‘Today’s internet values relatability more than authority’
‘The McDonald’s CEO’s big burger-eating mistake’
Ellen Cushing at The Atlantic
A video of McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski eating a burger “didn’t go well,” says Ellen Cushing. It “was discomfiting because it broke the rules of the internet-based marketing economy that Kempczinski belongs to (whether he wants to or not).” The “incident is an object lesson in what happens when the logic of food influencerdom collides with the reality of running a giant business.” This is “why the social media accounts of multinational corporations all speak like sleepy teenagers.”
‘Hard feelings’
Narges Bajoghli at Intelligencer
Over the “past week, the Iranian American community has been fracturing in real time across dinner tables, in group chats, in the silence of blocked numbers,” says Narges Bajoghli. There has “always been infighting among Iranians in the diaspora. The community has never been monolithic. It spans monarchists and leftists, secular nationalists and devout Muslims, people who left last year and people who left in 1979.” But “today’s divisions do not fall neatly along the old political lines.”
‘We’re gambling with men’s health. Here’s why that’s bad for all of us.’
Elizabeth Renzetti at the Toronto Star
In the “past few years, gambling has received a glow-up that would make a Kardashian green with envy,” says Elizabeth Renzetti. Gambling has been “rebranded as ‘prediction markets,’” and there are “clear winners in this explosion of micro-gambling.” But there are “clear losers, too. Mainly they’re the young men and boys whose health is being harmed by having a gambling den on their phones — and by constant ads reminding them that they’re losers if they’re not placing bets.”
‘The cinema of societal collapse’
Vikram Murthi at The Nation
“‘The Secret Agent’ and ‘Sirat’ are among the five films nominated in this year’s Best International Feature Film category, all of which confront state-backed oppression,” says Vikram Murthi. “Living with or dying under tyranny pertains to each of the nominated films, yet ‘The Secret Agent’ and ‘Sirat’ are primarily concerned with the texture of a fascist atmosphere.” Both “capture the psychology of knowing that one’s fragile world is on the brink of collapse but persevering anyway in spite of overwhelming despair.”