May 5, 2023
Sailing boat rescued by the Götheborg
Sailing boat rescued by the Götheborg. Imagine losing your rudder out at sea and sending out a distress call. And then the largest ocean-going wooden sailing ship in the world comes to your rescue. Or in the words of the sailors on the sailing boat: "This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it?"
Ethics in Supreme Court Jurisprudence
The real reason for the Supreme Court's corruption crisis - "Roberts's 2011 report and the Court's more recent statement on ethics portray the Supreme Court as a unique institution that cannot be constrained by the same ethical rules that apply to less powerful judges, especially when it comes to recusals." (previously) [more inside]
Brydge Collapses
The downfall of Brydge: iPad keyboard company folds, leaving staff unpaid and customer orders unfulfilled Chance Miller over at 9to5Mac with a well reported and sourced account of the extremely sudden demise of popular iPad (and more recently, Surface) accessory maker Brydge. [more inside]
Flappers are killing the whaling industry
What do I want to say as a parent? As a human? As a gay man?
Jon Lovett interviews Chasten Buttigieg about his new book I Have Something To Tell You [23m] but more about what growing up gay in the US has been like and what living as a [peculiarly high profile] gay man in the US today is like. It's one of the better, deeper interviews about how growing up queer can be damaging and the choices it leads one to make. [more inside]
The TV That Watches You Back
Another episode of slow-motion mouth tunes.
The Trees That Survived Hiroshima
Experts Agree That Memories Of Rare Music Can Persist For Many Years
Lost Ones: Decades later, Ben Ratliff, former pop music critic at The New York Times, can recall the details of a song he heard once, but that it is impossible for you to listen to. I’m sorry to report that it cannot be streamed. It cannot be purchased on a compact disc or a cassette, used or new. There’s no rare vinyl pressing listed on Discogs. Ratliff’s bit of recollected music criticism, shared over email, is a kind of ghost story.
Capital’s willing executioner
Ted Chiang writes on the probable implications of corporate A.I. adoption “ If you think of A.I. as a broad set of technologies being marketed to companies to help them cut their costs, the question becomes: how do we keep those technologies from working as “capital’s willing executioners”? ”
Capitalism in Chaos
Capitalism in Chaos explores an often-overlooked consequence and paradox of the First World War—the prosperity of business elites and bankers in service of the war effort during the destruction of capital and wealth by belligerent armies. This study of business life amid war and massive geopolitical changes follows industrialists and policymakers in Central Europe as the region became crucially important for German and subsequently French plans of economic and geopolitical expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [more inside]
"How much time is it going to take to wade through this?"
"The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped in a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world. Such artists show that interpretative syntheses need not be incompatible with a decentered subject and that an unforgettable story-image can also be a subversive counterhistory, packing all the more punch because imaginatively and artfully delivered." from Information Overload by Claire Bishop [ArtForum; ungated]
Rockin' in the Minivan
Billboard's list of the 50 Greatest Minivan Rock Songs
Think about popular music around the turn of the millennium, and what comes to mind? Maybe it’s the teen-pop that dominated TRL, or the rap-rock and nu-metal that rose up seemingly in response to it. Maybe it’s the crossover hip-hop and R&B jams that made household names out of Timbaland and The Neptunes, or the four-quadrant country that propelled Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks to diamond-level sales. Maybe it’s Eminem. Maybe it’s “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
What probably doesn’t come immediately to mind, however, is the music that served as the glue for top 40 radio during this period: accessible, catchy, cleanly produced rock music built on sonic foundations of processed guitars and/or driving piano. This was the dependable, generation-spanning pop-rock that filled in the gaps between some of the meteoric musical moments and careers shooting off around it. We call it Minivan Rock.[more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »