki, a pitcher from the Chiba Lotte Marines of the Nippon Professional Baseball league who is making the move to MLB in 2025, announced that he would be signing with the Dodgers3.

Unfortunately, we also had more bad news out of Los Angeles this week. As the city continued to contend with remaining fires and began reckoning with the sheer scope of the damage, one of its longtime icons exited the frame.

David Lynch died on Wednesday at the age of 78.

Lynch had been battling emphysema and in an interview with Sight & Sound magazine last year, he revealed that due to Covid fears and his emphysema diagnosis, he no longer could leave the house, which meant if he directed again, it would be remotely.

There were reports that Lynch "took a turn for the worse" after being forced to evacuate his house due to the Sunset fire in L.A., but nothing confirmed as of yet.

Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1970, as he was finishing his first feature film, Eraserhead. He lived in the Hollywood Hills and, up until his recent health troubles, he could be spotted out and about across Los Angeles, including daily trips to Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank for coffee and a shake.

He was a kid from Montana who made movies set everywhere from Washington state to Arrakis. But Lynch embodied L.A. – perhaps a version of the City of Angels that is no more – as much or more than any filmmaker, a sentiment echoed again and again in his passing:

• David Lynch Was L.A.’s Dark Poet Laureate

• David Lynch was Los Angeles

• David Lynch and Los Angeles: The City That Shaped His Surreal Vision

• Long live the wizard, David Lynch

Lynch came to speak to my film studies class at USC. It was 1999, and he had come for a pre-release screening of The Straight Story and Q&A afterwards.

If you haven’t seen The Straight Story, it’s the least Lynchian of all his films. This was before the internet film news industrial complex, so I don’t think more than maybe a few people in the room knew to expect a very earnest, straightforward (no pun intended) story about a man facing the end of his life, making his way on a riding mower across the country to see his brother and apologize before they both die.

The lights come up, Professor Drew Kasper introduces Lynch. He walks out, sits down, pulls out a trademark pack of American Spirit yellows. I don’t have a full transcript, but the initial exchange will remain burned in my brain:

Lynch: Can I smoke?

Kasper: (hesitates) Uh–

(Lynch lights and takes his first drag.)

Kasper: –uh yeah, that’s fine.

(Lynch stares off in the distance, as if he’s already forgotten the exchange.)

Kasper: “This is quite the departure for you. How did this project come to be?”

Lynch holds for an awkwardly long pause, takes one more drag.

Then he gives what at the time I thought was the coolest possible answer. Now it feels like advice to hold close as we steady ourselves towards an uncertain future:

“We’re all capable of doing many types of things.”

R.I.P. to a legend and true L.A. icon.

You once said that where a person lives tends to affect them. Los Angeles is a very particular, peculiar environment. What is it about this city that appeals to you?

Number one, the intense light. Also the different feelings in the air. But like every place it’s always changing. And it takes longer to appreciate L.A. than a lot of cities, because it’s so spread out, and every area has its own mood. What I really like about it is, from time to time, if you drive around – especially at night – you can get a little gust of wind of the great days of the silver screen. All there in, like, living memory. It just makes you wish that you’d lived in those times. I think that if you could go back, that’s the one place that you want to go back to. Maybe they didn’t appreciate it at the time, but it was an incredible place to be at the beginning of cinema.

–David Lynch

📈 Oddsmakers

Following the smart money4, here are a few things to watch for in 2025:

Meta replaces conference tables with octagons: +1000

Amazon famously banned PowerPoint presentations, Zuck will channel the company’s latent masculine energy and turn standup meetings into grappling and grunts.

Deion Sanders leads the Cowboys to the Super Bowl: +10000

He won a Super Bowl as a player for Dallas. He already wears a cowboy hat. He’s put together a college record of 40-18. Prime Time and the Star is too perfect: the big name Jones needs right now5 and no shade to those 40 college wins against the likes of Colorado State and Central Florida, but Jerryworld would give Deion the place to rustle up some real cattle to go with that hat.

Amazon’s One Medical starts offering whatever Jeff Bezos is taking: +100000

This man is 61 years old.

Check This Out

The internet is getting a little weird again. New apps and sites are broadening our digital horizons, working to enhance our lives (rather than commandeer them by attention hacking). This year, I am going to highlight a few of my emerging favorites here.

