Episode 105: Malta, Marketing, Make-Believe

Jessica and Michael discuss Lauren Oyler’s New York Times magazine column, This Is What It Sounds Like When Brands Cry, about the lengths companies go in attempts to express empathy, such as Burger King’s recent “Real Meals” campaign.

When this happens, Jessica says,

humanism becomes reframed around conflating the ideals of trying to take selling something, which in a sense is a propagandistic mission, with feeling something, which is meant to entice people to spend more money for a thing because they identify with a more human attribute that it conveys.

Also mentioned this week:

• London Design Museum, Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition
• Claire Messud, New York Times, Malta, Where the West Was Born
• The West Wing Weekly podcast
• The West Wing Wiki
• Mitch Goldstein tweets on Chernobyl typeface
• Serpentine font, the typeface for Chernobyl
• Scriptnotes, You Got Verve

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