• Weird, the Al Yankovic Story was brilliantly stupid. This is a group of people living their best life: Weird Al just having a ton of fun, Daniel Radcliffe continuing to go off. (Asked recently by a Guardian reader “Do you just tell your agent: “As long as it’s weird, I’m in?””, he replied that his approach to scripts was: “If you sit down and lecture somebody on how shame keeps us from love, that’s […]
I loved hearing Annie-B Parson talk about choreography on the Time Sensitive podcast—particularly her work over many years with David Byrne. Parson has worked on a large number of projects in the past two or three decades, culminating in American Utopia (I saw the show when it was on its original tour, totally fascinating.) But the most interesting part was that she now came to see all of those works as, ultimately, the same piece. […]
• Facing life: Eight people discuss life after incarceration in this beautifully simple, extremely touching project from Pen and Brandon. • New York Times is killing it with clear interactives at the moment—here’s one about the soundtrack to the AIDS crisis: I was sold as soon as they showed me a bunch of pictures of mixtapes. • How police interfere with public spaces. • I get the ethical stance of Ogilvy saying it won’t work […]
• “What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists“• This review made me want to read Megan Phelps-Roper’s book on growing up inside the Westboro Baptist Church• Something to explore: The Eames Institute for Infinite Curiosity• Feelgood story of the week had to be the footage of 11-year-old Prince being interviewed on TV. (Backstory)
Ukraine, viral philanthropy, asexuality, Facebook and two women on a quest to meet Evan Dando.
There are so many ways we can make mistakes, but also to make things that merely have the appearance of a mistake.
• 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 […]
The great gear shift in digital music took little more than a decade. But distributing music is different to funding media.
It’s become a kind of folksy, cheesey number over the years, but did you know that the Cat Stevens (AKA Yusuf) song “Father and Son” is actually about the Russian Revolution? I was a little bit amazed to hear in a recent episode of Song Exploder how the song had started its life as part of a musical about the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. It’s intended to be a conversation between a young […]
Been thinking a lot about the long view recently, both in work and in life. Everything’s awful and urgent and yet the past six months have felt so momentously slow that it’s creating a huge amount of internal dissonance: make-it-happen-now has to sleep in the same bed as when-this-is-all-over. And that’s presuming it will ever be over, of course. I’m placing high value on every little moment that breaks out of the immediate, every long […]
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