Mozi is a new app from Evan Williams (creator of Blogger and co-founder of Twitter) trying to solve the basic problem: how do I connect with people I know when I travel?

At first glance it gives vintage Foursquare vibes, but it’s a lot less involved than the old days of ‘checking in’ to venues in pursuit of Mayor badges. This isn’t about broadcasting your real-time location, just a simple way to say “Hey, I’m visiting New York for business in late February” or “I am planning to attend SXSW.”

I sign up for Mozi, choose who from my contacts I want to connect with, indicate some planned trips, and then my friends and I can see when we’re going to be in the same place. Let’s give it a try together, and give serendipity a nudge in 2025.

Sign up for Mozi

And finally…

Today, we end the show with a visit to Winter Park, Colorado, circa 1990, for a beautifully-restored VHS home video aptly titled “Destructive Testing: Eskimo Chairlift.” If you’re into that sort of thing, I highly recommend6.

NOTE: YouTube also has the full 22-minute video7

BOB UECKER: 1934-2025

Upon hearing the unfortunate news of baseball announcer (and Major League and Mr. Belvedere actor) Bob Uecker’s passing this week, I was comforted to see how many people expressed a similar sentiment to mine:

If you grew up in the 1980s or 90s, you personally had a Uecker-type in your world. It might have been an uncle or dad’s buddy from the club, for me it was my Grandpa Marty.

As I did a tribute rewatch of Major League, a movie that Uecker holds together at times as Harry Doyle, the play-by-play announcer for the movie’s lowly Cleveland Indians8, I could hear my grandfather’s voice and a sort of nostalgic pain washed over. In the movie (and in real life, as an announcer for an often mediocre Milwaukee Brewers team), Uecker found his way to an optimistic outlook regardless of the situation. I remember a lot of the same from my grandpa, the sort of worldview that I suppose came from the perspective of having seen plenty worse and finding pride in being able to still tell a joke, no matter the circumstances. We had our “I can do this all day” heroes right here.

Here’s to the man, and all of the other Bob Ueckers out there.

Welcome back to all, including the influx of new subscribers who've joined since we last met. I had planned to return from hiatus sharing reasons for optimism in 2025.

Instead, I'm writing about devastation in a place I love, filled with people I care deeply about.

To those in our community who lost their homes in the fires in the Palisades and across Los Angeles this week - and I know there are several of you - I'm sending all my thoughts, love, and strength right now. Whatever support you need, in this moment and in the long rebuild ahead, we are here to help.

The same goes for all of you whose lives have been disrupted, whose health is suffering under a cloud of ash and smoke, potentially still worried about an evacuation at any moment. The scenes from this week are devastating, please stay safe and take care of yourselves.

There are a lot of conversations to be had about what went wrong and what comes next, some of which I’m sure we’ll cover here. But for now, the best use of everyone’s time is to show our support for the people still in the middle of it.

There are literally thousands of different places you can donate, if you have some good ones please email me and I’d love to share them here in the future. For now, I am starting with a few that have been consistently vetted and recommended during this and previous wildfires and other emergencies in California.

We’ll be back again next week, hopefully under improving circumstances with everyone in good health. Stay safe, we love you Los Angeles 💙.

Where you can give

LA Fire Department Wildfire Emergency Fund

Seeking donations to help cover the costs of essential tools and safety equipment for LAFD firefighters, including emergency fire shelters, hydration backpacks, and wildland brush tools.

Donate to the LAFD

The CA Fire Foundation

Working with local fire agencies and community-based organizations to provide direct financial support to impacted residents as details of the damage emerge. The California Fire Foundation also provides critical support to surviving families of fallen firefighters, firefighters and the communities they serve.

Donate to the CA Fire Foundation

The LAUSD Education Emergency Relief Fund

Providing immediate assistance to families and Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) employees affected by the devastating fires.

The fund will offer direct cash assistance and support to families and employees affected by the fires; support teachers and in-class resources for students at impacted schools, ensuring continuity of learning to the greatest extent possible; provide flexible assistance for mental health support; and offer support for other immediate and long-term needs for students, families and teachers.

Donate to the LAUSD Emergency Fund

Baby2Baby

Responding to the devastating fires raging across Los Angeles by delivering critical items, including diapers, food, formula, water, clothing, and hygiene products to the most vulnerable children and families who have lost everything.

