Back after a hiatus due to a streak of weddings. For the new subscribers to fD, first of all welcome! This newsletter covers a wide range of culture, politics, foreign affairs, economics—basically anything I find interesting—but all with an emphasis on important trends and news that I think will still matter weeks, months, years from now.
🤖 Coolest thing I’ve seen this week, can’t be long until widespread real-time translation.
fD follow-ups
🏙 fD[79] and the crisis in commercial real estate. New funds are being raised to buy distressed commercial real estate from capitulating owners.
🇪🇨 fD[89] and the rise of gang violence in Ecuador. Since then, Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated in Quito after running a campaign that was “outspoken about the link between organized crime and government officials”. Ecuador has recently become plagued by violence associated with a rise in narco-trafficking and is now the largest exporter of cocaine to Europe.
🇷🇺 fD[90] and the attempted coup in Russia. Two months after his unsuccessful coup, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the paramilitary Wagner Group, was killed in a plane crash outside of Moscow, with early intelligence suggesting it was an assassination.
Good reading,
-Teddy
🎞✂️ I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking on the future of Hollywood. (Working on a standalone piece as well).
With the recent box office successes of Oppenheimer and Barbie and the ongoing dual strikes by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA unions, there’s a general uncertainty amidst conflicting data, glimmers of optimism on a horizon of pessimism. Is the box office roaring back or is the industry doomed, with auteur-driven television and film fated to fall by the wayside and replaced by AI-generated, mass-consumed dreck.
My prediction: the economics of the streaming model will improve as platforms consolidate and bundle, subscription prices rise, and ads come back as a major revenue source.
I’ve written about it before, but premium content for cheap subscriptions was a low interest rate phenomenon. In the coming years, we’re going to see a lot of that consumer surplus recaptured by distributors and creators as profits and debt servicing have already become a priority over platform plays. Content will flow to where it can be monetized best and consumers will choose from a wider variety of packages that best suit their needs.
“Let’s face it, the strategy to collapse all windows, starve linear TV and theatrical and spend money with abandon, while making a fraction in return, all in the service of growing sub numbers, has ultimately proven to be deeply flawed.” - David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery
It really hit home when I saw this on Netflix:
Licensing HBO content feels like a paradigm shift from the first phase of the streaming era, in which HBO specifically foresaw the risks of becoming an “arms supplier” and building up their inevitable competitor. You’re probably not going to see The Sopranos on Netflix anytime soon but you should expect to see more premium content crossing corporate lines to pop-up on SVOD, AVOD, and FAST platforms.
Ultimately, that seems like a good thing for creators seeing as studios screw over participants all the time, especially when self-dealing to affiliates owned by the same company. (Avatar 2, The Walking Dead). How much of a good thing it is will depend on the ongoing and future negotiations between creators and distributors.
🇮🇳🚀 India successfully landed a rover on the moon, becoming only the fourth country to do so and the first to land in the southern polar region where there’s frozen water. Just super cool to see, both technologically (they were able to do the mission for ~$75m) and socially in terms of the uplifting effect. Few things left anymore that can capture and unite the attention of a nation.
Prayers were offered for the mission’s success at Hindu temples, Sikh Gurdwaras and Muslim mosques. Schools held special ceremonies and organized live viewings of the moon landing, with an official YouTube video of the event racking up tens of millions of views.
…Chandrayaan-3 out-endured its Russian counterpart, Luna-25, which launched 12 days ago. Luna-25 was scheduled to land on the moon on Monday in the same general vicinity as the Indian craft but crashed on Saturday following an engine malfunction. That India managed to outdo Russia, which as the Soviet Union put the first satellite, man and woman in space, speaks to the diverging fortunes of the two nations’ space programs.
🍼🧬 A human-interest story about a young man going on road trips to connect with some of his 96 children (through sperm donation). A friend told me this is already a Vince Vaughn movie, but I’d love to see a version of this story made into a film by someone like Richard Linklater or Gus Van Sant. I think the article only begins to touch on the kind of loneliness and alienation that might drive someone this way and what kind of meaning ‘family’ retains in our society.
Stone-Miller opened Bowes’s Instagram page and saw Harper’s photo. Days later, he asked Bowes if he could join a Facebook group of parents called Xytex 5186 Offspring, named after his sperm bank ID. She agreed to form a new group for those interested. When he told the group he wanted to meet their children, the parents of 20 of them responded. Most of the parents in the group are female couples or single women, reflecting a trend in the sperm-bank industry…
Bowes said she has come to better understand Stone-Miller, and that she can imagine the powerful tug he feels toward the boys and girls who look like him and want his time and attention. She understands that her family and the other parents are connected to a man they barely know and whose steadfastness is untested.
“We came on the scene when he was going through hard times. Being with the children gave him a renewed sense of purpose,” Bowes said. “As we get to know him more, we all feel more comfortable. But my sense is he is going to feel more entitled, which can be problematic. We need to keep enough walls up to protect our girls and our family, but to make them permeable enough that he can come in.”