Looks like we're getting two Knicks movies.

Safdie and Stiller hit the streets.

Good morning from Fulton Street, where the streets are filled with New Yorkers of all ages patiently waiting for the New York Knicks ticker-tape parade to begin.

When I walked out of the Fulton Street subway, I was greeted by hands holding smaller hands, hands holding bagels smothered with cream cheese, and hands holding fat blunts. I took this photo before ducking through the crowds to get to my office.

Today’s newsletter includes: Teddy Kim’s report from Runway’s AI Festival at Lincoln Center, New York Times journalists are taking their dates to the office, and Zohran’s plan to make the city greener.

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Browsing and posting on the Feed Me Job Board is free. This week’s listings include:

• Cipriani is looking for a marketing analyst for their restaurants, hotels, and members’ clubs.

• Day Job (whose clients include David Protein and TBPN) is looking for a copywriter.

• Bloomberg Philanthropies is looking for a social media manager.

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AI of the beholder.

Stay Tuned is a Feed Me guest column about film and entertainment, written by Teddy Kim.

I went to Runway’s AI Festival last week, hosted at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, without many preconceived notions about what I would find there. I’ve seen a few generative AI films before, like the Aronofsky-produced Ancestra, but nothing that really made me worry that human filmmakers are about to be put out of work. I’m relieved to report that I still think that’s the case. Many, but not all, shots still had the signature look of being AI-generated. Most of the films had heavy voiceover narration because spoken dialogue still looked a bit tough in the naturalism of faces speaking on screen. The shots were also limited in length by what the models can produce, around 5-8 seconds at a time, lending most of the films a feeling of repetitive staccato.

The AI world is full of benchmarks. Since Runway’s Gen-1 text-to-video model first came out in 2023, my personal benchmark for short films has been something that’s at least as good as La jetée. Chris Marker’s short film is made up of just still photos, on-screen text, narration, and music. There’s nothing there that can’t be done already by AI filmmakers today. But it’s the storytelling craft necessary that’s still catching up to what’s already technically possible.

Still, some of the films stood out from the others. The Grand Prix was won by A Face Only a Mother Could Love, a short about a facially disfigured man in Paris searching for love, made by the one-man team of Robert Gaudette. A Face was the most narratively ambitious and coherent of the films on display. But I was most impressed by another finalist, Costa Verde by director Léo Cannone, about a kid’s summer visiting his grandparents in Corsica. The film really nails its retro camcorder aesthetic while mixing in these elements of magical realism. By the end, I was feeling nostalgic for childhood summers I never even had.

Of course, this all gets back to the unavoidable question: Are these films something we should treat as art or at least recognize creatively? Tentatively, my answer is yes. That might change if models are ever able to get so good that you can just one-shot prompt an entire movie. But as things stand now, these films come from an incredibly effortful creative process where you have to wrestle with the machine over and over just to get something close to what you want.

New releases this weekend: Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood, another gritty retelling of English legend, starring Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer. I really liked Sarnoski’s debut feature, Pig, but it seems like A24 is dumping this one. Has anyone seen much marketing for it?; Leviticus, Neon’s queer horror film from Australia. This one was one of the more talked about movies at Sundance this year; Toy Story 5. I’m a few Toy Storys behind at this point but I’m intrigued by Pixar’s new villain, even scarier than Sid: brainrot.

Here are some other screenings I’d encourage you to check out in the coming week:

🦈 Friday 6/19 & Saturday 6/20 (IFC) — Jaws (1975) — The movie that put Steven Spielberg on the map and created the modern summer blockbuster. Perfect time to rewatch before you head to the beach later this summer, and a great double feature pairing with Spielberg’s latest, Disclosure Day.

🍜 Saturday 6/20 (Metrograph) — Tampopo (1985) — One of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, Juzo Itami’s “ramen Western” follows the titular character on a quest to make the perfect bowl of ramen, intercut with a bunch of unrelated slapstick scenes that all revolve around food. I can’t think of a better way to work up an appetite before a late-night bite in Dimes Square, although probably not at Kiki’s…

🕵️‍♂️ Saturday 6/20 & Monday 6/22 (FLC) — The Conformist (1970) — Bernardo Bertolucci’s beautiful-looking black comedy about a mid-level bureaucrat trying to rise up in fascist Italy. I saw this a few years ago in LA and remember finding the cinematography, costume, and production design all incredibly impressive.

