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 […]
I started tracking my book reading habits a few years ago as a way of remembering what I’ve been consuming. Extra benefit: It’s also helped me see patterns or trends. The trouble is that I can also now look back and see when I’m losing the plot. Here’s what I mean: Last year my reading pace felt like it had fallen off a cliff—there were three months or so of total freeze during the pandemic. […]
If you want to generate a reaction among nearly any British person—actually, from nearly anyone who comes from a former British colony (and by that I suppose I mean about a quarter of the planet) then all you need to do is start talking about the complicated history and legacy of the Empire. And if you want to really crank your blow-the-gasket-o-meter up, then get onto the subject of museums and statues and things that […]
Eyeballs on the clash of the real and the virtual this week with the news that a new Bourdain documentary features an AI-generated version of the man’s voice reading out emails he sent people (notably, I think, the audio appears to have been used in the trailer.) This NYer piece, featuring my colleague Karen Hao in quotable form, goes through some of the issues. Creating a synthetic Bourdain voice-over seemed to me far less crass […]
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