Hello friends and enemies!

Some reading for you this week.

• Harmony Holiday’s writing on James Baldwin is amazing - Preface to James Baldwin’s Unwritten Suicide Note

• Chinese Cops are wearing glasses that can recognizes faces.

• Could the future of beauty shopping eliminate the need for in-store skincare consultants? [stares directly into the camera]

• The Skin Trade, Then and Now

• This piece on face tattoos is swell.

• There's a Nonprofit Offering Free Plastic Surgery to Domestic Violence Survivors

• How charcoal escaped the grill and ended up in your toothpaste and your face cream

• Michael Jordan’s ‘90s cologne was a phenomenal failure way ahead of its time.

• This machine isn’t actually… very revolutionary? It already kind of exists? So I’m confused as to why it’s being covered with such excitement, but oh well, I’d keep an eye on it, and note it’s by a white dude……wowza

• How to make your beauty routine more sustainable

• This is an oldie, but Connie always knocks it out of the park: why the death of shopping malls hasn’t come for the Mall of America. This pairs nicely with coverage on Hudson Yards gerrymandering NY laws to pilfer money from public housing projects in Harlem, I think… the politics of malls and how they exist in culture endlessly fascinates me.

• It also pairs well with these civil watchdog lawsuits over Toronto’s Quayside Project.

  I’m having a rough few weeks right now, good in special ways and utterly horrible and awful in many others. I hope yours is better than mine, and I hope I have good news to share with you all soon.

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