If you’ve been enjoying these curated article summaries that dive into cultural, creative, and technological currents, you may find the discussions and analyses on our Substack page worthwhile as well. There, I explore themes and ideas that often intersect with the subjects covered in the articles I come across during my curation process.
While this curation simply aims to surface compelling pieces, our Substack writings delve deeper into topics that have piqued our curiosity over time. From examining the manifestation of language shaping our reality to unpacking philosophical undercurrents in society, our Substack serves as an outlet to unpack our perspectives on the notable trends and undercurrents reflected in these curated readings.
So if any of the articles here have stoked your intellectual interests, I invite you to carry that engagement over to our Substack, where we discuss related matters in more depth. Consider it an extension of the curation – a space to further engage with the fascinating ideas these pieces have surfaced.
In the fall of 2019, I found myself wandering around Times Square in search of a billboard featuring National Book Award-winner Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel, The Water Dancer. “I’m not sure what street it’s on, but you’ll see it,” the book’s marketer had told me that morning, so there I was, dodging tourists with my head and iPhone turned to the sky. At the time, I ran social media for Random House (Coates’s publisher). We typically celebrated a book’s publication week on the company’s Instagram account by posting a stylized photograph of the finished book, but whenever Oprah Winfrey got involved, as she did by selecting The Water Dancer for her eponymous book club, the publicity, sales, marketing, and advertising plans expanded exponentially. It’s not every day in publishing you get to see Oprah and Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation at the Apollo Theater.
In an industry that sees five hundred thousand to a million new titles published each year in the United States alone, there are very few ways to make a book stand out. In recent years, programmatic celebrity book clubs—mainly Oprah’s Book Club (Oprah Winfrey), Reese’s Book Club (Reese Witherspoon via her media empire, Hello Sunshine), and Read With Jenna (Jenna Bush Hager via the Today show)—have exercised significant influence over which books garner buzz both among readers and within publishing companies, elevating sleepy debut novels to best-seller status and making big books even bigger.
First, a disclaimer to any self-important readers expecting a fiery takedown of the celebrity-book-club format: As someone who wants to see more books in the hands of readers, I am wholeheartedly in support of famous people using their immense clout and privilege to promote books instead of the many other products they could be paid handsomely to endorse. An article built on cynicism for something so overwhelmingly positive would be disingenuous click-bait, and you will not find that here.
But just because these book clubs are a net positive doesn’t mean they’re above investigation or critique. Ever since their rise in the late 2010s, the biggest celebrity book clubs have held immense sway over which titles land on the best-seller lists, and their future has an outsize impact on the commercial publishing industry. In order to better understand how these groups operate, I spoke to the teams behind the scenes, as well as to other publishing-industry insiders.
Read the rest of this article at: Esquire
I was 10 when I first told my folks that I wanted to give up playing tennis. They didn’t yield then, and they never did. Tennis was our family business. I first picked up a racket at the age of three, and spent 15 years of my life travelling the world in pursuit of entry into major tournaments.
I spent all of September 2005 – including my 24th birthday – alone in Switzerland, playing four week-long tournaments back to back. After 20 matches and with two trophies under my belt, I was ready for a rest. But I had already entered a tournament in Edinburgh – not knowing Switzerland would be quite so intense – for my ninth tournament in 10 weeks.
I phoned Mum from the airport in Geneva, telling her I was tired and would skip Edinburgh and fly home instead. She wasn’t having that. “This is your job now, Conor,” she said. “You can’t just not turn up because you’re tired.” I remembered my friend and one-time tennis partner Pat Briaud’s words: “Your parents don’t mess around.” I turned up and made the semi-final, losing a feisty two-and-a-half-hour match to Britain’s Jamie Baker. It was my 24th match in five weeks. Exhausted, I collected my prize money: $480, before 20% tax.
This is your job now, Conor.
There are three tiers in the hierarchy of men’s professional tennis. The ATP Tour is the sport’s top division, the preserve of the top 100 male tennis players in the world. The Challenger Tour is populated mainly by players ranked between 100 and 300 in the world. Below that is the Futures tour, tennis’s vast netherworld of more than 2,000 true prospects and hopeless dreamers.
I wasn’t schlepping my way through the lower ranks of the professional tour for the money or the prestige, both of which were in short supply. I, like everyone else, was there to remove myself from the clutches of the lower tiers. The Futures tour sometimes felt like a circle of hell, but in practical terms it’s better understood as purgatory: a liminal space that exists only to be got out of as quickly as possible.
I had my first closeup of the big time when the main ATP event rolled into San Jose, California for a week while I was a student at Berkeley. I was allowed to sit in the players’ lounge despite the fact that I was not a competitor. Our team had been brought down to the event by our coaches and given access-all-areas passes, with a view to soaking up the atmosphere and gaining inspiration.
All ATP tournaments need big names to draw crowds and media interest, and the top players can make seven figures simply for showing up for the first round. In San Jose, Andre Agassi was the big name. I was sitting in the players’ lounge when I looked up to see him walk past, surrounded by a gaggle of tournament organisers. I felt a surge of adrenaline seeing him up close for the first time. Some things about him were familiar – his brisk walk, pigeon-toed stance and rounded shoulders, as though permanently setting himself to return serve. Some others were unfamiliar. I’d never noticed his vacant gaze before, which was presumably the product of a long-practised avoidance of eyes staring at him.
“Can we get you anything, Andre?” the gaggle circling him asked earnestly. “Uh, sure, I’ll have some water,” he replied half-heartedly, even though he was standing a few paces from a fridge full of bottled water. He wanted to give them something to do. One of them was dispatched and quickly came back with a plastic glass full of chilled water. Andre took a small sip and put it down on the table beside him, the one I was sitting at. He didn’t pick it back up. After a few moments, Andre and his entourage moved on.
