On 4/20 of this year, Tumblr announced a new feature: Tumblr Blaze, the platform’s version of paying to quick-promote a single post. Initial announcements about Blaze exhibited a magisterial understanding of Tumblr’s core power audience by actively encouraging using the tool for frivolous amusement—even outright shitposting—rather than couching the pitch in the anodyne terms of paid engagement and ROI blah blah blah. Certain recent developments on Twitter, a competing social microblogging service much in the news lately, compelled me to start lurking on Tumblr again.

The 8-story Viceroy Hotel, built in 1967, occupies a long-term ground lease on City of Santa Monica land on the corner of Ocean Ave and Pico Blvd. In 1958, based ostensibly on the need for Civic Center parking, the City of Santa Monica acquires the property on the North East Corner of Ocean Ave and Pico Blvd through eminent domain proceedings. In 1960, the former Santa Monica Elks lodge (1811 Ocean Ave), the only substantial building on the property, is demolished.

“You get more of what you engage with. Everyone who complains about coverage should understand that every click, every quote tweet, every argument is registered by these publications as engagement. If what you want is really meaty, dispassionate, balanced, and fair explainers, you need to click on that, you need to read the whole thing, you need to share it, talk about it, comment on it. We get the media that we deserve.

Now, who will light up the darkness? Who will hold your hand? Who will find you the answers, when you don’t understand? -Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks Greetings from the Tortured Metaphor Department. Violence is plummeting in the United States. All available data from 2023 show a decline in homicide that is so large that it is near the top of all-time, one-year crime declines. Now, crime data from the first quarter of 2024 are becoming available, and they show a homicide decline almost twice as large as in 2023.

This is the free, Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. In a recent piece for the New York Times, sociologist Eric Klinenberg makes the case that libraries just might be able to save the 2020 election. In short: many Americans in states where mail-in voting is not the norm are distrustful about the mail-in and drop-off process.