Every week, I try to make art a habit, and not just a hobby. I’ve always been wary of drawing people, mostly due to a silly fear of failure (what does failure even mean in this case?! It’s just a sketch!). Then I accepted that the only way I can stop feeling like I’m bad at sketching people is, ironically, to sketch more people! So here it is:
- VOICES IN YOUR HEADlines The New York Times plans to make the vast majority of its articles available to users as narrations read via an automated voice. This is obviously coming to a lot of other surfaces - books, articles. One of my favorite apps, Pocket, has been offering text-to-voice for many years now. The affectation was lifeless, literally, and the delivery was never engaging enough for me to use twice. There’s a different kind of bias that is added when the written word is narrated, especially by AI that decides where the emphasis lies. If you and I read the same sentence - we may choose to emphasize a different set of words. Read this in your head "A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it." And then have someone else read it aloud to you. Different words are highlighted, and hence different worlds are born with each.
- ECLIPSES ALTER YOU I’m super jealous of all the folks living in the US who will get to experience a total solar eclipse next week! This piece goes into “how an eclipse might impact prosociality, as well as how one’s individual personality might affect the likelihood that viewing such an event will inspire self-transcendence. [the researcher] and his colleagues define self-transcendence as a positive altered state of consciousness associated with ego-dissolution, connectedness, and an elevated sense of morality, which impacts one’s well-being, sense of meaning, and pro-social attitudes.”
- BAGGY JEAN$$$ Levi Strauss stock is popping because people can't stop buying baggy jeans. The company is making almost half of its direct-to-consumer sales through its own online marketplace and physical locations. People are wearing baggier clothes. Fashion is complex in how it makes its way through culture - is it mostly 90s nostalgia, is it Asian (Japanese and Korean mostly) fashion-wave that kicked this off around 2019, is it luxury brands trying differentiate by jumping on the trend - it could be one or all of the above. But for a company like Levi’s it’s not about origins but about moving at the speed of culture. And looks like they have!
- QUAKE PROOF This week hundreds were stranded after a deadly 7.4 magnitude quake hit Taiwan. One life lost to these is already too many, but we must also appreciate how far we’ve come in our prep against natural disasters. East Asia has pioneered quake proof architecture for decades and the fact that Taipei 101 - Taiwan’s tallest skyscraper - withstood this earthquake must prompt other countries to emulate them.
- NOT PAPERBACK I love this so much as a piece of marketing. Louis Vuitton's new coffee table book isn't just for reading — it's also for sniffing. It’s a 380-page volume exploring the raw materials, from Indian oud to Italian bergamot, that inspire its far-reaching fragrance collection. But that’s not all, they also made a limited-edition box set, which includes extractions of all 45 ingredients catalogued in the book - worth $5000 👀