The caricature of Sanders’ vitriolic online supporters has driven political conversations for nearly four years, but at what cost? --- And within mainstream American politics, Bernie Sanders is nearly singular in his sustained resistance to the establishment logic that motivates these disastrous decisions. So the thinking goes: For his entire time as an observable figure, he has been right, and nearly everyone else has been wrong. He has never needed to evolve; his positions were fully formed from the start. This is not exclusively true, but whatever; a record of leftist foresight and nuance that has, on balance, turned out to be mostly correct in comparison to his peers is unbelievably seductive to people cursed with paying attention in a country that broadly does not. If I can pick out a genuinely identifying characteristic among all my friends who support Bernie, from the very online to the very not, it’s that they prioritize this quality. In the context of American politics, he feels like a revolutionary, though of course he is an elected politician. That his congressional record appears middling can be hand waved off with an acknowledgment of his prevailing milieu; it’s not so easy to dismantle institutional power when almost all of your colleagues are dedicated to propping it up. But as president, when public rhetoric and private whipping can force the chains of bureaucracy? Then maybe, just maybe… And with climate change and the endless wars and the brewing pandemics and shoddy health care and all of the myriad afflictions making life hell for a plurality of Americans, the necessity of electing the one candidate who seems to understand the urgency of wrenching back control feels paralyzingly clear to those who’ve done the reading and allowed themselves to feel one flicker of empathy. Hence the Bernie Bro affect: a righteous and logic-driven correctness about the trajectories and realities of American society, because haven’t you been paying attention, coupled with the combativeness inherent to the internet, where everyone likes to believe they are right, all of the time. Social media and all its related platforms offer an incredible opportunity to be correct, in public, and that Bernie’s overall argument looks so good on paper makes it easily repeatable when faced with the truly astonishing amount of stupid, banal bullshit repeated everyday on the internet. There is always someone to argue with. […] That is what I detect most within these collective spasms of Bernie-driven passion: the disbelief at how dumb all of this is, how the evidence for what we need is right there and yet the forces that be (and their followers) believe otherwise. […] But that such a niche phenomenon has captivated political discourse for so long reveals fundamental ideological disagreements about how the internet should be used, cutting across generation and gender and race and so forth with no fixed understanding. It is a real issue that sprawls far beyond Bernie, and can’t be as simply waved off as “old people don’t get the internet” — evidence shows it’s plenty of young people, too. One person’s ingrained harassment is another’s victimless shit-talking is another’s revolutionary action is another’s technically right, but being an asshole about it, and in a world where everyone expresses their opinion all at once, there is no easy way to gain consensus.

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Billie Eilish has done everything right in her career so far, but that’s not enough for a celebrity industry fixated on sex. --- But being anointed a liberating force in the body-image stakes is its own kind of prison, one that preserves physicality as the ultimate measure of a female star’s worth – and the standard by which they can be undermined. The music industry and the media like to pat themselves on the back for making stars of Eilish and Lizzo, who often joins her in headlines about body positivity, though if these women one day wish to change their physical presentation, they will be accused of betraying fans and squandering their authenticity.

Donald Trump is running for reelection on an anti-socialist message. But the COVID-19 outbreak demonstrates the emptiness of ideological labels.

Comey isn’t an abuse victim, and Trump is not gaslighting you. --- Survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence face significant barriers when they try to report their abuse, and the Trump administration is making it harder for victims to seek justice. Given this, there’s something inherently icky about people comparing political situations to sexual assault. It’s a metaphor that serves no one.

The experimental/ambient label has survived not just due to hard work, but to the depth, breadth, and persistence of their vision.

Perhaps the worst thing you can do for a block link is to wrap everything in the . If you fail to make the link to display: block, it will have dead areas around words or chunks of text, which can make them feel like distinct links for a mouse user. If you use an underline on the entire block of text, it can be hard to read, while no underline at all can remove that visual affordance. Worse, for a screen reader user the entire string is read when tabbing through controls. In the following example, the first link contains the heading, image (without declaring it as an image), and block of text, taking about 25 seconds to read before announcing it as a link. When tabbing, you do not always know the control type until the accessible name is complete.

