Links
A regularly updated collection of things I find worth reading, watching, or listening to. Subscribe via RSS.
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Letterboxd reflects on their first decade on the platform by interviewing some early members. Having joined the platform in 2013, it’s nice to read how other people have used it and what it’s brought them.
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Useful Praise
№ 19I got squeezed into the rabbit hole that is Mandy Brown’s website, and dug up this work note on praise. The act of praising others, to me, is a muscle you train, and a habit you learn to finesse. Praising others at work is an important thing to do often, and do well. "If you can get really good at noticing when your colleagues are truly killing it—and then sharing what you notice—you will all get even better at those things together, even faster than you think."
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Disambiguation
№ 18“I want to consider that we borrow some lessons from Le Guin and Shevek and look at ambiguity not merely as something to manage or navigate through, but as something to hold. Something to make space for.”
This essay by Mandy Brown about embracing ambiguity has lingered in my mind ever since I read it. In her newsletter, she wrote that the essay is more "tentative" than she’s comfortable with, but I think its tentativeness strengthens the piece. As Mandy writes, and I am inclined to agree: "I’m coming around to thinking that ambiguity, like change, is a constant companion. And maybe instead of manipulating or avoiding it, we need to listen to what it has to say."
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Life At The Cabin
№ 17A Dutch man named Martijn purchased two historic cabins on top of a hill in Italy with the goal to renovate them and create a homestead. He’s a photographer, so the process of him doing so is incredibly well documented. I’ve seen folks get put off a bit by the idea of him "being alone in nature, yet followed persistently by a drone", but I’ve really enjoyed watching these videos.
They’re very soothing, and you can watch them actively or have them on in the background. It’s fascinating to see him go about everything from shielding himself from the cold, to setting up solar panels, or driving wood up the hill to build a temporary cabin. Lovely stuff. Thanks for sharing, Marius!
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As the new season of Succession kicks off, it’s worth (re)reading this profile of Jeremy Strong—who takes playing the role of Kendall Roy incredibly seriously.
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Over on Criterion’s Current—a blog that quickly morphed into a full-blown magazine on film—Mike McQuade dives into his design process for the Criterion Collection edition of Citizen Kane. Iconic, yet divisive.
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A profile of Kendrick Lamar and the moves he’s made since leaving T.D.E., the label he was with since 2007.
"It’s hard to overstate the shock it caused in the rap world when Kendrick announced that he was leaving T.D.E. It was like when the Jackson 5 left Motown. When Prince left Warner Bros. When Jay-Z left Def Jam."
The last album he released on T.D.E., "Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers", is monumental, but this Big Step does feel like a clean slate, and I am so looking forward to seeing all the things he – Pulitzer Kenny – will do next.
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My colleague Amy recommended this podcast with Molly Mielke in which she speaks about her thesis on computers and creativity, which I’m linking to here. It’s a delightful read, one that makes me excited about the future of computers & computing. To quote Molly:
“Computers have, since their inception, been a rigid tool that the human user has had to adapt to use... However, through standardization, moldability, and abstraction, we can dramatically expand the utility of computers while broadening their capacity to help more people solve their problems creatively.”
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A lovely deep dive into Madlib’s "Sound Ancestors", a highly underrated album, in which the creator identifies a parallel between the combination of Madlib/Four Tet and Miles Davis/Teo Macero.
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I’ve written about it before: the cinematography of The Batman is fantastic. It’s a dark, immersive world, portrayed with shots wet with rain and dirty with grime. Patrick Tomasso published a video essay last year that details the work that director Matt Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser did to achieve it.