Today’s Important Headlines

Pooh Shiesty kidnapped Gucci Mane

Pooh Shiesty is accused of pointing an AK-47 at Gucci Mane and forcing him to sign a contract while his associate BIG30 blocked the exit. Prosecutors say nine people have been charged, and stolen jewelry surfaced on social media within hours. Authorities also allege Shiesty orchestrated the scheme while on house arrest, while he was barred from possessing weapons.

Takashi Murakami launches a new clothing line

After two years of development, Takashi Murakami is launching a new apparel brand with Yuta Hosokawa, founder of the upcycling label READYMADE. The collection, which drops in stores on April 4 and online on April 11, includes T-shirts, hoodies, belts, suspenders, and more. It was shot by Herbie Yamaguchi, known for capturing punk and new wave musicians as well as major artists and actors.

The stage for Ye’s LA show was insane

Designed by @ausssssssssssssssssss, Kanye West’s LA stage took the form of a massive spinning globe. The show, his first U.S. performance since 2021, filled SoFi Stadium with over 80,000 attendees. Online, many compared the design to Akira, a recurring reference point in Ye’s work, including the “Stronger” video.

A senior US government official swears he teleported to a Waffle House

Gregg Phillips, a senior figure in FEMA, the U.S. disaster response agency, is doubling down on claims that he experienced teleportation. Posting on Truth Social, he described the incident as both real and spiritually grounded, citing religious narratives to support his account. Phillips has a track record of promoting conspiracy theories, and was appointed during the Trump administration without Senate confirmation.

Dua Lipa is curating a literary festival

Dua Lipa is curating the London Literature Festival, which has previously been shaped by figures including Greta Gerwig, Margaret Atwood, and Tom Hanks. Known for her deep engagement with contemporary writing through her platform Service95, which includes a literary podcast, book club, and newsletter, Lipa is not as unexpected a pick as it might seem.

New music releases

A lot has dropped in the past couple days. Here are some of our favorites: Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE & SURF GANG — POMPEII // UTILITY; Nine Vicious — Emotions; Thundercat — Distracted; Loukeman — To The Sky; Miss Bashful + Christ Dillinger — Fake Designer Bitch; Edward Skeletrix — Slavery; Thaiboy Digital — Euro Dollar Yen; Yung Kayo — komodo.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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Culture is a vague term used to describe an array of strange behaviors, interests, and interactions. Culture has a list of symptoms: events in white rooms, events in dark rooms, feelings of self-importance in otherwise unexceptional people, the average contemporary screen time, questionable outfits. There is no defining something like this. There is only what you believe it is about.

I asked a bunch of people what culture is about. One of them looked at his phone for a moment and then without looking up said “the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement, regarded collectively.” Someone else said “looking cool and good.” “It’s like fashion and…that sort of thing.” “The things we think we do for fun and passion.” “Multiple things, obviously.” It’s funny that we don’t know. Maybe that’s why we’re interested.

As someone afflicted by not only cultural interest, but its matured form of cultural employment (and someone possessed, I have been made to understand, of exceptional naivete), I want to say that culture is about art. This is a good answer for several reasons. It is unlikely to make you kill yourself. It justifies the debasements of consumption, media, and bad society that comprise most of culture’s actual character. And it is structurally accurate; art (of some sort) is at the center of most cultural industries.

Culture would also like to give you the impression that it is about art. This is because art’s importance is potentially the most common conviction there is, apart from anomalies like the merits of good sleep and intercourse.

Like any consensus, our belief that art is important is an empty habit. We don’t really buy it. It’s clear in how we spend our time, our attention, and our money. Clear in the work we celebrate and the people we employ to do so. In the informational placards and the mission statements of the museums they hang in. It is abundantly clear: our collective and cultural belief in art’s importance has become a routine of thought, hollow dogma.

Consider the last handful of experiences with art (henceforth: aesthetic experiences) you’ve had, and in the privacy of your own reflection assess their quality. It’s hard to feel moved by a painting on a screen, a preview of a music video, a single scene of a movie, or anything else to which you can apply only half of your attention for half of a second.

Meanwhile, culture suffers. Diagnoses of this blight are rampant and the culprits are nasty, but look to the structural center. If culture is about our interactions with art, should we not consider the possibility that these interactions are where cultural sickness begins? That our cultural maladies are downstream of them?

Today, we have an aesthetic experience problem. I believe that it is the fundamental cultural problem of our era. So when I was recently obliged to conceptualize a thematically coherent column about ‘culture,’ my first and only thought was to investigate it.

Perhaps this sounds abstract. Aesthetic experiences are admittedly hard to talk about. They are mysterious. They can be transcendent and banal and sometimes both. They can involve thought and sensation and sometimes neither. They are transient, yet they stick with us. If a dementia patient who hasn’t recognized her husband in months being able to ace the dance choreography she learned fifty years ago when its song comes on is any indication, they may be the last thing that does.

But aesthetic experiences are not abstract. Saying what a movie or a song is ‘about’ is abstract. Aesthetic experiences are felt and immediate. Aesthetic experiences do not require you to grasp every finer technical and critical detail. They do require your attention, time, and focus. These are not demands today’s world often makes, so if you want to have meaningful aesthetic experiences you’ll have to demand them of yourself. I intend to make the argument that you should.

This is Looking Up, a column about the state of the contemporary aesthetic experience.

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What exactly an aesthetic experience is is the subject of several centuries’ debate. It is a term laden with the burden, unique to academia, of a dozen nearly identical definitions. I will now briefly clarify the sense in which I’ll be using it, along with several other frequently appearing concepts.

An aesthetic object is similar to, but not synonymous with, the word ‘artwork.’ The most famous definition, and the one I’ll be using, comes primarily from Jerome Stolnitz:1 an aesthetic object is anything we contemplate with an ‘aesthetic attitude,’ which is just a kind of open focus that ignores the pragmatic usefulness of an object. The aesthetic attitude does not consider a painting’s possible function as a cutting board, nor a movie’s box office success. It only assesses an object’s aesthetic qualities, i.e. how it is perceived by the senses, what it might express, what this expression might mean, and so on.

Aesthetic objects are therefore defined not by intrinsic properties, but relational ones. Anything can be an aesthetic object, which will make sense to anyone who has been struck by the beauty of a produce display at the grocery store, or from whose broken pen has sputtered a glut of ink with intriguing formal qualities. These are not ‘artworks’, but they can be aesthetic objects2, if we open ourselves to considering their aesthetic properties.

When we bring an aesthetic attitude to an object, thereby making it an aesthetic object, an experience often emerges. This could be a physical sensation, an emotion, a mental image, an epiphany, a memory. These experiences are aesthetic experiences.

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It is probably immediately obvious, based on the above definitions, where contemporary problems with aesthetic experiences start. An aesthetic attitude, the key that unlocks an aesthetic experience, requires (at least) attention, focus, and time, all of which are under significant pressure in daily life. This pressure is particularly intense when scrolling on social media, which is where the majority of our contemporary aesthetic encounters are taking place. Sometimes the obvious answer is the one to start with. This first column is about scrolling’s effect on aesthetic experiences.

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For the last two years, with the help of my colleagues, I’ve been building an exceptional burner account on Instagram. I use this account to stay up to date on various cultural concerns, discover new artists, and generally succeed in my work. I have scheduled scroll time. To maximize my exposure, I scroll quickly.

The rapid sequential replacement of stimuli while scrolling is the definitive aesthetic consumption style of our time. Anyone attempting to distribute an artwork digitally must reckon with it. Rational artists make artworks that can deliver an experience in the single second of attention they expect to receive. Ideally, this quick hit expands viewing duration.

Works that do this successfully are sometimes called ‘thumb stoppers.’ The term came from marketing. Lately it’s been artists saying it. Even if they aren’t, they’ve internalized the logic.