An emergent genre explores how class conflict is always part ghost story, and how the only answer is insurrection. --- Interpreting Parasite and Us in tandem, regardless of their differences, helps us understand crucial and complicated elements they share. In both movies, the violence enacted by the subterranean specters is emotionally and morally fraught — exactly who deserves to suffer or die like this, and why? Is it doing anyone any good? Once we understand these movies as Revolutionary Gothic, it becomes clear that’s the wrong question. We’d have to start with: Why wouldn’t we expect spectacular violence to erupt from the hidden violence of forcing human beings underground? Why would we expect the ghosts we’ve created not to haunt us? […] Revolutionary Gothic is less about the inevitability of overthrow than the inevitability of rupture, of all that haunts us coming back for a reckoning. These stories don’t try to comfort us with victory; they unsettle us with the implications of ongoing defeat.

The coronavirus could spread with frightening rapidity, overburdening our health-care system and claiming lives, until we adopt serious forms of social distancing. This suggests that anyone in a position of power or authority, instead of downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus, should ask people to stay away from public places, cancel big gatherings, and restrict most forms of nonessential travel. […] For a few days, while none of your peers are taking the same steps, moving classes online or canceling campaign events will seem profoundly odd. People are going to get angry. You will be ridiculed as an extremist or an alarmist. But it is still the right thing to do.

We need more intense attention on how artificial intelligence forestalls the ability to see what kinds of choices we are making. An excerpt from Noble’s book ‘Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.’ --- New, neoliberal conceptions of individual freedoms (especially in the realm of technology use) are oversupported in direct opposition to protections realized through large-scale organizing to ensure collective rights. This is evident in the past 30 years of active antilabor policies put forward by several administrations and in increasing hostility toward unions and twenty-first-century civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter. These proindividual, anticommunity ideologies have been central to the anti-democratic, anti-affirmative-action, antiwelfare, antichoice, and antirace discourses that place culpability for individual failure on moral failings of the individual, not policy decisions and social systems. Discussions of institutional discrimination and systemic marginalization of whole classes and sectors of society have been shunted from public discourse for remediation and have given rise to viable presidential candidates such as Donald Trump, someone with a history of misogynistic violence toward women and anti-immigrant schemes. Despite resistance to this kind of vitriol in the national electoral body politic, society is also moving toward greater acceptance of technological processes that are seemingly benign and decontextualized, as if these projects are wholly apolitical and without consequence too. Collective efforts to regulate or provide social safety nets through public or governmental intervention are rejected. In this conception of society, individuals make choices of their own accord in the free market, which is normalized as the only legitimate source of social change. […] We need more intense attention on how these types of artificial intelligence, under the auspices of individual freedom to make choices, forestall the ability to see what kinds of choices we are making and the collective impact of these choices in reversing decades of struggle for social, political, and economic equality. Digital technologies are implicated in these struggles. […] I often challenge audiences who come to my talks to consider that at the very historical moment when structural barriers to employment were being addressed legislatively in the 1960s, the rise of our reliance on modern technologies emerged, positing that computers could make better decisions than humans. I do not think it a coincidence that when women and people of color are finally given opportunity to participate in limited spheres of decision making in society, computers are simultaneously celebrated as a more optimal choice for making social decisions. The rise of big-data optimism is here, and if ever there were a time when politicians, industry leaders, and academics were enamored with artificial intelligence as a superior approach to sense-making, it is now. This should be a wake-up call for people living in the margins, and people aligned with them, to engage in thinking through the interventions we need.

Fears of bias, election hacking, and damaged children have earned algorithms a bad reputation. --- Yet the pressure being brought to bear on Facebook and others sometimes falls into the trap of letting algorithms become a scapegoat for human and corporate failings. Some complaints that taint the word imply, or even state, that algorithms have a kind of autonomy. That’s unfortunate, because allowing “Frankenstein monster” algorithms to take the blame can deflect attention from the responsibilities, strategies, and choices of the companies crafting them. It reduces our chance of actually fixing the problems laid at algorithms’ feet. Letting algorithms become bogeymen can also blind us to the reason they are so ubiquitous. They are the only way to make sense of the blizzard of data the computing era blinds us with. Algorithms provide an elegant and efficient way to get things done—even to make the world a better place.

