PJH Studios

Category: Pop Culture

Popular culture, culture that seems to spread beyond more than three people

  • Co-op as affordable housing

    The Swiss pioneering a different approach to affordable housing: co-ops.

    What if homeownership had no profit motive and no capital gains?

    In Switzerland’s member-based cooperative housing, new residents buy shares to gain admission to the building and get one vote in the corporation regardless of how many shares they own. The co-op uses the money to maintain the building, keep rents below market rate and, often, provide communal amenities like child care.

    When a resident moves out, their shares are returned at face value. There is no capital gain.

  • Play ball, get a car

    Back in the day, a college football player getting a car required either subterfuge or other shady creativity. Today, however, with the free for all that is NIL, players can get a car easily, and car dealers are becoming a power broker with programs.

    There has always been a mystique around cars in college football. Before NIL, there were whispers, message-board postings and social media photos soft-pedaling accusations of underhanded dealings by boosters.

    Paparazzi-style photos appeared in the newspaper, like in 1979, when future SMU Pony Express (and Excess) star Eric Dickerson’s gold Trans Am made national news and became the most famous car in college football history, right up there with the Ramblin’ Wreck of Georgia Tech.

    But now, there are thousands of Eric Dickersons. Players legally pose with their new sports car on a dealer’s Facebook page. While it takes some of the cool factor out of the old days, it’s a natural evolution for the combination of sports and commerce. And a Pontiac seems downright quaint in retrospect. Across the country, major college football parking lots might as well be outside the Chateau Marmont.

  • Printing The Onion

    While not profitable yet, The Onion is making money with subscriptions to its print edition.

    Filled with spoof ads and satirical headlines that often take swings at the news of the day, the Onion has more than 53,000 subscribers paying as much as $9 a month. The publication has a new deal to sell its papers at Barnes & Noble, and is expecting about $6 million in revenue this year—up from less than $2 million in early 2024.

    The Onion isn’t profitable, but Chief Executive Ben Collins aims to turn a profit next year. “People like getting something in the mail that’s not f—ing awful,” he said.

    The publication’s results show that old-fashioned media products can find a niche despite changing reader habits and an unforgiving digital landscape.

  • Banana Ball growth pushing up against MLB

    As Banana Ball grows, where does it fit in the sports landscape with Major League Baseball?

    On a Friday night this summer, the New York Yankees packed Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in a rematch of last year’s World Series. An hour south that same evening in Anaheim, another major-league stadium hosted a sold-out ballgame, but the contest had nothing to do with the nation’s most venerated sports league, Major League Baseball. It was between a troop of dancing ballplayers called the Savannah Bananas and a rival of their own creation, the Firefighters.

    MLB officials say they view the independent Bananas not as competition but as a complement, an aid to the number of baseball and softball fans everywhere. To MLB, the Bananas are an entertainment product — not competitive with an established sport and closer to a stadium-filling concert, or a sport-adjacent show like the Harlem Globetrotters of basketball.

    But Jesse Cole, the Bananas’ owner, sees what he’s creating as much more than just baseball vaudeville.

  • Moving a Swedish church

    An amazing photo essay of moving an entire church in Kiruna, Sweden.

  • The Rise of the Groomzilla

    Perhaps because most of my friends are past the getting married stage of life, but apparently, groomzillas are a new trend.

    On subreddits like r/weddingshaming, you’ll find viral posts in which users vent about or seek advice on managing the groomzillas in their lives, like the groom who demanded his groomsmen spend more than $4,000 on an elaborate, multi-day bachelor party, or the guy who insulted his bride’s appearance during the first look, commenting that her makeup and manicure didn’t look good and that her gray hairs “stood out.” Over on r/bridezilla, one post spells out all the ways a woman’s fiancé actually out zilla’d her — reviewing and approving every placecard, centerpiece, and decoration himself, in addition to requiring he and his bride learn the Charleston (and perform it) and hand-roll 75 chocolate cigars to give guests in custom bands and cigar boxes.

    The rise of the groomzilla is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, when a groom’s investment manifests in controlling, aggro behavior — well, then we’ve created a monster. On the other, it feels like progress that hetero men are finally helping shoulder the labor of planning nuptials.

  • How to get better at anything

    One idea in order to get better at anything: mimic/copy successful people.

    I think this should be at least a little bit surprising, the fact that our mimicry abilities can extend to latent space like this. Some combination of largely unconscious mental processes gives us the ability to simulate the thinking of others, even though we have no direct ability to observe it. Think of how quickly you can tell, just from an unusual text message, that a friend is unhappy. Even if we have only a small sample of observations of someone whose instincts we trust deeply, we probably have enough material to ask, “Does it seem like they would do this?” Trying to explicitly reason about the basis of ethical action is complicated.

  • The best college football TV guide listing

    College football start this weekend. One of the more annoying first world problems is finding out what game is at what time and on what channel. Enter https://cfb.guide/

    It does just that. If you create an account, you can set your time zone and your favorite teams. During game day, it even tracks the scores.

  • American state capitalism

    Not sure if Reagan envisioned American state capitalism.

    We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.

    The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.

  • What does a coxswain do?

    A friend of mine has a daughter who will be on a collegiate, Division I rowing team as a coxswain. It’s been interesting hearing about the recruiting process and what they do on a boat–they’re the brains.

    “They’re pretty much in charge of the whole race,” says Tom Sanford, the Director of Rowing at Marist. “They are a coach while they’re on the water”. Sanford also likened coxswains to jockeys in a horse race.

    The most important position on a rowing team, the coxswains are the ones responsible for steering the boat. They do this mostly by yelling loudly, but they also use a rudder and a GPS system that displays the boat’s performance metrics, such as speed and strokes per minute, on a screen. They have to be small in stature so that they don’t weigh down the boat and also possess great leadership skills.