Kyle Chayka @chaykak Twitter profile

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Kyle Chayka

7 months

My upcoming book FILTERWORLD: How Algorithms Flattened Culture got its first review! A star from @KirkusReviews : "Chayka's timely investigation shows how we can reject the algorithms of the digital era and reclaim our humanity."

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Last Seen Profiles

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

“sorry I responded late to your email I was unjustifiably terrified of opening it”

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

I hate what Pinterest did to google image search

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

Millennials praising a dessert: “Yeah it’s not too sweet”

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

I call this gentrification railing

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

Kafka’s Foxconn plant, @verge

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

Nothing is funnier to me than the app where you rate hikes on a five-star scale as if nature is constantly disappointing you

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

7 years

I want the Gothamist-DNA union to immediately set up a Kickstarter / Patreon to fund a new employee-owned subscription operation

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

1 year

this is a great piece on how TikTok shapes the aesthetic of food / restaurants. Instagram forced food to make for pristine, dramatic static images, now, TikTok requires moments of motion and "activation" because of video

How TikTok Took Over the Menu

Everything is cheesier, saucier, and drowning in caviar.

www.grubstreet.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

if your name is on the masthead of a prestige print magazine every week, you are probably not being silenced

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 months

the new american dream is to cultivate a parasocial relationship with thousands of strangers who pay you money for no reason, pretty much like tithing

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

NFT accounts are getting hacked and the artwork stolen

Michael J. Miraflor

@michaelmiraflor

3 years

Update: stolen art has been either sold or transferred by the purchaser. The items were in plain sight and Nifty Gateway was alerted. They confirmed that the new "owner" purchased the pieces on Discord, and that it would be unfair to take them back. Now they have been moved.

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

whenever some tech person says “the metaverse” please remember that the term was coined by Neal Stephenson in 1992 to describe an exploitative, corporatized, hierarchical space that ultimately kinda sucks

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

For my second @NewYorker column, I wrote about Great Jones, the illusion of the DTC millennial aesthetic, and being embarassed by my Away suitcase

Great Jones Cookware and the Illusion of the Millennial Aesthetic

Can a company that loses all of its staff still manufacture a sense of community? So long as the Instagram posts keep coming, the answer seems to be yes.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 months

On a Zoom with work colleagues, I brought up that I had cooked a great Alison Roman recipe last night. They snapped their fingers at me in dismay. Had I not been online in 2020? My mistake: I should have said I had steak frites at Balthazar like a true woke coastal elite.

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

my non-newsletter idea to save media is an app where PR people pay to email journalists

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

how does one become ‘at large’ as a critic, writer, or editor? simply escaping, fleeing?

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

. @BoredApeYC community: if all 5,000 of you RT this story my editors will be very happy #BoredApeYachtClub

Why Bored Ape Avatars Are Taking Over Twitter

N.F.T. clubs are all the rage among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Are they a get-rich-quick scheme or the future of culture?

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

1 year

I'll say again what I will doubtless be saying a million times in the coming years: Algorithmic feeds have pushed content creators to conform to the acceptable aesthetic and cultural average; A.I. generation will just automatically produce that average from the start

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

House paint companies are booming during the pandemic as we all get bored of our walls, and specific colors are suddenly much more popular. I discovered the Quarantine Palette:

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

very happy & proud to say that I’m now a @NewYorker Contributing Writer. I’m so excited to join the great writers & amazing staff. My weekly-ish column “Infinite Scroll” on the people & platforms of digital culture can always be found here:

Infinite Scroll

Kyle Chayka on the people and platforms that are shaping digital culture.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

8 months

My latest for @newyorker is this interactive “Touchstones” column on Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” — the way its beautiful aesthetic has become ubiquitous online but its deeper meaning kind of lost

The Era-Defining Aesthetic of “In the Mood for Love”

Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 masterwork has influenced filmmakers ranging from Barry Jenkins to Sofia Coppola—and innumerable teens on TikTok.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