Why, when he asked Google his question, was he directed to a white nationalist website trading in vicious propaganda, rather than to accurate statistics provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Southern Poverty Law Center? Had he gone to the FBI's webpage, he would have learned that the vast majority of violence against white Americans is committed by white Americans, and that the vast majority of violence against black Americans is committed by black Americans. Had his first hit been the SPLC, he'd have read that the Council of Conservative Citizens is "the modern reincarnation of the old White Citizens Councils," an organization that has "evolved into a crudely white supremacist group." Of course, it may not have mattered. Noble does not necessarily assume that the Charleston massacre would have been averted if these legitimate websites had ranked ahead of white supremacist ones. Roof was quite possibly looking for what his sick predisposition wanted to find, and would have scrolled for pages to find it. But she does rightly hypothesize that Roof's fated search touches upon the larger cultural relationship between search engine optimization and the perpetuation of racial ideologies rooted in a legacy of prejudice dating back to Jim Crow and chattel slavery.

“Everything’s geared toward self-sufficiency. Fuck that,” Björk told punk historian Jon Savage in Interview. “For me, the target is to learn how to communicate with other people, which is the hardest thing, after all. What you should be doing is learning how to live with other human beings.” Car parts, bottles, cutlery, technology, and political superpowers are no match against this outreaching feeling, this ethos of interconnectedness that lives inside “Hyperballad,” inside of Björk in general, and it is an instinct inherent, ever crucially, in the survival of humanity.

As the software enters its 30th year, a look back at one of its weirdest, most wonderful features. --- The idea is simple: you pick a tree species, change how voluminous you want your leaf count to be, on a sliding scale from zero to 100, and tinker with the size of the leaves and the height and thickness of the branches. Then fill the landscape with pre-rendered trees.

Five years ago I started a tumblr called Invisible Music, in which I posted tracks of (mostly) experimental electronic music and wrote about them without naming them. It was a lot of fun and I loved doing it but, alas, as happens with most online writing projects, I stopped doing it, and it’s time to put it to bed. Here are the tracks I posted, and there are a few pieces of writing here I still like. If you followed it, I hope you enjoyed it.

Looking into Deezer’s Spleeter and Facebook’s Musixmatch. Source separation can extract isolated vocal and instrumental tracks from any recorded song, but its potential repercussions for artists and streaming services hangs in the balance.

Oregon once aimed to be the greenest state in America. Its leaders adopted the nation’s first bottle deposit. They controlled urban sprawl. They declared ocean beaches public property. But in the last four years, Oregon’s most powerful industries have killed, weakened or stalled efforts to deal with climate change, wolf recovery, disappearing bird habitat, cancer-causing diesel exhaust, dwindling groundwater, industrial air pollution, oil spill planning and weed killers sprayed from helicopters. What changed Oregon? Money. Lots and lots of money. […] The consequences of Oregon’s logging practices are clear. State and federal scientists have blamed major population declines in species including the coastal Coho salmon, northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet on timber harvesting and state policies governing it. The Oregon Department of Forestry found 242 plants and animals listed or at risk of listing under the Endangered Species Act as of 2012. The trend was getting worse. Then the state agency, whose mission includes promoting the timber industry, stopped publishing the numbers and deleted past reports from its website.

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Just outside of Paris. Enter the still-functioning workshop of the innovative and influential French sonic pioneers.

Background music was once relegated to elevators and waiting rooms. Now the groundless consumption of music has become omnipresent. --- The idea of purposeful listening—which is to say, merely listening—is becoming increasingly discordant with the way that music is sold to us. […] In March, Warner Music Group’s Arts Division signed a twenty-album distribution deal with the German app Endel. The app’s proprietary algorithm “creates personalized soundscapes to give your mind and body what it needs to achieve total immersion in any task.” The company reports that its technology “is backed by science and uses personal inputs such as time of day, location, heart rate, weather to create custom sound frequencies to enhance one’s mood towards sleep, relaxation and focus.” Though I appreciate Endel’s creators not calling the app’s output “music,” I am nonetheless agog that my fellow-humans are comfortable with a late-capitalist robot voice telling them, “It’s 3:30 P.M. It’s a great time to get some work done,” and then generating electronic sounds designed to propel them deeper into their to-do lists. […] It makes sense that, in 2019, as we grow collectively more uncomfortable with our own quiet, inefficient sentience, we have also come to neglect the more contemplative pursuits, including mindful listening, listening for pleasure, listening to be challenged, and even listening to have a very good time while doing nothing else at all.

