The New York Puncher and Account Recs

Author

Izzy White
March 27, 2024

Hi!!! Welcome!! This is the a newsletters that has taken the IRL weekly trends briefing, and been transformed into the written word. All this information is a weekly digest of current news, trendy soundbites and sharp insights so that you can quit reading and still sound smart. Gathered from articles, newsletters, reports, and TikTok: It's like Blinkist for culture.

Algorithm References

The New York Puncher

Addressing The New Yorker puncher is not something I expected to include in this week's newsletter but here we are. It started when I saw one woman say she was punched out of nowhere when she was on her phone in New York, and then slowly it became multiple women. The whole incident is quite confronting, one that women are being assaulted and two that it’s seemingly at least a couple different men. It begs the question - where did this concept begin? Allegedly it was a “trend” 10 years ago called the ‘knockout challenge’ - which is to just randomly punch people really hard to see if you can knock them out, but it's suspicious to me that a challenge that was from 10 years ago has resurfaced and is targeting women. I suspect there is a different world online that leans much more alt-right, Andrew Tate style fans who have brought this behaviour back in full force. It’s also weird to me that Doja Cat confidently commented on one of the women’s videos and said it was a man named Andrew Wright who was doing it, the weird part of this is Doja Cat’s history with the alt-right world such as her wearing a well known alt-right Comedian. There is a lot of commentary on this ‘New York puncher’, and all I can hope for is that these reckless and dangerous challenges don’t inspire further resurgence of these behaviours.

@variouscomments

Women Punched In NYC. Women in NYC are reporting being punched in the face by an unknown assailant. Is this a part of The Knock Out Game? ... See more

Be a channel user > a brand

Small and surprising business accounts are using these dramatic edits on TikTok. I’ve seen at least 4 different ones on my fyp this past week. It shows how easy it is to get good engagement on platforms like TikTok when you show up as a user rather than a business.

@wandacardoso2

Nem a chuva pode parar uma pessoa determinada a comprar🛍️🛍️🛍️🛍️ Vem pra malwee😜 #compras #Malwee #Malweekids #CarinhosoKids #FashionKids #... See more

Extra algorithm references that might interest that are more sounds or trends -

Account Recommendations

Introducing a special addition to the newsletter and that’s recommendations of my favourite people right now on the internet. These are people who I might go to for references, perspective or understandings of the world on many levels. They include -

Articles

It’s been a hectic week, with not much time for article reading so here is more of a dump of articles that looked interesting! If you manage to give them a read, I’d love to hear your thoughts

Weekly Question

Thank you for getting this far. I look forward to hanging out with you all next week!

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