+ ‘Slow Horses’ Review: Bucking the Odds (The New York Times): “Season 4 … does represent a slight comeback … But it still has a feeling of going through the motions and casting about for new ideas. How many times can the beleaguered hero, River Cartwright … chase and be chased through London railway and Tube stations? The wait for more of the squirmy, transgressive excitement of the early seasons continues … ‘Slow Horses’ remains one of the most entertaining and well-put-together shows around. The motions through which it goes are good ones.”
+ J.Crew Fans, Get Ready: The Catalog Is Back (The Wall Street Journal): “The J.Crew catalog is returning to American mailboxes … in early September, as J.Crew tries to capitalize on momentum fueled by nostalgia … the company’s sales are approaching $3 billion this year … The catalog is more of a magazine than the inventory booklet J.Crew shoppers will remember dog-earing in the ’80s and ’90s, with less product and more places for editorial content … J.Crew used to produce 13 catalogs a year, and they were shipped to over a million customers. It will now make three catalogs a year and will be sending them out to a mix of customers in its loyalty program and other shoppers. It will also be available, free, in stores, and customers can opt in for the mailer online.”
+ Why Does A Simple Summer Dress Cost So Much Now? (The Cut): “Today, price and quality feel less connected in fashion than ever before, even when luxury logos aren’t involved. Long gone are the days when you could spend a Saturday at the mall and leave knowing you had seen the best styles of the season … our cultural obsession with snagging a good deal also plays a role in the pricing conundrum. Many brands today price their garments artificially high, knowing they will sell most of their inventory at a discount. Brands that sell through department stores are especially dependent on this vicious perma-sale cycle that often leaves shoppers feeling ashamed if they buy anything at full price.”
+ DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest (The Atlantic): “The stigma around openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made the subject difficult to study. In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof. Widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society. The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. ‘That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,’ he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.”
+ The Internet Spent Years Searching for Her. She Had No Idea. (The New York Times): “Nearly five years ago, a Reddit user who goes by TontsaH posted an image of a piece of cloth printed with illustrations of several faces. Some were quickly identifiable as celebrities … but one face remained a mystery. For years, internet sleuths tried to identify the unknown woman. A Reddit community devoted entirely to the hunt currently counts over 40,000 members … For years, they tried and failed, chasing leads, testing theories and ultimately coming up empty-handed. This month, several users on the platform finally followed the right clues. A user who goes by StefanMorse wrote that he had digitally edited the original image to make it look ‘less like a fabric and more like a real person.’ The user … said in his post that he then ran that image through a facial-recognition search engine, which turned up Ms. Sarda’s name. From there, another user … tracked down the photographer of the original image of Ms. Sarda that had been modified for the fabric. The picture came from a Spanish magazine in 2006, and the photographer, Leandre Escorsell, confirmed its legitimacy. Finally, word made its way to Ms. Sarda, who was shocked to discover that she had been at the center of a yearslong mystery.”
+ Rage Bait Is All the Rage on Threads — So I Tried It. I’m Sorry? (Business Insider): “… engagement-bait questions are taking over your Threads feed … posts with a big number of comments are heavily weighted when it comes to what shows up in your feed. Using comments rather than shares to indicate whether a post is interesting isn’t a new idea … but you can imagine how this ends up making a social platform look quite different from counting likes or shares … People have discovered that rage baiting is often the most efficient way to get attention online, and on platforms like TikTok, where views can translate to dollars, it’s a cottage industry … The most sublime and purely nihilistic rage bait I’ve seen was someone on X who said Phish is a right-wing band, sending fans, celebrities, and even a member of Phish into a frenzy of angry replies. This kind of rage bait is effective and largely harmless. In the best light, it helps us reinforce our norms, and it feels cathartic to scold someone who breaks them. It’s almost reverse trolling, where instead of harassing people you’re inviting them to harass you … But when that type of content is flooding your feed, it’s annoying. It’s also an easy play for people who seek to profit from engagement.”
+ I’ve been using the LANEIGE Cream Skin Refillable Toner & Moisturizer with Ceramides and Peptides since this spring and it’s become a fast favorite. This cream-toner hybrid has a watery consistency, but is absorbed easily and actually hydrates my dry and sensitive skin without causing any irritation. After months of daily use I’ve barely made a dent in the 320 ml bottle, but I still couldn’t resist getting another now that it’s 41% off (!!) on Amazon.
