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Summer's basically over, which I've decided is the perfect moment to start eating properly, going to the gym and getting my life in order. Three weeks of August left. Excellent planning as per usual.

The bit I keep being told is that I need 1.8 to 2 grams of protein per kilo, which used to sound like a full-time job and now sounds like a shopping list. I went to the supermarket this week and it's label after label. Protein bread, protein popcorn, protein Cup Noodles, a Starbucks bottle with 22 grams in it.

Then I found Doritos Protein, ten grams a bag, and had to have a small sit down. You're telling me I can hit my numbers on Doritos. Where has this been my entire life.

This week's piece is about how protein quietly replaced the calorie as the number we measure ourselves by, and why counting up feels so much better than counting down. Same habit, better mood.

We've been on the other side of this all summer. Half the packaging work coming through the studio is a version of the same question: how big does the number go on the front. With Iliyo we had the easy version of it, since strained Greek yoghurt is high in protein whether or not anyone's shouting about it, and the ingredients fit on one line. Still took a while to decide how loudly to say so.

Anyway. Back to the sofa with my protein Doritos, wondering why I'm not shredded yet.

In today's issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Barcelona is in the middle of a heat wave, the kind that flattens the whole afternoon, and what I wanted was the orange and mantecado I've been ordering since I was a child. Next to it in the freezer sat a chocolate one with 5 grams of protein promised on the lid, and I stood there in the cold air of the open case doing a small, ridiculous piece of moral arithmetic before I chose the optimized one. It tasted terrible and I ate it anyway.

Calories always felt like subtraction, a record of what you should have skipped. Protein is a target you aim for and hit, which means the weighing and the logging carried on more or less unchanged while the feeling attached to them flipped. The American protein market is worth something like forty billion dollars now and keeps growing while everything around it flattens, and a Stanford dietician has described the whole phenomenon as the SnackWell's problem in reverse — the same health halo low-fat food wore thirty years ago, handed over to a cookie.

None of it is really about muscle. You can't establish whether seed oils are poison or coffee is medicine this week, but you can hit a hundred and forty grams, and hitting it feels like control in a summer that offers almost none.

👉 Read the full piece

Judah was born at twenty-two weeks weighing a little over a pound, in a neonatal unit in El Paso nine hours' drive from his parents' house outside Dallas. His mother asked her employer whether she could do her job remotely while she sat next to him. Her employer, a company that sells bamboo sleep sacks to new mothers on the strength of how close it wants them to feel to their babies, approved the arrangement and then a few days later told her that if she wasn't coming in they'd treat it as a resignation.

The audience that took Kyte Baby apart had been practising. A year earlier a few million people had spent a fortnight zooming in on a beauty creator's lash line, deciding for themselves whether a partnered mascara review was true, and there was no reason they'd stop at mascara afterwards. Sprout Social found in 2019 that 70% of consumers wanted brands to take a stand on social issues, and in the same survey 53% said they thought brands only did it for the marketing. The industry spent four years building on the first number.

Walmart's $100 million Center for Racial Equity was quietly not renewed in 2024, and the vocabulary survived the programme, lightly rearranged and still available for next year's deck. Kyte Baby's mission statement is also still up. It talks about families and the earliest months of a child's life, and the company almost certainly meant it.

👉 Read the full piece

Columbia Sportswear has offered to give away the entire company to anyone who can travel to the edge of the Earth and document it. The campaign is called Expedition Impossible, the challenge is aimed squarely at flat earthers, and it proves a tagline like Engineered For Whatever without asking anybody to take the brand's word for it.

That kind of commitment runs through most of what we've collected this month. Dua Lipa and Livraria Lello have opened a permanent room in Porto, The Manifesto Library, given over entirely to banned and censored books from around the world. Karin Hosono has been painting cats since she was ten and has painted more or less nothing else since, and the repetition is exactly what turned her name into a style. In Norway, hundreds of fans sitting flat on the stadium floor in a synchronised rowing line has already escaped the tournament and started showing up in school hallways.

There's also Beatriz González's work running on Bogotá's digital billboards, the Japanese supporters who stayed behind after the final whistle to bag the trash, and a map of what the rest of the world eats for breakfast.

👉 Get inspired

Every friend I had in the late nineties talked about the floor in Jamiroquai's Virtual Insanity, the one that slid Jay Kay around the room while he danced through it in a single unbroken shot. The floor never moved. Moving it in different directions was too expensive, so Jonathan Glazer's crew moved the entire basement around it instead, and the rest of us spent a decade being fooled by the cheaper option.

Thirty years on, Beefeater 0.0 has put Jay Kay back on the same dancefloor to the same song with an alcohol-free gin and tonic in his hand, and this time the floor actually moves. Lucky Generals and director Julien Quentin built nine sets by hand, choreographed the camera moves manually, and engineered a physical mechanism to shift the floor under him while he danced. The thing that was impossible in 1996 is the centrepiece of the 2026 version, which is a reasonable position for a gin that removed the one ingredient everybody assumed was the point.

The choreography is Jay Kay's own, the way it was the first time. A prompt could have produced the same nine rooms in an afternoon, and nobody would be talking about them in thirty years.

👉 Watch the campaign