“Reality TV became so fake that people wanted real reality,” Ms. Goddard said, trying to explain her appeal. “Not from someone who’s a multimillionaire, from somebody they feel they can almost touch.”
This New York Times profile on ‘Snapchat royalty’ YesJulz is a perfect mix of story and theory. We learn about YesJulz, yes, but we learn more about Snapchat and our evolving, confusing relationship with media. The quote I included above is just one of many that suggest some of the deeper truths of why people love Snapchat so much.
Justin Davis managed to write an article about the future of New York City that was neither a cotton-candy-if-you-can-make-it-there love letter to the city nor a millennials-ruin-everything burn piece.
Davis takes a nuanced look at impact of the tech industry on diversifying boroughs, mentions potentially evolving immigration policies, and even details the benefits of parent-subsidized young artists in Brooklyn. His thorough exploration of how a future New York could could operate mimics the chaotic experience of actually being in New York City.
Over the past decade, gentrification represented a swing of the pendulum; the art, culture, and opportunity of big cities like New York and San Francisco drawing young, educated and increasingly upper-middle-class people back from the suburbs their parents and grandparents fled to half a century ago in pursuit of the American dream.
But now the crowds drawn to those cities wish to escape them, looking for their next font of hollowed-out, manufacturing-era authenticity to wear as their new shell. And the Rust Belt towns, seeing an opportunity to brush off the dust that’s accumulated over the past couple of decades, are more than willing to accommodate them.
Selected by Brian Maehl, talent development manager
“We’re simply getting more and more used to the digital manipulation of everything we see through our phones’ screens.”
If you’ve paid attention in the past 24 hours, you’ll know that the Pokémon Go app has launched, satisfying the fantasies of both new and old fans. Like countless millennials, I too used to play my GameBoy under the covers trying to become a master trainer. Now I can simply head to SweetGreen for lunch and catch a Squirtle.
Fast Company takes a look at what this means, not just for my nerd fantasies, but for augmented reality as a whole. Today, it’s Pokémon—but what comes tomorrow? I’m starting to feel like we’re not too far off from the humans in Wall-E floating around on chairs becoming a reality.
First up, props to everything Molly McHugh is writing for The Ringer. (Molly, if you’re reading this because you have a Google alert for your own name, I will pay you all the money to freelance for us.)
This examination of a short-lived site called PostGhost, and the promise of what an edit button for Twitter would mean, is pretty fascinating. It also dovetails with a larger question brought up by Snapchat’s release of Memories: How much should social media be raw and unrefined? How polished do we want everything to be? And is every social network destined to become Facebook?