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
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In the summer of 2018, staff of the Chicago Tribune awoke to find a story they didn’t recognize on the newspaper’s website. The article, multiple sources say, had something to do with a purse carried by Meghan Markle, the royal also known as the Duchess of Sussex.
Advertisements frequently masquerade as news articles at the bottom of actual journalism — this is the phenomenon some have dubbed “the chumbox.” But this article about Markle’s purse was, in terms of where it was hosted, how it was formatted, and where it was appearing, truly in the Tribune — its online edition, at least. Yet this was not what one would expect to run on the site of one of the most prominent newspapers in the country. It was more suited for a gossip rag or blog, a type of “as seen on celebrities” article pushing product. It clearly did not meet the paper’s editorial standards. (One person with knowledge of the article recalls that Markle’s name was misspelled.)
The piece was pulled down quickly after leadership at the company was alerted to it. When Tribune staff inspected the article in the site’s content management system, they discovered something curious: the piece had been published by BestReviews, a consumer product reviews website whose content was syndicated on the Tribune.
Read the rest of this article at: The Verge
This story I’m about to tell you is true, and it is not in dispute. Alice Munro was a beloved writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the apex of a long career already bent under the weight of its laurels. She died six weeks ago, after a long, degenerative illness, which sometimes reporters called dementia and sometimes they called Alzheimer’s.
It doesn’t matter what illness it was. What matters is that in the decadelong silence that ended Alice’s career, she had become only more beloved. “Our Chekhov,” yes, but one crossed with Marilla Cuthbert or Marmee or any of the other beloved mothers of sentimental fiction. In her last photographs, Alice looked soft, her hair floating white, her skin like cotton fabric washed many times over. The world piled praise on her grave like roses. The whole thing felt so safe.
Then, yesterday, her daughter Andrea wrote in the Toronto Star that Gerald Fremlin, Alice’s second husband, had sexually abused her as a child, that he had not just admitted to it but admitted to it in writing, calling himself “a Humbert Humbert” as though that excused it, and that when confronted with all of this many years later, Alice only briefly left the stepfather and then returned to him.
Andrea says her mother explained “that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men.” After that, Andrea tried to maintain a relationship with Alice, but it proved too difficult to live in such denial. When Andrea went to the police at last in 2005, the stepfather pleaded guilty to indecent assault on a minor. Still, Alice remained with him until his death in 2013. Andrea didn’t speak to her or her siblings for years afterward. Even then, she was able to tell her story only after her mother’s death. She had to wait the better part of her life for the world to listen.
Andrea’s stepmother, the only responsible adult in this scenario, is still alive and told the Toronto Star that “everyone knew” about Alice’s horrible choice to stay with her daughter’s abuser. She says, in fact, that she was asked about it at dinner parties, including by a journalist.
Of course, everyone didn’t know. I didn’t know, and in a world where nearly every reading person, Canadian or not, claims some affinity for Alice, I thought of my claim to “know” her as stronger than most. My roots are in the Ottawa Valley, a place so close to where Alice grew up, and frequently wrote about, that one of her more famous stories is called “The Ottawa Valley.” People often wrote of Alice finding the universal in the specific — well, she found the universal in what often felt like my specific, the white, Protestant, “quiet” rural life my family came from.
Read the rest of this article at: The Cut
In 2015, Josh Sisk, a freelance photographer in Baltimore, picked up a new Fujifilm X100S digital camera for thirteen hundred dollars. He wanted to use it on vacations and road trips, when his full kit of professional cameras and lenses would be too bulky to bring along. The X100S, which débuted in 2013, had a slim body and a fixed-length 35-mm.-equivalent lens that made it convenient to carry; at the same time, its optical viewfinder meant that it functioned more like a traditional film camera—the user looks through glass at reality, not, as with an iPhone, at an image on a screen. The camera also included the option to use “film simulations,” digital filters that made its images look like they had been shot on various types of classic film. Sisk ended up using the X100S constantly and eventually rehabbed it with new batteries, but this year he decided that it was time for an upgrade to the latest model in the line, the X100VI. “I went to my camera shop and asked,” Sisk told me. “They laughed at me: ‘You might get one in 2025.’ ” He hadn’t realized that the cameras had become a hit on TikTok and other social-media platforms. They were completely sold out.
Fujifilm’s X100VI is an upgraded model that was released at the end of February. Its sticker price is $1,599.95, but most retailers have it only on back order, and buying one on the secondary market might cost you twenty-five hundred. In 2023, Fujifilm’s revenue hit “record highs,” according to the company’s earnings reports, boosted significantly by digital cameras. If you spend enough time online, you’ll learn to spot evidence of the devices’ popularity. For the past few summers, I’ve noticed a slew of TikTok influencers posting travel photos from Bali, Lisbon, or the French Riviera featuring deep-orange washes, high-contrast shadows, and fuzzy faux film grain. The images stand in a marked contrast to the cold high-definition photos produced by iPhones on their default setting, an aesthetic that, as I wrote in a 2022 column, many users have come to find alienating. Kostas Garcia, a TikTok creator with more than a hundred and sixty thousand followers, told me, of the X100 series, “You can take these nostalgic-looking film photos but you don’t have the hassle of having to learn film or the process of waiting for your photos.” The cameras provide all of the cache of analog without any of the labor, like a supercharged version of the Instagram filters that were popular in the early twenty-tens.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
