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The internet, as we know, is now a depressing hellhole where everything is a terrifying shot of cortisol straight into the eyeballs or AI slop, interspersed with adverts for protein. So may I offer a recommendation for a modest corrective? It’s called Perfectly Imperfect.
It is a daily newsletter about stuff people like. That’s it; that’s the whole concept. The people in question are public figures, but only up to a point – the mostly US artists and musicians featured aren’t household names for a 51-year-old British woman (though there is the occasional megastar: Francis Ford Coppola likes Hawaiian shirts and halva; Kylie likes washi masking tape and fresh wasabi). Whoever is featured, their likes are deeply idiosyncratic and often unappealing: cracking your knuckles against your jaw; an unhinged cocktail comprising Aperol, milk, creamer and olives; a sporting self-help book or cold-calling people.
It is not the only place you can get extremely particular recommendations. New York magazine’s Strategist section regularly features weird stuff celebrities can’t live without. I have learned that Lena Dunham likes tiny ornamental mice and clicker-training her pigs, and Kristin Scott Thomas likes toe rings and dog poo bags. US literary event organiser and indie publisher Dream Baby Press also produces love and hate lists, where notables (though again, I haven’t heard of many) air their very personal preferences. David Sedaris loves feeding crows with hard-boiled eggs and hates British women painting their nails on trains; Richard Gadd loves slapping supermarket watermelons and hates how his dad eats yoghurt.
I tell you what I love: this stuff. There’s a bit of prurient curiosity about famous people’s lives, but I’m just as hungry for anyone’s weird little pleasures and pet peeves: Ayo Edebiri’s favourite tinned fried mussels, but also “New York electronic project” Chanel Beads explaining their love of clapping, or chef Clare de Boer hating “store-bought broth”. Perfectly Imperfect newsletters even feature recommendations from non-famous readers that I enjoy just as much: recent highlights include blue drinks and a YouTube clip of a woman who is terrified of cotton wool balls.
What’s the appeal? Well, there’s a kind of pessimism around taste. As a recent debate in the New York Times explained, ominously, Silicon Valley is “showing a new interest in being cool and in the idea of taste”, as AI tries to master and regurgitate this most human attribute. It’s supercharging the well-recognised phenomenon of online flattening and IRL homogenisation of aesthetics, identified and described by journalist Kyle Chayka 10 years ago as “AirSpace”. Trend forecaster Emily Segal recently called the 2026 version “tasteslop”, which seems to have struck an instant chord as a way of describing bland, generative AI-powered, algorithmically amplified tastes.
It is not that anyone relishes the idea of lines of code deciding what we get to like and consume, but it’s easy to feel helpless and resigned in the face of this technological juggernaut. I also wonder if the flipside to that fatalism is secret relief. Taste is a source of anxiety and insecurity for a lot of people, including me. I’m not particularly original or creative. I don’t energetically seek out new stuff or have confidence in my discernment, so I’m exactly the kind of person who watches the prestige drama the algorithm nudges me towards or paints my wall in a warm neutral I’ve seen online a thousand times. Tasteslop may be generic and soulless, but it’s reassuringly recognisable, and if everyone is giving in to it, I’m off the hook.
But that’s exactly why I relish – and need to see – assertions of individuality; to find out about people being into very particular, peculiar stuff. Their likes and dislikes are too weird to feel intimidating, as some exquisitely curated expressions of taste can be. It’s more of a “You like what?!” reminder that humans are fascinating and surprising in ways algorithms and large language models will never fathom. They make me curious to explore what I actually like and don’t: I couldn’t finish the ultra-hyped novel Lost Lambs, but I’ll devour any 1940s children’s stories about ponies; I love male soprano Bruno de Sá singing baroque arias, the backgrounds of Flemish primitive paintings, Seabrook sea-salted crisps and saints’ relics, the grosser the better. Go on, tell me yours.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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