Antonym Declassified Toilet Roll Edition
Antonym Declassified Toilet Roll Edition
Dear Reader
Sometimes things happen, and sometimes things happen all at once.
—Steven Pinker, interviewed on The Today Programme this week.
This a week when history was dancing like a massed ensemble of acrobats and breakdancers in the same Olympic arena, when suddenly the crowd decided to join in. Loitering drones blew up a Russian airbase, there was an attempt on Salman Rushdie’s life, and a former President of the United States was raided by the FBI for keeping top secret intelligence, possibly about nuclear weapons and one about “the President of France” (source: NBC).
As Taylor Swift said: “You need to calm down.” With that in mind, here follows some fripperies and delights. Mostly.
Wine trends
The Queen of non-nonsense wine advice, Jancis Robinson, gave an interview to the FT Weekend podcast that’s a respectful 15 minutes long and runs us through the trends in the wine industry. Including things like:
Amphoras and concrete are in, oak is out.
Armenia and Eastern Europe are rising in popularity.
Because of climate change, weaker, paler, more acidic wines are growing in popularity.
Also a perfect short holiday read or gift, Jancis Robinson’s The 24-House Wine Expert is a short, practical guide to wine for the layperson that busts myths and focuses on telling what you need to know to buy and enjoy a decent wine at a reasonable price.
Fun factories
This Twitter account features short videos of manufacturing everyday objects. By turns mildly fascinating, relaxing and mesmerising. Below is how suitcases are made. Other favourites include pasta (always watchable), coathangers, bus seats and chain-link fencing.
Meanwhile at TikTok
You don’t have to go to the US to monetise misogyny and high-earning hate. Reality TV contestant and former kickboxer Andrew Tate has been gaming the TikTok algorithm to rake in cash from disaffected dumbasses:
The coordinated effort, involving thousands of members of Tate’s private online academy Hustler’s University and a network of copycat accounts on TikTok, has been described by experts as a “blatant attempt to manipulate the algorithm” and artificially boost his content. In less than three months, the strategy has earned him a huge following online and potentially made him millions of pounds, with 127,000 members now paying the £39 a month to join Hustler’s University community, many of them men and boys from the UK and US.
— The Guardian | Inside the violent, misogynistic world of TikTok’s new star, Andrew Tate
And in the Chinese social media company’s London office, things are not as much fun as members of the fast-growing team there might have hoped:
A Financial Times investigation in June revealed dozens of workers had left TikTok’s London office since the beginning of this year, with some reporting working 12 hours a day or being demoted after taking leave. Joshua Ma, the ByteDance executive in charge of its ecommerce expansion in Europe, stepped down after the FT revealed he had told London-based employees he “didn’t believe” in maternity leave.
And, according to the FT, things have got worse since then:
Staff named on the so-called “kill list” would have their roles changed, to tasks they were not experienced or trained in, multiple employees said.
If they don’t like you, they gaslight you or make your job untenable, [they] take away your work,” said another recent former employee. Seven other employees told the FT they had similar experiences.
For all the talk of Gen Z being all about the purpose-driven brands and all, I’ve yet to hear anyone mention event he possibility of going elsewhere. TikTok has much of the world in its algorithmic thrall.
Why (and how) to turn your PowerPoints into GIFs.
We may be fans of GIFs. Fun! We may be Gif-avoidant. Too many!
But it's easy to overlook their usefulness for giving a preview of a presentation either to promote it or just to help colleagues get a sense of what's in it. It may be useful; to judge a book by its cover, but many corporate presentations look so similar from the front page that a preview image may as well not exist.
There's a second way they can be useful. Watching your own presentation in speeded up GIF form can give you a sense of its flow and feel. You may get a sense you have missed how long it takes to get the fun stuff, or how it is too text-heavy for its intended use.
By the way, if presenting slides is a part of your life at all, buy — in hard copy — Everything I Know About Life I Learned From PowerPoint. It's a fresh and delightful look at the development, use and arguments about one of the most powerful and under-appreciated forms of media of the last 100 years: the slide deck.
Succession series four
Reductress has some useful advice for Succession fans depressed by the realisation it could be next year before they see another season.
Optimists say late 2022 or early 2023 for the new series.
This week I’ve been…
Reading
Finished The Searcher by Tana French. The best!
Started Ducks, Newburyport. One sentence, 1,000 pages or 48 hours of audio.
Watching
The Sandman (Netflix) is surprisingly good. Surprising because some of the other adaptations of Neil Gaiman have not worked for me. The first episode did some deft storytelling and looked great.
Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99 (Netflix). A weird documentary in three parts about a hardrock rebadging of the 1969 love-and-peace fest. There’s a management case study in there somewhere where high minded purpose left-hand doesn’t pay any attention to the venal commercial right-hand and years later, on reflection, none of them players in a totally avoidable disaster feel any regret whatsoever about their part in it. There’s a tenuous link to Me-Too thrown in at the end.
And that’s it for this week
Antonym’s going to be away for a couple of weeks for some expert mandated rest and recovery. I suggest you do the same… If August is “the silly season” for news, goodness only knows what September will bring.
Antony