The thumb-stopping imperative is the primary conditioning force of aesthetic distribution and aesthetic experiences on social media, and has several particularities that bear further consideration.

Stopping a thumb is a task often left to sound. On today’s Instagram, if you encounter a static image at all, it will be accompanied by an audio snippet. There is an art to selecting the snippet that will create a pause of maximum duration. There is also an art to aligning the content of the snippet to the content of the post. Posts with audio become multi-sensory aesthetic collages, combining two aesthetic objects to create a single aesthetic experience.

Bad audio selection feels cheap, a transparent attempt to make you feel something specific. Good audio selection can be genuinely powerful. Hardened as our hearts are today to the virtues of Aphex Twin and Radiohead, who among us has not choked up by a melancholic photo series set to ‘#3’? Audiovisual Instagram posts have made me feel swells of ego and the pangs of anger, have reminded me of higher goals and aspirations, made me want to make a drastic change in my life.

If snippets are intended to elongate and transform a viewer’s experience with visual material, music videos on Instagram are the conceptual inverse. In these cases, the visual content of the post is designed to stop people long enough to absorb the auditory content of the song.

The ways to do this are numerous and diverse. “You’re giving me at least five seconds for that” was a musician I was interviewing’s defense of his decision to commission a custom supersuit. Editing style is a more common strategy. In Fakemink’s “fml .” video, no shot exceeds 5 seconds in duration, and most are shorter than 2.

On the other end of this spectrum is Bladee’s ‘Ingen hör’ music video, which is a single shot3 that tracks him at varying proximity with a strange shudder and disorienting continuous refocus. Concrete, bare trees, cloudy day. You never quite make out his face in the shadow of his hood. For some reason, this successfully stopped my thumb. Later I showed it to my friend who actually knows how to make music videos. “See the problem with this,” he said, “is that I would have already turned it off.” Our thumbs all stop for different reasons.

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Music videos are fundamentally ornamental, secondary to a primary aesthetic object (the song). Attention-grabbing is baked into their essence, and so they’re resistant to the debasement of thumb-stopping. Static artworks probably suffer the most.

In an as-yet unreleased interview, Lorenzo Amos (one of the art world’s brightest young stars) said “painting is about surface. Surface isn’t something you can understand through a screen.” Lucy Bull, another contemporary painter, thinks screen viewing has degraded our ability to engage with paintings at all. “People don’t really know how to look at them anymore. Looking at a photo of a painting is a completely different experience.”

The flat glass of the screen skews the artworks that succeed. Countless are the times, presumably, that I have scrolled right past a work unimpressive on my screen that in a different environment of physical confrontation might have made an impact.4 This selection isn’t only a consumer-side issue. I’ve spoken with multiple artists who say that considering whether a work will photograph well is ingrained into their ideation process.

An emergent property of works made in this context is a split personality disorder, wherein the attention-grabbing aesthetic content (color, macro composition) is sometimes literally in visible tension with the aspects of work designed for more robust focus (micro composition, style, thematics).

One way to stop a thumb with a static artwork is to show people something that offends them. Making iconoclastic art today is incredibly difficult because we’re out of undefiled icons. The church and the state are both irrevocably weakened, as is every moral precept I am personally familiar with. Woke 1 offered some candidates which have all lost their shine. There is nothing that matters to anyone that has not been disrespected by some artist somewhere.

The closest thing we have to a sacred iconography is probably Apple products. The first work I saw by Mika Ben Amar was a Macbook Air skewered by a sword, and my thumb stopped immediately. My aesthetic experience with this work, as well as Amar’s subsequent work which stacked eleven and a half Airs side-on-side floor-to-ceiling, was defined by a conflicting discomfort and release characteristic of iconoclasm. A visceral reaction to seeing these devices destroyed is understandable. There are few objects whose destruction promises more personal inconvenience.

Alexander Endrullat is the quintessential Apple sculptor. In his works, the structural integrity of Macbooks, iPads, and iPhones breaks down entirely5. They hang over clotheslines and bend around corners.

But iconoclasm has always been a shallow aesthetic strategy. At its best it can create an ambivalent experience, but this generally diminishes as the thrill wears off. I expect that my thumb will soon move unhindered over bent laptops.

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The shortcomings of aesthetic experiences in the scroll mode are many, but there are also interesting aspects. Scroll quick enough and disparate aesthetic objects begin to blur, and an accretive aesthetic experience emerges. Accretive aesthetic experiences of this sort are often tainted by the overstimulation and negative emotions social media is designed to deliver, but this is the fault of the platforms and the content, not the mode. An accretive aesthetic experience is a fascinating thing, and one productive horizon presented by our current method of consumption.

Accretive aesthetic experiences are not only possible digitally. This fall, while in Prague, a city whose public art collection is thematically and physically segmented between several historic buildings, I visited the Convent of St. Agnes of Bohemia which houses the permanent exhibit ‘Medieval Art in Bohemia and Central Europe 1200 - 1550.’

When I arrived, the Convent was entirely empty other than a group of American highschoolers being forced to give short presentations on various significant artworks by a Czech chaperone. After they invariably fumbled the Czech’s follow-up questions he would step to the front of the group to deliver a heavily accented and superior analysis.

This is one way to approach a museum. My preference, which was easier done once I overtook the gauntlet of body spray characteristic of teenage Americans in foreign countries, is to move from painting to painting at roughly equal intervals, standing square to it and adjusting my distance based on its size and composition, attempting to clear my mind and ignore informational placards.

Under normal curatorial conditions, the diversity of aesthetic objects keeps these aesthetic experiences separated. But large collections of religious paintings have comparatively little diversity, especially when they are focused on a particular period of time in a particular part of the world. This homogeneity can be further intensified by curatorial decisions, such as, in the Monastery, the choice to set up about twenty ‘Madonna with Child’ paintings in close proximity.

This remarkable series began in one room with several distinguished and well-lit pieces, continued down a dim hallway lined with Madonnas of lesser quality, and ended in a second gallery room with several more, broken up by a Crucifixion here and there.

The paintings varied minimally, and created a formal mold in my short-term memory, so that each new work textured an ongoing mental image. The result was a single stacking aesthetic experience stitched together of subsequent paintings. A feeling of satisfaction accompanied the stacking, like puzzle pieces fitting.

Different artists emphasized different characteristics of the paintings’ subjects. Mary was at turns stolid, motherly, forlorn, or fearful. Artists have always had a hilarious time trying to paint baby Jesus, and his facial structure varies from an entirely adult skeletal distinction to a prefetal ambiguity. Sometimes he regards the viewer, others Mary. Often, he is raising his hand in benediction.

Madonna with Child is a simple format of great depth. The relationship between Mary and Christ specifically contains the mystery of immaculate conception and God in human flesh. This is something large. The succession of paintings at the convent embodied the attempts of numerous individuals over hundreds of years attempting to articulate this single big thing.6 It is a telling done by diverse aesthetic and spiritual perspectives working under a variety of societal conditions. Each version is a unique perspective. Consumed in sequence, these perspectives were collected into a single aesthetic experience with immense texture.

The scale of what this sequence of paintings was able to convey to me is something that only a rare few paintings can capture on their own. But it does sometimes happen. Raphael’s Madonna del prato, which I encountered several days later in Vienna, is one example.

Raphael’s Madonna places its subjects in an idyllic green rolling field set off from the human world by fine blue mist. Mary is supporting Jesus with both hands, but her downward gaze is trained on St. John, whose cross Jesus is reaching for. From the hem of Mary’s deep blue robe, a single slender white foot extends.

