STEM Babies and Carrier Pigeons

A How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days sequel is in the works; KATSEYE scored its first No. 1 album in the U.S.; Olivia Rodrigo released a new Handmaid’s Tale track called “Serena Joy”; and Emma Chamberlain is the face of J. Crew’s latest rollneck campaign (my thoughts and some TikTok analysis below!).

GROUP CHATS MIGHT BE FULL OF AFFILIATE LINKS SOON, bloomberg
The popular affiliate marketing platform ShopMy — valued at $1.5 billion, with 329,000 creators and 40,000 brands — is expanding beyond influencers to regular people who are no longer shy about slipping commissionable links into Instagram Stories and personal group chats. A 27-year-old who has “always been the friend that people text asking, ‘Where’s your jacket from?’” now earns money from the links she texts back; another woman with just 1,900 Instagram followers made over $500 in her first couple of weeks posting links. If you’ve been reading this newsletter a while, you know I believe (most) everyone will eventually be an influencer. Back in April, prom made me even more bullish on this, with girls flooding the comments asking where dresses were from and the enterprising ones linking to ShopMy or LTK for affiliate kickbacks. This month, I’ve noticed the same behavior on an even bigger scale with back-to-school and rush. Taste is monetizable!

GET A TECH JOB, BABIES!, newyorker
Women in STEM? Babies in STEM! Board books aimed at teaching toddlers about quantum physics and coding have become a booming category, with Ruth Spiro’s 26-title Baby Loves Science series (example title: “Baby Loves Angular Momentum on Hanukkah!”) selling more than a million copies and Chris Ferrie’s Baby University collection (“General Relativity for Babies”) topping four million. Peg Oliveira, director in Early Childhood at the Yale Child Study Center, calls them “a PowerPoint presentation dressed up as a board book,” arguing they teach kids “that books are boring and reading is hard.” The trend harks back to the Baby Einstein boom, which hit $200 million in annual sales before Disney issued refunds in 2009 following a Journal of Pediatrics study linking the videos to smaller vocabularies.

This is the best job I’ve ever had! It’s also a lot of work :’) so I’m going to be experimenting with the paywall. If these emails are part of your routine, I hope you’ll consider upgrading!