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In 1979, an article by Blake Fleetwood in the Times Magazine reported a surprising phenomenon: young people were moving to big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. This was news because America’s metropolises, New York especially, had been given up for dead, gutted by white flight, a deteriorating economic base, and financial mismanagement. In the nineteen-seventies, New York had lost eight hundred thousand people, ten per cent of its population. Yet the evidence suggested, Fleetwood wrote, “that the New York of the 80’s and 90’s will no longer be a magnet for the poor and the homeless, but a city primarily for the ambitious and educated—an urban elite.” It was an uncannily accurate call.
Those “ambitious and educated” gentrifiers were the young urban professionals, the yuppies. The term first appeared in print in 1980, in a Chicago magazine piece by Dan Rottenberg. Rottenberg said that he had heard the word being used around Chicago, possibly in real-estate circles, but, wherever it came from, “yuppie” was an inspired coinage, in an etymological line of descent from “hippie,” “Yippie,” and “preppie,” a similarly irresistible neologism.
After the word appeared in a Chicago Tribune column by Bob Greene, in 1983, “yuppie” took off. (Greene, too, claimed that he had heard it from someone else.) The column was syndicated in two hundred newspapers, and, overnight, the world turned yuppie. Gary Hart, running for President in the Democratic primaries, was the yuppie candidate. Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” was the yuppie novel. Lawrence Kasdan’s “The Big Chill” was the yuppie movie. Madonna’s “Material Girl”—“The boy with the cold hard cash / Is always Mister Right”—was the yuppie anthem.
Presiding over it all was Ronald Reagan, elected to a second term in 1984. He carried forty-nine states and won the popular vote by eighteen percentage points. But, in a preëlection poll, his margin among eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-olds making more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year (seventy-five thousand today) was twenty-four points. If Reagan was not the yuppie President, he was the yuppies’ President. Newsweek named 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie.”
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Let’s face it, Twitter isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The platform is a lot like a cockroach. It is ugly, skittering, repulsive, and incredibly difficult—despite many efforts—to kill. Elon Musk purchased the network in late 2022, treated its power users with disdain, haphazardly fired much of its workforce, alienated its advertisers, insisted on calling it X, and turned it into a vehicle for an edgelordian political project. People left in droves. And yet somehow, at this moment in 2024, X has the juice.
It’s still a rat’s nest of reckless speculation, angry partisans, and toxicity, but it’s also alive in a way that’s hard to quantify. Joe Biden’s shocking performance at the presidential debate in late June set my timeline ablaze in a way it hadn’t been since 2021. When a gunman shot at Donald Trump eight days ago, the platform did what it does best, offering a mix of conspiracy theorizing, up-to-the-second hard-news reporting, and, perhaps most crucial, a notion of communal spectating (which, despite the awfulness, is genuinely addictive). The past three weeks have been extraordinarily chaotic, full of the kind of infighting, violence, and spectacle that X was built to help document and even fuel. All of that culminated this afternoon when Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the presidential race with a series of posts on the platform. X has always been in the doomscrolling business, and business is booming.
If you step back, though, you may notice how awkward this situation is: Joe Biden chose to make one of the biggest announcements in presidential history on a social-media site owned and operated by one of his opponent’s biggest donors and most vocal supporters. Musk reacted to the news by posting about how his “smartest friends” are voting for Trump and by compulsively replying “Trump/Vance LFG!!” to people on X.
Biden’s staff posted the news on X because they must have understood that, for better or worse, it is the quickest, least mediated way to inject information into the bloodstream of political and cultural discourse. (As Musk remarked about the mainstream media this afternoon: “They’re so slow.”) That X is back to its old ways means journalists, pundits, consultants, lawmakers, and hyper-engaged political hobbyists have all settled back into the familiar pattern of refreshing the app to consume news in the 24-second news cycle. “Among other things this should be the moment that brings all the liberal exiles back to Twitter/X,” the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posted shortly after Biden’s announcement. “Nobody’s ever escaping this platform now.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
Here are some of the TikTok rabbit holes I’ve tumbled down, pleasurably wasting hours and hours of time.
(I regret nothing.)
The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show off massive homes with the house numbers in the font of gentrification. They travel around the world, mostly in first or business class, discussing their enjoyment of champagne and caviar and perfectly cooked fish and sumptuous desserts. They review hotels and lie out on beautiful beaches overlooking crystalline waters. They adventure and ride camels and visit rainforests. The world, for these TikTokkers, is an abundant oyster, from which they pluck pearls of audience engagement.
There is a young woman, Nara Smith, who is a model and influencer married to a model and influencer named Lucky Blue Smith. They are zygotes, relatively speaking, and already have four children (one from Lucky’s previous marriage). Though they rarely say it, they are Mormon (and there are a lot of similar influencers on TikTok). I am chagrined to know this, and yet. … Most days, Nara makes videos, speaking in that ubiquitous monotone people on the platform use, as she makes the most ludicrous things from scratch. She makes her own marshmallows and Turkish pizza and granola and mozzarella cheese. She can make Snickers bars from scratch and ice cream and also chewing gum. Clearly, she is doing this, in part, to mess with her very large audience, who often express bewilderment, admiration, and/or disdain as she appears in her perfectly appointed kitchen and starts cooking while wearing a lacy evening gown or other outfit that is not conducive to cooking. She is selling an enviable lifestyle — one where she is unencumbered by how the dishes are washed or who is tending to the children while she makes her videos, one where the particulars of her financial situation are inscrutable as she surrounds herself with the trappings of conspicuous consumption. Don’t get me started on Ballerina Farm, but it’s a whole thing.
