The Victoria’s Secret show belongs to a chauvinist past – new statesman
Despite the internet’s upbeat reaction to the return of Victoria Secret’s fashion show, the lingerie company’s attempt to revive its iconic runway moment seems to have fallen flat. In this article, Zoë Huxford reminds us of the brand’s questionable values throughout the 2000s, pointing our how incompatible these are with today’s world. “No longer able to sell the priapic fantasies of old men, Victoria’s Secret has little to say,” she writes.
The next chapter of Swarovski’s ‘pop luxury’ turnaround – business of fashion
Swarovski called upon pop princess and Wicked witch Ariana Grande for their latest campaign, hoping that her inclusion will bring ‘warmth and accessibility’ to the brand as it strives towards hallmarks like ‘joyful extravagance’ and ‘pop luxury’. Via its creative crystal collections, the brand is looking to attract a fun, design-driven clientele. This will allow the expansion of its lab grown diamond collections to carry the sector of higher end pieces.
AI slop is flooding Medium – wired
Should we be worried that people are using apps like ChatGPT to create content for their paid blogs? Looking at almost 275,000 articles published on its platform over a six-week period, Medium estimated that over 47 percent were likely AI-generated. Though the company says human moderation combined with an automatic spam filter is helping to keep these pieces off our main feeds, it doesn’t stop them from being posted. But Medium’s CEO says if no one is reading them, it doesn’t really matter.
The problem with AI playlists on Spotify – thred.
What happened to all the human-made Spotify playlists, brimming with undiscovered tracks? How about the stream of recommended songs that exposed us to artists we’d never heard of? Oh, that’s right, Artificial Intelligence ate them. Despite this weakened user experience, Spotify is charging more than ever for its monthly subscription. Are new algorithmic features (like AI DJ and AI-made playlists) worth losing out on enhanced exposure to various genres and cultures?
More than 1 in 3 tree species worldwide faces extinction – euronews
The IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species now includes a majority of the world’s tree species. Shockingly, the number of threatened trees is ‘more than double the number of all threatened birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians combined.’ Why should we care? Well, we are heavily dependent on trees, with more than 5,000 species on the Red List used for timber and over 2,000 species used for medicine, food, and fuels.
On peanut butter – from the desk of alicia kennedy / substack
I love natural peanut butter and so does Alicia. The majority of consumers in the US don’t though, simply because they don’t want to have to stir the jar before scooping it out. This piece highlights how our engrained ‘preferences’ (which are, in the case of peanut butter, mainly rooted selfishness and laziness) are nothing but privilege – and why it might be worth changing our own minds.
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