Mary’s downgaze is difficult to parse, perhaps one of subtle approval or even amusement. The supportive hands, the stolidity of her garb, the tenderness of her gaze all create a sense of peace, stability, and safety. Christ, at her feet, off balance and reaching, is already embodying the commitment of his passion, and facing the limitations of his human form.

The tragedy is there in Christ’s imbalance, in the buildings behind. So too is divine love and the natural beauty of God’s creation. A sense of peace and safety permeates the field. A magnetism, that becomes yearning, that becomes desperation. I wanted it, the field and the peace. First it was an upwelling of tenderness and desire. It broke into something like heartbreak.

But it was partial, and fast. The museum was hot, and people kept coming to my shoulder to read the placard. I promptly left, and on my way out encountered the phenomenon, common to every central European museum, of dressed up young women having their photograph taken on the grandest stairwell available.

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“Culture is about what is meaningful to people in a given moment.” Perhaps aesthetic experiences just aren’t. Hard to blame anyone without getting sanctimonious. And if there is one thing that culture won’t put up with for long, it’s sanctimony.

But also: “Culture is an attempt to make human life a meaningful experience on a collective scale through the search for a common understanding of what life is, what makes it worth living, and how it should be shaped as a result.” For generations, aesthetic experiences have been an integral part of that attempt.

I know a guy who felt despair in front of an Edvard Munch it took him days to get out of. I saw the end of It’s A Wonderful Life make my whole family cry. Someone I spoke to recently said that for the first time in their lives they understood what a human being is while reading a Dostoyevsky novel. These are not trivial things. Everything written here is just the start.

Today’s Important Headlines

Antwerp Six are unhappy with the new book about them

Several members of the Antwerp Six, along with MoMu (the museum handing their new exhibit), are distancing themselves from Oscar van den Boogaard’s new book The Six, despite having initially participated in its development. The controversy centers on the inclusion of intimate stories and sensitive details. While the author maintains that the material is drawn directly from interviews and reflects an honest portrayal, the backlash has led to withdrawn institutional support and exposed deeper tensions within the group.

Snow Strippers are the first ever electronic act to play Rolling Loud

Rolling Loud has announced that Snow Strippers will perform at its annual Miami festival, marking the first time an electronic act has been included. The decision has split reactions, with younger audiences praising the shift and noting the Florida duo’s ties to rap through collaborations with Lil Uzi Vert, Surf Gang, and SlimeGetEm. Meanwhile, older fans have pushed back, criticizing both the inclusion of an electronic artist and a lineup that leans more underground, with less emphasis on the legacy rap acts the festival is known for.

MoMA is struggling with the new Duchamp exhibit

MoMA’s new Marcel Duchamp retrospective show is challenging curators. As Michelle Kuo, chief curator at the MoMA, puts it, “everything he made is designed to confound the traditional systems of art as we know them.” The artist never treated art as fixed objects, and his work disrupts ideas of authorship, style, and completion, forcing curators to reconstruct a practice without any stable timeline, or enduring collection. In other words, Duchamp’s work was intentionally made to be impossible to exhibit normally at a museum. On April 12, MoMA is going to try anyway. The show marks the first major U.S. exhibition dedicated to his career since 1973.

Instagram’s new paid tier lets you stealth watch peoples’ stories

Meta is quietly piloting a paid tier called Instagram Plus, adding controls like viewing Stories without being seen, extending their lifespan, and refining audience targeting. The test follows broader plans to introduce subscription-based features across Meta’s apps, with early trials appearing in countries such as Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines at low monthly costs. Given the massive success of paid subscriptions on X and Snapchat, along with the lengths users already go to stalk, it’s likely the subscription will be popular.

Bassvictim speaks on Fakemink’s voice

In a characteristically Bassvictim moment, Maria (one half of Bassvictim) took to Instagram Stories to share her thoughts on Fakemink’s voice these days, making it clear that while she loves Mink, she has noticed him putting on a “cooler” voice recently. The stories are a funny and light poke at Mink who has been coming under fire recently for his pseudointellectual aura-farming on IG live.

Protein hookah is the new gym trend in Saudi Arabia

Gyms in Saudi Arabia are introducing a first-of-its-kind “protein shisha” concept, swapping tobacco for a herbal, molasses-based blend infused with supplements like whey protein, creatine, BCAAs, and pre-workout formulas. Designed as post-workout lounge spaces within or adjacent to gyms, the initiative aims to merge regional shisha culture with fitness, with each session reportedly delivering up to 25 grams of inhaled, “aroma-activated” protein. While some local doctors claim inhalation may improve absorption, many medical experts are cautioning against the practice.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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In Mario Kart 64, the seagulls in Koopa Troopa Beach are never seen up close during regular gameplay. However, viewing them in a model viewer reveals they have surprisingly detailed eyes.

This is the second installment of Monthly Discoveries.

Each month, our team spends an enormous amount of collective time on the internet. We discover a lot of incredible art, artists, and artworks this way. Last month, we decided to try to keep track of these discoveries, and curated a short list of some standouts. This list serves as a running archive of attention, part taste log and part time capsule.

This month, we did it again. Our March Discoveries span art, music, fashion, design, and internet ephemera. Some entries stand out for their craft, others for their strangeness, intensity, or quiet resonance with the present moment.

However they arrived here, each of the following discoveries stayed with us throughout March. We hope you enjoy them.

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Torbjørn Rodland’s new exhibition

Norwegian-based photographer Torbjørn Rødland’s exhibition at NYC’s David Kordansky Gallery features a photograph captured in London depicting a man kissing someone while a woman pulls his arm in a futile attempt to get his attention. Other favorites include “Banana Black” 2005, “Awkward Seat” 2023-26, and “Baby” 2007. He describes the goal of his work as “reënchantment project,” seeking to instill mythology into our contemporary society which feels glaringly devoid of any.

New Paloma Wool video by Carlos Didierr

@mariabottle_

Maria Bottle on Instagram: "Sweet things happen in Paris. ⭐️ @p…

Paris-based, Mexico-born director Carlos Didierr’s latest video for Paloma Wool has a simple concept: following model Maria Bottle through a single whimsical day. Shot with highly technical, stop-motion-esque camerawork, the video stitches together a series of scenes, using flower petals, cotton candy, stars, and spiderwebs as surreal transitions as she glides from one liminal space to another.

T-shirts by The Blank Traveler

The Blank Traveler is a Massachusetts-based clothing brand producing graphic-driven designs on Gildan blanks using direct-to-garment printing. Their drops are typically available online for just 48 hours and stocked at three curated stores worldwide. The pieces draw on thrift store-style ironic graphics, often defined by a restrained palette of two to three colors, paired with cropped visuals or fragments of typography.

Chainsaw Maid (2007) by Takena Nagao

This one is technically a rediscovery. Takena Nagao is a Japanese director known for his stop-motion animated horror films. His gory 2007 seven-minute short Chainsaw Maid follows a maid who protects her family from invading zombies using a chainsaw. Other interesting works from him include Maid of the Dead (2013) and Midnight Vampire (2024).

Animal hair sculptures by Shinji Konishi at Noir Kei Ninomiya’s AW 2026

Hair has long been a central focus in Junya Watanabe collaborator Kei Ninomiya’s collections, and the AW 2026 show pushes this even further. Models walk the runway with elaborate, sculptural avant-garde hairstyles, featuring animals such as squirrels, panthers, and bears crafted entirely from hair, perched atop intricate, basketwoven structures placed on the models’ heads.

Heraldic Visual Sequencer by Callum Bridge

@ellery3000

@ellery3000 on Instagram: "Heraldic Visual Sequencer is a custo…

Heraldic Visual Sequencer by London-based designer Callum Bridge is a custom tool that creates animated visuals using a mix-and-match library of heraldic symbols. It lets you control movement, layers, and motion trails in real time, so you can generate thousands of unique visuals for performance, projections, or dynamic use cases.

