and how does that make you feel?
Hello everybody
Hope your week is off to a gorgeous start. Itโs now the moment youโve all been waiting for: newsletter day!
In this weekโs edition weโll be looking at how AI is reshaping societyโs beauty standards, a very Trump-like response to the current global market chaos, an emerging IVF alternative, and some other wonderful stories woven throughout.
Letโs go, shall we?
Media
What are the biggest-selling vinyl releases of the decade so far? โ 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. Sheโs 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 2025โs record sales are also included โ and a bit more varied.
Your TV is watching you โ 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 ownerโs watching habits (sometimes by monitoring whatever is on the screen) and use this information to serve up personalised ads on the TV or elsewhere. Letโs 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 donโt dream of marriage or motherhood. โ soโฆ 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 donโt want either, everyoneโs left either astonished or clutching their pearls. Written by Simi, this article describes what itโs like to dream of a different life โ one that is just as meaningful and full of a different kind of love and care. Itโs an important piece because this perspective is often taken for granted, overshadowed by the white picket fence ideal.
Reclaim imperfect faces โ 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 โ and thatโs not a good thing. โGiven the ability to amend our own faces, weโve 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,โ 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 paramedicโs 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 โdid not randomly attackโ any ambulances, insisting they fired on โterroristsโ that were approaching in โsuspicious vehiclesโ. Autopsies conducted by The Red Crescent have shown that the paramedics shot in the upper body with โintent to killโ. Even Israelโs closest allies are questioning the motives of Israel now, raising calls for an urgent investigation into the armyโs actions.
Market carnage goes global โ 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 โon purposeโ 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 โa Trump put?โ to which he replied: โI think your question is so stupid.โ
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 Gametoโs 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 youโre unwell โ 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 isnโt, having lived on a limited selection fruits and vegetables which they ate according to each season. But between the โnaturalโ supplements, sea moss gels, hydration sachets, kefir drinks, and probiotic sodas being pedalled everywhere you look, it can be difficult to remember that thereโs nothing more unnatural than obsessive over loading your body up with every possible nutrient every single day.
Recommendation
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