The middle
A terrific essay on something that seems irretrievably lost. Rodrigo Brancatelli in his newsletter, Found Object:
This is not an essay about movies, tho. Have you noticed that the middle is gone from everything? Restaurants, companies, careers, music, retail, the economy itself. What replaced it is a barbell: one enormous weight on each end, nothing in the center, and most of us trying not to get crushed by the bar.
And the replacement does look better every single time, I grant you that. The A24 film is better than the $40 million adult drama from 2007, yeah, we can all agree on that. The Sweetgreen bowl is better than the Applebee’s chicken parm, sure. Your favorite Substack is sharper than the mid-list magazine that folded in 2019. Every replacement is a genuine upgrade. But every replacement serves fewer and fewer people. And nobody seems to think that’s a problem, which is how you know who the replacements were built for.