Links
A regularly updated collection of things I find worth reading, watching, or listening to. Subscribe via RSS.
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I’ve been flip-flopping between Spotify and Apple Music myself, and can relate to this piece by Kyle Chayka. Changes to their apps in recent years have not favoured (album) listeners like myself. It’s fascinating and saddening to see one platform steer the way we consume music into a certain direction.
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"This site explores the graphic design of Penguin book covers, with a focus on series editions. […] The covers presented on this site are all from my own collection of about 1.400 Penguins, which have been chosen for the beauty or interest of their cover designs. They span the history of the company all the way back to 1935 when Penguin Books was launched."
What a collection—beautiful.
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In response to a recent post by Elle Griffin ("No one buys books"), Lincoln Michel decides a more positive take is needed.
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I’ve not watched any other videos about the Vision Pro because I will not buy the goggles and I’ve been somewhat sceptical of this product direction, but Casey Neistat’s video does an excellent job of showing what it’s like to use this thing in real life, and gets across well the hints it provide at a future with spatial computing. It’s… kind of exciting?
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I’ve been replaying James Blake’s latest album “Playing Robots Into Heaven” somewhat obsessively, and was reminded of this conversation he had with Brian Eno, for who he plays the music and who then provides him with his honest impression.
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“ChatGPT rejects any notion of creative struggle.” Nick Cave’s elaborate and thorough answer to questions about ChatGPT and creativity, written on his Red Hand Files blog, read aloud by Stephen Fry.
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Losing Alice
№ 44
“For the last two years, Sheila Heti has been writing to—and with—a chatbot. But what happens when the software gets updated?”
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Drawing comparisons to the late Joan Didion, Gopnik outlines why Ernaux’s win of the Nobel Prize in Literature signifies an importance of memoir as a genre in times of Twitter and TikTok. I have not read enough of Ernaux’s work and am therefore in what he describes as the second camp, but The Years was one of my favourite books read in 2021. Time to head to the book store once more.
"Her ascension marks a recognition that memoir, in all its many faces and poses—direct, self-critical, rueful and comic, engagé and not—is perhaps the leading genre of our time, as much as the novel was for the first half of the twentieth century."
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Three of Fitzcarraldo’s authors have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and they have not been in business for even 10 years. The New York Times published a profile on the publishing house. Trying to account for the Nobel success, Testard [the founder of Fitzcarraldo] said that his taste just happened to align with "a bunch of older bourgeois Swedish people." Delightful!
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A fantastic profile of Jonny Greenwood, best known for his work with Radiohead and The Smile, elaborating on his work as a composer of incredible film scores.