PROGRESS REPORT

The Gift of Culture

It’s that time of year again. For being with friends and family. But also for signing off work, staying in your PJs all day, and finally making headway on the tabs that have been open in your browser for months.

To say thank you for subscribing, we’re sending a handful of links to add to that ‘to read’ list. These are all things our team has enjoyed and shared with each other recently. Consider it the gift of culture. We hope you enjoy them, too.

Till 2025…

Articles

1. Sales of Bibles are booming, fueled by first-time buyers and new versions

2. Inside Hanif Abdurraqib’s sneaker collection

3. Limited Too makes a comeback, catering to grown-up fans

4. Where did our 2004 photos go?

5. The business of Ellie the Elephant, the WNBA’s most valuable mascot

6. NASA has specific rules for naming its spacecraft

7. How “The Golden Girls” celebrated—and distorted—old age

8. How Gen Z came to see books as a waste of time

9. I reviewed restaurants for 12 years. They’ve changed, and not for the better.

10. A shift in the media business is changing what it is to be a sports fan

11. The Atlantic is expanding its print magazine as it surpasses 1 million subscribers

12. Twitch is transforming into a political arena

13. What is ‘sexy grotesque’ and what should brands know about it?

14. Oxford’s word of the year is ‘brain rot’

15. A woman won South Korea’s first literature Nobel. That says a lot.

16. The internet’s AI slop problem is only going to get worse

17. An influencer is suing another influencer for copying her aesthetic. Can she win?

18. How Shaboozey’s “Bar Song (Tipsy)” tied “Old Town Road’s” greatest Billboard record

19. Gen Z broke the marketing funnel

TikToks

1. Global anti-intellectualism came from STEM education

2. Pokémon GO tricks gamers into building a global geospatial model

3. A look at brands driving packaging innovation

4. Why we are struggling with Gen Z in the workplace

5. The origin of the word “hello”

6. A guide to Google fonts that don’t suck

Books

1. Good Material by Dolly Alderton. A modern romantic comedy with two endings.

2. Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang. Futuristic short stories about age-old problems.

3. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh. A dark tale of a budding friendship between two women in 1960s Massachusetts.

Apps

1. Is My Blue Your Blue? A web experience for testing your perception of color.

2. Every Noise at Once. An algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space.

3. Fog of World. A privacy-focused app that tracks travels both big and small.

4. Merlin. Essentially Shazam, but for birds.

About Progress Report

Progress Report is a bi-weekly newsletter of business considerations, cultural conversations, and fun recommendations from around the world and web.