Rick Rubin, taste as brand strategy, and why impressions aren’t relevance. Marathon scores 93% on Brand New. Software turns liquid. An Anthropic paper reveals the hot mess inside smarter models. Stone Island takes Product Anatomy into a drained swimming pool in Milan.
Ana Andjelic’s latest Sociology of Business arrives timed to Rick Rubin’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction this November — but uses it as the springboard for something sharper. Taste is everywhere on Substack. So is The Devil Wears Prada 2. The movie about the foremost taste-making industry in the world almost certainly measured its promotional campaign in impressions, reach, and views. Andjelic’s point: impressions are evidence that people scrolled past you. They are not cultural relevance.
The free portion frames the collision between attention and taste as played out in real time through the film’s global rollout — celebrity cameos, Vanessa Friedman, method red carpet dressing, the popcorn purse, brand activations from Dior. Behind the paywall: the analysis of what different implications of attention versus taste mean for brand strategy. It’s the kind of piece that rewards reading slowly, with a pencil.
A parallel current surfaces in Dot Dot Dot’s dispatch from Milan Design Week, where Product Anatomy went live with Stone Island and Lyst. The event happened in a drained swimming pool inside Capsule Plaza. A 4×8-metre LED ceiling. Seating upholstered in NO SEASONS fabric. Archive folders passed hand to hand through the audience. The team explained the jacket’s construction “uncomfortably close, which was the point.” That’s taste as proximity, not reach.
And on the craft end: B Pando reviews Sooki sesame seed oil by The Collected Works under the subject line “Like, so retro, but so the future” — a product that reads as analog luxury in a sea of algorithmic optimization.
This week’s Brand New opened with a big one: Walmart’s Great Value redesign by JKR and in-house. With 10,000 items, it’s the largest food and consumables CPG brand in the U.S. The navy blue and off-white palette pairs with surprisingly many colors. Logo: 63.5% Great. Packaging: 78.3% Great. Not a crowd-pleaser, but a crowd-respecter.
Week’s top vote-getter. Designers Republic meets Black Mirror meets Weyland-Yutani. A game identity system so influential that designers are already citing it as best-of-year. 10/10, no notes.
Used in the Extellis identity by Hoodzpah — a satellite imaging company that broke away from the futuristic-sans-serif industrial complex with a Modernist serif that feels timeless.
Two acquired-taste crowd-pleasers combine for a limited-edition lager. Maltiness meets dill-forward punch. Easy-drinking? Debatable. Curiosity-generating? Absolutely.
Global Tetrahedron’s takeover is official. Tim Heidecker in charge. The new logo proudly flaunts the LGBTQ+ rainbow. From conspiracy-peddling to satire-powered reclamation.
Also notable: the WNBA Draft 2026 identity by Sunday Afternoon earned praise for its fractal treatment that mirrors hardwood court floors. The Washington Commanders reverted to a Native American reference with a spear on their alternate uniform, drawing swift condemnation from the Association on American Indian Affairs. And Gaptooth Soda by Saint-Urbain charmed with a hand-done wordmark celebrating imperfection — 73.2% Great on packaging.
Friday Likes featured Jetlag Books (81.1% Great) with its Boeing-interior gray palette and rigorous-in-its-chaos system, and the ever-present question: where does the Hallmark crown come from? Rumor traces it to the altar at Our Lady of Sorrows in Kansas City — the golden crown symbolizing Mary’s assumption, reportedly inspiring founder J. C. Hall.
Jamie Thingelstad’s Weekly Thing 345 includes his most substantial essay yet: “Software Is Liquid.” The argument is deceptively simple. For two decades, building software has been like chiseling granite — expensive, brittle, hard to undo. AI-assisted development makes software malleable. You can refactor faster than you can run the guardrail process that was supposed to prevent the wrong decision in the first place.
Thingelstad traces the lineage: waterfall existed because mistakes in C were catastrophic. Agile emerged because Python made refactoring cheap. The cloud did the same for infrastructure. Now: what if proof of concept is just discovery, and discovery happens in code? The paradigm of discovering through creating changes everything — including who should be close to the codebase. His contrarian take: managers belong in the code again, because agents collapse the context-window problem that kept leaders away from the asset they’re accountable for.
Benedict Evans anchors the infrastructure side in Newsletter No. 640. Tim Cook steps back as Apple CEO, handing off to hardware lifer John Ternus. Anthropic signed a $100 billion, 5GW infra deal with Amazon (including Trainium chips) on Monday, then a separate deal with Google ($10B now, up to $30B more) on Friday. Effectively, Anthropic is buying compute with equity because agentic coding has pushed demand for raw capacity by orders of magnitude.
