Things That Briefly Felt Necessary
McDonald’s is selling its Big Mac sauce in bottles now—in Australia only, which is the correct amount of unavailability to make it feel desirable. I’m not going to pretend I’m above it. I eat salad and I also occasionally need to sink my teeth into something that should probably be regulated as a controlled substance. The sauce is part of that. If they sold it here I’d buy two and feel nothing.
Rihanna exists in this permanent oscillation where half the time she’s the most chaotic, exhausting, insufferable presence in pop culture and the other half she’s the coolest person alive and I want to be her best friend. Her i-D cover lands firmly in the second category. Frame it, hang it, done.
There is a ring you can buy, called the Mota Smart Ring, that vibrates on your finger to tell you when someone has retweeted you. I have nothing to add. The object exists. Someone made it. Someone will wear it on the subway and check it with quiet satisfaction.
Moment makes an iPhone 6 case with an actual lens attached, which is the sensible middle ground between Instagram and the Canon EOS 5DS—a fifty-megapixel machine that costs as much as a small car and implies you photograph things for serious money. The gap between the camera you can afford and the camera you want is one of the defining frustrations of anyone who thinks seriously about images. I know which side of that gap I’m on.
Kim Kardashian is publishing a book of selfies called Selfish and it’ll cost fifteen euros and everyone will buy it while pretending not to. The genius is real. While everyone else uploads their self-portraits to the internet for free, she’s packaging hers as an object and selling them. I have genuine respect for this, even as it produces an emotion I can’t quite name.
Nike’s Black History Month Air Force 1s are a reissue of the 2005 model, white and red, and despite my general indifference to Nike—a position I arrived at years ago and have no reason to revisit—these are genuinely sharp. Fresh, even. I said it.
Louis C.K.’s Live at the Comedy Store is available on his website for five dollars, which is the correct price for the funniest hour you’ll watch this month. The direct-sale model is everything I want the entertainment economy to be, and the material—horny commuters, his lesbian daughter, the particular misery of singing children—is him at full power.
Hello Kitty and A Bathing Ape made a Valentine’s Day collection together and it’s exactly as cute and unnecessary as that sounds, and I’m charmed by it anyway. Some collaborations exist purely as aesthetic pleasure and require no further justification.
And somewhere in America, a company called American Greens is installing marijuana vending machines. This is the most civilized idea I’ve heard all month. The concept of obtaining what you need from a machine in your own hallway, without negotiating with anyone in a park at midnight, is a vision of human progress I’d genuinely like to see spread further. Someday.