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In the latest “Diary of a Song” episode, Lil Nas X is joined by the producer YoungKio — who didn’t even know he was a part of “Old Town Road” until he heard it in a video meme — and Billy Ray Cyrus, who lent the song another layer of novelty and outlaw credibility. The video also features cameos by the influencers @nicemichael and @elitelife_kd, who were crucial to the track’s early rise.

Maybe I’m trying to make up for my personal failings through social activism, journalism, and other projects, as a way to try and make up for my lousy personality. In other words, activism and journalism are also just some sort of emotional crutch for me. It makes me feel quite inauthentic, frankly. But regardless of the deeper psychological motivations for my actions, call it being self-righteous or what have you, I still don’t think I’m wrong.

I mean this reaction to poverty is not even mocking, or laughing. The have-nots hate the haves just for being themselves, glorious, glossy and rich; thus the haves needn’t, and won’t, even acknowledge that the have-nots exist, those gap-toothed ignorant peasants in their gross marabou-free clothes. They need to shut up, control themselves. Calm down.

Proponents of Libra are all yabbering on about “serving the world’s unbanked,” as if it were 15 or 20 years ago. For more than a decade, Kenya has already had M-Pesa, a thriving micropayments system based on trading cell minutes!! M-Pesa predates Bitcoin, and has expanded from Kenya through East and Central Africa, and on beyond to the Middle East and India, covering millions of people who most emphatically do not need Mark Zuckerberg sticking his grubby mitts in their wallets. Bitcoin was meant as a curb on the man, perhaps even as a strike against the Man; Libra is the Man.

Eight or nine years down the road, we can be pretty sure that if a tech behemoth suddenly feels like doing something horrible, they just will do it. Please buy paper books.

A collaborative social publishing engine. Known allows any number of users to post to a shared site with blog posts, status updates, photographs, and more. Its robust open source framework can be used to build fully-fledged community sites, or a blog for a single user. It's up to you.

Read 🌐 online or 📃 print out, ✂️ cut, and 🙏 fold to create a physical copy. 💜 Remix and write your own zine!

A Google spreadsheet listing musicians.

A new amazing way to create decentralized blogs.

Stacey Abrams, the Democratic State of the Union response speaker, and other authors respond to Francis Fukuyama's Foreign Affairs essay "Against Identity Politics" and discuss the meaning and value of identity politics in the United States and beyond. The marginalized did not create identity politics: their identities have been forced on them by dominant groups, and politics is the most effective method of revolt.

The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.

I didn’t expect that spending a week with a couple thousand lesbians on a cruise ship would push me to radically reconsider the future I’d planned for myself.

Many of us would love to be taxed for the things we are solely and individually responsible for. But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group. We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It’s impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.

n 1964, Decca Records released one of the most extraordinary LPs in recording history: a compilation of ten somniloquies by a loquacious sleeptalker named Dion McGregor. Despite having been a commercial flop, The Dream World of Dion McGregor (He Talks in His Sleep) has become a cult classic during the fifty years since its original appearance.

Vivus is a lightweight JavaScript class (with no dependencies) that allows you to animate SVGs, giving them the appearence of being drawn. There are a variety of different animations available, as well as the option to create a custom script to draw your SVG in whatever way you like.

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response. Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

Paris syndrom is a condition exhibited by some individuals when visiting or going on vacation to Paris, as a result of extreme shock at discovering that Paris is different from their expectations. The syndrome is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, or hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others, such as vomiting.

Influencer-style pictures are simply the way we document our lives now. Beyond pointing out the fact that the original tweet is a sensational fabrication designed to spark outrage—which is really unfortunate and bad!—this argument seems too simplistic, too much of a “Actually you're wrong, this is fine and how we do things now” hot take. Sure, one can take selfies at sites of tragedy, but we can also question and examine how this all came to be: What is an ‘influencer?’ What effects do they have on audiences and subjects? Is this ‘ruin porn?’ How does publicly available life-documentation (i.e. Instagram) differ from the limited availability of the personal printed photo album of the past?

The gear that Aaron Parecki uses to record our meetup.

How to do this.

Reading poetry and Googling rates of decomposition, on my fourth cup of coffee, I prepared myself for the nasty task of exhumation. I didn’t want to disturb her remains, but if somebody had to dig her up, if anyone must pry her bones from the soil, it was going to be me. I wasn’t about to let the capitalist cucks of our property management company touch my fucking tortoise.

Through listening to the album and all of the posts everyone has been making here, I put together a comprehensive list of all the differences between the original leak and the new version. Please let me know if I missed something! All songs are less compressed and have a much better mix.

Conventional wisdom tells us we should eagerly embrace every opportunity that comes our way, but playing a little hard to get has its advantages.

It's not just bad storytelling—it’s because the storytelling style changed from sociological to psychological [...] But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.

When I'm traveling and am at a loss for how to spend my time, I look up as many libraries I can in the area I'll be traveling to, and I check to see if they have special collections. Then I make an appointment with the library to visit those special collections, and usually it means I get to spend a day in a quiet, climate-controlled room with cool old documents. It's like a museum but with no people, and where you have to do all the work, which is honestly my idea of a perfect vacation.

Art/music can be disruptive technologies. Art doesn’t just come from reorganization of cultural forms. It is radical when it perturbs dominant cultural modes & shakes people out of their ordinary experience. It has the power to connect us to mysteries of imagination and being.

The one neat trick to solving the housing crisis: give the things owned by the rich to the poor.

Most of what you’ll hear about is paid for by someone; benefits someone. If there is information that might hurt the reputation of anyone in power—their exercise of that power, or their ability to make money—massive resources will be spent to conceal it from you, divert your attention, change the subject.

We’re calling for a global strike on 20 September. Disrupting our normal lives is the only way to secure our future, says Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben and others

The ongoing debate between the scientific and the miraculous, as seen through a very thin piece of fabric: the Shroud of Turin.