I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that? --- Closeness is impossible between an artist and a critic. Each wants from the other something—the artist’s mojo, the critic’s sagacity—that belongs strictly to the audiences for their respective work. It’s like two vacuum cleaners sucking at each other. […] To limber your sensibility, stalk the aesthetic everywhere: cracks in a sidewalk, people’s ways of walking. The aesthetic isn’t bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption. If you can’t put a mental frame around, and relish, the accidental aspect of a street or a person, or really of anything, you will respond to art only sluggishly.

An extremely real and heartbreaking story for a number of reasons. In 2017, I got an interview for the Master’s degree program at the Yale School of Art. When I returned a week later to pick up work I had left there, one of my paintings was gone. What happened to it? This is the story.

The latest escalation mirrors growing anti-democratic sentiment in the national GOP. --- In a nutshell, Oregon Republicans are exploiting an arcane constitutional provision in order to exert veto power over legislation developed by the Democratic majority, on behalf of an almost entirely white, rural minority. Five times in the past 10 months, they have simply refused to show up for work, preventing the legislature from passing bills on guns, forestry, health care, and budgeting. The fifth walkout, over a climate change bill, is ongoing. It is an extraordinary escalation of anti-democratic behavior from the right, gone almost completely unnoticed by the national political media. Nevertheless, it is a big deal, worth pausing to consider, not only because it is preventing Oregon from addressing climate change, but because it shows in stark terms where the national GOP is headed. […] Republicans’ objections have been heard and addressed. They just haven’t stopped the bill, and that’s what they want. It was never really about process, it’s about state government doing something they don’t want it to do (pricing carbon) in a state where they believe they ought to have veto power. They believe that rural white people and the kinds of jobs they do are more authentically Oregonian than those of city dwellers working service jobs, and thus they ought to have a greater voice in politics. […] “We must get our way, no matter what” is not a reasonable premise to carry into a dispute in a democracy. […] Republicans don’t just get to arbitrarily decide, as a defeated minority, how the majority’s bills pass, or what form they take. Their enormous sense of entitlement notwithstanding, they don’t get to rewrite the rules of democracy on the fly as it suits them, from bill to bill. […] Oregon has the country’s loosest laws on money in politics, with no restrictions whatsoever on what corporations or individuals can donate to politicians. This has led to a flood of cash into state politics and the steady erosion of the state’s once-proud pollution and environmental laws. Oregon is now first in the country in per-capita corporate donations to politicians; almost half the total money donated to Oregon legislators comes from corporations, far more than comes from unions or individuals. […] There is simply no precedent for what Oregon Republicans are doing, treating walk-outs as routine, using them to prevent passage of what is a fairly milquetoast set of carbon policies (less stringent than in many other states) and even to set the pace of work in the legislature. Democrats have never done anything like this, anywhere. […] This is an extraordinary situation. An overwhelmingly white, rural minority of voters is holding an entire state’s business hostage. Oregon Democrats played by the rules, got more votes, and developed legislation through appropriate channels. Now fewer than a dozen lawmakers, heavily funded by the very industries they are defending, are blocking it, at will, using an anachronistic quirk of the state constitution. There is no conceivable justification for it, no possible democratic rationale. It only makes sense in the context of white supremacy: the notion that rural white Americans are more authentically American than other groups and deserve outsized representation in its politics and veto power over its legislation. It is no surprise that there are copious ties between the Oregon GOP and the far right. Consider TimberUnity, which passes itself off as a grassroots group of rural Oregonian loggers and truckers against the climate bill. At a January 11 “Vanguards of Victory” awards ceremony, the Oregon GOP gave the group an award. […] It’s all an interconnected network in the state: the far-right groups, the GOP, and the resource industries that fund them. Over and over again, this minority is allowed to assert its will at the expense of its fellow citizens, the norms of conduct that hold state government together, and democracy itself — without consequence or accountability. […] For example, have a look at this story from the Associated Press. It is positively surreal in its devotion to the exhausted tropes of mainstream political coverage. The debate in Oregon has become “pitched” and the episode “reveals sharp divisions.” Republicans say this, Democrats say that, he says, she says, the end. Nowhere in the story will the reader be told that Democrats have a supermajority in the legislature. Nowhere will they be told that a small, demographically homogeneous minority is using once-extraordinary measures to routinely thwart the will of the democratically elected majority. Nowhere will they be told that the white minority holding the state hostage has been backed in the past year by the threat of far-right militia violence. Mainstream political coverage, as we’ve seen again and again in the Trump years, is simply incapable of communicating a sense of crisis. There is only one model of story — what each side says, in equal measure — and it only serves to blur and obscure a situation in which one party, not the other, has lurched in a radically anti-democratic direction. (The local coverage from outlets like OPB is much better.) Meanwhile, Democrats in state government wring their hands and cave to Republican demands again and again, as though it is simply a matter of course that a large majority must bend the knee to a small minority. […] In national US politics, as in Oregon, it’s increasingly clear that the population is urbanizing and diversifying and there simply aren’t enough rural and suburban white Christians to constitute a majority anymore. If that demographic — which has now become an intense, all-encompassing political identity — is to maintain its traditional hold on power, it can only do so through increasingly anti-democratic means. In Oregon, that means exploiting the quorum rule and unlimited corporate money. At the national level, it means exploiting rural overrepresentation in the Senate, the electoral college, voter suppression, the filibuster ... and unlimited corporate money. In national politics, as in Oregon, anti-democratic tactics and rhetoric are escalating on the right, but there is little pushback or accountability. They pay no penalty for lying, violating norms, or taking legislative hostages, so they keep doing it, keep escalating. The institutions around them seem unwilling or unable to draw lines in the sand, and when they do, as when Democrats impeached Trump, they find those lines blown aside by partisan unity.

