Put your phone away.
Brides and birthday boys are requesting the same of their guests.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I’m writing to you from the passenger seat of a rental car, zooming up the coast of Liguria. This is my second time in Italy — the first time I was 19, visiting my sister during her study abroad program in Florence.
Today’s newsletter includes: Charli XCX’s music video features reading smut on a Kindle, why Adam Faze replaced phones with a live illustrator at his birthday party, and J Lee’s first time to Long Island.
I was alone last night in Nice, so I took myself for a Negroni and panisse with a galley of Emma Cline’s next novel, Switzy. Tables of happy families shared plates of spaghetti under the bright blue 10 p.m. sunset. Tanned teenagers with clean hair whispered and stared at other groups of teenagers eating ice cream cones. Most of the light on the street was coming from within buildings, with the exception of a few glowing phones and lit cigarettes.
When I got into bed around midnight, there were still groups of people sitting on the beach and swimming under the moon. I scrolled through Instagram and was served a trailer for The Siege of Paradise, a documentary that premiered at Tribeca earlier this month. It’s about the onslaught of influencers and tourists who come to Cinque Terre every summer. These women look so stupid, pulling huge bright pink suitcases up the steep hills of Italian villages in workout clothes and white sneakers. Per Panayiota Soutis’s recent observation, this phenomenon is spreading beyond Cinque Terre.
This whole phenomenon reminds me of a line in one of my favorite Drew Austin essays: “In the contemporary landscape, the punishment for being authentic is becoming someone else’s content.”
In one shot of the trailer, an Italian man pretends to be holding a phone up to take a photo and says “They are all looking here,” nodding towards the phone. “Look with your eyes.”
I woke up this morning and walked through an outdoor market in Nice, recognizing the organized wooden boxes of zucchini, watermelon, dates, and slices of Pissaladière. I’d seen this exact market on my Instagram feed so many times that I could arrange the boxes into formation like a Rubik’s cube. I left my phone in my pocket and instead went to an art supplies store I’d visited in the past and bought a set of watercolors and postcards.
I’m grateful that the Adobe team gave me the opportunity to go Cannes Lions this week. Adobe’s products have helped to lay the foundation for so many of our businesses, but their team also put together the most thoughtful panel formats. I’m going to spend the next few days distilling what I saw and heard during the last few days. But an observation that’s top of mind to me is: at Cannes, Creator Kids were both the gate-crashers and guests of honor (“Kids” generously as some of these podcast guys are 48). There was a palpable sense that the creators and influencers had migrated from the periphery of media to the center, but not everyone is at ease with their newfound power in media, least of all the creators themselves.
I’ll be on vacation next week, and I haven’t yet decided the publishing game plan. We’ll all find out on Monday.
Expense Account. By J Lee.
Expense Account is a series on Feed Me by semi-anonymous restaurant critic J Lee. He hosts a podcast with the same name. Today, he wrote about his first time on Long Island, and the best place to eat in New York this summer.
Lin Beach House.
I’m writing to you from Long Island. Can you believe that I’ve lived in New York for 19 years and I’ve never been? I used to say that it’s because I like the city so much in the summer, and then I’d say that I’m more of an upstate kind of guy, a lake is more my vibe. But the truth is that no one has ever invited me to Long Island. Now I’ve finally been invited. All it took was two decades and a burgeoning career as a fake influencer (i.e., journalist).
I’m staying at the Lin Beach House, in Greenport on the North Fork of Long Island, close to the tip. It’s a cute and cozy beach inn, owned and operated by Leslie and Brian Kwasnieski, who also own and operate Matchbook Distilling down the road, where they concoct some of the world’s most interesting and delicious spirits (actually). This place is a B&B of sorts. More than it’s a bed and breakfast, you might call it a bed and booze, but of course there’s breakfast too, and there’s dinner, and there’s lunch. They’ve built their own little ecosystem here, and when you stay at the beach house you get to experience it all. They buy fruit and botanicals from local farmers and turn them into fruit wines, and expressive and unique distilled spirits, and with those spirits and wines they make incredible cocktails. With the raw distilled spirits, we blended bottles of our own gin. Brian works part-time as a fisherman. He took us out on a boat, and we got to see him catch the fresh fish we’d be eating for dinner. Long Island puffer fish are a delicacy that I highly recommend.
“The table next to us smashed two glasses, but it was fine, it happens, they had so much fun.”