There’s some real content left in this world…

There’s a certain kind of nostalgia that shows up this time of year every year. It’s the kind that isn’t loud or performative, but arrives like an Eastbay catalog yanked out of the mailbox and dog-eared beyond recognition on a freezing cold December morning (millennials will get that reference)…

But it’s starting to get a little bit weird this year.

Earlier this week, a few friends sent me an Instagram carousel packed with vintage New York holiday images that almost felt like that. Moments from childhood, holidays, toys, textures, colors that were unmistakably “from then.” Except they weren’t. The whole thing was AI, designed to imitate memories it never lived. 👇

That’s the strange new frontier: nostalgia without origin. Feelings engineered instead of earned. Familiar, but hollow in a really-hard-to-pinpoint type of way. Close, but not quite warm.

So this week, instead of an essay, we built a quick moodboard - twenty-five images pulled from real eras of holiday culture in the New York city over the years. Things and feelings that became folklore. Nostalgia with provenance. Memories that existed before the machine tried to recreate them.

Enjoy the scroll, and enjoy the post-holiday weekend as we move into the month where everything can feel like home.

Until Next Week…