6 years

Why is all graphic design like this

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

IKEA x A24 would be the most cursed brand collab

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

My first book, The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism is on shelves today from @bloomsburypub ! You can order it here: But I also wanted to do a thread of my favorite people & quotes from the book —

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

the “creator economy,” or, as I like to call it, the economy

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 months

would be cool if there were a website we could go to to read stuff

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

5 years

Still freaking out about these Eat Pray Love ass Camus covers

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

in my head, the title of this essay I wrote for @NewYorker is “Notes on Vibe”

TikTok and the Vibes Revival

Increasingly, what we’re after on social media is not narrative or personality but moments of audiovisual eloquence.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

artists live in bushwick, journalists live in prospect / crown heights, producers live in south bed stuy, novelists live in fort greene

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

1 year

Twitter making the For You algorithmic feed default seems like the total opposite of what Twitter is useful for. Almost no one I actually follow shows up in it right now, only stuff people like and viral tweets

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

here’s my @NewYorker column on why photos taken with the latest iPhones look so weird: the uncanniness of algorithmic photography

Have iPhone Cameras Become Too Smart?

Apple’s newest smartphone models use machine learning to make every image look professionally taken. That doesn’t mean the photos are good.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

David Graeber was an incredibly inspiring thinker. RIP. Here’s “Bullshit Jobs”, a perfect reframing of the world in one short essay

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

wow if you hate pinterest maybe you’ll love my book about minimalism

The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism a book by Kyle Chayka

"More than just a story of an abiding cultural preoccupation, The Longing For Less peels back the commodified husk of minimalism to reveal something surprising and thoroughly alive." -Jenny Odell,...

bookshop.org

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

6 months

do we have a name for the relentlessly shitty period of history we're going through yet?

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

5 years

Mʏ ᴏᴡɴ ᴘʀɪᴠᴀᴛᴇ ɪᴄᴇʟᴀɴᴅ a long story for @voxdotcom about: — algorithmic tourism — digital Northern Lights — fake hot springs — grumpy GoT tour guides — reclaiming inauthenticity

Travel has never been "authentic"

Visiting Iceland in the age of overtourism.

www.vox.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

what is a magazine if not a hype house of writers?

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

I started this essay for @NYTmag in late 2019 on sensory deprivation and the trend of numbness in American culture. Then quarantine happened. Over the year, it became about commodifying nothingness, isolation, and the pessimism of our time.

How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted (Published 2021)

Even before the pandemic, American culture was embracing numbness as an antidote for the overload of digital capitalism. But is it a real escape — or another trap?

www.nytimes.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

jerry just make your own coffee

Jerry Saltz

@jerrysaltz

4 years

Commencing Day 16 Of Sheltering-in-Place. Coffee-run to gas-station complete. Eighteen large to-go. Put in car, drive them home, deloused, decontaminated, showered, and placed in fridge for use. Stay safe out there, outlaws and creative-gypsies.

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

you will never stop me from taking photos of my laptop screen with my phone and texting them to people

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

for my @NewYorker column, I wrote about how Tumblr, a semi-forgotten internet relic, is doing exactly what Facebook and Instagram can’t right now: gaining Gen Z users

How Tumblr Became Popular for Being Obsolete

The social-media platform’s status as a relic of the Internet has attracted prodigal users as well as new ones.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

An announcement: I’m writing another book!! FILTERWORLD will be the culmination of my writing about algorithms and culture, looking at how digital platforms shape everything we create and consume. I’m so excited to be working with Thomas Gebremedhin & @doubledaybooks

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

wow it’s almost like the pandemic wreaked untold havoc in the lives of every human on the planet and nothing is or can be quite the same as it was before

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

5 years

the cycle reaches its natural conclusion

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

16 days

for my @NewYorker column this week, I wrote about Byung-Chul Han, the internet's new favorite philosopher, the Sartre of looking at your phone a lot, author of the paperback manifesto your favorite artist / designer / architect is carrying in their pocket

