One of my favorite things about British actors is that the same people work together in completely different configurations — Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Grieg working together in absurdist hospital comedy Green Wing, then reuniting as screenwriters in the Hollywood satire Episodes, for example. Or Mark Heap, Sarah Alexander and Julian Rhind-Tutt all working together in Green Wing, then reuniting for the movie Stardust. Or David Tennant and Michael Sheen working together in Bright Young Things, Good Omens and Staged.
The array of dead princes in Stardust.
The point is: these creative ventures mix, match and recontextualize the same elements, and some intrinsic qualities persist.
And so it goes with email newsletters. You all had subscribed to So What, Who Cares?, which originally began life on Tinyletter before migrating to Substack. The original newsletter was meant to have a fairly structured editorial conceit. However, times change: I learned my metier is best described as "blurb synthesizing several things into one," and my newsletter provider was best described as "Der Stürmer, but for the Nerd Reich."
Thus So What, Who Cares? needed to wind down, I needed to migrate platforms, and I needed a rethink of what text-based value I can possibly contribute to The Discourse.
So what now?
One of the best things about long-haul flights is having several hours to do nothing but read, flip through the in-flight entertainment options, and let your brain drop into the state where you can do your most genuinely floaty and interesting thinking. Some of my most serendipitous discoveries have been mid-flight, happily munching the mustard powder-dusted pretzels and looking up from a long read or finishing a movie I had never heard of, then feeling my memory stretch and connect what I've just experienced to something I've already internalized. What a sensation, to feel the world expanding as your calves are contracting from the lack of space in your row.
Living in the K-shaped economy is not unlike being sardined into a bargain seat on the Stockholm-to-San Francisco route. In some ways, the world feels excitingly big; in others, you are reminded of how hard the folks on the upslant of that K are working to take your money and kick you harder down the other slope.
And thus -- Notes from the Economy Class. I'm sitting here sipping my three ounces of grudgingly-poured beverage and marveling at the ever-evolving stories in commerce, technology and human culture. Thanks for joining me on the flight.
Your Flight Today
Of all the zombies coming back in 2026, who had "girlboss" on the bingo card?
Conceived in less gender-polarized times, the original iteration was a fantasy of inclusive capitalism, even though in practice the girlboss was the exact opposite of "intersectional," and an obvious contradiction of Audre Lorde's "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." And as I pointed out six years ago:
Working women haunt the American culture wars, but girlbosses are cheerleaders for capitalism.
Girlbosses are cool -- they're not linearly-achieving women, they're business-is-fun girls -- until they're sexually harassing their staff, fostering inhumane workplace practices, running their businesses into the ground, or behaving in ways that seemed counter to what the company was intended to sell. Then they're suddenly everything wrong with women in the workplace.
And now, girlboss is a synonym for the kind of grifty lady who thinks money will insulate her from the realities of gender bias. This week alone, we have had two separate opinion pieces: The Cut's "The Girlbossification of AI" and the NYT's "The Revolt Against the Girl Bosses Has Finally Come." In both excellent pieces, two points are made: Women have given up on getting ahead and are merely trying not to backslide too hard. AI is not helping."
Related: Deloitte slashed parental leave benefits only for their admin, IT support, and finance workers: these are the workers whose jobs are expected to be heavily impacted by enterprise applications of AI, and they're also likely to be female. AI industry leaders have already started saying how their products will reduce the economic power of women and their products already have bias against women embedded in both the training data and the results.
With a 2026 tech industry vibe that reads like a pitch deck for "The Screwfly Solution," the girlbosses exhorting women to learn to love the thing that erases them from full economic participation is really gross. Time to shoot the girlboss zombie in the head and bomb the lab where she was created.
Your In-Flight Snack
Is it a newsletter if I don't include some pop culture recommendations? We all know the answer.
A few years ago, I got the Sam Wasson biography Fosse and read it during the liminal week between Christmas and New Year's. It's a handy way to understand both Bob Fosse and the twentieth century in American film and theater. It was also, if you were me, another wonderful way to play "spot the differences" when the FX series Fosse/Verdon came out. Gwen Verdon fares considerably better on-screen than she did in Wasson's book.
I will not bother explaining this, you just need to see it.
We're living in real Cabaret-type times, but I'm going to swerve here: the movie that captures living in 2026 is All That Jazz, a movie about compulsions and delayed consequences that doubled as Fosse's lacerating autobiography. You can watch it for free on Tubi most months. This movie is a whole 1970s vibe, and the individual setpieces show what's been lost and found on stage and in movies ever since.
And that's it. Thank you for joining me in this new newsletter venture.