[SIC] 397: Glyphin Splendour

Vol 8, No. 37. Kareemly quotables, HIP REPLACEMENT with my son, Newsletterers of the Caribbean, NYCs hat of the summer and all the links. Only three more to go now...

[SIC] Weekly is a digest of developments in trends, tech, media, marketing, fashion, food, places and events, compiled for information obsessives and published free on Wednesdays. Read like an outline for a sense of the week’s gestalt. Nobody clicks every link, except me.

I’m Ben Dietz, advisor-for-hire to brands, publishers and agencies, interviewer, moderator and occasionally event/exhibition producer. Give a shout: @dietznutz on socials.

New original art and animation each issue is made by Gordon Hull. Special thanks this week for ideas: Shelley Wright, James Friedman, Piers Fawkes, Iolanda Carvalho, and Celeste Blewitt. Comments, questions and contributions are invited from everyone.

This digest was sent free on 5/13/26 to 8523 subscribers. Original source is cited. Corollary sources are listed at the end of each digest.

[SIC] is made possible by its paid subscribers, who also get 20 “[SIC] Day” links on Mo/Tu/Th/Fr, and the weekly [SIC] Sundays mini-digest of 30 freeform links.

Many recipients expense their subscriptions as research in marketing, advertising, entertainment + tech. [SIC] prospers when you share it, so please do.

---

Hi all,

The results of last week’s poll about [SIC]’s future surprised me a little: the ‘grab bag’ won (ie: a magazine-style approach), but “reporting” was a very close second. I’m not a Journalist by any stretch of the imagination but I do have access to lots of interesting people, so I’m gonna practice leaning in there and see what happens.

Case in point: [SIC} Talks alum Kareem Rahma emailed me today, “I need you to open this email keep the meter running is BACK!”. I texted him to ask how he was feeling about the show’s return to Youtube, and he wrote back,

“This is an unprecedented moment in television history and I’m so glad to be a part of it. It’s time to take some of the magic of old Hollywood and infuse it into the magic of new Hollywood. I’m excited for the future of the industry.”

For my part, I’m mainly excited to discover some new New York stuff. Stoked it’s back.

On the subject of New York Stuff, NYT’s annual 100 Best Restaurants in NYC is a FOMO-fest as always for me, but the single-author approach also managed to ellicit the first J.Lee piece for Feed Me that I’ve ever liked, the frenetic “I need answers." For a guy who tends to drag on, he does quick takes really well. Give this man more lists.

Apropos of Sundberg et al; I’m looking forward to the BTS from Substack’s girls trip to St. Martin with / for Belmond, the hospitality division of LVMH. I DM’ed EMILY DAWN LONG about it and she sent back a picture and wrote “Girls want a Ben Dietz hang,” whatever that means. Newsletterers in paradise. Or maybe a response to the narrative that Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax?!

There’s definitely something in the water, though; Shelley wrote to advise that Ace Hotels recently launched a Substack title called Room with a View (making it the first hospitality co to do so), so a Belmond-from-the-beach sletter would be apropos.

Suffice it to say the overton window has moved. [SIC] Talks alum Alyssa Vingan’s After the Bezos-Sponsored “Tech Gala,” What’s Next? digs into this too, covering ChatGPT and Claude’s swanky influencer dinners, Palantir’s sold-out chore coat, and a new meme genre might give us a clue (while also writing from … St. Martin)?

Get in where you fit in, is my motto. So… who wants my pithy observations live from Cannes Lions? I’ll have time, haha.

HIP REPLACEMENT EP.57: Campbell Dietz

Back with the defending champ, series producer Campell Dietz for another turn pinch-hitting. Fresh off Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick’s 40th we dug into some other new wave of parasocial media sponsorship before turning the topic at hand: how are college kids feeling about AI right now? As Kyle quoted Campbell in the newsletter:

“At the end of the day, the guys who are trying to bring this technofuturist world to fruition are the guys that I would have kicked out of a party last weekend...They’re not cool"

Questions of who’s cool and why aside, the ‘taste’ gap that’s been interrogated endlessly of late might just come down to a sense of what Noah Brier has called “fingerspitzengefuhl”. Fingertip feel, a very human sensation.

Anyway, it’s a good chat. Check out the rest of Kyle’s summary or (preferably) listen to the whole here. Campbell’s back in NYC over the summer starting next week, so look out for him.