The Elon AI shuffle gets its own subplot: xAI exploring a Mistral merger, a $10B “partnership” with Cursor (which had 20%+ negative gross margins last quarter), and SpaceX pushing toward a $75B IPO raise. Evans’s verdict on Musk: “a bullshitter who delivers… something. He raised money promising the moon, and delivers LEO, and that’s still pretty good.” Meanwhile, Meta cuts 8,000 jobs to fund AI, continuing a pattern where the company has hired 54k and laid off 39k since 2019.
The Slow AI dissects a new Anthropic paper presented at ICLR 2026 with a memorable title: “The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity?” The finding upends the core assumption behind every AI deployment: the smarter the model, the more unpredictable its failures on the tasks that matter.
The paper splits AI error into two parts. Bias is systematic — a model that consistently gets legal terminology wrong in the same way. You can build guardrails for that. Variance is random — the same model answers the same question correctly three times and incorrectly twice, for no traceable reason. They define “incoherence” as the fraction of total error from variance. On hard tasks, bigger models become less reliable, not more. Understanding and execution come apart as models grow.
This dovetails with Ed Zitron’s latest at Where’s Your Ed At: “AI’s Economics Don’t Make Sense.” And from Sidebar: a growing existential question across the industry — Sidebar flagged “On the Right Tool for the Job” (choose based on project requirements, not past preferences) alongside A11Y.MD, a context system for building accessible software by default, with enforceable rules aligned to WCAG. The tools are proliferating. The judgment gap remains.
Case Studied (via Vendry) breaks down P&G’s Mr. Clean retirement stunt — the biggest product innovation to the Magic Eraser in 20 years, announced through a mascot “hanging up his whites.” The sequencing was textbook: retirement press conference on February 18 (21 million TikTok views), a Zillow listing for his “absolutely spotless” Maui home two weeks later, then the unretirement reveal on March 4 tied to new Shower & Tub, Kitchen Grease, and tropical scent lines.
Three beats, three news hooks, two weeks of earned media. Brands including Instacart and Old Spice played along in the comments. The stunt was developed by MSL (via PGOne/Publicis), and the social-first launch gave journalists organic traction data before they were pitched. P&G’s Q3 earnings on April 24 beat estimates — product volume grew for the first time in a year.
On the other end of brand theater: Dot Dot Dot’s Product Anatomy event at Milan Design Week (covered above in § 01) represents the opposite approach. No mascots, no TikTok views. Instead: archive folders designed to look like Stone Island research files, a Friendly Pressure Studio One sound system retuned for 2026, and Alberto Ghidotti explaining the NO SEASONS jacket’s construction in nerdy detail to a room seated in its fabric. Part 2 is confirmed for October in London.
Today in Tabs delivers the week’s sharpest coverage of Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. Cole Allen rushed the Secret Service checkpoint above the Washington Hilton ballroom. Five or six shots were fired, one officer hit in a ballistic vest. Allen wasn’t shot, and it remains unclear whether he ever fired a weapon himself. His letter to family listed “rules of engagement” specifying only administration officials as targets. Rusty Foster’s observation: the sentiments in the letter sound absolutely ordinary.
The United Arab Emirates pulled out of OPEC, a move that reshuffles the global oil production cartel’s already strained unity.
The U.S. Justice Department indicted former FBI Director James Comey — nominally over seashell photographs. The prosecution reads as political theater.
The NYT reports OpenAI has missed its own user and revenue targets, raising questions about data center plans and its forthcoming IPO. (Via Public Announcement)
The Google co-founder has praised Trump, donated to Republicans, and spent $57M blocking a California billionaire tax. Once a backer of liberal causes. (NYT)
Also in the mix: GitHub’s merge queue silently reverted code on customers’ main branches on April 23 — thousands of lines of already-shipped code quietly removed, every subsequent merge built on broken history. And a Claude-powered coding agent deleted an entire company database in 9 seconds, backups included. As Today in Tabs puts it: “It’s genuinely impossible to tell if tech products are bad now because of AI or just because tech products have always been bad.”
Dense Discovery leads with a different kind of precarity. Financial journalist Hanna Horvath’s essay distinguishes material precarity (the basics slipping out of reach) from positional precarity (earning well but the life that income was supposed to buy keeps receding). Her sharpest point: the family earning $75K and the family earning $350K have more in common with each other — structurally, in terms of their relationship to capital — than either has with the family whose wealth generates its own income without labor. Both are running on the treadmill. The resentment travels sideways instead of up.