The cultural curmudgeon was lonely until this week. Cheerleading - for our few annual popular movies, for premium mediocre streaming tv shows, for Taylor Swift and Beyoncé albums - has been the default setting of almost anything professionally written for a decade. But the feeling that all our pop culture sucks bubbled sadly underneath that. It was relegated to people like me and my five remaining friends. Cynical, overly media literate and the last generation to remember a time when hating popular things was cool, we were seemingly the only ones who felt alienated by the marketplace of what felt like increasingly lifeless cultural products. I think this week, though, was when I noticed that feeling has gone mainstream. For any idea or feeling to be truly mainstream now it must simultaneously achieve top-down and bottom-up transmission, like someone passing themselves on a parallel escalator: it has to be coming up the escalator through algorithms and going down the escalator through elite tastemakers at the same time in such way that it’s unclear from where it really originated.
In this case, the top-down epicenter was a column by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times about a forthcoming book called “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change” by W. David Marx. That column, in which Goldberg confesses that she is bored and that this book finally explains why and it’s because of the internet, spawned reactions from Bob Lefsetz to Max Read. Even Marx himself had to respond. Clearly the column and the book struck a chord. Also this week, though, regular people seemed to finally notice how bad TV is. Apparently the new "Lord of the Rings" show and the "She-Hulk" show are so bad that fantasy and comic movie fans, used to cheerleading, relentlessly mocked them online, the former for its community theater-worthy marketing material and the latter for its terrible CGI and whatever this is. Anyway, everyone involved seems to agree that culture is suffering from “malaise,” they just disagree over the cause. Read and Christian Lorentzen blame money. Goldberg and Marx blame the internet. I blame you, the reader.
What you don't need to know
Brian Stelter moved to a farm in New Jersey. (Puck)
Brendan Fraser is about to be everywhere. (VF)
Gwyneth Paltrow's 30-woman pajama party is "fragrant, businesslike and reeks of oestrogen and money." (FT)
Shia LaBeouf has a 60-dude Zoom every day at 6 pm. (Variety)
The subtext here is that "Game of Thrones" is as exhausting to the people who make it as it is to the people who who have to hear about it. (THR)
Jennifer Anniston's prescription treatment for insomnia needs to pick either night or day to talk about in their ads, and I think it should probably be night. (img)
Mohammed bin Salman bought some very prime Hollywood ad space for his fake city Neom. (img)
I’ve noticed that a lot of tastemaker types read way, way too much into what mugs and thermoses say about their owners. (The Atlantic)
Silicon Valley wellness trends are a click machine. (The Information)
See: Zuck fighting. (Daily Mail)
Good tabloid-y rundown of Olivia Wilde's very normal press conference in Venice (NYT)
See: Zuck fighting. (Daily Mail)
What you need to know
"Lord of the Rings" did 25 million. (Amazon)
A Dallas man proposed outside the first day of a Shein pop-up store. (NYT)
Fielding and/or responding to this survey is in bad taste. (The Cut)
OnlyFans generates a lot of revenue. (The Guardian)
Disney membership looks like the future of everything. (WSJ)
Three private equity guys ruined Montauk. (NYT)
Things are about to get spicy between TikTok, Biden and China. (Semafor)
Netflix is asking for $65 CPM for commercials, higher than last year's Super Bowl. (WSJ) (Digiday)
"Some fail to distinguish feeling itself from the rote-learned expression of it: the jargon, the grammar, the concerned frown." (FT)