Singing Chinese engine saleswoman

@auto.parts.store.tina#engine #caraccessories #motor #used #auto #engineaccessories #newengine #original #factory

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Tina, a Chinese saleswoman, is promoting the engines she is selling in China by singing. Buyers rest assured; she sings that the engines are “very complete” and have “low mileage.” Her unconventional style of advertising has gone viral in China and has captured the hearts of millions of mechanical engineers worldwide. Dive into the rabbit hole here.

NYC Street Life Lamps by @chefabdu1

@chefabdu1

@chefabdu1 on Instagram: "NYC Street Life Lamps
3/13 This Frid…

Product designer @chefabdu is creating 8 by 11 inch NYC Street Life Lamps depicting scenes of New York City. The lamps are a collaboration with artist Nicholas Colalella and are available for preorder. Each piece features a rotating, globe-like display of Chinatown’s Mott Street, along with its residents, fire escapes, and apartment facades. Also worth checking out is his inflatable Mii punch doll, designed for everyday use but intended for “normal punches only.”

Stuffed plushies by Josie

Josie is an artist who uses secondhand and repurposed fabrics to create, among other things, one-of-one stuffed animal creatures. Her work often combines disparate animal parts with exaggerated proportions, resulting in plushies that are somewhere between cute and unsettling. Her most recent bunny plush features a visible pouch containing a small baby plush embedded within the body, pushing her signature aesthetic into even more surreal territory.

Painting by Utanhole (2026)

Drawing on Agnolo Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (1545), 花鳥風月, or Requiem for the Damned, is Utanhole’s 2026 oil-on-canvas work that reframes Renaissance painting in the realities of contemporary Japanese life. The piece was recently shown at the 2026 Tokyo Art Fair, the largest art fair in Japan and the oldest in Asia.

Music by twentythree

Toronto rapper twentythree makes music in the vein of DJ Mustard 2010s strip club rap, with bass-heavy production that feels like it’s echoing in a club bathroom. While “Queen St” has racked up over 8 million streams, it’s worth diving deeper into tracks like “POPSTAR” and “I HATE DRUGS.”. If you listen closely, you can hear the Drake “6” sound effect embedded in his songs, paying homage to his Toronto roots.

Sneakers by Paul Easterlin

Paul Easterlin’s Golden Goose-esque sneakers are a scuffed-up hybrid of Converse Chuck 70s and Vans Old-School silhouettes. Each pair is handcrafted by Italian artisans. Updating their vintage inspiration with contemporary design, no two shoes are exactly alike. They feature two-tone laces and layered materials including canvas, suede, and leather.

“On the Brink” by Aram Bartholl

@arambartholl

Ar@m B@rtholl on Instagram: "„On the brink“ (2024) Apparently s…

Aram Bartholl is a Berlin-based conceptual artist exploring the digital–physical divide, with a focus on anonymity and privacy. “On the Brink,” running through September 13, 2026, is a stripped-down, ironic exhibition featuring a plain white museum guard chair and a steaming phone plugged in nearby. Reportedly, someone has already panicked and unplugged it.

Read more

Today’s Important Headlines

Jil Sanders curated a literal ‘Reference Library’ for Milan Design Week

Jil Sander and Spanish cult-classic design magazine Apartamento will debut a new exhibition during Milan Design Week titled “Reference Library,” which will feature over 60 books carefully curated by a diverse range of creatives. Attendance will be limited to 60 hourly time slots, during which attendees will be required to wear white gloves to handle the collection. Contributors include Jil Sander’s creative director Simone Bellotti, Celine Song (Past Lives), Lykke Li, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and many others.

Bully is 2026’s biggest rap release

After years of botched releases, AI usage allegations, and cancellations, BULLY is out and allegedly pulled in nearly 50 million Spotify streams on its debut day, marking the biggest opening for a 2026 rap album so far, surpassing J. Cole’s The Fall Off. Overall, reactions to Bully have been far more positive than those to Vultures or Donda. The album has been compared to the range of TLOP, feeling more polished than recent projects, though some fans feel the final stretch still needs refining and may incorporate AI elements.

Another developing footwear trend: sneaker-formal hybrids

Continuing 2025’s footwear trends around Mary Janes, loafers, and ballet flats, this year we’re seeing those silhouettes blended into sneaker-hybrid reinterpretations. While models like the Puma Speedcat Ballet and Adidas Taekwondo Ballet have been especially popular, some of our favorite releases blending formal and casual footwear include Nike’s upcoming collab with Lakewood, Onitsuka Tiger’s loafer-sneaker hybrids in collaboration with Versace, and the Nike x Comme des Garçons Air Max loafer hybrid crafted in patent leather.

Bob Dylan dropped a Patreon page filled with AI slop historical fiction

While currently on tour, Bob Dylan has launched a Patreon page called Letters From the Grave under the username @bobdylan180, an archive of historical fan fiction featuring figures like Aaron Burr, Frank James, and Wild Bill Hickok. For $5 a month, users can access short-story-style “letters that were never sent” from historical figures, including one from Mark Twain to Rudolph Valentino. AI usage is fairly apparent throughout, which comes as little surprise considering how Dylan infamously used Moby-Dick’s SparkNotes for his Nobel Prize lecture a decade ago.

7-Eleven made a vintage workwear collection

To celebrate 45 years in Hong Kong, 7-Eleven has collaborated with fashion label GrowthRing & Supply on a ’90s-inspired, vintage workwear collection, which debuted at ComplexCon Hong Kong last week. The standout pieces are the button-down chore jackets, detailed with an assortment of custom patches that commemorate key milestones from the past four decades.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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Today’s inspiration supplement. Click through to view.

From The Archive

An extra piece of content from the Welcome Archive for Magazine subscribers only.

UEFA fined Serbian soccer club Crvena Zvezda $103,000 for a tifo featuring an Orthodox icon of Saint Simeon and a “May our faith lead you to victory” banner.

UEFA’s official reason was: “Displaying a message deemed inappropriate for a sporting event” and “undermining the reputation and integrity of football and UEFA.”

They say history rhymes. At least it does to those with an ear for it. And the most relevant line for our current times was written about a half century ago, when the mainframe computer gave way to the PC. The parallels between this transition and the one we are undergoing today are striking, and have a lot to tell us about what the next stage of AI might look like.

To start, a story. Here’s what it was like to use a computer before the emergence of PC:

Say you’re an economics student at MIT in the ‘60s wanting to run a regression on some macroeconomic data. You’ve identified the relevant variables, surveyed, and recorded data in massive binders. Until a few years ago, the next step would have been to calculate your regression by hand with a desk calculator, recording results in pencil, a painstaking process that would take you weeks. Now, it’s only going to take you a couple hours. There’s new tech on campus; a mainframe computer. It has its own building. You head there, lugging all of your data binders.

The first step is to transfer your data onto keypunch cards, which a designated employee will batch load onto disk storage so the computer can read it. Then you go to the ‘terminal’ where you can access the computer. This terminal looks a bit like a typewriter bolted to a desk. You have to log in, so the amount of compute power you’re using can be tracked. Compute costs a certain amount per command, but as long as you stay below a certain threshold, your department will foot the bill for you.

You’ve memorized a series of cryptic code commands to access and regress your data. The process is slow. After each command you have to wait several moments for an answer to spit out. You can’t even see the computer itself, which is in a climate controlled environment a few rooms over. There are, however, four other terminals in the room with you, and the people sitting at them are part of the reason this is taking so long; the computer is splitting its compute power between the whole group.

Despite all of this, in the end, the computer runs your regression in 1/1000th of the amount of time it would have taken you to do it yourself. Your R-squared, coefficients, B1, B2, and everything else you need, returned in list format you can take with you. As you exit the building, still weighed down by the binders of paper data, you feel like a weight has been taken off your shoulders, and wonder if this means you can throw away the binders of data.

