Meatballs, flat packs and girl math
The stuff the high street and solid business deals are made of
Welcome to a new issue of mostly cool stuff, a space dedicated to the the random things I come across online and offline that get my attention as per the dozens of screenshots, pictures and links in my phone to remind me about them.
Happy reading!
Coolness is like energy: it never dies, it just transforms
It’s taken longer than expected -in fact it comes with an 18 month delay- but it’s finally happening: IKEA has confirmed Londoners will no longer need to embark on day trip to Croydon to savour their meatballs as they’re finally opening their Oxford street shop on May 1st. If you think this is no big deal YOU’RE WRONG.
Oxford street (one of the main shopping streets in Europe) hasn’t recovered from the loss of Topshop which occupied the building where the new IKEA shop will be located.
While my sister may have found frustrating our visits to a place with four floors full of clothes none of which she found wearable, the reality is that you didn’t go to Topshop to buy anything you needed but rather to spend time hanging out while trying things you probably wouldn’t dare to wear outside the shop. This was a concept my sister, who lived in Paris at the time, struggled with as she didn’t understand getting the London look was all about the experience and not so much about finding any sensible clothes.
It’ll be interesting to see if strolling around flat-packed interiors and the promise of cheap meatballs proves as exciting as spending an afternoon putting on maxi-sequined bell-bottom trousers and mesh see-through tops, and whether that’s enough to revitalise an Oxford street in decline since a string of dubious American candy shops and Harry Potter shops popped out of nowhere during the pandemic.
Your average Topshop outfit If last week I talked about H&M announcement about cloning 30 models (with their consent) for advertising purposes, this week is time for another iteration on digital likeness as London-based Synthesia has offered company stock to the human actors they use to generate their digital avatars. There are worse side hustles if you ask me.
Talking about replicating human likeness, The Independent is launching AI-powered news service for ‘time-poor audiences’ but it has assured that it’ll be edited by humans. Same as this newsletter (wink wink)
And talking about newsletters, it seems you may be missing out if you don’t have at least one. According to Bloomberg, Substack is the new podcast and that is not necessarily a good thing as it may lead to the spread of misinformation and the rise of culture wars as more people have access to their own platform to disseminate polarising ideas. To prevent this, Bloomberg suggests, Substack needs to acknowledge the role it plays in the information chain and be accountable for the content that gets published, which doesn’t mean going down the censorship route but rather sticking to the accuracy one, especially as more journalists are abandoning legacy media and transitioning to Substack to publish their work. If you’re interested in the issues that can arise from the lack of fact-checking or not condemning hate speech on the platform, I wrote a piece exploring the real meaning behind Substack co-founders recent endorsement of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk as champions of free speech.
Five million potential readers willing to pay. There’s still hope for this newsletter. I might not be the savviest when it comes to business deals or financial investments but Elon Musk using his xAI money to buy X sounds to me like he’s taking the girl math mindset to the extreme. I mean, Musk already bought X (then Twitter) for $44 bn in 2022 so buying it again for $33 bn (plus $12 bn in debt) in 2025 to push up stock share prices by integrating it with xAI after X valuation dropped by $12 bn last December is very girl math coded. A bit like spending money abroad thinking it doesn’t count because it’s in another currency - or so I’ve been told.
Have you watched Award-winning animation film Flow yet? I’m still thinking about how the film captured the reverberation of the water so precisely as well as the reflection of light. This may be a low-budget production by Hollywood standards but Gints Zilbadolis’ film delivers a great cinematic experience and it’s further proof that there is fantastic creative talent outside the traditionally English-dominated film/media industry. I particularly loved the choice of letting the animals behave like animals and resist the temptation to infuse them with human-like behaviours. I confess I couldn’t help but identify with the standoffish black cat which finds it annoying to be around others (especially and overexcited labrador) and cooperate with them for a common goal. Don’t read too much into it.
Staying on the animation topic, OpenAI has restricted Studio Ghibli-style art as its new image tool has gone viral and reignited copyright concerns, although others argue that this has put the Japanese animation studio on the radar of the big public. In the meantime, people have used it to create some interesting images...
This controversy hasn’t stopped OpenAI from closing a $40 billion funding round led by Softbank Group. The company will nitially receive $10 billion and the remaining $30 billion by the end of the year. However, it is subject to OpenAI to convert to a for-profit entity by 31st December. If the AI developer fails to do so, they will only get $20 billion. Still enough pocket money to settle any copyright disputes.