The Kardashians and the Real Housewives are talking about premade Judy survival kits. Are they any good? --- Clearly, people need supplies like food and water in the wake of any disaster, but as Redlener sees it, typical advice tends to flatten these events into a one-size-fits-all mold, particularly when you look at prepackaged kits. Take the first kit that appears on an Amazon search. Available for $114.99, it promises a “100% satisfaction guarantee” for surviving for three days after “earthquake, hurricanes, floods + other disasters.” It’s a bold claim, considering the myriad variables not only in the disasters described but also when you take into account who might be purchasing the item and the specific needs they have. “In some ways, they just somehow misrepresent themselves as being ‘disaster preparedness.’ So people think, ‘I’ll buy a kit for my car and another for my house, and I won’t have to think about it again.’ Really a false sense of security,” Redlener says. […] Judy is largely being marketed as a trendy new tool your favorite influencers are excited about. The success of that approach hinges on the fact that Americans are keener to follow in Kim Kardashian’s footsteps than FEMA’s. This, despite the fact that she exists in an income bracket that is less likely to be deeply affected by climate change. […] In the US, lower-income communities are also already dealing with a higher rate of pollution in the air and in their water sources, which makes them more vulnerable to any additional issues brought on by climate change. Globally, a similar situation is playing out between higher- and lower-income nations. If the emergency items market continues to grow as projected, it’s hard to imagine the costs won’t continue to increase, as well, responding to a more competitive and eager market — potentially pricing out the consumers that need them most. That stark contrast in who is able to afford to not only evade disaster but also to recover from them is already clear in the postmortems of recent disasters. […] “It’s taking a moment to take stock, which is what the preparedness kits can do, but also taking a moment to to to know who’s in your community, and how you can help and how they can help you,” she says. “Not only be prepared for really, really bad things, but to also be prepared for the day-to-day stress. And so you’re investing when you’re doing this and not just, ‘Oh, well, when is the big, big bad thing going to happen?’ You’re actually doing something that makes you and your community healthier.”

