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Welcome back to Pursuits Weekly, our look at the world’s biggest culture stories, as well as ideas and recommendations around travel, dining and art. Sign up here to get this newsletter every Saturday in your inbox. The triumph of the lowbrow
Fellini it ain’t.
Photographer: Ben Symons/Peacock
Love Island USA is a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Last year’s six-week run generated 18.4 billion minutes of streaming — 35,000 years. That dwarfs other hot reality shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race and The Traitors, which managed to rack up 3.2 billion minutes this season, per Nielsen. The current Love Island season, which ends Sunday, is doing even better than last year’s. Part of the reason is that while Love Island is airing, new episodes drop six days a week — a constant drumbeat of content, served up with a heavy dose of parasocial participation. Fans, who can vote off contestants via the official Love Island USA app, have created a huge parallel ecosystem of TikToks and group chats devoted to discussing the show’s machinations and assignations. Last year’s season generated some 4 billion social impressions across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X and YouTube during its six-week run. A Love Island episode is a bit like a major sporting fixture: “viewers have to show up in real time,” Danielle Lindemann, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University, tells Melos Ambaye. You can’t afford to postpone watching an episode, since your social channels will be full of spoilers as soon as it’s over. That makes it very different to 99% of scripted television (the exception being S4E3 of Succession). It turns out that if you don’t have to watch the next season of a show you like, you probably won’t. You get Lucas Shaw’s Screentime newsletter, right? If you don’t, sign up here. Shaw’s readers know that Netflix is struggling to get viewers to stick with its shows for more than a season. Season 2 of Beef, for instance, suffered a drop of more than 70%. The Night Agent shed 50% of its audience for the second season and another 35% for its third season. 
The fact is that high-profile original series, even when they dominate the press, are far from the most-streamed TV shows. Last year, for instance, the top streaming program, with 45.2 billion minutes watched, was Bluey; in second place, with 40.9 billion minutes, was Grey’s Anatomy. Only one of the top 10 shows was streaming-native (Stranger Things); the rest originally aired on linear TV, often well over a decade ago. Netflix “has taken steps to address sluggish growth,” writes Shaw, by adding live sports and podcasts — more unscripted viewing. One big problem with scripted original series seems to be that they just take far too much time to produce: Animated critical darling Blue Eye Samurai, for instance, will have a gap of four years between Season 1 and Season 2. “You can’t get to know characters if you have to wait years to watch another season,” writes Ryan Broderick. Prestige TV is not dead, far from it. It still drives conversation and culture. But as economist Dan Ariely noted in 2011, “In principle, we want to be the kind of people who watch serious movies, maybe even French ones — just not tonight!” In the comfort of our own homes, we tend to consume vastly more lowbrow content than we’d necessarily like to admit. By the numbers
Mayrlife’s anti-inflammatory program involves hypoxia training as well as liver wraps.
Source: Mayrlife
€4,295 The price of the anti-inflammation program at Austrian wellness clinic Mayrlife. (That’s about $4,900.) “Inflammation is designed to help us,” says Philip Calder, professor of nutritional immunology at the University of Southampton in England, but fighting it is now big business, as Sarah Rappaport discovered. 61% The increase in the number of family bookings at Four Seasons Bora Bora between 2023 and 2025. Dobrina Zhekova, went there for her article on how family travel is changing honeymoon destinations, finding that “an unspoken rhythm seemed to prevail,” with families gravitating toward the shallower end of the pool. 26% The proportion of American adults reporting estrangement from their fathers in real life. In fiction, art imitates life: Toby Lloyd read a slew of recent books with characters who don’t speak to their parents, and finds “a culture in which the bonds of the nuclear family appear weaker than ever.” 5 The number of hours that some travelers have been stuck in airport immigration lines, waiting to enter the EU. Yurii Stasiuk and Lyubov Pronina report that it’s all thanks to the bloc’s new Entry/Exit System Where popular music has no beat
Bloomberg’s Tiffany Ap has painstakingly curated a playlist of 100 Chinese ballads for your listening enjoyment. Dive in!
Illustration: Lucia Pham for Bloomberg
“A fairly crude rule of thumb is that the Chinese mainstream likes what I would call upper-body music,” music executive Alex Taggart tells Tiffany Ap. “In the West, it’s lower-body music, as in music with a groove.” Taggart, whose job involves helping Western artists enter the Chinese market and Chinese artists expand abroad, has his work cut out for him. Popular Chinese music tends to value melody over rhythm, with expressive ballads accounting for nine out of the top 10 songs last year on Tencent QQ Music. Its musical ecosystem is built around singing rather than dancing, with karaoke at its heart. And its lyrics are received as a form of high art, complex philosophical essays that are sometimes used as reading-comprehension questions on university entrance exams. Ap finds “a broader aesthetic of restraint” running through Chinese culture, derived from philosophical traditions such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism, where the deepest truths often reside in what’s left unsaid or never acted upon. Which probably comes as a disappointment to anybody hoping for Love Island Beijing. Where Faisalabad meets Dublin
Tandoor-roasted chicken in a creamy chile-infused sauce at Daata.
Source: Daata
As Big Tech companies including Microsoft and Amazon have attracted workers from around the world to Dublin, the city’s restaurants are getting increasingly diverse. Daata is a prime example: The most interesting new spot in the bustling South-East Inner City neighborhood of Dublin, Olivia Fletcher and Jennifer Duggan report for our Five Top Tables column dedicated to the Irish capital. The Punjabi restaurant features dishes inspired by the owners’ roots in Faisalabad, formerly Lyallpur. Try the Lyallpuri paneer, a spicy curry that combines the soft cheese with cashews and tomato (€21 as a main), as well as proper black daal — a rare find, in the city. Chart of the week
The US tourism industry is set to bring in about $40 billion less across 2025 and 2026 than it would have done sans Trump, bucking the trend of increased tourism almost everywhere else. K Oanh Ha and Dorothy Gambrell have the details. One Very Specific Recommendation: Carol Bove’s collage sculptures
They’re almost... cuddly?
Photographer: David Heald/The Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation
The Carol Bove mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim New York received a jolt of newfound relevance this week when the city’s attention was drawn to the buckling Pfizer Building at 235 East 42nd St. There, a series of buckling columns prompted a major evacuation and plans for a wholesale reconstruction of the star-crossed residential conversion. Uptown at the Guggenheim, Bove’s show starts with Sweet Charity, a brand-new collection of iron columns that have been bent, crumpled and then covered in urethane paint. The works aren’t macho, in the way a John Chamberlain crushed-car sculpture might be; instead they’re welcoming and seductive. As Deborah Solomon writes in the NYT, “Bove extracts something entirely new from steel, dispelling its aura of brawn.” More from Bloomberg Ideas & Culture
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Saturday, July 11, 2026
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