💘HAPPY MONDAY 💘
Today we’re starting with a BIG shout out to the 26 new ✨SYSCA SUPPORTERS✨ who’ve joined us in the last week!
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Happy Monday angels! My weekend was restful as it NEEDED to be (if you saw my latest working day in the life you’ll see that I was trying to squeeze the MOST into my days last week.) Friday night was meant to be one beer and became… kinda huge but incredibly wholesome and cute, so... worth it. I’m also trying to lean into my hangxiety a bit more these days and just accept that I am who I am as a person. It’s just too draining to wake up after every night out (even if you were completely fine) and battle the demons of how loud or affectionate you were the night before, so we are simply gonna start ✨embracing it✨ I think. Needless to say, Saturday was very slow and relaxed. I finally unpacked all my shit from my various trips, washed my sheets, played my guitar and started to make a dent in some of my magazines which have been neglected as I’ve been travelling. Flo also helped me make some TiKToks which was cute, she’s like my consultant on this platform which is exactly what I need!!
Sunday was just as slow but if you’ve been here for a while you’ll remember that I had an 🐜ant🐜 problem in my room a while back (there ain’t even crumbs so idk why they love it so much??) but THEY ARE HERE AGAIN!! So I had a bit of an ant battle, read lots of newsletters (again, my inboxes have been a lil neglected lately) cleaned the bathroom, cooked dinner for the flatties… all that Sunday reset shit that we really need. To break up the day though I went & had lunch with Rubes, Liv and our bestie Abby and we just had one of those much-needed catch-ups where you talk about the same thing you’ve talked about for years, make all the same ‘we’re not gossiping, we’re analyzing’ caveats, reach all the same conclusions, add a little bit of GST every time we re-tell the stories, and it was just exactly what we all needed I think. I love friends and I love you 🥺🥺
Ready to seize the week!
Climate activists fill golf holes with cement after water ban exemption
Plz meet my bestie Dunc, and also listen to our cool pod ep 🥺
Ekin-Su and Davide are getting a travel show!!
Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage
Liv’s leftovers
Climate activists fill golf holes with cement after water ban exemption
This is kinda… really smart. Climate activists in France have been filling golf course holes with cement to protest against the exemption of golf greens from water bans. Yep - you heard me, right now the country is facing a severe drought, but golf courses are still being watered while 100 French villages are short of drinking water. Golf is pretty widely known as the ‘leisure sport of the most privileged,’ so you can see why activists (and no doubt the people living in the villages without drinking water) were pissed!!
Plz meet my bestie Dunc, and also listen to our cool pod ep 🥺
Dunc is my bestie/ mentor/ and incredibly integral yet incredibly behind-the-scenes character in the SYSCA cinematic universe. He’s also the founder of The Spinoff and has a nerdy as hell pod (also my all-time fave) called The Fold which you’re about to hear all about!! I also want him to start writing lil bits in here for you all a bit more often, so give him a warm SYSCAhood welcome 🥺💘
Honestly this is as intimidated as I've been writing in forever. Am a day one newsy subscriber, have read every word of every edish and am deeply invested in the community Luce has built up in this thing (+ in awe of what Liv has done with the look/Culture Vulture and Rubes with making the partnerships pop). But also just super honoured to be ducking my head into the SYSCAverse, alongside Squish and Bel, will occasionally pop up here to geek out over media things because that takes up 98% of my CPU.
I'm sure I'm not alone among readers of the newsy in often thinking over the past few years "something has gone badly wrong with the internet". I first went online in the mid-90s (!!) and talked to Britpop fans in different countries as a teen on bulletin boards, then watched as the internet evolved from this cute alt-y phenom into a machine which ate the world. And at some point it seemed to feel like every cool new thing had been done, and it was all owned by like five massive companies with HQs in northern California. Every few days there seemed to be some new terrible story about what tech was doing to our minds and democracies, and it was just a huge bummer.
Then Luce forwarded me an edition of Digital Native, and suddenly the internet started to seem magical again. It's a Substack written by Rex Woodbury, a 20-something venture capitalist who analyses trends in human behaviour for a living. He catalogued week-to-week profound changes in values and vibe, mostly driven by Gen Z, and both what he saw and how he thought about them legit flipped me back into thinking that maybe the internet might be OK after all. (He also often used incredible analogies to unlock new tech or paradigms, notably flipping me from web3 sceptical to curious thru the strategic deployment of Taylor Swift.)
Luce and I became obsessed with him, and often pinged responses to his latest back-and-forth, until one day I just decided I had to try and speak to this swole brain. I emailed in June, just when the whole VC world was melting down, along with the global economy. Shockingly he agreed to talk to me on my podcast The Fold, (I had Lucy on it a year ago, it was super fun) on the condition that we focus hard on Gen Z. In the spirit of ‘nothing about us without us’ and because I couldn't gatekeep this dude from her, I got Lucy along as a real life Gen Z person. It's out today and I think if you like this newsy then you will enjoy this buzzy geeked out convo.
See you next time Luce lets me chat with you in here!!
Luce note: if this newsy gets clipped you can blame dunc (and just click ‘view entire message’)
Rex Woodbury on all the ways Gen Z is changing the world - The Fold | Podcast on Spotify — open.spotify.com
SRSLY THIS EP IS SO GOOD GO & LISTEN!
Ekin-Su and Davide are getting a travel show!!
We asked and they (ITV2) listened. Our Iconic Love Island couple Ekin-Su and Davide are getting their own travel show where they go on a road trip to Italy and Turkey!! When they were making the announcement, Ekin-Su said:
"It'll be a little bit, you know, a little bit fighting and sort of like I'll be cooking for him and he'll be cooking for me…you know, two cultures."
I personally can’t wait!
Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage
Content warning: the descriptions of what happened are kinda graphic
Author, Salman Rushdie, was stabbed roughly 10 times as he prepared to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York on Friday. The stabbing was apparently both pre-mediated and targeted, and 24-year-old Hadi Matar has been arrested for it.
Rushdie is now off his ventilator and can talk, but his agent has said that he “might lose an eye, his liver had been damaged and the nerves in his arm were severed.”
A lil bit more context from The New York Times:
“Mr. Rushdie had been living under the threat of an assassination attempt since 1989, about six months after the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses.” The book fictionalized parts of the life of the Prophet Muhammad with depictions that offended some Muslims, who believed the novel to be blasphemous. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led Iran after its 1979 revolution, issued an edict known as a fatwa on Feb. 14, 1989. It ordered Muslims to kill Mr. Rushdie.
In 1991, the novel’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death and its Italian translator was badly wounded. The novel’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times in 1993 outside his home in Oslo and was seriously injured.”
Liv's Leftovers:
For those of you who are monthly or annual subscribers and get the Culture Vulture newsy (if you think you haven’t been receiving it, check your junk 👀) you will have noticed that for some reason the last section which is ‘more to feed on' was cut off!! But Liv had some good recs in there so you’re all getting a lil treat as I’m putting them here instead of my final thoughts 💘💘
America Has a Problem and Beyoncé Ain’t It (The New York Times)
Beyoncé’s Sequined Revolution (Vulture)
Lady Gaga Confirms ‘Joker 2’ Role Opposite Joaquin Phoenix in New Musical Teaser (Variety)
Issa Rae Is Having a ‘Good-ass Summer’ (The Cut)
Monica Lewinsky Would Also Like Beyoncé to Change Some Lyrics (The Cut)
The Role of Art in a Time of War (The New York Times)
Marcus Mumford Opens Up About Childhood Sexual Abuse (Pitchfork)