The Sunday Digest 010
Street style, slugging, inspo, and more. Ahhh.
Welcome to The Sunday Digest — a free Sunday newsletter featuring long (and some short) reads, original columns, things I’ve saved over the last week, relaxing playlists, episodes releases, exclusive product drops, and more. Yes, you can reply to this email. I’d love to hear from you. Or, if podcasts are more your speed on Sundays, we’ve got that too.
The Sunday Haiku
Where’s my credit card?
Oh no, it’s still at the bar.
It’s time to day drink.
Sunday Read: The Age of Everything Culture Is Here
by Jason Parham for WIRED
Every Wednesday, I receive an email at 11 a.m. CST. Simply titled Lunch Reads, my good friend Phil curates articles and presents them with minimal framing or explanation. Simply put, it’s the perfect newsletter.
This week, one particular article felt all-too-timely. Recently, I discussed “slugging” on the podcast — a practice in which you receive glowing skin in exchange for simply lathering your face with Vaseline every night. Largely portrayed as a “trend” on TikTok, it’s actually anything but.
And because Jason Parham did a much better job explaining it than I could, here’s an extended excerpt:
What the popularization of slugging on the internet represents is an ongoing, and unmistakably American, battle over ownership: the masking of cultural theft as cultural literacy. It should come as no surprise that slugging videos have garnered hundreds of millions of views. TikTok’s fabric is woven through with appropriation. Ownership is a shared vocabulary on the app. Nothing is ever one’s alone.
It’s no secret: Black culture drives pop culture. It is “the original avant-garde,” as Felipe Luciano, a former TV producer, has said. But I sometimes wonder if appropriation is a prerequisite of Black culture going mainstream. What's happening currently is an acceleration of a phenomenon that began in the late 1980s, when corporations started to deliberately mine Black cool as hip-hop was becoming a global force. The incorporation of social media into this—which enables people to make, shape, and share anything they want and call it their own, even when it’s not—further helps to distort what we experience on these platforms. Feeds are flooded with culture that, translated through the screen of a creator who is only interested in clout, comes across as hollow and cheapened.
What is surprising, however, is how slugging videos on TikTok—along with a cacophony of other macro- and micro-crazes across the social internet—have ushered in a remarkable, and remarkably demanding, new period. Generated, propelled, and legitimized by social platforms, trends will never be the same.
Read it in its entirety here.
New Episode: Home Bar Staples, Job Resignation Guilt, Work-From-Home Essentials, and More Listener Questions
This month’s listener questions include (but are certainly not limited to) at-home bar essentials, iPhone photography tips, trendy food and beverages, “treat yourself” Sunday purchases, coffee table book recommendations, splurges for first-time apartment dwellers, the guilt of quitting your job, fitness trackers, work-from-home essentials, dealing with friends who go out more than you’d like, knowing when you’re financially stable, and the perfect Sunday evening movie spread.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else podcasts are found.
Things I Saved This Week
Relaxing Watch of the Week: What People Are Wearing at Copenhagen Fashion Week
I spoke briefly about this during this past week’s Retail Therapy, but a major avenue of relaxation that I’ve found for myself is vlogs documenting people’s street style around the world. The Unknown Vlogs (see above) is what prompted me to go down the rabbit hole, but there are so many out there that it’s hard not to get sucked in. I hope you enjoy as much as I have.
See you next week,
Will