While this doesn’t feel like the ideal summer for someone like Taylor Swift to be taking up space, her new album really is good. A far cry from Lover’s Jack-Antonoff-signature bangers (though he produced this one, too— how’s that for range), Folklore is built on a foundation of solemn cottagecore. Other central collaborators on T. Swift’s expertly written isolation opus are William Bowery (a pseudonym, we think— try finding anything on him) and Aaron Dessner from The National, who co-wrote many of the tracks. There’s already enough album analysis running around, so rather than inundating you with more, I’ll leave you with this Dessner interview, which gives a behind-the-scenes look at all the songs he touched. (Spoiler: Bryce Dessner helped, too.)
After months of sourdough, we finally have a baking thinkpiece that isn’t just, “everybody’s doing it!” In the NYTimes, Tim Wu wrote about small flour companies that are thriving right now, and he says they could provide a template for a more equitable economy. Historically, he writes, America optimizes for commodity goods, producing things at maximum scale to achieve the most competitive pricing. But that structure (embodied equally by General-Mills-owned Gold Medal flour and, like, Amazon) makes a few people rich and hold everybody else down. By contrast, a smaller company like King Arthur, which is owned by its employees, is incentivized not by maximizing profit but by running an operation that its workers can stand by. And boy, do they. Their flour is of consistently high quality, and have you ever called their free baker’s hotline? (Try it.) When you offer something people love, you get to charge more, which makes up for your inefficiencies relative to whatever nickel-and-diming big guy is leading the pack. And if you’re super tiny like Maine Grains, you’re that much less efficient than the giants, which means you get to hire more locals and be a part of the community. Sounds nicer than being a part of General Mills.
Nothing encapsulates our current economy better than the announcement of Instagram’s new “personal fundraiser” feature, which basically improves the UI of posting a gofundme to your socials. As we’ve come to learn (and in no small part resulting from the commodity-goods economy), people can’t afford their own lives, whether they’re getting treated for Covid, renting an apartment, or going to school. That’s all about to get worse, of course, as the federal assistance programs shrink and shutter and reps keep rejecting healthcare proposals. But at least, thanks to one of our great consolidated companies, now it’s easy to ask strangers for help. Are we feeling cared for yet?
On the note of systems that make sense for humans, Mother Dirt believes that skin problems are a result of an imbalance in your skin biome— and as the pioneers in probiotic personal care, they should know. Using bacteria isolated by an MIT researcher, their products reverse the damage of the chemicals that have been slathered on you for years to restore and nourish your skin microbiome. Their classic product is AO+ Mist, a patented live probiotic spray that restores the peacekeeping Ammonia-Oxidizing Bacteria (AOB), which is clinically proven to restore clarity and balance in 4 weeks. It works by consuming the ammonia and urea in your sweat and converting it to Nitrite and Nitric Oxide, which, together, promote healthy skin. AO+ Mist is the only product on the market that has this bacteria. Try it (or any of their other products) and waive 20% on your entire order with the code LOREM20.