They are working with 470 partner organizations across LA County, including schools, shelters, and hospitals, to fulfill requests for essential items. Baby2Baby has already provided over one million emergency supplies to impacted families and is committed to continuing this work in the coming weeks and months.

Donate to Baby2Baby

World Central Kitchen

Mobilized across the region to provide immediate relief in the form of sandwiches and water as they identify areas of need. WCK Chef Corp Members are providing meals.

Donate to World Central Kitchen

Other places to give

The Mutual Aid LA Network (MALAN)

A hub for mutual aid resources across Los Angeles, has made a public Google spreadsheet available full of information about shelters, animal centers, where to source personal protective equipment (PPE), food, as well as volunteer opportunities and places to donate. The list is being continually updated, and you can donate directly to help the group distribute resources on the ground.

GoFundMe

Has created a centralized hub for all its pages related to the wildfires across Southern California, as well as a relief fund that will go to nonprofits and individuals seeking financial relief directly through GoFundMe fundraisers.

The Salvation Army

Also accepting donations online to help provide emergency aid, shelter, food, and other support for first responders and wildfire victims across Southern California.

Support Local On-the-Ground Efforts

Food

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank is mobilizing its network to feed people displaced by the fire. They are accepting food and cash donations, and have opportunities for people to volunteer if you are in the Los Angeles area.

Donate to LA Regional Food Bank

Housing

The nonprofit guide 211 LA is partnering with Airbnb to offer free, temporary housing for a week for people who have been displaced by the fires. You can apply for emergency support by filling out this form here.

If you’re able to host, visit Airbnb’s page for more information on offering shelter to those in need (service fees waived and damage protection insurance included). Not in LA? You can donate directly to Airbnb's efforts to provide free, emergency housing from anywhere online here.

Donate Housing with Airbnb

Emergency Supplies

The California-based organization Direct Relief supplies critical PPE including N-95 masks, medication, and other healthcare resources, for first responders and health providers during fire emergencies. Donate to support their efforts against the LA wildfires online here.

Donate Emergency Supplies

I hope you’ve enjoyed watching me try to make sense of a wild year. I spent just a few minutes revisiting the archives this week, so I can say with confidence: we saw some shit. This year will definitely be one of the good chapters in a future textbook, assuming we still have books and/or reading by the end of the decade.

Thank you for taking the ride so far.

The time of our lives

With this our 36th and final edition of the year, let’s do a quick tale of the tape:

You have been a remarkably loyal and consistent audience, so popularity of each installment week-to-week has stayed mostly steady, at a very healthy 60% average open rate.

Our one standout was Children of the Corn (Vol. 2, No. 4), which was our most opinionated installment and proceeded to do 50% more in terms of readers and views than any of our other issues. Point taken and warmly received. More judgmental content on the way in 2025.

Most Clicked Links

1. Mike Tyson's Bare Ass Exposed During Pre-Jake Paul Fight Interview (TMZ)

2. Tapedeck.org

3. Seized Whiskey Auction (Kentucky Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control)

4. The 6 New Rules of Communicating (Honest Broker)

5. Pink Hawk Tuah Jumpsuit Costume (Spirit Halloween)

6. Is It Perimenopause or the Fascist Death Knell of Late-Stage Capitalism? (McSweeney’s)

7. Microtrends are taking over social media, and keeping up can be really expensive (Business Insider)

8. California Takes Step to Ban Kids from Riding E-Bikes (Micromobility)

9. The How & Whyyy of Unhinged Marketing (On Brand / Kira Klaas)

10. The Making of Sam Altman’s Eyeball Scanner (Bloomberg)

Not sure what to take away from the top 10 or even the top 50, other than to say I covered a lot of ground (some might say a little too much) between high(ish) and low brow, and many of you were flexible enough to navigate that growing expanse with me, so thank you.

Most Viewed Videos

1. The Obstruction of Action by the Existence of Form (R Eric McMaster)

2. Conference Championship Picks with Timothée Chalamet (ESPN)

3. Three Pete Bites the Dust aka my SportsCenter debut (ESPN)

4. Washington’s Dream 2 (SNL)

5. Dorm Rooms for Adults (@saxyboybilly18)

The data doesn’t lie, the people want to see more of Timmy and me on ESPN, just two bros will chill mustaches talkin’ college football.

