• I was rapt by the way this Katie Baker piece on Eric Schneiderman’s attempt at a #MeToo redemption tiptoed through such difficult territory. • Hype as a scale. • Scratching that Murakami-esque, middle aged vinyl dad itch: Listening Room on Instagram • When she was worried about the state of the world in the 1960s, Pauline Oliveros started singing and playing long, extended drones on her accordion. She spent nearly a year on a […]
Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans said if you inspire enough people to support your work just enough, you can earn a living from almost anything. A thousand people, a hundred dollars each, that’s enough to build on. A simple theory. Li Jin recently put forward a modest proposal: what if you get 100 people who give much, much more? More money from fewer people. Why stop there? Why not a single patron giving one thousand […]
Susy Thunder was a pioneering phone phreaker How does the FBI’s art crime team operate? Janet Kessler has been tracking San Francisco’s coyotes for 15 years. Dominic Cummings has a £10 per month Substack newsletter. It shows a “voracious intellect” “coupled with a tireless curiosity” with writing that is simultaneously “too long, too aggressive, too inward-looking.” The Guernica tapestry is back at the United Nations Roxane Gay pulled her podcast from Spotify: “Sometimes, racism is […]
You can lose a lot of things. Your door keys. Your temper. The plot. If you’re particularly careless, you might even lose entire countries. Ukraine is on the edge right now. It’s not the first. Doggerland was a piece of prehistory, a stretch of marshy coastline from when Britain was just an archipelago dangling from one corner of Europe. It was misplaced during the Original Brexit 9,000 years ago when the sea carved East Anglia […]
• Beautiful images of polar bears who have moved into an abandoned Arctic weather station (drone footage on YouTube) • Coober Pedy is a town in Australia where half of people live underground because it’s so bloody hot. • The alien’s binary: Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on motherhood. • Pew’s morphology of Republicans identifies five distinct groups. • Mind expanding (to me) piece on the possibilities of Arabic typography.
The great gear shift in digital music took little more than a decade. But distributing music is different to funding media.
There are so many trees, and not enough. We need a billion trees, a trillion.
Longform is saying goodbye. Or at least the reading service, which has listed thousands of great articles over the last decade, is coming to an end. (The podcast continues.) The site came up a lot when we were starting Matter, as a kind of guiding light for a journalism renaissance that started in the 2010s. Folks were challenging the notion that writing on the web had to be short and informational, pushing back on the […]
I bloody love podcasts. I mean, I get that this is not a unique or particularly brave position to take. We’re surrounded by the things, everyone probably has their favorites, or they have one of their own. (Everybody* Has a Podcast now in the same way that Everybody* Had a Blog 15-20 years ago.) The Golden Age might be over, the market flooded with terribly-produced, inconsistent audio and formless blobs that are merely placeholders to […]
This WSJ video on how TikTok’s algorithm works is proof that just really explaining something that’s pretty obvious can be pretty engaging. Ultimately, I’m not sure there’s a great deal new to what they found—a lot of bots, and a little bit of interpretation, to determine that a lot of TikTok’s algorithmic decisions are based on what you watch, which seems obvious. (I basically never like anything on TikTok and follow almost no accounts: my […]
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