Posts by Swedan Margen
How to validate your business idea using customer interviews
You probably already know the advice: “Don’t build until you talk to customers.” And yet here you are, with a Notion doc full of ideas, a half-built MVP, and a quiet fear that you’re still guessing. Customer interviews sound simple, but most founders either avoid them or run them so poorly that they get false…
Read MoreAI Won’t Replace Trust in Marketing
Generative AI is impressive, but it still misses what matters most in marketing: trust. That’s my stance, and it comes from hard-won experience. As a founder and operator, I’ve watched the hype grow louder while the work of earning trust has not changed. Marketing runs on authenticity, not shortcuts. When content feels fake, people check…
Read More“The President’s Cake” Is a Neorealist Treasure from Iraq
In the city, the story splits in half: Lamia gets separated from Bibi (for reasons I wouldn’t dare disclose) and searches for the one person she knows there, a classmate’s father, who supposedly works at an amusement park. At the venue, she espies the classmate, a boy named Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), picking someone’s pocket.…
Read More‘Ass power!’ Hundreds gather in L.A. to play a video game about donkeys and the resistance
The donkeys are pissed off. Put upon, out of work and victims of decades-long systemic abuse, it’s time, they have decided, to protest. The donkeys, metaphorically, are us. At least that’s the premise of “asses.masses,” a video game played by and for a live audience. It’s theater for the post-Twitch age, performance art for those…
Read MoreThe End of Books Coverage at the Washington Post
There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent. There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books; cult favorites, like Bookforum; and irreverent newcomers, like The Drift and The Point, the latter of which I edit. These magazines…
Read MoreTrial starts in L.A. lawsuit alleging Instagram and YouTube knew apps harmed kids
A landmark civil trial that will ask jurors to decide whether social media companies can be held liable for pushing a product that they allegedly knew was harmful to children began Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, with attorneys sparring for more than four hours in combative opening arguments. The closely watched test case…
Read MoreEmerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” Is Extravagantly Superficial
Catherine and Heathcliff—now played by Robbie and Elordi—will prove each other’s undoing as well. Fennell teases out the tricky evolution of the characters’ deep bond, from steadfast sibling affection toward a combative, quasi-incestuous desire. Catherine, incensed by Heathcliff’s treatment of her, slips several eggs into his bed; it’s a childish prank with an erotic undertone,…
Read MorePierre Huyghe’s A.I. Art Monster Takes Over a Night Club in Berlin
In the far corner of the Halle, there’s a dim glow. Your job, you realize, is to grope your way toward that light, which reveals itself to be a projector beam hitting a colossal screen, almost nine hundred square feet. This is the centerpiece of “Liminals”: a fifty-minute film on loop. A few other tweaks…
Read MoreBarry Blitt’s “Split Screen”
In February, 1925, the first issue of The New Yorker was published, featuring a drawing by the art editor Rea Irvin of a top-hatted dandy examining a butterfly through his monocle. This dandy—later named Eustace Tilley—has made an appearance on the cover virtually every February since and, in the process, has become one of the…
Read More“Industry” Is a Study in Wasted Youths
In the new season of the hit HBO series, its young protagonists have left the trading floor that made them. Their second acts are revealing. Source link
Read MoreBad Bunny’s All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show
Bad Bunny arrived on the Super Bowl stage wearing a silver trenchcoat and a matching do-rag. He delivered a perfectly incendiary verse in which he declared, “Viva la raza!,” and then he disappeared—and no one really seemed to mind. The year was 2020, and Bad Bunny was appearing as a special guest of Shakira, who…
Read MoreAI’s latest 20-something billionaire got his start at L.A. garage sales
The man set to become one of the world’s youngest artificial intelligence billionaires started his entrepreneurial journey as a bored preteen living in Los Angeles. When Ali Ansari was 12, living with his family in a single room at his aunt’s house in Woodland Hills, his immigrant mother told him to stop wasting time staring…
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