Alice Bolin: The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime (Vulture)
The “true-crime boom” of the mid- to late 2010s is a strange pop-culture phenomenon, given that it is not so much a new type of programming as an acknowledgement of a centuries-long obsession: People love true stories about murder and other brands of brutality and grift, and they have gorged on them particularly since the beginning of modern journalism.
Scott Patterson and Alexandra Wexler: Despite Cleanup Vows, Smartphones and Electric Cars Still Keep Miners Digging by Hand in Congo (Wall Street Journal)
Supply chains at Apple, VW and others still include the owner of a mine where workers produce cobalt without safety equipment
Becky Ferreira: Climate Change Exacerbates Hurricane Florence as America Becomes World’s Leading Crude Oil Producer
Hurricane Florence will make landfall in the Carolinas on the same day the US Department of Energy announces that the US has likely surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia in crude oil production.
Nature photographer should capture the true essence of wildlife, not forcing the poor animals to hold an umbrella, dance or do kungfu. The nature is beautiful and interesting as it is. We believe in the true beauty of nature, not fabricated, posed photo at the expense of animal rights.
Jesse Dorris: The Prodigy — The Fat of the Land (Pitchfork)
Today, The Fat Of the Land is easy to swallow, even if mix of party-on and patriarchy leaves a strange taste in the mouth. As usual, Kim Deal knows the score. “Firestarter” was, after all, built on women’s work: that charmed and pissed-off “Hey!” throughout belonged to Anne Dudley, one of the virtuosos behind Art of Noise; the song’s raucous guitar line belonged to Deal, whose Breeders track “S.O.S.” birthed it. “Since I own, like, a quarter of [”Firestarter”]…I root for them since they used a song of mine,” she told the A.V. Club in 2009. “It’s like I’m in the biology club and they’re in the football team, you know?” With The Fat Of the Land, they packed the stadiums.
Taylor Link: Andrew Sullivan plays himself, proves “racist” tweets by New York Times hire were innocent (Salon)
In a column Sullivan cited a tweet by Sarah Jeong as an example of racism, failing to realize she was parodying him
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When it comes to racism targeted at people of color, Sullivan insists both sides need to be heard. When it comes to "racism" targeted at white people, you better damn expect a 1,200 word screed attacking the speaker.
Thread by @nomadj1s: "RE Sarah Jeong: I am not a white person & I don’t know how it feels to you when people of color (POC) generalize about white people But…"
Equating generalizations made by POC about white people & those made by white people about POC strike me as disingenuous at best. they’re informed by very different lived experiences (see above) & have very different material implications (see above)
Trevor Alixopulos: I Make You a Cocktail: Luna Negra (Popula)
A new song, a capital S Song that persists through your life, is magic. It’s not so much like having a new dish or drink and more analogous to discovering a new color or flavor. My sight feels altered permanently, things are recontextualized.
ClickRepair is a mature, well-tested, application for declicking and decrackling audio in uncompressed audio files. It has been developed over a period of many years. There is an extensive user manual that is part of the download package. ClickRepair will not operate on compressed audio files, such as mp3, and there are no plans to incorporate such a feature.
A “Bike Fun Library” is in the works, just in time for Pedalpalooza
This story was written by Portland bike fun enthusiast and Shift volunteer, One Hwang.
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Members of the public could more easily organize their own Pedalpalooza ride if they had access to a bike ride equipment library, where they could borrow for free a flat bed trailer, sound system, disco ball, batteries, and radio transmitter. Furthermore, if they receive training on how to welcome women and other underrepresented groups, they could help create a more inclusive bike community and address factors that discourage these groups from participation.
Elizabeth Newton: The Next Big Thing in Music Theory (Popula)
Whether conscious or compulsive, whether musical or otherwise, the counting seems likely to continue. We will go on quantifying everything from our garbage to our daydreams, calculating what can’t be separated, let alone captured and kept. But we are also beginning to acknowledge measurement’s externalized costs. Music reminds us to redirect resources beyond the confines of measure. Not because the measurements don’t matter, but because we have yet to account for the movements between.
Eric Harvey: How Smart Speakers Are Changing the Way We Listen to Music (Pitchfork)
Indeed, many of the most pressing issues of the streaming music economy—artist compensation, statistical transparency, sexism—remain untouched, if not deepened, by the rise of the smart speaker. Moreover, as Amazon, Apple, and Google continue to carve out their spaces in the voice marketplace, music consumers and musicians alike will continue to fight against the companies’ preferred walled-garden approach to exclusivity. And though there’s no real reason to sympathize with Tidal or Spotify, the idea that the smart speaker industry might become the exclusive province of massive firms with enough capital to experiment (and huge captive audiences to use as guinea pigs) is significant reason for pause, no matter how little one is interested in owning the devices. A world in which three of tech’s “frightful five” become the equivalent of the major labels, with exclusive holdings in hardware and software, and plenty of incentive to lock competitors’ products and content out of their systems, is a chilling idea, and not as far-fetched as it might seem.
