The Brooklyn Dispatch: Wednesday Notes
History of the Hoodie, #FAFO, the different Gen Zs, degrowth communism, The Clock at MoMA, etc.
Wednesday Notes is a collection of weekly readings, snapshots, and observations.
A mid-week catalog of what I'm consuming, thinking about, and noticing – from art shows to political essays, street corners to browser tabs.
Nothing Here is one of the most brilliant newsletters out there. This week I truly liked reading about FAFOnomics - F*ck Around and Find Out Economics and I might start using the hashtag #FAFO
”Anyone Who Believes Exponential Growth Can Go On Forever in a Finite World Is Either a Madman or an Economist” - Kenneth Boulding, quoted by Kohei Saito.
If you don’t know Kohei Saito, who managed to sell over half a million copies of his book advocation for degrowth communism, you should. Brilliant mind, driven by urgency. This podcast is a good introduction and almost makes you wonder why everyone is not a communist in 2025.
I keep a list of ridiculous corporate understatements and semantic distortions, and this one from LVMH’s ceo entered my all-time top 3, talking to Mark Zuckerberg and describing lay-offs as being ‘promoted outwards’, and I’m still not sure whether he was joking or not -
If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at Rachel Janfaza’s super smart diagram on the two different Gen Zs, 1.0 and 2.0, basically determined by if they graduated high school before or after the pandemic hit. Totally different behaviors. And her newsletter, The Up and Up, is truly worth reading and subscribing to.
A good trick if you land at JFK’s Terminal 5 (JetBlue), rather than walking 20+ mins to the taxi or Uber zone, go straight to the TWA Hotel and call a cab or Uber from there. It’s not so much about the convenience, it’s about seeing a monument of amazing architecture, the old Terminal 5 built by Eero Saarinen in 1962, truly a marvel.
I’ve had a 20+ years fascination and shopping addiction with hoodies, and probably own more than 100 pieces. Reading Blackbird Skyplane’s piece on “what’s the point of a hoodie” and his love/hate relationship with hoodies, it reminds me of this short and fascinating Paola Antonelli’s TED Talk on the 3000 years history of the hoodie.
Very few garments have carried so much history and symbolism.
Below, two photos I took during the Guggenheim exhibition, “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility” in 2024, one from David Hammons, and the second one from John Edmonds.
Although different and executed more than 20 years apart, both artworks share a crucial element: both deny the viewer direct engagement with a face or body, forcing consideration of how society views and often pre-judges Black individuals based on clothing alone. And seen together, they create a dialogue about protection versus vulnerability, presence versus absence, and the ways clothing can both shield and expose its wearer.
Lastly, it is still time to go and see The Clock by Christian Marclay at MoMA, until May 11th. It’s my 3rd or 4th time seeing it in different cities, at different times of the day, and every time is a renewed marvelous experience.
“The Clock” is a 24-hour film made up of thousands of clips from movies and television shows, each depicting the precise time of day that you are watching it. (NYTimes).
The work encapsulates 100 years of moving-image history, featuring a vast array of clips from various genres and eras, more or less famous, and, despite the fragmented nature of the clips (12,000 total), Christian Marclay creates a sense of flow through careful editing and sound design.