Earth Day should be a time for thinking about time. --- Just as a satellite view shocks us with the strange beauty of our seemingly familiar home, Earth Day has the potential to give us a new temporal perspective. There is no natural basis for a week or a decade, and the endless extractive growth that corporations project has no analogue in nature. Earth's clock is richer than the Western manmade clock, an overlapping set of rhythms in which many scales coexist: not only days and seasons but also tides, flowering events, ecological successions, and geologic accumulations. […] I would like Earth Day to be like that: a pause for consideration, a day unlike other days, a time for thinking about time. Some things are visible only from a remove. Let this day be a porthole through which we look out on the vastness of ecological time, laughing in retrospect at our small-minded schedules and wondering how we might think and act in different ones. If we agreed to do that, I wouldn't be surprised if the effects of Earth Day cascaded into all our other days.

As we enter a new decade, the ways in which we define electronic music styles are rapidly changing. Chal Ravens explores the etymological evolution of “UK club music” and speaks to some of its key players: about how regional roots are growing into digital ecosystems, and powering new conversations about globalisation in club culture. --- It’s more about the mood, ultimately: vibrant, kinetic, unpredictable. In fact, club is probably best understood as a style of DJing rather than production, a sound invented in real time. The element of surprise is highly valued, along with quirky edits, bizarre blends, and a fearless approach to clashing musical keys. You might hear a spinback or three. It’s music to stay on top of rather than music to get lost in. […] Why aren’t these UK club DJs appearing on European festival lineups? “If I knew I’d be playing more festivals,” says Finn, who wonders if there’s a basic mismatch in attitudes and expectations. “There’s not much room for humour in dance music. It all feels like it has to be quite serious,” he says. […] In the process of absorbing and reframing various black genres, the term “club” obscures the roots of its own diversity. That shouldn’t write off its utility as a catch-all term; how else might we capture the contemporary intermingling of dozens of related global scenes? But intersecting factors of race and class are always at work in the creation and adoption of new styles. […] There’s an absurd feedback loop at play in which promoters excuse pedestrian bookings by citing commercial imperatives, which does audiences a disservice by suggesting that they’re too bigoted or unimaginative to branch out from house and techno. But insofar as club music is thriving in small clubs and basement parties in the UK, the next challenge will be to establish the current generation as an internationally recognised creative powerhouse.

Every person I talked to was now two people, the one who was nice to me because I was thin, and the person who had been mean to me when I was fat. I was also two people: the fat person who felt like everyone was better than me, and who was so scared to walk across a room, or even stand up, and now, the thin person, who did not know how to manage the exhilaration of suddenly not feeling that way, and of sometimes even feeling superior to people. […] It’s bizarre the way that women’s feelings about their bodies, good and bad, are tied to other women, like, if a woman has a great body, this can feel like a rebuke to everyone who has a regular body. As I watched J. Lo’s Super Bowl halftime show, I thought, this is going to turn into a thing where middle-aged women get upset because they don’t look like that, and they will express this anger in racist and sexist comments about her clothing choices and the precise shape of her body. Poor innocent J. Lo’s body — here it thought its whole purpose was just to move J. Lo’s consciousness through space. I wonder how many women don’t feel so much that they’ve accepted their bodies as much as they need to present as someone who has. Younger women tell me that the way that they hear weight anxiety being expressed is more through the buzzword of “health,” so women say they’re not eating dairy, or bread, or sugar so they won’t be seen as judging themselves, or others. […] I am not saying that no one has accepted her body, that it’s all a lie. I am just saying that I’m pretty sure we haven’t “arrived” anywhere. And why would we have? The material conditions of being a woman have not been altered in any dramatic way, and seem to be getting worse, for everyone. And while there is certainly more of what is called a “celebration” of different shapes, it is rare that those shapes are not proportioned in a fairly universally attractive way.

He’s been DJing for more than two decades, so we talked about a lot besides that. --- I ask him simply: is this why you do it? He snaps out of his stasis, looking at me indignantly. "I just love it. I genuinely love the music I play. I love looking at people's faces when they lose it." He stops. "I've spent the past 35 years seeing how collective euphoria works. It's people coming to escape; to lose themselves and lose the stresses. For two hours, four days – they become part of this bigger thing. This sexy mess. There's a level where you can totally freak somebody out. It's the equivalent of making them cum. It's half-voyeurism, half-vampire; my secret of eternal youth. Not drinking the blood of the young – absorbing their sweat! I genuinely love it."