📺 From the Friends apartment to the Modern Family house, TV is getting neater — Vox

I don’t think this factors in the types of people/characters enough. The neatness from Sunny → Friends → Modern Family makes sense for those demos.

🎣 Ridiculous Fishing EX — Apple Arcade

It’s still so good. Trying to figure out if the game got harder in this version or if I just got older and suckier (the answer is obvious, I just refuse to accept it).

🎙️ Actors Go On Strike — The Town

Great episode of The Town going over the strike plus a great clip of the guild president, Fran Drescher, and a reminder that, when it comes to the money, it’s about the minimums that the working class actors will get.

💭 Dream of Antonoffication — The Drift

While normally we might expect such a decoupling of art from its commodity status to release the artwork from some of the demands of the market, leaving it slightly more free to go its own way, just the opposite seems to have happened in the world of streaming music. At the extreme point, the pop song abjures any dream of artistic autonomy and shrinks down to a mechanism for delivering bursts of raw sensation — a scream of anguish, goosebumps on your neck, a whisper in your ear.

A bit esoteric in it’s pontification, but I’m here for ragging on Jack Antonoff and the Bleachers (I don’t hate them, just not my thing, but I did love the debut album from Fun. before they went down hill with Some Nights/We Are Young).

🐂 Chicago Bulls granted $10.2M disabled player exception for guard Lonzo Ball — ESPN

No one else around here probably cares, but it’s nice that the Bulls will have some more money to work with. Still hope Lonzo can get right for next year…

🎥 silver-screen voyage vol.003 — foofaraw

Back with another edition of my movie newsletter. A ton of new trailers out in the last week or so.

🎙️ The Bear creator Christopher Storer on the Making of Season 2 — The Watch

I may or may not have an unhealthy obsession with this show, but either way, this interview was great. It starts at about the 30 minute mark.

📹 Bill Hader Reveals Barry Alternate NoHo Hank Ending — Variety

Really cool just to see all these talented people talking about the decisions they make going into and around a single scene and where they may make a wrong turn here or there.

🥦 Against the “Eat Your Vegetables” Approach to Timeline Curation — The Present Age

More Threads talk. This time Molloy discusses Mosseri’s comments about not courting media. A big piece of this comes back to the benefits of the chronological feed.

🤖 My A.I. Writing Robot — New Yorker

Its core product, as Habib put it, is “automated insight extraction”–another way of describing the task of thinking, which is arguably the purpose of writing in the first place. As Joan Didion wrote, in 1976, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” A.I. programs such as Writer aim to supplant that process.

Quite depressing if you ask me. Even things as simple as making these posts, rather than just saving the links, forces me to think and understand. The idea people may one day default TK ChatGPT over writing… maybe in a curmudgeon, but I don’t think that’ll end well.

🏟️ Sports Reference Acquires Immaculate Grid — Sports Reference

I tried playing Immaculate Grid and loved the concept, but my lack of baseball knowledge makes me terrible. Excited to see a basketball version soon.

🚉 Platforms run away from politics and news — Anchor Change

A great rundown of the inevitable responsibility these platforms have when it comes to news and politics.

🇸🇪 Turkey agrees to advance Sweden’s NATO bid — Semafor

Some good news on the world stage for once. Not that Turkey deserves any credit here. Hungary should follow shortly, but seriously about time.

👟 Ye & Dov Are Having a Fashion Baby — Puck

It’s clear that the former American Apparel boss is currently committed to West, and sees himself as playing a newly created role in the never-ending piece of performance art (or accelerating mental health deterioration, depending on how you look at it) that is Ye’s life.

I don’t like mentioning Kanye around here given he’s turned into (has always been?) an abhorrent antisemite (not to mention the other idiotic things he’s said and done only to break my little Chicago heart), but I do think people are underestimating the audience he will have despite his recent history and this toxic pairing.

📺 streaming variability vol.032 — foofaraw

Newsletter is back this week with The Horror of Dolores Roach, The Afterparty, Full Circle, and more.

🎽 Is Ssense hurting the cool-clothes ecosystem? — Blackbird Spyplane

A little late getting to this one, but it’s a great little piece of reporting about Ssense and it’s effect on fashion as they follow the Amazon/Uber playbook.

☕️ Wait, should I not be drinking airplane coffee? — Search Engine

Solid first episode from PJ Vogt after his excellent series on crypto. Very much feels like Reply All; I wish the duo was still together.

🏀 NBA officially unveils in-season tournament — ESPN

I still think they need to shorten the season (and add a Seattle team), but I do like that the groups are based on record and not division. Single elimination portion will be fun, but still not sure players will be motivated.

💪 The Surprising Popularity of Andrew Huberman’s Podcast, “The Huberman Lab” — Air Mail

Who wants to think about themselves that much? Who wants their focus to be inward for that much of the time? No offense to my mitochondria, but the most interesting things in the world are not happening inside my body.

I definitely had a phase where I was way into optimization and reading Tim Ferris, but now I’m more focused on just being happy. This quote really nails it for me.

🧲 Gregg Popovich signs new five-year deal with Spurs — ESPN

Pop blowing Monty’s deal out of the water. He’ll be 79 at the end, but it should give them time to build a contender around Wemby and limit (some of) the retirement talk.

🎵 Sunburn by Dominic Fike

Easily my release of the week and a contender for album of the year so far. Such a diverse collection of sounds from alternative to rap and mellow to indie pop, r&b. Just so good.

👹 My Little Time Demon — Sunday Morning Transport

First story I’ve read from SMT and enjoyed it enough to subscribe for a year. Plus, all four of their July stories will be free to read.

🧶 Meta unspools Threads — Platformer

I gave it a download and poked around a bit. Similar to Bluesky, I just don’t feel the need for it myself, but I hope it gains traction and that ActivityPub comes sooner than later.

🎙️ Chipping away equal rights — Indignity Morning Podcast

Good summation of the recent Supreme Court decisions that have been all over the news.