Catholicism is back baby.

The Knicks giving me hope in sports again.

Mexico paid $20 million for eight minutes in this movie. Then those eight minutes forced them to invent an entire cultural tradition. Before Spectre, Mexico City had no Day of the Dead parade. The holiday was celebrated at home, at cemeteries, with family altars. Quiet, intimate, centuries old. Sam Mendes fabricated a massive street parade for the opening sequence, shot it with 1,500 extras in skeleton costumes across the Zócalo, and audiences worldwide assumed they were watching a real annual event. Mexico's government had negotiated hard for the placement. Leaked Sony hack emails showed officials offered up to $20 million in tax incentives for four minutes of positive portrayal. Sony was drowning in a $300 million budget. The deal included script changes: the Bond girl had to be a Mexican actress, the villain could not be Mexican, and the city's modern skyline had to appear on screen. Then the movie opened in 182 countries and tourists started booking flights to Mexico City for the parade. The parade that did not exist. Tourism authorities panicked. Visitors were arriving expecting the spectacle they saw in the film and finding nothing. So in October 2016, the government spent $500,000, hired 650 volunteers, built dozens of floats and giant skeleton marionettes, and staged the first real Día de los Muertos parade in Mexico City's history. 250,000 people showed up. They openly called it a "Spectre-style parade" in press materials. Ten years later, the parade draws millions. Anthropologists call it the "pizza effect," where a cultural element gets exported, transformed abroad, and reimported as authentic. Mexico's most famous public celebration of its most sacred holiday was invented by a British director shooting a $300 million spy movie. That tracking shot is doing more for Mexico City's economy every November than the $20 million they paid for it.

Teenagers have started calling AI art "boomer art" and consider it cringe, and YouTubers have stopped using AI-generated thumbnails because teenagers find them cringe and won't click on them. I honestly couldn't be happier.

Thanks to the @oasishealthapp I’ve switched from poisonous FairLife Protein Milk to Bourbon and I can’t even begin to explain how much healthier I feel.

Beautiful first outing from Tong.

I genuinely don’t believe anyone wants hyperpersonalized media. People YEARN for communal viewing. Barbenheimer. Game of Thrones. Heated Rivalry. Part of the thrill is other people experiencing it with us. We should be bringing back appointment tv and 90 day theatrical releases

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

TYRONE HAS CITI FIELD GOING CRAZY! 😤

After several years of declining search traffic, Condé Nast CEO @rogerlynch has directed all the company's brands to operate as if search traffic to their properties will be zero. He says the era of turning search and social media traffic into profitable businesses is gone. And that if you run a media business that doesn't have an authoritative brand, a very strong niche, or a direct audience, you're going to be fighting hostile algo changes all the way down. He describes a recent board meeting: "We took a snapshot of search results from seven or eight years ago. And what you saw were a few sponsored links, then the ten blue links." "Do the same search today, you get an AI overview, then you get rows and rows and rows of commerce links, then you get sponsored stuff." "Each of the last three years, we would do our budgets, and we'd put forecasts in of search traffic declining. Because we'd seen the pattern of algorithm changes. And generally those algorithm changes were negative." "Every year, our search traffic was down more than we had forecast. So last year I told our teams, 'Assume there's no search.' You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero. We don't expect it to be zero, we expect it to be a single-digit percentage of our traffic."

Attenborough has no respect for crabs. Always gives them ridiculous music. They are jesters to him

Heron Preston says streetwear is no longer a subculture

honestly fascinating.

Revenues of Fabric Social passed €15m as it sells to Publicis Groupe UK thecurrency.news/articles/22…

I can't do the Mets anymore. My God.

ten Ls in a row.

American men are more likely to have gambling debt than to have read a book in the last year.