+ Americans Clicked Ads to Get Free Cash. Their Health Insurance Changed Instead. (The Wall Street Journal): “Year-round enrollment created a continuous opportunity to make sales. And the boost in subsidies gave agents an enticing sales pitch: zero-premium health insurance. To grab more commissions, some agents used misleading ads to draw business and some switched customers’ plans repeatedly without their consent … CMS has received more than 208,000 complaints this year of unauthorized ACA insurance sign-ups. Nearly two-thirds were about people who hadn’t previously been insured under the ACA. The rest were people who said their plans were switched without their consent. CMS said in July that it would stop allowing brokers to change consumers’ plans unless they were already linked to the consumer—or conduct a three-way phone call with the customer and a CMS official. CMS said it suspended 200 agents or brokers for suspicion of fraud.”
+ Greed, Gluttony and the Crackup of Red Lobster (The New York Times): “… last year, Red Lobster was wobbling. Shunned by young diners and crowded by cheaper rivals, the chain would later report that its customer count had plunged 30 percent since 2019 … New management had arrived in 2020 … Thai Union, a seafood giant based in Samut Sakhon, Thailand, administered the shocks in the form of stern lectures, surprise inspections and cost-cutting measures that strained the staff to its breaking point … By last year, the spirit of warmth and generosity had vanished, and Endless Shrimp had made the dining room ‘hellish and chaotic’ … Some customers planted themselves there for hours, ordering nothing but shrimp and water … By January, Thai Union was done. Citing mounting losses … Thai Union’s chief executive, announced that the company was cutting all ties to Red Lobster, like a parent disowning a child … Nudged by activist investors, Darden sold Red Lobster in 2014 to Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm in San Francisco, for $2.1 billion … Golden Gate sold the real estate under 500 restaurants for $1.5 billion.The transaction, called a sale-leaseback, netted a quick and immense windfall for Golden Gate and its shareholders. It produced something else for Red Lobster managers: a new expense called rent … By 2020, Red Lobster’s leases were a tightening noose. They stipulated 2 percent annual increases, which slowly ballooned into as much as 50 percent of revenue in some locations. Many of the restaurants were built decades earlier, in areas that were out of favor. Moving was either impossible or cost prohibitive. A bankruptcy document filed by new management at the company in May said that last year Red Lobster spent $64 million on rent at “underperforming” restaurants … Today, Red Lobster is about to get a new owner. Fortress Investment Group in Manhattan, an investment management firm, made the only offer to acquire the chain as it languished in a bankruptcy court in Florida. On Thursday, the judge overseeing the case approved the deal. The price, $375 million, is a dizzying discount from the company’s $2.1 billion valuation 10 years ago.”
+ Why Did I Stop Loving My Cat When I Had a Baby? (The Cut): “Birthing a child is an efficient way to shatter certain delusions while fostering a set of brand-new ones, and pets seem to suffer from this shift. I don’t know many pet-having persons for whom the introduction of a baby didn’t cause a plummeting of interest in the legacy mammal. In some cases, this disillusionment is temporary, in others permanent. Cats, being standoffish in nature, tend to be grievously neglected; dogs, having nonnegotiable daily needs, are more often resented.”
+ New York Fashion Week Isn’t Dead (The Business of Fashion): “Homegrown talents like Peter Do, The Row and, most recently, Gabriela Hearst have decamped to Paris. Former mainstays like Oscar de la Renta and Marc Jacobs now show off-calendar. Shows in hard-to-access locations on the far west side of Manhattan and in the Brooklyn Navy Yard have made programming into something of a week-long schlep … however, New York Fashion Week has proven its critics wrong. The big moments this season felt more grand than before … this New York Fashion Week flaunted its hometown and brought back an excitement that hadn’t been felt in years. The perfect early autumn weather didn’t hurt either … As it gets more expensive and logistically difficult to stage shows, brands must think harder about whether they really need one. A runway show isn’t always the best format every season for small brands and sometimes even larger ones. A number of brands favoured small gatherings rather than traditional shows this season … The intimacy of these events also underscored the closeness of the fashion community in New York City — another reason why this season felt reinvigorated.”
