There is something deeply unsettling about the idea that no matter how far you fall through reality, there's still a McDonald's waiting for you at the bottom. As Kane Parsons' Backrooms movie tears through the box office, McDonald's has decided to celebrate by posting its own trip into the internet's most famous endless yellow maze: a liminal nightmare of glowing menu boards, abandoned play-place furniture, and fluorescent lighting that looks personally offended by your presence. The whole thing is a nod to a long-running joke inside the Backrooms community that somewhere in Level 0, hidden among the damp carpet and infinite hallways, there's a fully functioning McDonald's.

The funny part isn't that a global fast-food chain learned enough internet lore to make a Backrooms joke. It's that the joke only works because McDonald's has accidentally become part of the mythology. The Backrooms are supposed to be generic spaces stripped of identity: empty offices, forgotten hallways, places that feel familiar but belong to nobody. Yet fans collectively decided that even at the edge of reality, there would still be a McDonald's. Some brands spend decades trying to become cultural symbols. McDonald's somehow achieved the much stranger feat of becoming infrastructure. It isn't being referenced as a restaurant anymore. It's being referenced the way you'd reference gravity.

For most of human history, "designed by Prada" was not a phrase you expected to hear about life-support equipment. And yet here we are. This week, Prada unveiled the latest piece of NASA's Artemis moon mission wardrobe: a sleek gray bodysuit threaded with cooling channels that astronauts will wear beneath their lunar spacesuits. Technically, it's called the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment. In practice, it looks like someone asked the Marvel costume department to redesign long underwear. The launch event took place inside Prada's SoHo store, surrounded by four-figure handbags, where executives discussed thermal regulation while waiters circulated with champagne. Naturally.

The suit exists because astronauts need to survive eight hours on the lunar surface. But the Prada partnership solves a different problem entirely: getting people to care. Apollo didn't need luxury brands, Nat Geo specials, social media campaigns, and carefully staged unveilings inside SoHo flagship stores. The Moon landing was already the biggest show on Earth. Artemis is happening in a much noisier world, which means NASA and its partners aren't just building spacecraft. They're rebuilding cultural attention. Inspiring the next generation and securing the next round of funding turn out to need the exact same thing: a spacesuit people actually want to look at.

I promise the thumbnail above is not a file export error or a resize tool going rouge. To launch its new Smash Burger, A&W opened a one-day Toronto pop-up with a storefront that appears to have been squeezed from both sides by a giant invisible hand. The doorway is compressed. The signage is warped. The whole thing looks like a restaurant that got caught in a Photoshop resize tool and never recovered. Inside, the destruction continued: bent trays, distorted furniture, and a visibly squashed version of Rooty the Great Root Bear. It was all in service of a simple idea: if you're going to launch a smash burger, why stop at the burger?

Most brands spend years treating their assets like museum pieces. The logo has rules. The storefront has rules. The mascot definitely has rules. What's clever here is that A&W temporarily threw all of them out the window. The stunt works because every piece of damage makes the idea clearer. The warped doorway isn't decoration. It's the punchline. There's something oddly confident about a brand willing to crumple its own logo, flatten its mascot, and make its restaurant look broken for a day. Most brands treat their logo like it's load-bearing. A&W spent a day proving it wasn't, and somehow came out looking sturdier for it.

One of my favorite corners of the internet is a subreddit where people try to guess who you are based solely on a photo of your fridge. Weirdly, they're often right. That idea sent me down a rabbit hole about creative work, taste, and why the things we collect might reveal more about us than the things we make. I wrote about it for The Subtext, along with how a neon artwork, a claw machine, and a rideshare campaign ended up connected in my head. Read all about in the link below.