Read the rest of this article at: The Bitter Southerner
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Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has desired to air grievances against those we felt have wronged us: This is not hyperbole, but fact. An almost 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet from the ancient city of Ur gives us Nanni, who writes to copper dealer Ea-nāṣir, accusing him of failing to follow through on a deal, sending him low-grade copper, and treating him poorly. According to one translation, Nanni asks, “What do you take me for?” and demands the ability to select his own copper on his own schedule “because you have treated me with contempt.”
Who can’t relate to Nanni? It feels good to bitch about being ripped off, to snatch back a bit of the power that was taken from you when you were forced to rely on someone else for a service and your needs were not met. The Ea-nāṣirs may insist they are giving you the best, but you, the everyman, know better. You can tell it like it is.
Here’s how Yelp advertised itself in a Thrillist newsletter in 2008:
Value honesty? Trust the everyman? Hit Yelp for user-generated write-ups on pretty much any local business — from bars and restaurants, to pet stores, to haberdashers. If you’ve got your own opinion on an establishment, get on Yelp and add to the chorus of unvarnished opinion. Yelp: Real people, real Swiss chocolate. No, wait, real people, real reviews.
In 2004, former PayPal employees Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman founded Yelp, which has become the ultimate repository for, as they said, “unvarnished” opinions. Stoppelman said he was inspired by the lack of reliable, unbiased information when he was looking for a new doctor. From there, Yelp flourished into a forum for reviews of every kind of business. Almost immediately, however, restaurants — likely the kind of business you frequent most in a given week — became the most popular. Today, 49 percent of all reviews on the site are for restaurants.
The point of Yelp was of course not just to air grievances, but provide recommendations and feedback in general, a group answer to the ultimate question: Is this restaurant worth it? Previously, diners relied on personal recommendations or newspaper reviews, both of which hinge on trusting the opinion, however expert, of a single person. Unlike other existing websites like Citysearch and Chowhound, Yelp seemed to split the difference between straightforward directory and nerdy, niche internet forum, where anyone had the power to bestow stars upon a business. It felt like nothing short of a sea change.
“I remember from the moment of knowing about it, it was like, Yelp is happening, the streets are talking,” says chef Tiffany Derry of Roots Southern Table. Before Yelp, any customer feedback was entirely internal, says Derry, whether it was guests having conversations with managers or sending an email to the restaurant. Now, those critiques were public, bolstered by the law of averages: Dozens, hundreds, thousands of people collectively rating a restaurant — presumably with no skin in the game other than the well-being of their fellow diners — can’t be wrong.
Read the rest of this article at: Eater
Almost every US president has been inaugurated in a Brooks Brothers suit. Civil War soldiers were outfitted in the brand. Hollywood costume designers consistently turned to Brooks Brothers’ archives, whether for The Great Gatsby’s double-breasted waistcoats, the slim 1960s tailoring in Mad Men or the wide lapels of ’80s power suits in Wall Street. But as casual Fridays—and then casual every days—chipped away at suit supremacy, comfort replaced custom tailoring. After a couple of failed ownership changes, the 202-year-old company finally sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection soon after the pandemic shut down offices, obviating the need for pants, let alone sport coats. The only one celebrating? Jamie Salter, ready to pounce on the iconic retailer for a fire-sale price, adding it to his portfolio of famous dead brands.
Since its start in 2010, Salter’s Authentic Brands Group LLC had been stalking troubled retailers and picking through their corporate carcasses for one valuable thing: their name. By the time Salter subsumed Brooks Brothers, he’d already bought Aeropostale, Barneys New York, Forever 21, Frye, Jones New York, Nine West and Volcom, disassembling and resurrecting them into hundreds of products. It was a business model with little overhead: Authentic purchases a store chain’s intellectual property, usually for somewhere in the low-mid nine figures, and finds contractors to do the design, manufacturing and pretty much everything else but marketing. That way it gets brands that every shopper knows without taking on all the debt, rent and headcount that sank said brands. By the end of the pandemic, Authentic had devoured a mall’s worth of zombie brands, including Eddie Bauer, Izod, Lucky Brand, Van Heusen and part of JCPenney.
The feast was years in the making. Well before Covid-19 decimated foot traffic and Amazon.com seduced shoppers, the private equity industry had ravaged retail through leveraged buyouts that left many too heavily indebted and eventually needing to file for bankruptcy. “People thought the value of a bankrupt brand was zero,” Salter says. “But why would it be zero? So I came up with a strategy to put a value on it.”
Authentic, which Salter says was valued at about $17 billion this year, now owns more than 50 brands and is the third-largest licensor of IP after Walt Disney Co. and media conglomerate Meredith Corp. Its portfolio generates more than $29 billion in annual retail sales, according to the company, which collects a guaranteed minimum royalty of about 5% of each licensee’s annual estimated sales, even if they don’t hit those numbers. But even with those kinds of numbers, Salter, a feisty extrovert with a habit of making midnight brainstorming calls to his business partners, doesn’t want to be a bottom-feeder forever.
During the past four years, Authentic has pushed beyond bankrupt brands into bigger deals, more countries, healthier targets and entirely new industries. The shift began in 2019 with its purchase of Sports Illustrated. Two years later, Salter made his biggest acquisition yet, buying Reebok International Ltd.—fading, though hardly on its deathbed—for $2.5 billion from Adidas AG. Soon after, he bought a majority stake in David Beckham’s lifestyle brand for about $269 million in a deal that made the soccer star a top Authentic shareholder, alongside fellow celebrity-entrepreneur Shaquille O’Neal. Last month, Authentic announced it would continue chasing massive sports-related deals, buying Champion from Hanesbrands Inc. for $1.2 billion. “This was his vision,” Beckham says of Salter’s desire to be a sports and entertainment mogul. “And if me and Shaq have played a little bit of a part in that, well, then that was always the plan on Jamie’s side.”
Read the rest of this article at: Bloomberg
