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and how does that make you feel?
Hello everybody 
Hope your week is off to a gorgeous start. It’s now the moment you’ve all been waiting for: newsletter day!
In this week’s edition we’ll be looking at how AI is reshaping society’s beauty standards, a very Trump-like response to the current global market chaos, an emerging IVF alternative, and some other wonderful stories woven throughout.
Let’s go, shall we?
Media
What are the biggest-selling vinyl releases of the decade so far? – euronews
This Saturday is Record Store Day, so in celebration, the Official Charts Company has released data on the best-selling vinyl albums from the last decade. Unsurprisingly, pop superstar Taylor Swift is dominating the charts. She’s claimed three places in the top 10 vinyls sold list, with albums by Harry Styles, David Bowie, Ed Sheeran, Billie Eilish, and Tame Impala keeping her company. The stats for 2025’s record sales are also included – and a bit more varied.
Your TV is watching you – vox
Roku, Amazon, and virtually every other streaming company are working to invent new ways to collect and make money off your data. More and more, TVs are being programmed to harvest data about their owner’s watching habits (sometimes by monitoring whatever is on the screen) and use this information to serve up personalised ads on the TV or elsewhere. Let’s face it, ads are here to stay, will likely to increase in numbers, and will soon become even more targeted towards your tastes. How you feel about it depends a lot on your mindset and feelings about privacy.
Society
I don’t dream of marriage or motherhood. – so… now what? (via substack)
The expectation that women have dreamt of their wedding day and having children their entire lives is so deeply engrained into society that when a woman reveals they don’t want either, everyone’s left either astonished or clutching their pearls. Written by Simi, this article describes what it’s like to dream of a different life – one that is just as meaningful and full of a different kind of love and care. It’s an important piece because this perspective is often taken for granted, overshadowed by the white picket fence ideal.
Reclaim imperfect faces – atlantic
For those of us who are too afraid to go under the knife, technology offers us the ability to change the way we look using social media filters and other photo-editing tools. Editing photos, as it turns out, is as common as breathing these days. But emerging AI software, trained by a plethora of these digitally altered online images, are clearly changing our sense of how we should look – and that’s not a good thing. “Given the ability to amend our own faces, we’ve helped normalize and propagate a horribly restrictive vision of beauty and humankind, and the more we distort ourselves in turn, the more confining the ideal becomes,” Sophie Gilbert writes. What happens when we lose sight of the blueprint?
World
The Israeli government has backtracked on its story after video footage from a dead paramedic’s phone showed that a group of 15 medics recently killed in Gaza were driving in clearly marked ambulances with their emergency lights flashing. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) initially said its soldiers ‘did not randomly attack’ any ambulances, insisting they fired on ‘terrorists’ that were approaching in ‘suspicious vehicles’. Autopsies conducted by The Red Crescent have shown that the paramedics shot in the upper body with ‘intent to kill’. Even Israel’s closest allies are questioning the motives of Israel now, raising calls for an urgent investigation into the army’s actions.
Market carnage goes global – economist
Steep tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump on April 2nd (and the trade war that has followed) is causing carnage. Is Mr Trump bothered? Well, two days later he reposted a video to Truth Social claiming that he was crashing the stock market ‘on purpose’ in order to lower government-bond yields and allow public debt to be refinanced more cheaply. On his way back to Washington after a golfing weekend in Florida, Trump was asked if there was a threshold of market pain he was unwilling to tolerate, or rather, whether there was ‘a Trump put?’ to which he replied: ‘I think your question is so stupid.’
Health
New York-based startup Gameto is aiming to ease this burden for patients looking to have a child. Their method includes maturing eggs outside the body, replacing 80 percent of the hormone injections needed for traditional IVF. It will also shorten the length of a treatment cycle to just a few days. With Gameto’s method, patients take an initial two to three days of hormones, then undergo egg retrieval. The eggs are incubated with ovarian support cells for about 30 hours. By reducing the amount of drugs and time to egg retrieval, Gameto is aiming to make it easier for patients to freeze their eggs and have babies. The approach has already led to one live birth in Peru, announced in December.
The internet wants to convince you that you’re unwell – thred
When did we become so obsessed with hitting every possible nutrition gap every single day? Is consuming this many vitamins and minerals on a daily basis even necessary for maintaining our prolonged wellbeing? Our ancestors would likely say it isn’t, having lived on a limited selection fruits and vegetables which they ate according to each season. But between the ‘natural’ supplements, sea moss gels, hydration sachets, kefir drinks, and probiotic sodas being pedalled everywhere you look, it can be difficult to remember that there’s nothing more unnatural than obsessive over loading your body up with every possible nutrient every single day.
Recommendation
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