This is a good plugin for media management.
Create folder to order image in your WordPress media manager. WP Media Folder also provides a importer, a gallery manager, media replacer and more.
Music Review: C. Spencer Yeh — The RCA Mark II (Tiny Mix Tapes)
The machine cost $250,000; it stood at a forbidding seven feet tall and stretched the width of the room; it could take up to 12 hours to re-calibrate if a mistake were made. The user would control for pitch, timbre, volume, and envelope for each note individually with a typewriter-like hole-punch, creating a paper script to be fed into the machine. Only the machine’s designers and engineers were even vaguely comfortable with it, and only the most intrepid of composers dared use it.
Thread by @RinChupeco: “Speaking as someone born in the last years of a dictatorship, you Americans are already several steps in one.”
[The Philippines’] Ferdinand Marcos' greatest trick was convincing people all protesters were communist animals, so when they went missing, few cared. Even after bodies were discovered.
These white people & journalists talking about being civil? These were the rich people, the Fil-Chinese, the mestizos in the Philippines who knew they won't be affected by many of Marcos' policies, and therefore could ignore them even as the killings started.
Marcos was also adept at convincing regular Filipinos that "as long as you don't commit crimes I won't come for you. I'm only getting rid of the 'filth'." He lied, of course. He jailed his most vocal opponents, people whose businesses he wanted to confiscate for his use.
Centering gender and sexual politics and discussion on the people most strongly affected is absolutely the right thing to do, but I think it’s still useful to be aware that this spectrum exists and literally everybody is somewhere on it (that’s why it’s a spectrum).
This is important for a number of different reasons.
The first is simply that I’m pretty sure that it’s true. It’s good to believe true things. The world makes more sense that way. This model of how people are behaving is (as far as I can tell) extremely consistent with both the data and many many quiet conversations I’ve had with friends about their experiences.
The second is that I think it is extremely helpful to people to understand this about themselves, especially if they are in a boundary area. Stressing about the question “Am I bisexual or am I just faking it?” seems to be an almost universal bisexual experience, and that’s not surprising given this dynamic! When most of what you hear is from people whose sexual identity is burned into their very soul, “I don’t know what’s going on but sometimes I feel like it might be nice to be able to kiss boys??” feels fake in comparison.
It’s also useful from a political point of view. There is strength in numbers, and understanding that the range of experiences includes a much more broad base of people who would experiment if given the option significantly increases our numbers. I’d much rather describe my sexuality as “Look over there!” followed by dropping a smoke bomb and escaping in the confusion, and my decision to identify as bisexual instead is in no small part a political one. I suspect there are quite a lot of others out there who could usefully do the same.
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When most of what you hear is from people whose sexual identity is burned into their very soul, “I don’t know what’s going on but sometimes I feel like it might be nice to be able to kiss boys??” feels fake in comparison.
Alex Zielinski: ICE Continues to Deny Immigrants Their Legal Rights in Oregon Prison (Portland Mercury)
"They've been defeated. They have fled terror in their home country only to be welcomed to this country with more terror," Garcia said. "What the government is doing is accomplishing what the cartels never could, which is separating these men from their families."
Philabaum says prison staff have also kept faith leaders from visiting men who've requested their presence. According to ICE's own "detention standards," immigrant detainees must be granted at least some weekend visiting hours from family members, faith leaders, or legal counsel. Those standards also grant detainees free calls to legal counsel, along with a list of free legal aid programs they can call. The detained men have been denied all of these rights.
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"It's important to remember, the law never required these men be detained. The law never required these men be separated from their families," said Philabaum. "And the law definitely never required they be placed in a federal correctional institution."
Renee Gladman is the author of ten works of prose and poetry, most recently *Calamities*, a collection of essay-fictions. Her first monograph of drawings, *Prose Architectures*, was published by Wave Books in 2017. She lives in New England with the poet-ceremonialist Danielle Vogel.
Jeremy Larson: Eminem — The Marshall Mathers LP (Pitchfork)
American culture allowed Eminem to freely negate any kind of identity he wanted to, as was his inherent privilege. But, as the critic Hilton Als wrote in his 2003 essay “White Noise,” it didn’t matter to Eminem. “Mathers never claimed whiteness and its privileges as his birthright because he didn’t feel white and privileged,” Als wrote. It’s interesting, though, that Eminem never negated his masculinity or heterosexuality, two identities that were and, more or less, remain intrinsic to the success of male rappers. His privilege meant that he could shed his racial signifiers and become a ghost, a psychopath, a loving father, a bigot, a clown. So why do fans believe any of this? Why, when they listened to Eminem rip his vocal cords open and disconnect from reality and mimic slitting the throat of his wife while he screams at her to “bleed, bitch bleed” do they take him so seriously?
