Happy Friday! Please indulge in this jauntily insidious track from Dua Saleh, a Sudanese-American poet and rapper from the Twin Cities. “Sugar Mama” describes Saleh’s power-building seduction of the rich girl next door who’s clearly got some privilege issues and some, uh, racially-tinged biases. The track is measured by a metronomic beat, an invisible container for Saleh’s pent-up energy; as a result, every line is packed with buzzing particles, charged beyond the sum of its parts. Saleh calls it a satire on consumer culture. We’ll call it the standout of their new EP, Nūr. Listen here.
Look at any residential block and you’re likely to notice Amazon’s cardboard optics issue. Prime boxes everywhere! The company knows this, and partly to reduce their costs, but mostly to reduce chatter, they’re looking to eliminate extra Amazon packaging on top of whatever they’re shipping. To be clear, that will be accomplished by pushing their retail partners to create packaging that’s shipment-stable– kind of the way Amazon already bullies sellers to sell to Amazon at rock-bottom prices. Got to love a monopoly.
While Amazon runs the internet, the textbook company Pearson just announced the ground-breaking move of going digital-first (LOUD eye roll, in case you couldn’t hear it). If you have been a student of any kind, you know this: every year, practically every textbook gets an update of some sort, and you can only stay up to date by buying a new one. Bad for trees, bad for students. Now, after decades of consumers complaining, Pearson will issue updates first to e-books, which also cost 30% less than paper. Now, who’s afraid to ask if Pearson has heard of the MOOC?
News: Nestlé makes something called a “Yes!” bar (proving that food board rooms are mostly thinking about sex). Even more news: they’ve replaced its plastic packaging with a paper wrapper that has a water-based coating to keep the product shelf-stable. The new bars will read, “carefully wrapped in paper” (more sex), somewhere alongside the accents, “MMMM,” “OOOH,” and “OOSH” (seriously, see above). Reportedly, that wrapper only exists in a handful of countries, but it’s set to expand, and it’s also coming for the Kit Kat and others. Nestlé may even sell the packaging to other food companies to create a new revenue stream and boost their environmental rating. Krafty.