This hypothetical sounds archaic to us, but it is an apt analogy for our current era of AI. Five years after that MIT Econ student ran that regression, the personal computer arrived and rendered the mainframe computer mostly obsolete. A similar change is coming to the world of AI, and it will arrive much sooner than five years. Really, it’s here already.

In case the similarities aren’t obvious, let’s return to the mainframe computer. It is a massive, centralized piece of technology owned by a company or an institution. Individuals essentially share this machine. They pay for their slice of its compute. They come to the machine with questions, and hopefully leave with answers. The process by which the machine achieved those answers is opaque. Its function is solely determined by the company building it, and there is almost no room for customization.

Despite the fact that modern software and interfaces and internet access obscure this fact, this is basically also how large chatbot LLMs function. ChatGPT seems like it is running on your computer, but it is not. The vital technology is elsewhere, in a massive windowless facility, centralized and privately owned. Its compute power is split between active users, which anyone who has ever tried to use chat during a surge knows. We bring our questions to the terminal (in this case, the chat box), and it gives us answers, which mostly we are left alone to apply ourselves. The particular methods and logics used to reach these answers are guarded trade secrets.

To understand the ways that this is about to change, let’s return to the emergence of the PC in the ‘70s. PC’s replaced the centralized nature of the mainframe computer with individual ownership. Suddenly, people owned their own compute. A general utility became a personal workflow tool that could be directly integrated into everyday tasks. A highly standardized version of the computer, built on the vision of a few big companies, was replaced by a more democratic model where the computer’s function could be endlessly reinvented through software.

There’s a long and interesting history of how this transition was possible, but the two most important factors were interface simplification and a compressing cost curve. In other words, they figured out how to make computers simple enough for the average person to understand, and cheap enough for the average person to afford.

The same thing is happening right now for AI. While using an LLM chatbot is easy and intuitive, figuring out how to extract deployable utility from them is still, for many people, prohibitively difficult. We all know that Claude can be used to build websites, but only a fraction of us know the right prompts, revisions, and software interactions to actually do so. But if the functionality of Claude was built directly into an OS, and what appeared was not the blank chat box but simply a button with something along the lines of ‘want me to do this?’, suddenly everyone can use AI for anything. And on the price side, the training frontier was a trillion dollar trailblazing endeavor. Running smaller models locally is going to very little in comparison. The per-inference cost is also collapsing.

So what does this mean? What is the ‘personal computer’ of AI?

It will take more than one form, but some general principles: you won’t rent AI compute, you’ll own it. It won’t be centered elsewhere, but will live on your computer, or desk, or around your neck. The basic use cases will be streamlined enough for anyone to use. Easy access and simple use means that the level of integration into our daily lives and environments will explode. And just as the personal computer brought with it an explosion of software, building on top of the now ubiquitous hardline, in-home AI and local AI networks will lead to a proliferation of new use cases, functionalities, and customizations.

If it’s true that history rhymes, this seems like the way things are headed. But this is just the start. Right now, as doomsday competes with utopic abundance in prediction models, it’s more important than ever to try to imagine a future. Understanding this transition is a good foundation for that.

Today’s Important Headlines

New music releases

A lot has dropped in the past couple days. Here are some of our favorites: Yeat — ADL; Ye — BULLY; Chief Keef — Skeletor; Fetty Wap — Zavier; smokedope2016 — The Comedown; Bladee — Love Is A State; jackzebra + Bloodz Boi — Bloodzebra; Robyn — Existential; Fckers — ö; Dorian Electra — Feel Good Inc.

The Antwerp Six are getting their first museum exhibition

MoMu, Antwerp’s iconic fashion museum, is hosting a new exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the Antwerp Six’s international breakthrough. The show presents a hometown retrospective on the six influential designers: Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, and Marina Yee. The exhibition opens on Saturday and is the first dedicated entirely to the group.

10 iconic Off-White designs are being updated by 10 leading contemporary creatives

Off-White™ is handing over 10 of its signature designs to a roster of creatives including Kid Cudi, A$AP Nast, Guillermo Andrade (424 label), Ava Nirui (formerly of Heaven Marc Jacobs), and others, each reworking one unique piece in their own way. The results will roll out in staggered releases over the next year and a half, supported by a series of events across different cities. Each contributor takes on a different category, from “JEANS”, “EYEWEAR”, “SNEAKERS”, “OBJECTS”, and more.

Matthew Williams joins Travis Scott to co-run Oakley’s creative vision

Matthew Williams is stepping into a broader creative role at Oakley, overseeing apparel, footwear, and accessories, while Travis Scott remains on as Chief Visionary Officer. Williams, who founded 1017 ALYX 9SM and served as creative director at Givenchy, is a natural fit for the role, drawing on a long-running collaboration with Scott dating back to the Been Trill era, as well as a luxury-meets-utility design language that Oakley has been cultivating in recent years.

A Pop Smoke café is opening in his childhood neighborhood

A coffee shop honoring Pop Smoke is set to open in Canarsie, Brooklyn. It’s being spearheaded by his family, and it’s called “Pop’s Place.” Announced by his brother Obasi Jackson, the project is hiring experienced baristas as it moves toward opening. This is only the latest community work from Pop Smoke’s family.

There’s a humanoid robot in the White House

On the final day of an international summit focused on integrating technology and AI to improve global education, Melania Trump did a walk-out beside a humanoid robot. Upon entering the room, the robot, known as Figure 03, addressed the audience, thanking them. It is being used as a housecleaning assistant in the White House. The whole event was very characteristic of Trump’s PR approach: vaguely America-first and only superficially impressive.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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Something exciting is happening in cultural media, if you know where to look. From the culturally flattened desert of major media platforms is springing new life: Instagram pages showcasing emerging artists and eclectic fashion; independent Substacks blogging to devoted followings; a new generation of scene photographers mythologizing subcultures in real time. We are living in the Second Blog Era. Just not everybody knows it yet.

You’ve heard of the ‘blog era’ (henceforth referred to as the First Blog Era). Probably, you have a romanticized idea of this period, one filled with grungy early underground live shows, vibrant Tumblr forums, and a sense of early 2000s cultural optimism.

During the First Blog Era, roughly 2004 - 2014, the internet’s adoption by creatives created a fertile environment for new scenes and aesthetics like Twee, (what is now referred to as) Indie Sleaze, Midwest Emo, Scenecore, and early Swag. Early internet style blogs like Tumblr, KanyeToThe, and Flickr defined these new movements, and established communities around them.

But over the past two decades, both the internet and the culture moving through it changed. Curation, once decentralized across hundreds of independent blogs and guided by human taste, became increasingly commodified as algorithms prioritized corporate efficiency and user convenience. Feeds became centralized, making it easier for corporations to push out polished paid partnerships and covert industry plants. A few massive pop culture pages like Complex, Worldstar, and Genius dominated coverage.

Today, things are changing again. While it is true that a few major clearnet platforms continue to host cultural material, there has been a shift away from centralized, commercial, mass-market distribution towards decentralized, human-to-human, taste-driven curation. Blog-era aesthetics and taste-sharing modes have resurged. TikTok-driven discovery, algorithm fatigue, and AI slop content have reignited desire for thoughtful, human-led coverage. Legacy cultural platforms like Vice and Pigeons and Planes have been revived.

This isn’t just nostalgia—it’s the return of decentralized discovery systems and the prioritization of individual taste that defined the First Blog Era. It is a renaissance in taste-sharing. This is the Second Blog Era, and it has implications for every cultural industry.