HIP REPLACEMENT EP.57: Campbell Dietz

Ok, last thing before the links:

I went to a “Spring Hang” at ‘campus for creators’ The Lighthouse in Greenpoint last night; s/o Ara, Veronica and Daniel for the invite. Great space, nice night and the party was full of interesting folks including ANU and her friends from Forecast, Ashley and Jimmy, Million Goods’s Drew Kaufmann and Jocelyn from Perfectly Imperfect, but what I noticed more than anything else was (at least) three separate instances of the Cibone dad cap. Looks like they might be the hat of the summer. Currently sold out in most colors but there are a few in the store. Hurry!

ok, now the links.

Ben

---

[SIC] 397: Glyphin Splendour

Big Picturing

• How American Cool Dies / NYT

• Related, because: Caring is tiring. Connoisseurs vs. con men / Blackbird Spyplane

• Chinese corollary: The Shanghai Cabaret Theory of Globalization / The Chow

• Interrelated: The indelible appeal of tattoos. Getting inked is more popular than ever but a rapid expansion in providers has reduced work for London’s parlours / FT

• More cabaret, from Piers: Scientology Churches Scramble to Keep TikTok Speedrunners Out / NYT

• Was There a Crisis Actor Aboard the Hantavirus Cruise Ship? / Roca News

• Speaking of speed: New Jersey’s largest ever meth bust just went down / NJ.com

• The Colorado Artist Company Act creates a new kind of LLC — the A-Corp — built for creative people / Metalabel

• The Art World’s Managed Fantasies: A Response to Josh Kline / The Brooklyn Rail

• Help! My Kindergarten Is All In on AI NY Mag

• But then, like, Why do Kindergarteners have so much homework? / The Cut

• On the subject of doing the homework: Someone Bought My Middle School Jacket on Poshmark, Then Found Me on Instagram / Selectism

---

Platformationing

• Digg remakes itself into an AI news aggregator / TechCrunch

• While Spotify’s launches a Wrapped-style recap of your entire listening history / TechCrunch

• And MrBeast’s creator platform signals a more programmatic creator economy / Dididay

---

SubLLMinals

• A Report on AI Content Detection & Reality. A national survey on our ability to identity what’s real / Zine

• Case in point?! Your AI was trained on villains. Here’s the fix / Artificially Intimidating

• In reponse?: Anthropic says ‘evil’ portrayals of AI were responsible for Claude’s blackmail attempts: Fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence can have a real effect on AI models, apparently / TechCrunch

• But still…. Anthropic wants small businesses to use Claude / Axios

• Corollary: The Sad Wives of AI. Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? I’m so, so sorry / Wired

• Is that one of the non-obvious reasons why AI will create some transitional problems in employment / Marginal Revolution

• Another one?: AI is the New Netflix / On my Om

• The Story That Had No Memory. Prompt-Powered Animation Versus Building a World That Remembers / Lore Machine

The Built World

• Apropos of worldbuilding: Verbiage as Viagra. Architecture’s shifting, coagulating language is a record of its ongoing and developing insecurities / Untapped

• How architecture can save lives. Carefully designed homes in Tanzania have been shown to lower disease rates among children / FT

• A private beach club for “the people who five years ago were dancing in Montauk and now live in a townhouse in Brooklyn or Queens” is coming to Riis Beach / NYT

• Apropos: Affordability is alive in Wichita, the new Mecca for the Middle Class / WSJ

• But No one has managed to gentrify Times Square’s Hotel Carter / NYT

• While Weak Hotel Bookings Leave World Cup Financial Boom in Doubt / The New York Sun

• The Unhappy Hosts of the World Cup. Cities and states are covering a lot of the costs of this summer’s matches, and have few options for bringing in much revenue / The Atlantic

• Unhappy corollary: Do Sanctuary Cities Work? The policies reduce deportations of law-abiding immigrants — historically, that is. Today, amid mass ICE raids, the impact is harder to gauge / / Reasons to be Cheerful

• Ergo?! : The LA Run Club That Became an ICE Watch Unit / GQ

---

Fashionz

• How District Vision Created a Cult, High Fashion Running Brand for the Wellness Era / Vogue Business

• Sales Are Up. Celebrities Are In. Is Gap Officially Back? / NYT

• Also back: Jelly shoes are experiencing a resurgence that is driving local designers and market growth / Jing Daily

• And even Under Armour Touts Turnaround, Pushes Sports Reset Amid Weak Earnings / Front Office Sports

• Meanwhile, Nike sued by consumers for not refunding tariff costs / Reuters

• Adding to… Nike’s Viral Negativity Problem. Get in, loser, we’re going to complain about Nike…. / Snobette

• But like, Nike’s SNKRS App Isn’t Going Anywhere / BoF

• In contrast: Target killed its creator program, launched 2 new ones / Digiday

---

Entertainmentizing

• On the topic of creators: Bravo is creating unscripted microdramas for the Peacock app / TechCrunch

