Le Studio Weekly
🧮 Numbers of the Week
[11%-]The increase in costs of classic Fourth of July foods as compared to last year.
10–The number of states in which the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline is more than $5.
71,688–The peak demand in megawatts on the Texas electric grid on Tuesday, May 31, the highest level ever recorded in the month of May, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)
25%-The proportion of American adult Twitter users who are responsible for 99 percent of political tweets, according to a Pew Research Center study released this week. The study also found that one-third of all tweets from adults in the U.S. are political.
👥 Venture Capital
Soba raises $13.6M: Soba has raised $13.6 million in seed financing led by Lightspeed, with participation from FTX Ventures. Based in Berlin, the company offers no-code tools for game building through its open-world gaming platform
Klarna valuation crashes to $6.5bn from $46bn: Payments fintech company Klarna is set to raise fresh capital at a valuation of about $6.5bn, a fraction of the $46bn it was valued at just a year ago, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.
🏛️ Culture & Trends
London Modern and Contemporary Auctions: A Market Minus the Froth: The prices — $36.9 million for Monet paintings, and $52.8 million for Francis Bacon — show that even as Britain’s share of the global art market has decreased, it’s an important player. Headline auction prices quelled, for the moment, talk that London is losing ground to Paris as a hub for high-end art auctions: A sum of 30.1 million pounds with fees, or about $36.9 million, was paid twice in the same sale for two different Claude Monet paintings, and about $52.8 million purchased a Francis Bacon portrait of Lucian Freud. Last year, in the aftermath of Britain’s departure from the European Union, France’s share of global auction sales rose to 9 percent, while Britain’s shrank to 13 percent, according to the latest annual Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report.
Harry Gesner, Architect of Soaring California Style, Dies at 97–His houses cantilevered from cliffs, straddled canyons and sprung from mountains; they would come to define the Southern California landscape. As an architect he was largely self-taught, though Frank Lloyd Wright invited him to study at Taliesin West, his estate and school in Scottsdale, Ariz. His shiplike houses, which were often built by Norwegian shipbuilders, were distinctly, excitingly Californian, with walls of glass, round, sunken living rooms, fire pits and peaked A-frame roofs. They would define the Southern California landscape and aesthetic and its freewheeling ethos, as much as the houses of John Lautner, another eclectic modernist, who designed the Chemosphere, otherwise known as the flying saucer house, which floats above the North Hollywood Hills. Check out his work here.
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