The people have spoken

The state of newsletter openings

Following up on last week’s conversation about small talk and subsequent poll, I have the results and it seems you feel the same way I do about opening intros in newsletters. You could kind of go either way:

Lacking a clear referendum, I’m going to try something novel in the current state of the newsletter milieu and…stfu unless I have something meaningful to say. Some Sundays, I’ll walk in and strike up a conversation with all sorts of personal developments or thoughts to discuss. Others, I am just going to walk in, hit play on the boombox, and start spitting.

And with that…

Here’s one more for the 2-4.

Rickey Is Forever

We lost a true 🐐 this week, as Major League Baseball legend Rickey Henderson passed away on Friday at the age of 65.

Everyone talks about Bonds and the steroid taint, but Rickey’s (free of PED scandal) stats are off the charts, especially by modern stat nerd definitions1. Along with 3,055 career hits across 25 seasons, he still holds the record in more offensive categories than any one player:

• Most runs scored - 2,295

• Most stolen bases - 1,406

• Most single-season stolen bases - 130

• Most walks2 - 2,129

• Most games led off with a home run - 81

He won two World Series, he was the 1990 AL MVP and a 10-time All-Star, continued to produce well past the point that most guys are Rendoning their way through the lucrative final contract. In 1998, during his fourth stint with with Oakland, a 39 year-old Henderson became the oldest player in history to lead the American League in steals with 66.

In 2003, he played his last MLB games with the Dodgers, where he hit his final home run as a big leaguer:

After 2003, Rickey didn’t race to start cashing retirement checks. In 2005, more than a year removed from his last pro at bat, Rickey was still refusing a one-day contract from Billy Beane to let him retire with the A’s, insisting he could still play.

The career numbers, the wins, the determination, all of them would be more than enough to cement his place as one of the all-time greats. But the Legend of Rickey is so much bigger.

Rickey grew up in Oakland, he played baseball, basketball and football, and was an All-American running back with two 1,000-yard rushing seasons3. He dreamt of playing for the Raiders, but his mother encouraged him to go with baseball because it had better career longevity:

"The main thing was I wanted to get to the major leagues in a certain amount of time. If I played football, it would take four years of college before I could play in the pros. I said, 'In four years, if I can't make it to the major leagues, I'd rather go to college and play football.' I made it to the major leagues in 2 1/2 years."

He was drafted by the A’s, came up in their system, and he ultimately did four stints with the club. No, it’s not lost on anyone that Rickey is passing in the year that he is, the same one that watches HIS team limp out of town in pursuit of the bag4.

Then there’s Rickey being Rickey. The quotes and stories. So much lore:

• In the early 1980s, the Oakland A’s accounting department was freaking out. The books were off $1 million. After an investigation, it was determined Rickey was the reason why. The GM asked him about a $1 million bonus he had received and Rickey said instead of cashing it, he framed it and hung it on a wall at his house.

• During his time with the Yankees, Henderson received a six-figure bonus check. After a few months passed, an internal audit revealed the check had not been cashed. Current Yankees GM Brian Cashman – then a low-level nobody with the organization – called and asked if there was a problem with the check. Rickey said, “I’m just waiting for the money market rates to go up.”

• When he was on the Yankees in the mid-1980s, Henderson told teammates that his condo had such a great view that he could see, “The Entire State Building.”

• There was the time he fell asleep on an ice pack and gave himself frostbite–in the middle of August.

• In 1996, Rickey’s first season with the Padres, he boarded the team bus and was looking for a seat. Steve Finley said, “You have tenure, sit wherever you want.” Henderson looked at Finley and said, “Ten years? Ricky’s been playing at least 16, 17 years.”

• This one is a classic, but has been refuted by both parties: When Henderson signed with Olerud's Mariners in 2000, he came up to Olerud and asked about the helmet the first baseman always wore in the field. After learning the reason -- Olerud suffered an aneurysm in college, and wore the helmet to protect his head -- Henderson said, "Man, I played with someone like that in New York."
  And Olerud's response: "Yeah, Rickey, that was me."

• In the last week of his lone season with the Red Sox, Chairman Tom Werner asked Henderson what he would like for his ‘going-away’ gift. Henderson said he wasn’t going anywhere, but he would like owner John Henry’s Mercedes. Werner said it would be tough to get the same make and model in less than a week and Henderson said, “No, I want his car.” The Red Sox eventually got Henderson a Red Thunderbird and when he saw it on the field before the last game of the season, Rickey said, “Whose ugly car is on the field?”

