Small Talk: Welcome To Your Grandmacore Era
Plus: AI can be scary!
Welcome to Small Talk, an email I serve out every Monday morning exclusively to our Breakfast Club members in NYC and Charleston. The premise is simple: my top of mind topics for the week’s worth of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners ahead anytime some chatter is required. From now on, I’ll be sharing it with subscribers of The Supersonic as well. Enjoy, and crib topics as necessary.
Someone is bound to hit you with some mindless small talk at the dinner table this week. Well, now you've got topics to thwart their attack. Let's dance!
For consideration …
Self-Elder Care
If there's one thing The Wall Street Journal knows, it's youth trends — and bond markets. The newspaper is declaring 'grandmacore' a thing: young people are turning away from their phones and the virtual worlds therein and are embracing old-timey activities like scrapbooking and knitting. This gentle mindfulness craze isn’t new, though. Want to live your best bubbe life? Here are some new hobby ideas: gardening, embroidery, and baking — soothing, wholesome stuff. But not every 20-something is quasi-retiring. Many are here for hooking up at the office. Fast Company wrote a brief article about Gen Z work habits: according to a study by EduBurdie of 2,000 20-somethings, 47 percent claimed their sex lives are improved by homework. But a shocking 38 percent admitted that, were they to return to work, they'd want office romances to be normalized, and would be okay with replacing some public spaces with nooks for hooking up. Sketchy!Da Beards
The prestigious James Beard Foundation Media Awards took place Saturday night in Chicago, and the restaurant honors will be announced tonight. The Media Awards celebrate excellence in food storytelling by writers, journalists, filmmakers, and other creative professionals across print, digital, audio, and visual media. So many deserving cookbooks, podcasts, and documentaries won. The James Beard's MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award went to Food & Wine's “The City that Rice Built” by Jeff Gordinier and George McCalman, a sprawling history of Charleston, South Carolina, and the humblest of grains. This piece is a fantastic meditation on past and present, and the ways food shapes who we are and where we live. The New Yorker's Helen Rosner won for her deeply reported profile of former Top Chef host and bon vivant Padma Lakshmi. The Feature Reporting Award went to Adam Reiner's piece, "We Need To Talk About Trader Joe's," for Taste, which investigates the popular grocery chain's business practices. A must-read. They're all must-reads TBH. Congrats.A.I.-Yi-Yi.
The future of technology, and our little civilization, is artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be some bumps along the way. Some creepy, unsettling bumps. Anyway, don't freak out, but ChatGPT is allegedly preying on the vulnerabilities of people struggling with their mental health. The popular generative A.I. chatbot has been enabling—and amplifying—the delusions of people who spend hours "talking" to machines. In a New York Times article this week, writer Kashmir Hill wrote that, recently, he and his colleagues at the Grey Lady have been sent messages "by people who claim to have unlocked hidden knowledge with the help of ChatGPT, which then instructed them to blow the whistle on what they had uncovered." In Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré writes about the intense, obsessive relationships some people are having with ChatGPT. She talked to a woman whose husband called his chatbot "Mama" — and how Mama had him acting like a religious fanatic. Meanwhile, according to The Guardian, there's an A.I. cheating epidemic at universities. Thousands of students! These wrinkles will all be ironed out, soon, no doubt. Hopefully very soon.
Quicker hits …
Spoiler alert: Top Chef season 22 has a winner. (Padma is missed, but Kristen cooks.)
At Japanese Takoyaki stands, sausage is replacing expensive octopus in the batter of the popular street food.
Oi! British pub rules are no joke. Learn how to order a proper pint, bruv.
Jimmy Buffett's true legacy: laid-back tropical party rock and food chain cheeseburgers.
“Hi. Nice to meet you. Would you like to know the history of Jell-O?”
Special wrapping paper that makes your gifts look like bread? Sure!
Breaking news: there are aliens under Antarctica’s ice. (Maybe.)
Enjoy your week.
BL
Ben Leventhal
Founder + CEO
Blackbird