• More drama, from Celeste: “Loved this feature of Joan Collins, what a powerhouse.” [Fame And Glamour Are Ephemeral] / Vogue UK

• Speaking of dramatic: The Iceman cometh? Kendrick Lamar’s GNX album mysteriously vanished from most streaming platforms / Hypebeast

• Apropos of ‘vanishing’: About those blue dots / Trapital

• Tour corollary: Q&A with Los Angeles based Slippers / Gunk

• Meantime, back in Philly: A Nice Hang With a Low-Key Rock Star / NYT

• Adjacent tunes: The new Fletcher C Johnson album, “For Your Head,” / Bandcamp

• Unrelated, from Iolanda: “This one obviously... ;)” [From ollie to dolly: Why skateboarders flip to directing] / Shots

---

Marketizing

• BuzzFeed and GoPro learn nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills. The goodwill of middle-aged consumers won’t be enough to generate a meaningful return / FT

• Tesla’s mysterious new logo design has sparked some surprising theories. Will the new Roadster fly... or does Elon Musk just like The Punisher? / Creative Bloq

• Meantime: Tesla has built its last Model S and Model X / Quartz

• While in contrast: Charli xcx is the new global ambassador of (and investor in) the consumer tech brand Nothing / Hypebeast

• Also mysterious, from Celeste: Going, Going, Gone: The Mysteries Of Sotheby’s Unoffical Mascot / Sotheby’s

• Speaking of unofficially official: Kaia Gerber and her Library Science team set up between bootleggers on Canal Street to give away merch from her book club / IG

• More reading aid: Ogilvy has created a special edition packaging for KitKat that doubles as a kind of tiny smartphone jail / Dezeen

• While Dezeen picks the eight most covetable products from IKEA’s latest PS collection / Dezeen

• And from Iolanda: “The huge bill 🙂” [Impossibly Long Restaurant Bill Tallies Up Mothers’ Unpaid Labour] / LBB

---

Mediarations

• You either pay for the the product or you are the product, y’all. Why Your Life Is Now on Subscriptions / NYT

• Speaking of main characters: At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing. Nick Denton’s diaspora is still shaping media — and haunted by what happened / THR

• Corollary, from Celeste: “An excellent insight into the James Murdoch’s bid for New York Magazine and Vox Media. What will happen to NY Mag with a Murdoch at the helm?” [The Murdoch Who Left] / The Grill Room

---

The “Natural” World

• From James: “This was an interesting read if a little outside the usual domain of sic” [Inside the Interstitium, the Body’s Hidden Pathways] / NYT

• Apropos of health hacks: Arts engagement linked to slower biological ageing, study says / The Art Newspaper

• Don’t forget your Update on the African Psilocybin Mushroom Rivaling Cubensis / Doubleblind

• Also: 1 in 5 New Mothers Has Postpartum Depression. Can Ketamine Help? / Doubleblind

• Cause, like “Basically every single person I know is on spironolactone” TikTok’s Favorite Acne Drug Is an inexpensive blood-pressure medication the secret to clear skin? / The Cut

• Apropos of keeping schtum: The Secrets of the Sarcophagus Dealer. A family’s 50-year rise through the international antiquities trade is a tale of entrepreneurial genius—and of theft, deception, and betrayal / The Atlantic

• From Celeste: “I cannot stop reading about the world’s most remote inhabited island following the UK military emergency oxygen drop over the weekend” [The Busiest Place You’ve Never Seen ]/ NPR

• Corollary, also from ‘Celeste: “An ode to David Attenborough from a new find, The Oldie Magazine.” [Happy 100th Birthday, David Attenborough] / The Oldie

• Meantime, Endangered Butterflies Are Thriving Behind Bars / Reasons to be Cheerful

---

Foodendrink

• Apropos of winged creatures: ‘Boneless Wings’ Aren’t Really Wings. Is That Fraud? / Reason

• Related, from Piers: “Fast Food For the Ladies” Meet the new Chicken Chain, Flock & Fresh, launched by Smoothie King CEO Wan Kim. He feels women want better quality—and choice / Restaurant Business Online

• Less fast food: 24 consecutive hours at Veselka / The Infatuation

• From Celeste: The History Of London’s Squat Cafes / Vittles

• Which are strangely not yet covered by Britain’s most prolific TikTok alcoholic / Tiktok

---

---

[SIC] 397: Glyphin Splendour

Corollary Sources this week: Public Announcement / Retail Dive / Gothamist / Feed Me / Politico Future Double / After School / Off the Fence / The Material Review / Gothamist / Lerer Hippeau