“Nigerians think any apparel can be repaired – we’ve seen everything brought in for our tailors, from bras to waist trainers to duvets,” Kanyinsola Doherty of Mend Lagos tells the BBC. Doherty founded Mend Lagos to address the need for specialised alterations beyond obiomas. For the traditional obioma, times have changed for various reasons, and many are being phased out. Security is one reason – increased crime in certain areas has resulted in more neighborhood security patrol. This limits the comings and goings of non-residents, so mobile tailors are no longer able to roam as freely as they previously did. And the economic downturn has also had an effect – due to inflation, many have found the business not sustainable, and have opted out.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression idled thousands of factories. To spur consumption, desperate manufacturers began researchinghow to make their products worse, writes Giles Slade in his book “Made to Break.” By incorporating inferior materials, companies forced people to buy replacements earlier, a practice called “planned obsolescence.”
Today, the idea of degrading the physical durability of many products, although alive and well, has been eclipsed by something more pervasive: “psychological obsolescence.”Persuading consumers to ditch perfectly usable products for more fashionable versions with little more than cosmetic changes has transformed consumer capitalism.
The idea of creating an autonomous taxi service has been kicking around Tesla for at least eight years, but the company has yet to stand up much of the infrastructure it would need, nor has it secured regulatory approval to test such cars on public roads. For the moment, Musk has put off plans for a $25,000, mass-market vehicle that many Tesla investors — and some insiders — are pushing for and believe is crucial to the carmaker’s future.
While anti-conformists may, at first, succeed in devising their own personal brand of sartorial rebelliousness, it’s followed by an inevitable, if unintentional, synchronization around a single appearance. Touboul’s study looks at how such people seem to inevitably become synchronized. He suspects that a major influence on the way it happens may be the speed of propagation of styles through a culture.
When you peel a banana, you’re on the receiving end of a near-miraculous $10bn supply chain. One that sends seemingly endless quantities of a tropical fruit halfway across the world to be among the cheapest, most readily available products in supermarket aisles (on average, around 12p a banana). But, incredibly, there’s no inbuilt backup plan or safety net if the one variety that most of the global trade depends on starts to fail.
Besides cultural opposition, Japanese citizens possess high, complex standards when it comes to cellphones. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn’t cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner, according to Kuittinen.
Hard Art is led by musician, artist, and climate activist Brian Eno (who, among other initiatives, is crediting the Earth as a songwriter on his releases, with the planet’s earnings going to his climate charity EarthPercent). Among the dozens of other participants are visual artists like Jeremy Deller, Cornelia Parker, and Gavin Turk, as well as writer Jay Griffiths (author of the fictionalized Frida Kahlo biography A Love Letter From a Stray Moon), actor/director Andrea Arnold (who directed the beloved TV series Transparent and I Love Dick), designer Es Devlin, writer Jon Ronson (So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed), filmmaker Asif Kapadia (director of the Amy Winehouse biopic Amy), and rapper Louis VI.
In Succession, status is signalled by what characters eat – or don’t eat. When Cousin Greg brings along his arriviste date to Logan’s birthday party – the one with the “ludicrously capacious bag” – Tom Wambsgans quips that she’s “wolfing all the canapés like a famished warthog”. Tom occasionally reveals his own middle-class greed and snobbery through his irrepressible excitement about fine food, as in the scene where he introduces Greg to the pleasures of eating deep-fried ortolan. Later, when he’s threatened with prison time, the first thing he frets about is the “prison food” and the logistics of making “toilet wine”. By contrast, the Roys, the billionaires atop the Waystar Royco media empire, seem to barely eat or drink anything at all.
Dozens of people have now had their memories turned into images in this way via Synthetic Memories, a project run by Domestic Data Streamers. The studio uses generative image models, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E, to bring people’s memories to life. Since 2022, the studio, which has received funding from the UN and Google, has been working with immigrant and refugee communities around the world to create images of scenes that have never been photographed, or to re-create photos that were lost when families left their previous homes.
Analyzing Trends 