+ How Drake Lost the Plot (The New Yorker): “Like Drake’s recent music, much of 100 Gigs portends a tomb of unknowability, a cracked window into the life of an atomized idol. Although his diss tracks aimed at Lamar are some of the more invigorating songs he’s made in a while, they wilt in comparison with Lamar’s scorching character studies. Lamar is a ruthless examiner of identity, race, country, and religion. Applying this inquisitive lens to Drake led to brutal admonishments … The pair may have begun their beef by feuding over who was the better rapper and the more definitive auteur, but Lamar’s victory was less a result of technical prowess than one of narrative ingenuity, leaving listeners to imagine Drake alone on his estate, surrounded by riches yet ridden with shame. 100 Gigs mostly confirms this message, casting a sidelong look into how a burgeoning star lost himself in the specious and solitary world of intractable celebrity.”
+ Apple TV’s “Slow Horses” is my favorite show on TV/streaming right now; I discovered it late, in its third season, like many in America. But a six-episode season every 10ish months leaves me wanting more, so I’ve been diving into the source material, Mick Herron’s Slough House book series, to tide over the long (though relatively short, compared to the release schedule of other prestige dramas) wait between seasons. To avoid spoiling the show, I don’t read books that haven’t been adapted yet so I’ve only read Slow Horses, Dead Lions, and Real Tigers. The show is faithful to the books, but its short seasons are ruthlessly efficient, and leave no room for indulgences, so the books fill in details for fans of the show who can’t get enough of the characters, and adds layers to the “Slow Horses” world when you revisit the show.
+ How Elon Musk Fumbled His Purchase of Twitter — and Apparently Gave Grimes’s Baby Name to His Other Child (Business Insider): “Elon and Grimes had picked out a name for their daughter that they wanted to use. That name ended up being used for one of Shivon Zilis’s twins with Elon. When Grimes found out about it, obviously, she was very upset. She posted some song lyrics that she had written about the name essentially being stolen from her. And then, Shivon ended up changing that child’s name, which is how the existence of Shivon’s children came to light to the public, actually, because the name change paperwork became public.”
+ The Divorce Tapes (The Cut): “To me, the tapes had mattered because they provided a modicum of proof of what kind of family we had. They gave me a foothold; they said, ‘It wasn’t just your imagination.’ But Colleen trusted the reality the first time it happened. She had carried it with her every day, and ‘proof,’ as far as she was concerned, was just more of the same harsh reality from which she wanted to escape … My single-minded quest helped nobody but me. Proof has its limitations. Proof, I realized, didn’t matter for my father. He hoped the recordings would compel the family to see our mother in a different light, but instead they decided he was the asshole. Nor could the conversations be used as evidence in court. During the divorce proceedings, the judge granted our mother the house, which she immediately sold, and an alimony award of $3,500 a month, of which my father never gave her a dime. Instead, he drained his 401(k), paid cash for a new Corvette, and spent the next ten years partying. Bitter that his proof got him nowhere, he lost his touch as a salesman and grew apathetic. If he didn’t want to go to work, he didn’t. If he didn’t have money for his mortgage, he didn’t worry about it; he’d pour himself a gin-and-tonic and go for a swim. Ten years before he died, in 2010, he lost his house. He became homeless, and honestly, I don’t think he even cared. Proof is, or at least can be, just another fold in the knot. Today, there’s only one fact that I, Colleen, and our mother agree on: that as a child, Colleen was raped by the older relative. Other than that, hardly any of our mother’s memories match ours.”
+ The Mysterious, Meteoric Rise of Shein (The Atlantic): “The de minimis clause, a once-obscure provision of U.S. trade law, allows for imports worth less than $800 to enter the United States duty-free and with limited screening … From 2018 to 2021, the number of de minimis imports increased by 88 percent … Customs and Border Protection expects more than 1 billion de minimis packages to be processed this year … an interim report published in June 2023 by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party found that Shein and Temu, a competitor of Shein’s, are likely responsible for more than 30 percent of all packages shipped to the United States each day under de minimis. According to the report, in 2022, Gap paid $700 million in import duties, H&M paid $205 million, and Shein and Temu paid nothing.”
+ The World of Luxury Fruit: Does a $156 Melon Taste Sweeter? (The New York Times): “Luxury fruits, which have a long history in parts of Asia, are gaining popularity in the United States, as new varieties are being grown and imported, including those developed over several years by companies aiming to market unique-looking and unique-tasting produce … And as the luxury goods industry has grown, so too has the interest in luxury fruit.”
Have a good weekend, everyone!