What the First Blog Era looked like, why we lost it, and what replaced it are all questions that will help us understand why our media landscape looks the way it does today, where it might be going, and what that means for culture. What follows is a comprehensive timeline of the first blog era, its demise, and its contemporary revival.

Early Internet

On the early Internet, discovery tools were open and decentralized; anyone could publish and distribute culture. Taste was shared human-to-human through early file-sharing platforms and social media, most notably Napster and MySpace.

Napster foreshadowed how music discovery and consumption would function online through peer-to-peer exchange. Discovery was driven by users, rather than editorial curation. It also gave independent artists a cheap, effective promotional tool outside traditional label systems, while offering unprecedented access to vast digital music libraries.

Napster and similar MP3-sharing sites posed a major threat to the music industry, leading to the decline of physical CD sales and the shift toward digital consumption. In response, Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003, offering a simple and centralized way to digitally purchase music. This laid the groundwork for the streaming infrastructure that would ultimately bring about the end of the First Blog Era.

New Platforms: MySpace and Tumblr

Small blogs paved the way for decentralized music discovery, but MySpace and Tumblr brought this consumption style to the masses. These platforms linked personal identity to media consumption, giving rise to the digital persona, where taste was visible at a glance. They also introduced peer curation, allowing users to instantly share discoveries and create a constant feedback loop between discovery and conversation.

While MySpace mirrored real-life social networks, Tumblr introduced something more radical: sprawling, niche digital communities built around shared aesthetics and interests. Fans debated music, shared obscure references, and built new cultural languages.

DIY Blogs

Around this time, DIY music blogs began to emerge. These blogs were largely independent, small, and hosted on their own sites. Written by passionate music lovers, they focused on discussing and sharing emerging, internet-native artists. Between 2004 and 2007, sites like Nah Right, 2DopeBoyz, and Hype Machine became highly influential in rap, helping launch artists such as Kid Cudi, Lupe Fiasco, and Wale.

At the same time, mixtapes from DJs like DJ Drama and DJ Clue circulated widely across peer-to-peer platforms like Limewire and Kazaa. Indie blogs like Music for Robots and Fluxblog introduced emerging artists such as Animal Collective and Sufjan Stevens, while electronic-focused blogs such as Fluokids, Discobelle, and Missing Toof played a central role in popularizing acts like Justice, Digitalism, and M.I.A., helping define the aesthetics most associated with the bloghouse era.

In the broader cultural landscape, blogs disrupted the hierarchy of music journalism, challenging legacy publications like Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Creem, and NME, which had previously served as the primary arbiters of taste. Tastemaking shifted from magazines and radio to decentralized online communities, where listeners could bypass traditional gatekeeping and establish taste-based authority. This allowed local music scenes, such as Montreal’s indie rock scene, Houston’s chopped and screwed scene, Atlanta’s trap scene, and Brooklyn’s hipster scene, to integrate into the broader online cultural landscape.

In this way, for a generation of music fans, blogs became the most exciting place to discover new sounds, driven entirely by passionate human curators and largely free from corporate or algorithmic influence.

Early SoundCloud and Peak Tumblr

In 2007, SoundCloud launched on the same ethos of free access that defined the MP3 blogosphere era. It allowed artists to bypass traditional rollouts and label support by uploading and distributing music directly, which Tumblr and other emerging platforms quickly adopted. Electronic acts like Flume, Skrillex, and RL Grime emerged through the platform, while rappers such as Drake, J. Cole, and Big Sean built momentum via online mixtapes.

Tumblr reached its cultural peak between 2011 and 2014. Artists like A$AP Rocky, Danny Brown, The Weeknd, Odd Future, SpaceGhostPurrp, Lil B, Black Kray, Bones, Xavier Wulf, Chris Travis, and Yung Lean began to heavily incorporate internet aesthetics directly into their artistic identities. Music discovery became deeply intertwined with visual culture. Fans and artists built evolving aesthetic worlds around imagery and references such as Windows 95 interfaces, galaxy prints, vaporwave graphics, and cult brands like Been Trill, PYREX, and HBA. Cloud rap emerged as the defining sound of the era, with producers like Clams Casino shaping its atmospheric, washed-out production style that still echoes in internet rap today.

Already during this period, we see the early inklings of the death of the First Blog Era. Discourse moved from smaller hip-hop blogs to larger, more centralized hubs like Kanye-To-The, and Reddit forums like r/hiphopheads and r/hiphop101. But these spaces were still distanced from corporate interests.

The End of the First Blog Era

The ascension of streaming to the primary metric of an artist’s success played a key role in ending the First Blog Era. In 2013, streaming data was incorporated into Billboard’s charts, catapulting the careers of some Tumblr artists like A$AP Rocky, The Weeknd, and Odd Future, while confining others to the underground. As platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Vimeo grew, the blogosphere declined, and music discovery was centralized into streaming libraries. This reduced the need for link-sharing sites. By 2014, streaming revenue had surpassed digital downloads across the music industry.

For a time, SoundCloud remained in a liminal space as both a centralized streaming platform and one of the last accessible frontiers of free file sharing. During its 2014 - 2017 peak, its accessibility for non-label-backed artists defined a new generation of “SoundCloud rap”. Think Kodak Black, Lil Uzi Vert, XXXTENTACION, Playboi Carti, Lil Peep, Famous Dex, Denzel Curry, Ski Mask the Slump God, Yung Lean, Bladee, Lil Pump, Smokepurpp, Trippie Redd, 6ix9ine, Wifisfuneral, and others. Many of these artists emerged from loosely connected online collectives like Raider Klan, Goth Money, Members Only, GothBoiClique, and Drain Gang.

But by 2017, the centralizing forces in culture were winning out. Corporations were adapting, and swallowing blogs, forums, and small communities. Platforms, algorithms, and centralized playlists replaced them. As scale increased, taste began to flatten, with corporate editorials and algorithms overtaking human curators as the main engines of discovery. Instagram pages like Complex, Our Generation Music, DJ Akademiks, Worldstar, and Rap came to dominate cultural discovery, compressing the once sprawling ecosystem of small blogs that defined the era.

A major turning point was the rollout of new algorithms across Instagram, Twitter, Spotify, and Apple Music, shifting feeds away from chronology and toward opaque recommendations. This marked a growing influence of corporate systems in creative discovery, further amplified by thinly veiled ads and sponsored content.

In 2015, Spotify launched Rap Caviar, which quickly became one of the most influential editorial playlists in streaming and a major tastemaker within rap, helping pull the once-underground SoundCloud scene into the mainstream. Its success cemented these editorial playlists as a central force in shaping taste, with a 2022 study reporting that 31% of all listening on the platform comes from editorial and algorithmic playlists.

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Many people think that this is still the media environment we live in: centralized, corporate curators, homogenizing algorithms, flattened taste. In reality, in recent years these trends have reversed, giving rise to the Second Blog Era. It just hasn’t always been recognized.

The Second Blog Era

One of the major catalysts for the Second Blog Era nobody saw coming. In 2020, COVID created a cultural shift that transformed social and artistic life. As physical spaces temporarily disappeared, culture and tastemaking entirely retreated back online. Scenes that once relied on parties, concerts, and in-person communities were forced to reorganize and double down digitally. This moment quietly set the stage for a new era of blogging.

An unlikely driver of the Second Blog Era is TikTok. On the surface, due to its enormous scale, TikTok looks like one of the commercial platforms that buried the First Blog Era. Yet its algorithm produces dense, overlapping niche communities that often collide, occasionally breaking into wider virality. In this way, the platform recreates one of the blog era’s core dynamics.

Just as in the First Blog Era, when obscure tracks circulated by a few small blogs exploded into wider popularity, today on TikTok a clip using seconds of an unknown song can become a breakout moment. Many of the most popular artists of the past few years have emerged through this process, without relying on label marketing. Songs circulate through decentralized participation. Users remix, reinterpret, and attach songs to entirely new cultural contexts.

