Good Morning,
Nostalgia is big. Physical game discs are all but gone, with preservationists bracing for what that means (The Verge). Meanwhile twentysomethings are hunting down grainy, flash-blown digital cameras from 2003 (NPR), and the mail-order catalog is staging a comeback aimed at shoppers who want to browse deliberately instead of reflexively (Salon). This isn’t just retro fetish, though. Turns out we may actually want to invest is getting to the things we want.
The platforms keep making the opposite bet. Spotify now auto-plays music videos at users who mostly want to hear albums (Wired), and Netflix stock is down 49% in a year (Los Angeles Times). Infinite frictionless content, it turns out, can get old.
The day’s hardest news comes from Nebraska, where the state is clawing back a third of a cultural endowment built on philanthropic gifts matched dollar-for-dollar with public money (NPR). The match was the innovation. It’s also the vulnerability: what a state gives, a state can take back.
And the Hollywood Bowl has a new sound system so good audiences can’t quite believe they’re outdoors (Los Angeles Times). Nobody misses the old version.
All of our stories below.