The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher

Byung-Chul Han, in treatises such as “The Burnout Society” and his latest, “The Crisis of Narration,” diagnoses the frenetic aimlessness of the digital age.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

24 days

the only thing more powerful would be a combination Cut personal essay and Bookforum pan

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

an Apple store

New York Magazine

@NYMag

3 years

The Port Authority Bus Terminal is ugly and grimy and just generally bleak. Here's what its replacement could one day look like

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

7 months

I think this was a clear case of hating the game and not the player! I've been into Mr. Guy since the Put This On / Fuck Yeah Menswear era

derek guy

@dieworkwear

7 months

Me: Oh this is fun, one of my favorite writers wrote something about why the internet isn't fun anymore *clicks open* Kyle Chayka: The internet sucks because of Derek Guy 🔗:

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

staying up til 1 am when the next episode drops

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

5 years

Coffee shop generic style: — 2016: tail end of reclaimed wood — 2017: full Blue Bottle minimalism — 2018: handmade ceramics, beginning of plants trend — 2019: tropical jungle + chunky fabric wall hangings

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

having a great editor is like thinking with two brains

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

Italian hot pot where you braise things in tomato sauce and dip in Parmesan cheese

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

Really need a Gawker investigation on the Sartorialist’s chaotic breakup

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

1 year

this is just straight up airport aesthetics

Sprudge

@sprudge

1 year

A stunning new cafe in Cleveland.

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

holy shit

The Pitfalls and the Potential of the New Minimalism

The mantra of “less is more” still obeys a logic of accumulation—but it hints at genuinely different ways of thinking.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

you write 1000 words then you write the one five-word sentence that says what you actually mean

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

some personal news 😁

Michael Luo

@michaelluo

3 years

Great debut for ⁦ @chaykak ⁩’s new @newyorker column, on the people and platforms shaping internet culture, that we’re calling, Infinite Scroll. This is going to be fun.

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

7 months

my latest @NewYorker column is on how social networks have given up responsibility for distributing news, and what's left is an "algorithmic fog of war" without signposts of accuracy

How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News

The Israel-Hamas war has displayed with fresh urgency the perils of relying on our feeds for updates about events unfolding in real time.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

In sea shanty times deplatforming was called walking the plank

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

social media is over; what’s really innovative is gathering in the town square at dusk every evening to hoot and holler

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

girl in this cafe is using “laying the pipe” as a phrase to describe “setting up the narrative” in a play

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

7 months

damn girl are you a flâneur, cause you’ve been wandering aimlessly through my mind pondering lost artworks, the tides of history, arcane rituals, &c.

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

1 year

I hate when I marry into the Firestone family fortune, get divorced, and am forced to move into the vast Soho corner loft I bought to be an art studio

A Rare Corner Loft in SoHo

A divorce turned an art studio into a full-time apartment with an uptown feel.

www.curbed.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 months

The fetishization of “context” and “narrative” is already happening

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

who wants to give me $500k for a media company? it’ll prob work

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

my writing process is I wait to feel something

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

I appreciate how, like the sea shanties, the quarantine-era internet just makes us cycle through obscure niches of culture faster and faster. You have to listen to the sea shanties this week, not next week. (Better yet today, not tomorrow.)

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

I’m interested in obscure currencies: the tote bags of defunct art magazines

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

1 year

when a magazine closes down, it's not just that you lose a place to read stuff; you lose a whole unique culture of commissioning, editing, and paying for writing, which is what helps explore & promote all sorts of other culture

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

a vibe is haunting America

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

6 months

using this dying platform to talk to the remaining media biz people: the only things successful publications are going to concentrate on now are loyalty and habituation, subscriber benefits, making a consumer feel special & paid attention to

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

For @NewYorker I reviewed the Netflix reality show “Get Organized With The Home Edit”, which is an elaborate infomercial for clear plastic boxes:

“Get Organized with The Home Edit” Is Infomercial Reality Television

Netflix’s new relative of “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” in which two organizing influencers transform Khloé Kardashian’s garage and regular families’ clutter, feels like just another marketing...