Random B-sides and previously little-streamed tracks have been catapulted into virality this way, at times overtaking an artist’s more established work. For example, ambient artists like Duster and Grouper have accumulated hundreds of millions of streams. Aphex Twin’s “QKThr,” a relatively obscure track from Drukqs, has become his most popular song.

Combined with the lack of in-person spaces, these algorithms that rewarded niche interests created an environment where subcultures were revived, new scenes emerged, and independent voices documented culture outside traditional media institutions. It pushed younger users towards riskier self-expression in fashion, and more experimental genres like hyperpop, shoegaze, and ambient music. Discovery was once again driven by communities rather than institutions. Only now, the communities were operating on algorithmic feeds instead of independent websites.

Another way the Second Blog Era asserted itself was through a collective exhaustion with centralized editorial ‘tastemaking,’ such as public playlists on major streaming platforms. For nearly a decade, platforms like Spotify, TikTok, and YouTube have dominated music discovery through opaque early algorithms and editorial curation, prioritizing engagement over personalized taste.1

The tradeoff of this curatorial scale is a cultural flattening. New York Magazine examined one way this happens through the “Discover Weekly music” phenomenon, where Spotify’s algorithm pushes a uniform layer of slightly obscure tracks to millions under the guise of personalization. As AI increasingly shapes these systems, concerns around the “slopification” of culture continue to grow. In response, audiences are turning back toward human curators, with Instagram archive pages, niche Substacks, and independent newsletters occupying the role that MP3 blogs once held.

Instagram pages dedicated to hyper-specific aesthetics, micro-genres, and archives now function like decentralized media outlets. Pages and platforms like ours, HIDDEN NY, Perfectly Imperfect, Nina, Sadprt, and Silk, as well as blog-meme hybrids like Hyperpop Daily and Dick Owens Online, curate culture that feels closer to early Tumblr blogs than traditional feeds. Curation itself has once again become a form of cultural authorship.

Another defining feature of the Second Blog Era is the documentation of IRL scenes. In the First Blog Era, photographers like Mark Hunter, better known as Cobrasnake, along with the Vice team and Ciesay and Soulz, the duo behind Places+Faces, and many others, became as significant as the musicians themselves, visually defining entire subcultures.

That IRL ecosystem is reappearing today, accelerated by the deterioration of authenticity on the internet. Today authenticity is validated in physical spaces, and these are documented by party photographers, small magazines, and Instagram pages, which now function as real-time archives of scenes.

Contemporary photographers like Simran Kaur, Stolen Besos, and Matt Weinberger are capturing some of the most compelling snapshots of contemporary culture, documenting everything from Paris Fashion Week events for Enfants Riches Déprimés and Anne Demeulemeester, to alt-literature magazine openings like Heavy Traffic, to niche curated shows like those run by The 1989 and John Richmond.

Underlying these shifts is a new blogging infrastructure that is much more accessible than it was in the 2000s. Running a blog no longer requires technical knowledge and costly infrastructure. Platforms like Substack, Instagram, and Discord allow anyone to build a media outlet instantly for free. Substack in particular has revived long-form independent publishing, enabling writers who once relied on magazines to build their own readerships and income directly. This has effectively recreated the conditions of the blog era, but with more accessible tools and larger potential audiences.

There is also a generational dimension to the blog revival. The people now shaping culture in their twenties and early thirties grew up during Tumblr and the blog era. Many are now writers, DJs, photographers, designers, and editors whose cultural instincts were shaped in a period of decentralized discovery and niche online communities. As they gain influence, they naturally recreate the media environments that shaped them.

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People often say the First Blog Era ‘died.’ But really, it was buried, temporarily overshadowed by the scale and efficiency of streaming platforms and algorithmic feeds. Now, those same human desires that gave us MP3 sharing blogs are driving a new media ecosystem defined by Instagram archive pages, niche newsletters, independent magazines, and scene photographers. Discovery is becoming decentralized again, and taste and individuality have been reprioritized. In many ways, today’s internet resembles an earlier form, just with larger infrastructure.

Big tech is convinced that taste will be the defining skill of the future, and they’re attempting to convince audiences that it’s one that AI can possess. In reality, tastemaking remains an inherently human instinct. Audiences can still distinguish what genuinely resonates from what feels manufactured. The rise of the Second Blog Era confirms this.

AI and algorithms will undoubtedly shape the future of culture. But for creatives, the patterns outlined here should be reassuring. Platforms come and go, and commercial interests will always have their say, but taste is not replaceable.

Written by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

Today’s Important Headlines

Reviews are in: The Whitney Biennial fell flat

Critics say this year’s Whitney Biennial lacks a clear point of view, with many pointing to its avoidance of political themes. The New Yorker described the work as “ChatGPT art,” citing a disconnect between the pieces and their makers. The response raises a broader question about whether art needs authorship or politics to resonate, though generational differences may be shaping the divide.

Spotify’s new feature lets you see who sampled who

Spotify has launched SONGDNA, a feature that shows the full chain of samples and interpolations behind any track, along with expanded credits for producers, writers, and collaborators. The update follows Spotify’s recent acquisition of WhoSampled and marks a major step toward giving proper recognition to the full ecosystem of contributors behind a song.

Art Basel comes to Hong Kong this weekend

Despite supply chain disruptions tied to conflict in the Middle East, Art Basel Hong Kong will host 240 galleries from 41 countries and territories, alongside an unprecedented six satellite fairs and a Joan Mitchell painting that stands as the highest-valued work Sotheby’s has ever brought to the Asian market. Our must-sees include Zero 10, a digital-era art collection; Lap-See Lam’s Asian gallery solo debut Bamboo Palace, Revisited; Remembrance: A Tribute to the Work of Dinh Q. Lê; and In Pursuit of Naïveté: Fang Zhaoling’s Journey.

Grimes and Meek Mill are now on LinkedIn

After a week of tweeting about Claude and saying he needed to use Palantir “for like an hour,” Meek Mill has created a LinkedIn profile, saying he wants to connect with real people and further his brand and business. Grimes, who announced a year ago that she would only release music on LinkedIn has finally joined the platform. Her bio highlights her work as an artist, her interest in AI, and her claim that she “set the NFT world on fire” with her 2021 WarNymph Collection Vol. 1. Neither are close to hitting the coveted 500+ connections.

Music collective highlight: Asian Paper

UK-based South Asian collective Asian Paper is up next, blending electroclash with South Asian influences and samples. From The Twins, check out “holding on” featuring RADA, “FUCKERSBY” featuring fakemink, and “TUMERIC.” From amil raja, start with “i like you around” and “st mary’s triangle.”

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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Today’s Important Headlines

A new aesthetic is taking over underground rap covers

Paying homage to metal and psychedelic aesthetics, a growing number of recent underground rap covers, including projects from Che, Osamason, Nine Vicious, and others, feature colorful, maximalist collages filled with demonic, occult, and spiritual imagery. Recurring motifs include eyes, spirits, fantastical creatures, swords, and blood, with some online describing the visuals as reminiscent of a salvia or NyQuil induced hallucination.

You can now play any location on Earth as a Minecraft map

The tool, Arnis, is free and can generate areas as large as your computer’s memory allows. Using community-contributed OpenStreetMap data, it builds highly accurate Minecraft maps including streets, buildings, and vegetation without any AI. The project is distinct from the long-running BuildTheEarth initiative, a manual effort started in 2020 where Minecraft players aim to recreate the entire Earth block by block.

