2024 Lifetime Achievement Award

London Just Made Its Phones 'Unsnatchable'

Plus: Cinematic love letters and more goodies from Europe

In London, a phone gets snatched every 6 minutes. Thus, Joan London created “The Unsnatchable,” a set of cases that make the snatch a little harder: One has sharp spikes, another has shock hardware, another is printed with a curse. The website itself is actually a tool for giving you practical advice on what to do to keep your phone from getting jacked, and what to do if it ever happens. We’d love a curse case, though. Shame and suffering for a thousand lives!

Next, something beautiful and weird that’s going to eat 12 minutes out of your day. Mother Berlin helmed this “cinematic love letter” for the launch of Paul Kalkbrenner’s new EP. It’s called “Kabelmann,” and depicts an outsider who seeks human connection but is hindered by a “mysterious energy” that flows through cables connected to his body. (Sounds like life on the internet, frankly.)

In Sweden, McDonald’s turned 4000 receipts into merch. This is to show fans some love for the orders they’ve been habitually placing for ages. It’s retro, and even has a little QR code that employees can scan so you don’t have to speak to get the same thing you always get. Work by Nord DDB. Also, who doesn’t need another T-shirt?

Alongside online verification platform Sumsub, Amsterdam’s Cloudfactory created Greenflag, a kind of remote verification service to connect the world’s 627 million people, who can’t access basic digital services for finance, education, healthcare or employment. This group represents the third-largest nation in the world in terms of size, with a collective spending power of $1.75 trillion. We don’t exactly understand how online verification gets them what they need, but if it does—cool!

We’ll wrap with some tourism and surrealism. For Vienna’s Tourist Board in Austria, and to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the city’s Central Cemetery, Jung Von Matt created a film whose protagonist is a mayfly. Tour the city with this wacky little weirdo while exploring Vienna’s colorful relationship to death. Our kind of tour.

2024 Lifetime Achievement Award