🍵 Sunday 6/21 (Metrograph) — Late Spring (1949) — Yasujirō Ozu’s gentle and moving film about a mutually devoted father and his daughter, who is reluctant to get married and leave home. The kind of movie that makes you think deeply about your life and your loved ones all day after you get out of the theater. There’s a famous shot in here (not really a spoiler) where Ozu abruptly cuts to a vase, something Paul Schrader wrote about prominently in his book Transcendental Style in Film. Now that I think about it, this kind of visual film grammar is something I’d like to see more generative AI films adapt, as a way of working around the current technical limitations.

🌊 Wednesday 6/24 (Metrograph) — A Bigger Splash (1974) — What better way to commemorate David Hockney, who sadly passed away last Thursday, than by watching Jack Hazan’s documentary about the British artist. Not to be confused with Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, also named after the Hockney painting, but the two would make a good pairing.

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• Polymarket is making a podcast with Dear Media.

• “If it walks like a hotel and quacks like a hotel, it’s a hotel.” The kind of quote you only get from an Upstate New York attorney representing a group of locals opposed to a luxury hotel on a 236-acre estate in the town of Clinton, New York.

• A New York Times journalist took Maggie Rogers to the office as a date at 1 a.m., and they made out in a conference room. According to Rogers, onstage at MSG on Tuesday night, via the celebrity confession booth that Rosalía has been utilizing each night of her Lux world tour. Yesterday, Byline co-founder Gutes said, “I know exactly who this is about because I had this exact same experience AMA.” Of course, these could be two different guys, but it’s interesting if they’re making the same move. I started writing about the idea of the “corporate fetish” in 2024, and it appears it has finally come full circle.

• I really enjoyed this little story about how trees can really transform an area as small as a city block. It focuses on the corner of White Street and West Broadway, and the trees outside of Rigor Hill and One White Street. I’ve lived in my apartment for almost eight years, and even though it’s probably just my imagination, sometimes I think I can feel the trees outside of my windows getting bigger and stronger. This story also brought to my attention that Mayor Mamdani’s administration recently released a report on their tree-planting efforts. The city’s current tree canopy covers approximately 23.4% of the city, and they’re hoping to make that number 30% by 2040.

  

  Tribeca trees, thanks to a local Lorax.

• Rachel Karten interviewed 834 social media professionals for her latest industry survey. You should read the whole thing, but some takeaways included:

  • Social marketers are moving away from X.

  • 44% of social marketers feel like their boss doesn’t understand social media. One respondent said, “Approvals have to go through our CMO who only cares about aesthetic and not content that actually works to grow accounts.”

  • Reddit, YouTube Shorts, and Substack rose YoY as platforms social marketers would consider a “priority”.

  44% of social marketers feel like their boss doesn’t understand social media

• The Drift made Knicks hats.

• So did Emily Dawn Long.

• Josh Safdie appears to be working on a Knicks movie project.

• And Ben Stiller is also working on one with A24.

• Chris Dixon is New York Magazine’s new design director. Dixon spent seven years at the magazine from 2006-2011, and went on to be the global creative director at Vanity Fair, and then the director of global brand design at Herman Miller. Tom Alberty, who had been at New York Magazine for 14 years, announced that he would be leaving last week.

• Sweetgreen’s former head of culinary left for a new job at Pura Vida.

• The Atlantic’s flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, announced that they’re launching a new Monday morning video episode of the show every week. It will be co-hosted by Adam Harris. The Atlantic’s team told me that, “The Atlantic has been rapidly scaling in audio + video – we doubled our network of shows and staff, bringing in top talent who’ve built shows at NPR, Vox, NYT, AP, and elsewhere.”

• Charli XCX told Rolling Stone that she doesn’t do much besides work. “I don’t fucking have hobbies. This is my life. It’s every single fiber of my being.” She also said that the interview would probably be one of the last longform interviews she’d do for a while.

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