R.I.P. to a proper legend, one of the last on-the-field greats with mystique to match.

Nicolas Cage & Christian Bale to Star in David O. Russell's ‘Madden'

Considering some of the roles he has pulled off before, this week’s report of Christian Bale as an age-approximate Al Davis felt almost boring. I’m not saying it is a bad choice, I am sure he’ll kill it and I am guessing it requires less prep than just about any role of his career.

I am much more interested to see where Nic Cage is going to take John Madden. The appearance, the wardrobe, the mannerisms, the sound, I need that first look ASAP. And the updated description that was circulating with the Bale news has me hanging on one more key casting announcement:

Don’t expect a token sports biopic. Russell’s film is not that. Madden is being described as a “video game movie.” It’s the origin story of MADDEN NFL, one of the biggest video game franchises of all time. “Madden” will focus on the former coach’s exit from the league and subsequent partnership with EA Sports to create the pioneering “Madden NFL” video game franchise. The film will recount the rivalry between Madden and ex-footballer Joe Montana, in a race against time to develop the ultimate football video game.

Assuming this is a late 1980s/early 1990s timeline, who do you get to play a 35ish Joe Montana opposite Cage as Madden and Bale as Al Davis? Only wrong answers in the comments please.

As if all of that weren’t wild enough, the casting of this movie has been a ride in and of itself: Madden was Will Ferrell, then Hugh Jackman before landing on Cage. Meanwhile Al Davis was going to be Tom Hanks in the earlier iteration, before things reconstituted with Cage and Bale5.

Eventually, Madden will find its way to theaters, hopefully in time to help Woody Johnson’s handlers explain to him that it’s just a game.

1-800 CHAT GPT

I love the phase that OpenAI is in right now. It’s that adorkable pre-IPO stage where they can do things like these and then just launch them with product folks talking to camera and sitting around a table at what feels like the most awkward company-sanctioned holiday party imaginable6.

In two years this will relaunch with a global campaign featuring a short-film by David Fincher and VO by Viola Davis.

🦞🥞 Holiday Potluck

As you make your way through those last open tabs, saved items, reading lists, and streaming queues7, should you find yourself in need of a last minute story to round out the year with mirth, merriment and a sense of childlike curiosity (or just a smidge of childish humor), please make yourself at home and enjoy the best from my last foraging adventures of 2024:

Texas is bigger in Japan (Axios)

How McLaren Went From The Brink Of Bankruptcy To Formula 1 World Champions (Huddle Up)

Hermès and the success of the coveted Birkin bag (60 Minutes)

• Related: Why Louis Vuitton is struggling but Hermès is not (The Economist)

Can Vans Recapture Its Cool? (Business of Fashion)

Timeless Style is a lie (Blackbird Spyplane)

The Long Game: Why Family-Owned Hotels Are Redefining Luxury (Skift)

A Year of Los Angeles Dining (Jason Stewart / Taste)

The first trailer for James Gunn’s Superman (DC Studios)

36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024 (NY Times)

Bobby Hundreds’ Best of 2024 (Monologue)

Starbucks is the new Venmo for Gen Alpha (Fast Company)

Vote Dicker the Kicker (LA Chargers)

Why NHL arenas are designed the way they are — and how they're changing (The Athletic)

Churches and their Hidden Basement Bowling Alleys (Messy Nessy)

Haliey Welch Tells Caroline Calloway How Hawk Tuah Changed Her Life (Interview Magazine)

How to Substack (Max Read)

People Are The New Brands (Ed Elson)

The Year in Brain Rot

• Related: The 1800s Had 'Brainrot' Too! (Pessimists Archive)

Happy holidays to you and yours. Thank you again for the time you spent reading me and Sunday Bunch in 2024. I’ll talk to you on the other side.

Cheers,
BUNCH

One more thing…

😎

Take it slow, or dive right in? It's the question I grapple with each week.

Many of my favorite newsletters spend time on the set up - glimpses of the author's week, allusions to coffees and dinners, revealing little personal moments. Some know just how to set the mood, others try too hard and kill the vibe. Yet it's become almost mandatory in the weekly newsletter format.

I think we might be reaching a breaking point. I’m not saying there won’t always be a place for autobiographical writing as part of the newsletter mix, just that it feels like we’re at a similar inflection point to blogging circa 2004ish, when the majority of the medium moved from “navel-gazing” about one’s own life to crafting narrative around specific topics, fandoms, etc.