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

as I get older / continue writing I feel more acutely the difference between good writing as interesting ideas and good writing as smooth prose, they are not the same and don’t always go together

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

wish I was born in the 14th century and spent my entire life learning to paint trompe-l'œil marble on altarpieces

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

what do we do when every artist’s late-career memoir is like “I was on the internet for 40 years”

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

A child at Robertas just got the birthday present of a wooden model nespresso machine

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

jealous of everyone who gets paid a lot of money to be an idiot

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

My essay on cultural numbness is in the print @NYTmag today under the title “Into the Void.” The layout and illustrations really echo the text. Hope you check it out there or online

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

5 years

technology simply loves to intersect with other things, such as culture, society, and politics

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

11 months

. @hyperallergic doesn't get enough cred from media people for being an independent, small-scale, totally sustainable publication that runs on high-quality display ads and no-paywall memberships. The model works if you stay small and serve your readers.

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 months

Today is the launch day of my new book FILTERWORLD: How Algorithms Flattened Culture! It's in stores and online everywhere now. Some glamour shots of the beautiful hardcover, designed by Oliver Munday. All the info you need is here:

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

1 year

Average Garbage Forever is the single commandment of 21st-century culture

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

5 Sea Shanties to Listen to Because You’re Lonely AF and Want to Imagine Safely Singing with Your Bros on the High Seas

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

2 years

the internet era of culture is a contest between the old model of top-down elite tastemakers telling you what's good and the new numbers-driven viral creator ecosystem in which algorithmic feeds tell you what you like

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

Supreme x Le Creuset

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

For @NewYorker , I wrote a feature about two of my favorite things: Airbnb and upstate New York, and the pandemic boom that’s happening

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

Ben’s column notwithstanding, the way journalists are forced into becoming public brands for their work — to sustain a Patreon or Substack — is also not ideal

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

7 years

Algorithmic culture

Paul Shapiro

@fighto

7 years

These are some of the ways that the Amazon brick and mortar book store is categorizing books.

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

the discovery experience of bookstores, where you can just be surrounded by different ideas and styles and subjects and just glance at something, is still totally irreplaceable online. Tons of curatorial voices coming together in one IRL space

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

I want to know how Dean Baquet decided the story on the Harper’s letter should go on the front page of NYT

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

I think one tendency of the internet era is that every piece of writing / fiction / whatever is called upon (by critics and audiences) to serve every role at once when the writer rarely / never has every role at once in mind

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

I predict a great Blogging Renaissance

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

nice chondo

New York Magazine

@NYMag

4 years

The conversion of this former Jersey City church into condos left left much of the original Gothic architectural detail intact. See inside one of its airy lofts

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

here’s my pitch: restaurant critic, but only coffee shops

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

I wrote this long reported essay for @newyorker on architecture during and after pandemic: from the legacy of modernism to redecorated apartments and improvised bacteria shields

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

1 year

my body is at my desk but my mind is here, living my entire life without leaving these walls, knowing every one of my neighbors from birth to death, gathering nightly in the piazza

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

5 years

if you're considering being freelance 4ever ask yourself if you have the stomach for $28,000 in unpaid invoices

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

I wrote about ornament, crime, and the 21st-century Gilded Age of interior decorating for @NewYorker

The North American Maximalism of Gigi Hadid’s and Drake’s Home Design

There’s a sensibility at play at the highest end of interior decorating right now, the fulfillment not of a designer’s vision but of a personal identity.

www.newyorker.com

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

4 years

Dream Home Makeover on Netflix is Mormons designing McMansions for other Mormons, the ultimate fulfillment of Kinfolk

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

5 years

having a nauseating feeling of career instability, AKA I feel and resent the pressure for everything on the internet, all media all the time, to be as big and fast and popular as possible or else fail to accelerate

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Kyle Chayka

@chaykak

3 years

the thing about a ton of writers running tiny newsrooms and publishing their own newsletters is that it’s massively inefficient

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