Annalee Flower Horne: How “Good Intent” Undermines Diversity and Inclusion (The Bias)
The harm is that telling people to “assume good intent” is a sign that if they come to you with a concern, you will minimize their feelings, police their reactions, and question their perceptions. It tells marginalized people that you don’t see codes of conduct as tools to address systemic discrimination, but as tools to manage personal conflicts without taking power differences into account. Telling people to “assume good intent” sends a message about whose feelings you plan to center when an issue arises in your community.
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If you want to build a culture of “assuming good intent,” start by assuming good intent in marginalized people.
Assume that they already tried being nice. Assume that their feelings are valid. Assume that, after a lifetime of practice, they are responding to harmful behavior in the way that is safest for them. Prioritize that safety over the momentary discomfort people feel when they realize they’ve done something hurtful.
Culture-setting documents like your code of conduct and corporate values should be designed around protecting marginalized people from harmful behavior. Leave out “assume good intent.” Instead, create a culture that recognizes and pushes back against the ways that marginalized people are dehumanized. Expect people to demonstrate their good intent by treating people with respect.
Thread by @eveewing: " LORDT. two black economists i really respect, @SandyDarity and @DarrickHamilton, just published a KILLER report debunking what they call 10 commonly-held myths about the racial wealth gap and how to close it. I'm gonna tweet the hig
Myth 2: The racial homeownership gap is the “driver” of the racial wealth gap.
"Among households that own a home, white households have nearly $140,000 more in net worth than comparable black households. While the wealth ratio between whites & blacks may narrow somewhat among those who own a home, a 6-figure wealth differential remains."
Primarily, Sandy & Darrick seem to take issue with the causal implications here. "By definition, homeownership/home equity is a component of wealth. Hence, the statement that 'homeownership drives wealth' is equivalent to saying that 'wealth drives wealth.'"
"The idea that homeownership creates wealth simply may put the relationship backward. Rather than homeownership creating wealth, having family wealth in the first place leads to homeownership, particularly high equity homeownership."
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TL;DR - WE NEED REPARATIONS
Brand playlists are advertisements, even if Spotify strives to imbue them with so-called editorial integrity. Such uncompensated advertorial playlists are harmful in that they offer artists no option to opt-out, but also because they undercut what can sometimes be a valuable source of revenue for artists. If brands can align themselves with artists without having to pay specifically for individual tracks or artist appearances, what do we think they’ll do? Can we at least give people the option to sell out if they want?
In juxtaposition, Sullivan’s and Coates’ pieces provide a miniature history of how a certain variety of self-congratulatory openness to inquiry is in actual fact a barbed thicket of power relations. What Sullivan depicts as a “different time” when “neither of us denied each other’s good faith or human worth,” is, in Coates’ understanding, a time where he was required to “take seriously” the argument that “black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people” as a price of entry into the rarified heights of conversation at the Atlantic. The “civility” and “generosity of spirit” that supported “human to human” conversation is juxtaposed to Coates’ “teachers” who didn’t see him “completely as a human being.” What was open and free spirited debate in Sullivan’s depiction, was to Coates a loaded and poisonous dialogue where he could only participate if he shut up about what he actually believed.
Doreen St. Félix: How Alexandra Bell Is Disrupting Racism in Journalism (The New Yorker)
The series had its clandestine début, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, on New Year’s Eve in 2016. Bell critiqued the Times’s coverage of the death of Mike Brown, in 2014, in which the paper ran side-by-side profiles of the victim and his killer, Darren Wilson, under the joint headline “Two Lives at a Crossroads in Ferguson.” Bell and many other readers felt that the framing of equivalence, and of tragic coincidence, diminished what had happened that August afternoon. Bell erected a diptych of her own, with Wilson’s profile whittled down to read, simply, “Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.” The second panel bore the new headline “A Teenager with Promise,” I noted last year, when I interviewed Bell.
The melodramatic style of dance music was born alongside the European Union’s utopian vision. But how does it fit into the Continent’s current wave of political and social upheaval?
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The boutique hotel in Ibiza called Ushuaïa is located on a stretch of the beach that is less a tribute to the Mediterranean island’s storied dance history and more a feudal system of investment properties. Competing bass kicks from the poolside bars of adjacent hotels ping-pong between buildings, creating syncopations of privilege. Packs of day drinkers lounge a few yards away from African immigrants in knockoff Yankees caps, standing just far enough away in the sand to avoid being seen as interlopers. There are waist-high red ceramic cats holding serving trays in the entrance to the lobby, and chairs that look like well-toned butts. And up on the rooftop bar, Armin van Buuren is ushering in the sunset with a short DJ set.