As I see this shift play out across Substack (and the rest of the newsletter/blog 2.0 space, from Beehiiv to Ghost), my current inclination is to weave any personal storytelling into the topics we cover here, vs needing to carve out a space upfront for an update on what’s happening in my world. Of course, I say all of this having just done exactly that.

What’s your take? Do you want your newsletter authors (me, in this case) to take their time with these weekly check-ins, or should we skip right to the good stuff?

And now, on with the show…

First things first

Luigi got got. The man who allegedly shot UnitedHealthcare’s CEO was located in Pennsylvania1, thanks to a tipster who saw him at the McDonald’s in Altoona.

I would add more detail about this story–from the manifesto and accounts from what would appear to be every person who ever passed him on the street to the endless font of memes and horny mythologizing that have exploded all over the internet since Luigi Mangione got his post-arrest close-up–if it were possible to share anything you haven’t already seen, or to say anything that hasn’t been blown out into a million words of thinkpieces and hot take threads already.

More on Luigi to come, but for now prayers up to the crisis team at Nintendo who’s having to game theory out what they do if Luigi Mangione does linger in culture as some sort of vigilante folk hero.

The Eras is over. 54 cities, 149 shows, one Super Bowl champ boyfriend, and more than $2 billion later, the billionaire popstar declared a ceasefire against parents’ wallets and closed out her record-setting tour in Vancouver2.

The truth is out there. Reports out of New Jersey and Maryland of mysterious drones hovering over various locations have people spooked. Between this story and the aforementioned Luigi storyline, conspiracy theory Twitter is buzzing like the Sunday Bunch intern after a Tropical Vibe Celsius.

• Related: How to Produce a Kamikaze Drone

Reading the vibes

Are Social Media Platforms the Next Dying Malls?‘

It’s game over for facts’: how vibes came to rule everything from pop to politics

Deep in the heart

• Texas Stock Exchange to Open Temporary Home in Dallas Next Year

• Michael Dell Spent 40 Years Preparing for an AI Boom No One Expected

• Kevin Durant eyeing potential Austin WNBA franchise

• 'Interstellar's IMAX Box Office Returns Are Out of This World

• What happened to Whataburger?

• New Braunfels ranks No. 2 in US for largest population increase; 4 Texas cities in top 10

  • Related: The Texas School District That Can’t Stop Growing

• The revenge of the company town: Elon Musk, the new Baron of Bastrop

Sunday Bunch wants to get you off that SaaS hamster wheel...This is a good place to make a statement about growth and sharing and word of mouth...

Share Sunday Bunch

Consumerish

Universal Music’s New Hotel Brand Banks on Trend in Live Tourism

Japan launches drinkable mayo for fans that just can’t get enough

‘Everybody Is Drinking Guinness.’ We Know Why.

• See also: Guinness rations supply to British pubs as popularity soars with gen Z

Hollywood Embraces the Noodle Boys, Ditching the Muscly Look3

The Business of Sport

Scottie Pippen and the heady rise of the athlete turned crypto bro
As the article notes, the athlete-to-crypto pipeline is nothing new, but Scottie is really doubling down in this new role, with the engagement baiting and HEAVY use of Grok-generated images to push his new project:

…a new cryptocurrency that attempts to tokenize the basketball the Bulls used to beat the Lakers for the first of their six championships. “I think the game 5 ball that I have is very recognizable to some degree,” he told TMZ Sports, “and what we’re trying to do is make it a real-world asset.”

Do yourself a favor and make sure you watch some of this unfold in real time. It’s wild.

Bill Belichick reached out to Jets about vacancy before taking UNC job
I’m sure whoever they end up with will be just as good.

Ishbia Sports Empire Targets Minnesota Twins for Portfolio
The Phoenix Suns’ bros want to be the next in the multi-sport mogul arena.

Whitecaps Owners Retain Goldman Sachs to Sell MLS Franchise
At this point, how does Ryan Reynolds not buy the football club in his hometown?

Humanity, etc.

Google Says It Appears to Have Accessed Parallel Universes

The small metal plate that reshaped American neighborhoods.

Tripping on psilocybin helped traumatized and depressed COVID-19 frontline healthcare workers

What Did Roman Emperors Do All Day?4

And finally…

A little reminder that a lot can happen in two years: