PicoBlog

Hi! This is a newsletter about artists I like. I began acquiring art through some friends that worked in galleries. I started small, working on a limited budget, for stuff I could afford. As time passed, my collection grew, and it was exciting to watch many of the artists I'd collected go on to bigger shows and critical acclaim. My goal with this newsletter is to make a digestible resource for anyone interested in artists that are making great (and still affordable!

Welcome to Pearl, a bi-weekly newsletter dedicated to Filipinas and their beauty journeys. Read more about its mission here. I once received a DM from someone who told me she wasn’t wearing traditional white for her wedding because the color would make her skin tone look “very dark.” It stuck with me: Very dark. Like it was something to avoid.  While I believe you should wear whatever you want for your wedding, it called to mind how deeply rooted colorism is in the Philippines.

Whenever I find myself visiting a new place (or returning somewhere I’ve enjoyed in the past), I always try to figure out how locals might string together various activities to yield a memorable morning or afternoon. I know, too, that many of you are looking for ways to experience Paris in non-orthodox, done-to-death ways— so I thought I’d share one of my own prized morning routes: a stroll in and and around the Marché d’Aligre market.

Nikki Allan, months before her death On 7 October 1992, seven-year-old Nikki Allan was brutally murdered, her body left in a semi-derelict building. The child had been lured from nearby her home by a tall, white, clean-shaven man in his 20s whom she obviously knew. Her last moments alive were captured on CCTV – poor quality, grainy footage showing a small girl skipping behind a man who appears to be striding purposefully ahead.

In the latter half of the 2000s, physical music sales fell off a cliff, and while the blow was temporarily offset by a rise in digital sales (e.g. MP3s and, oddly, ringtones), it took less than a decade for that market to collapse as well. For all the ongoing talk in recent years about a vinyl revival, a CD revival and even a cassette revival, these things are all niche concerns in an industry where streaming now generates more than 80% of recorded music revenue in the US.

Today on #NEVERWORNS, I’m sharing the episode with Mellany Sanchez. I’m in awe of this woman, so much that I let this episode run longer than usual. Watch the Mellany’s episode at the end and learn a bit more about her below. As always, subscribe, watch the NEVERWORNS channel, and stay tuned for guests’s drops on neverworns.net. I first met Mellany Sanchez in 2016 when baby-me did a Vogue story about her shopping at her favorite downtown jeweler, Jane of New Top on 185 Centre Street.

AI singer-songwriter Anna Indiana’s new song “Betrayed By This Town” recently went viral, and one X user had a fitting observation. “There is one thing glaringly missing from this... soul,” he wrote. It’s a clever response, and literally true. As Anna Indiana explains in the intro of the song, every single aspect of the tune is AI generated. The chords. The lyrics. The image of the singer herself. It was a song generated by a machine, so to speak.

I mentioned in last year’s Father’s Day gift round-up how a high-speed personal blender changed Abe’s life. He became quite the smoothie chef, whipping up concoctions every weekend after his bike rides. So when his beloved Nutribullet began to lose its juice a few months ago, I thought I was just going to buy him a new one — until I saw that Our Place now makes a “Splendor Blender” which wasn’t very much more, and (in my opinion) a lot prettier.

During the 25 years or so that I’ve been exploring how humans learn, one of the concepts I’ve been most interested in is “Overlearning”.   Whether we know it or not, for people who design and deliver learning experiences of any kind, Overlearning is the north star which we all aspire to achieve. It refers to a state in which a learner continues to study or practice well past the point of initial understanding to full mastery of concepts and skills.