This video doesn’t go where you expect it to. Set to the march of punchy indie rock, it follows a costumed astronaut through a sort of absurdist cityscape for several minutes until she finds her way to a wood where a baby is hanging out by itself. Upon finding the babe, the astronaut sheds her helmet and her spacesuit, unleashing flowing long hair and purple nail polish. The baby is now hers and she carries it to a beach somewhere, fading into the sunset.
It’s not the most contemporary attitude toward womanhood (you only really find it as a mother, yadda yadda, oh and by the way that means you shed whatever other adventures you’d been having, yadda yadda). But maybe a contrarian narrative is what we had coming on an album called Flat Earth. Watch & listen here.
With “disruption” now overdone in Silicon Valley, the startup crowd needs a new way to talk about their virtue of doing things differently. And there’s a cute new term that they’re kicking around: “narrative violation.” It’s an unnecessary set of words for a simple concept, so let’s break it down. A narrative violation is something you don’t expect: If Travis Kalenick were to become a good person, he would be violating his narrative. If Quip, a dental care company, sold candy, that would violate their narrative. But of course, everybody is already using the term for everything, so any company doing well is also dubbed a “narrative violation” by somebody who wants to sound cool on tech twitter. To violate the Valley narrative real quick: do we think any women were consulted on this language choice?
One company doing an excellent job of (I’m not going to say it again) DOING SOMETHING UNEXPECTED is the Washington Post. They’re on Tik Tok now, producing satirical video content to loop the youth into their regular news offering. In another UNFORESEEN TWIST, setting up a presence in Gen-Z-land was the enterprising idea of a young staffer, not a pandering plan from a higher-up, and it seems to be working, at least a little. WaPo now has a healthy 280,000 followers on the platform, which is way less than, say, ESPN’s 1.8 million, and also considerably less than WaPo’s numbers on other platforms, but if you can get that many non-news-subscribing kids to let your newspaper into their lives, power to you. That, my friends, is what we call “the long game.”
(Wee how easy it is to not say “narrative violation”?)
My friend Kaylin Marcotte was the first hire at theSkimm, where she built a massive community around everybody’s favorite pink-colored newsletter. As you might expect, building an early-stage startup into a real media player is pretty stressful, and every night, Kaylin would go home and build a puzzle to decompress. Now, she’s struck off on her own to launch a new company, Jiggy, which makes puzzles based on works by female artists. The pieces come in reusable glass containers and once they’re assembled, they’re pretty enough to frame, which makes them a dual gift— in case you happen to be in the market for that sort of thing around now. Congrats, Kaylin! Get Jiggy here. (Couldn’t resist.)