How many times do you have to fail to realise maybe you need to abandon something for good? Apparently sky’s the limit as TikTok has rolled out TikTok shop in France, Germany and Italy this week despite the previous failed attempt at winning traction among European customers, who already rejected the live shopping feature that is so popular in China, and equal poor response in the UK market that led to UK staff departing en masse.
The London property of the week is this lovely flat above a Chinese restaurant that comes with its own swimming pool and sauna. It is making the rounds of social media this week despite the property was originally advertised back in 2022. Let me say that again in case you missed it: a bloody swimming pool above a Chinese restaurant. That’s every health and safety regulation self-combusting into flames (or turning into wet paper more like). And yes, you’d be right in thinking it was probably a brothel. May still be for all we know.
Jang Ik-sun, a South-Korean man paralysed due to muscular dystrophy, has completed a master’s degree in social welfare by blinking his thesis away one letter at a time. I get tired of typing this newsletter so I can’t imagine what that must have felt like.
Because the aim of this publication is to be inclusive, it’s only fair I also pay attention to the problems of the top 1% not only because they are a minority group, but also because they too are afflicted by very distressing issues. Take for instance the dilemma investment bank UBS finds itself in as it still doesn’t know what to do with the art inherited from the acquisition of Credit Suisse back in 2023. ‘There’s still art that will be found somewhere, in a closet in Shanghai or something,’ is one of the most unrelatable sentences I’ve ever heard in my life and yet it’d make perfect sense to me in a Steven Soderbergh film.
Talking about Steven Soderbergh, I’ve seen Black Bag four times at the time of typing. In my defence the third and fourth were emergency viewings as I did wanted to see a different film but there was a clash between my availability and the screening times so the only thing showing when I could go to the cinema was Soderbergh’s latest film with Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett who play a highly envied spy couple. The fact that Cate Blanchett’s outfits in it are a masterclass in cool dressing, and that I project myself in them every time I see her on a scene, has nothing to do with my multiple rewatches.
I so need that leather jacket Bad news for romantics: the couple who set record for longest kiss in 2013 have now separated after over a decade together. The former partners set the Guinness World record for the longest kiss first in 2011 only to reclaim the title in 2013, when they interlocked lips for 58 hours and 35 minutes. I have many questions about the logistics of that, but I’ll only say that if anyone had ever asked me to kiss for several hours straight twice I would have probably broken up with them on the spot. I’m done with co-dependent partners.
Pedro Pascal becoming A-list famous may just be the best thing that has happen to the world in the last 25 years and I’m not even joking. There’s something about him that is extremely endearing, goofy, sweet yet hyper masculine and sexy all at the same time. Have you watched his Latin mom skit on SNL? Or how Denzel Washinton and his wife have also surrendered to his lovability factor? Not to speak of his ability to make the words “a healthy snack” sound dirty while eating avocado on toast… Seriously, we don’t deserve this man.
The internet’s favourite daddy has a string of films coming out in 2025 and I’m looking forward to seeing all of them, including the new Fantastic Four which I wasn’t hoping to be intrigued by but the trailer did the trick as I was reminded Vanessa Kirby is also in it. Besides that, Pascal will be starring opposite Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans in Celine Song’s new film The Materialists as well as on The Uninvited, the directorial debut of Nadia Conners starring Lois Smith, Elizabeth Reaser, Walton Goggins, Eva De Dominici and Rufus Sewell.
It’s still a while until the above films are released in the UK so in the meantime I’ve been consoling myself with watching Pedro telling me that “I’m perfect” in the new Spike Jonze’s Apple ad. Both the ad and the making of video get top marks in the cool-o-meter this week.
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The average Topshop outfit made me chuckle. Back in the 80s Topshop was where people who didn't like clothes bought their clothes. They were marginally less fashionable than British Home Stores or the clothing aisle at ASDA. They certainly deserve kudos for reinventing themselves since.
Looking forward to seeing Flow and the new Soderbergh next week - thanks for both recommendations!
Here for the rise of Pedro! When did ads become 5 minute films?? I mean I'll take all the Pedro choreographed dancing you give me but I now want to see which bit they used for the cut down version (must've been a long discussion in that marketing meeting). Also, South Korean man making me feel like I need more writing grit!