Developing footwear trend: shoes that change color

Shoes that evolve with wear are gaining traction. This shift reflects a growing preference for visible wear as a sign of quality and longevity, pushing back against fast fashion. Puma has introduced two colorways, Midnight and Ombré, featuring patent leather that gradually fades. Clarks’ Wallabees take a similar approach, revealing three layered colors as the leather upper wears in. ASICS has also released white skate shoes that slowly turn blue with use.

Two highly anticipated new art museums are opening this week

In Tokyo, MoN Takanawa: The Museum of Narratives opens Saturday, March 28, centered around a highly interactive experience blending digital media, music, animation, and live performance, with new seasonal themes introduced twice a year. In New York, The New Museum just unveiled its expansion this weekend. Designed by Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, the renovation doubles its space with a 60,000-square-foot, three-floor addition that brings new galleries, programs, and more.

Lana Del Rey and Ethel Cain are beefing

After an Atlanta venue promoted an “Ethel Cain vs. Lana Del Rey Drag Brunch,” Lana Del Rey commented, “Sadly, none of this is funny. She’s abusive and that’s all there is to it.” The remark adds to a series of recent jabs, including accusations of body shaming and a diss in a snippet from her upcoming album. The feud is also reportedly tied to personal tensions involving Jack Donoghue of SALEM, Del Rey’s ex-boyfriend and a friend of Cain.

British Navy submariners are rolling on ecstasy while deployed 1000 feet deep on nuclear submarines

More than 170 UK nuclear submarine personnel have tested positive for substances including cocaine, cannabis, ecstasy, benzodiazepines, and steroids over the past seven years. The rise is attributed to shifting attitudes toward drugs as well as their use as a coping mechanism for the pressures of military life. These submarines carry the UK’s most powerful weapons: Trident II nuclear missiles.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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Simone Decker’s giant chewing gum in Venice was actually tiny pieces staged for the camera (1999)

In ‘Chewing in Venice,’ she placed small pieces of gum close to the lens and photographed them against buildings, using forced perspective to make them look massive. The work was shown at the 1999 Venice Biennale and only exists in the photograph.

Today’s Important Headlines

Trespasser destroys famed Chihuly sculptures

After breaking into the Seattle Center museum, a 40 year old man shattered $240,000 worth of artwork by celebrated glassblower Dale Chihuly. Reportedly the man also threw glass shards at the security guards, even attempting to stab a guard. There were luckily no injuries. While it is planned to be replaced, whether the pieces will be entirely new Chihuly creations remains to be seen.

Kiko Kostadinov’s Dr. Martens collab just dropped

Kiko Kostadinov’s latest collaboration with Dr. Martens deconstructs the brand’s iconic Oxford into a Mary Jane, radically flipping the silhouette in typical Kiko fashion. The women’s version features a scaly yellow pattern throughout, accented by hints of muted green leather patina, triple-contrast stitching, and a Kiko Kostadinov women’s dog tag. The men’s version takes a more restrained approach, featuring a matte black construction with an oversized strap, reminiscent of Margiela Futures, replacing the traditional lace box. They drop in Japan and Korea today.

Elijah Wood is DJing a Lord of The Rings rave

Celebrating 25 years since the first Lord of The Rings movie’s release, Elijah Wood is spinning a vinyl-only set at a sold out Denver venue alongside his longtime DJ partner Zach Cowie. Going by the name Wooden Wisdom, the duo has been performing together for over 15 years. Check out a 2015 set from them here.

Earl Sweatshirt hid RSVPs to a secret show in this website

After releasing two singles from their upcoming project with SURF GANG, the group quietly embedded three RSVP links for intimate shows in New York, LA, and London within the project’s website. The site features artwork by California sculptor Sharif Farrag, who created the visuals for the entire rollout. Hidden within the mural are clickable elements that unlock each show: a clock for London, a man in a black shirt for New York, and a snake for LA. (Here’s the cheat sheet.)

Morbid bidding war for Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s Prada jacket drove price up to $192K

Following an intense 29 person bidding war, the jacket blew the initial $15K-$30K initial estimate out of the water, propelled by the massive cultural moment and popularity of Love Story, the anthology series documenting the relationship between Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and JFK Jr. The sale of the jacket has raised questions regarding the blurred ethical lines between archiving fashion and profiting off of the legacy of a notoriously private woman.

RIP Chuck Norris

Iconic actor and martial artist Chuck Norris has died at 86. Best known for the television show Walker, Texas Ranger and films like The Delta Force and Missing in Action, he also became a defining figure of early 2010s internet culture through viral memes about his invincibility. He passed away in Hawaii after being hospitalized earlier this week.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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Today’s inspiration supplement. Click through to view.

From The Archive

An extra piece of content from the Welcome Archive for Magazine subscribers only.

Microsoft Wine Guide (1997)

In 1997, Microsoft released a cd rom that organized wines by region, with basic tasting notes and food pairings, as part of its early multimedia reference software.

The program included video clips, glossary entries, and searchable categories, and was designed to run on windows 95 with standard cd rom drives of the time.

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Design role creating digital campaigns and visual content across platforms, ideal for a detail-oriented creative with experience in editorial design, storytelling, and strong technical design skills.
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Senior design role within UNIQLO’s R&D department developing a diverse array of products across various categories, ideal for an experienced menswear designer with strong product development skills, cross-functional collaboration experience, and the ability to take concepts from idea to production.

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Today’s Important Headlines

The most powerful playlist in the world is inside GTA VI

The GTA series has long had the ability to transform niche tracks into streaming hits by putting its hundreds of millions of players onto new music through its in-game radio curated by artists like Frank Ocean, Vegyn, Cara Delevingne, and Flying Lotus. That influence is already evident in GTA VI’s trailers: “Love Is a Long Road” by Tom Petty surged 37,000% after the first trailer, while “Hot Together” by The Pointer Sisters jumped 182,000% within hours of the second. A placement in GTA VI won’t just revive songs, it could redefine careers.

One of the most expensive paintings ever, unseen for over a decade, is now public

Public viewings of Three Studies of Lucian Freud, a portrait of Lucian Freud by his longtime friend and rival Francis Bacon, have been exceedingly rare since its $142.4 million sale in 2013, which made it one of the most expensive artworks ever sold at auction. The triptych, whose panels were separated for 15 years after its creation, will become the first work by Bacon to enter the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

John Galliano will rework Zara’s “archives”

The experimental designer will rework the brand’s so-called “archives,” a term rarely, if ever, associated with Zara, into a series of seasonal collections. John Galliano’s partnership signals a more troubling rise in high fashion designers aligning with fast fashion, from Glenn Martens and Mugler at H&M, and JW Anderson at Uniqlo. Together, these collaborations raise deeper questions around luxury and sustainability, and whether economic incentive is beginning to outweigh ethical responsibility in fashion.

The US. Mint removed the olive branch from the dime.

When unveiling new dime designs to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, one omission stood out: the absence of an olive branch in the bald eagle’s talons. Its removal is difficult to read as accidental, given that Charles Thomson, who helped define the symbol, described the olive branch as representing the power of peace. Beyond the dime, the rest of the coin series has also been redesigned, marking the most significant overhaul since the United States’s 1976 Bicentennial.

We’ve all been training AI for free

Recent reports show that for years mundane internet actions, like catching Pokémon or logging into websites, have been being used to generate training data for AI systems. Pokémon GO players helped build hyper-precise mapping models now used by robotics companies, while reCAPTCHA turned everyday log-ins into billions of hours of unpaid data labeling to train self driving Waymos. Together, these systems reveal how such widespread digital experiences have doubled as invisible labor pipelines, raising deeper questions about consent, the surveillance state, and who ultimately benefits from the data we produce.

Headline curation and words by Mikail Haroon (@mvkail)

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Today’s inspiration supplement. Click through to view.

From The Archive

An extra piece of content from the Welcome Archive for Magazine subscribers only.

Yoshikazu Ebisu ads from back covers of Garo