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In this edition of his monthly column, the premier writer on new, emergent, underground music addresses how the framing of music can radically redefine it. I love vaporwave and ‘internet music’, I really do. At its best it’s a provocative, complex and highly modern statement—but can you imagine it getting stupider, then more commonplace, then sticking around for more or less a decade? And towards the end of the decade, a well-meaning ebook gets published called Internet Music: The Weird and Wonderful World of Online Sounds, its title all spelled out in unicode characters and a naked 3D virtual woman floating above a blue watery backdrop on the cover? Wouldn’t you want a more exciting decade?

Great interview. Porpentine is an award-winning artist who has recently released a collection of her hypertext work from 2012-2015 called Eczema Angel Orifice. There are 25 stories collated in total. To create them, Porpentine drew from her own traumatic experiences and emotions, spinning them into engrossing, oneiric fictions.

Every time we write about an encounter that portrays the police in a negative light — the death of Bland, or the McKinney pool party, or police in Austin pepper spraying and snatching property out of citizen hands for no visible reason — we receive comments from readers who want to know why we don’t spend more time writing about the good things that the police do, or why we aren’t writing about when police are killed in the line of duty. The reason for that is simple: Because when an officer like Brian T. Encinia, or Eric Casebolt, or any other person we entrust with a badge and a gun abuses his authority, he’s doing so in our name, on our dime. When a police encounter ends with Sandra Bland dead or teenagers abused, we all bear some culpability for it, because we paid them to do it. And as long as we talk about bad-apple police, or how refusing to comply with police orders with a smile on your faces means that you bear some responsibility for whatever the police do to you afterward, we’re endorsing that system. The death of a police officer at the hands of a criminal is a tragedy, but it’s one that has a clear and simple villain: The person who pulled the trigger. The death of Sandra Bland is a tragedy, too, but the villain there is one it’s a lot less comfortable to identify: It’s all of us who empower a police culture that, as it’s been proven again and again in recent years, does not work for all of the citizens it was created to serve and protect.

Too often, work cultures neglect the fact that workers have bodies, forgetting that food, exercise, and rest are design requirements.

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection. The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs. The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.

But words do not adhere to their creators’ intentions, and the word “meritocracy” has certainly not clung strictly to Young’s definition. In usage it has morphed from a flawed sociological experiment to a disingenuous defense: having failed to introduce the necessary changes to produce an actual meritocracy, the wealthy elite simply appropriated its trappings. The new meritocrat is simply the old aristocrat with a righteous smirk on his face.

A podcasts site focusing on black podcasts and podcasts of color.

Don’t you hate when editors use “I don’t know enough writers of color” as an excuse to back up the homogeneity of their publications? We do too. Here’s a fix, brought to you by Durga Chew-Bose, Jazmine Hughes, Vijith Assar, and Buster Bylander. Need someone to cover politics? Here you go. A correspondent in Chicago? We’ve got you covered. We aim to create more visibility for writers of color, ease their access to publications, and build a platform that is both easy for editors to use and accurately represents the writers. The response so far has been overwhelming (thank you!) and we welcome further feedback from both camps, but please realize that this site is run by volunteers and is a work in progress. We still need help fixing mistakes and keeping things running smoothly.

To understand race in the U.S. today, it's Kalief Browder's story, not Rachel Dolezal's, that really matters. … At our implicit behest, a boy was snatched off the streets of New York. His parents were told to pay a certain sum, or he would not be released. When they did not pay, he was beaten and then banished to lonely cell. Browder’s captors then offered him a different way out—pay for your freedom in the political currency of a guilty plea. He refused. More beatings. More solitary. The sum was lowered. Browder still refused. He was subjected to the same routine. Browder defeated his captors. They tired, released him, and likely turned to perpetrate the same scheme on some other hapless soul. … If Americans are not responsible for what happened to Kalief Browder, for the ransoming of children, then we are not responsible for ensuring that it never happens again.

Regarding the ‘Why Are You So Angry?’ series of videos about angry gamers on the internet. My feeling was that I, as a privileged person, can get away with kicking a hornets’ nest. The angle I’d never considered, likely because I and the people who helped me make the video have never been on the receiving end of this kind of backlash, is splash damage. That when you engage with Jack, there are often bystanders. That privilege may protect me, but it doesn’t protect everyone in the blast radius. That if I engage with Jack about Anita, he might just go attack Anita in retaliation. The thing about hornets is they don’t only sting the person who kicks the hive.

“I’m trying to put on those Phil Collins melodies,” West told Miss Info, naming the most elusive and least-explored influence on 808s. He was talking about Collins’ synth-like, proto-Auto-Tuned voice, but there’s also a sonic kinship between the hard, sharp, and dry drums that Collins popularized on his earliest solo records and the uncanny explosions in dead space that make up 808s’ beats. Collins first came upon this “gated reverb” drum sound while working on Peter Gabriel’s 1980 track “Intruder”, when the song’s engineer, Hugh Padgham, used a microphone normally used for in-studio communication—something closer to an intercom—and then trapped and snuffed out any overtones with a signal processor called a noise gate. It made the drum hits both vivid and lifeless, loud sounds that confused our sense of how loud sounds travel. The technique was famously employed on Collins’ signature hit “In the Air Tonight”, which Kanye has covered live.

Once he left Syria, Mr. Aljasem said one of the first things he did was get a new smartphone, because it was too dangerous to travel with one in Syria. Soldiers at government checkpoints, as well as at Islamic State checkpoints, commonly demand Facebook passwords, he said. They look at Facebook profiles to determine one’s allegiance in the war.

And if you are a whale, we take Facebook stalking to a whole new level. You spend enough money, we will friend you. Not officially, but with a fake account. Maybe it’s a hot girl who shows too much cleavage? That’s us. We learned as much before friending you, but once you let us in, we have the keys to the kingdom. We will use everything to figure out how to sell to you. I remember we had a whale in one game that loved American Football despite living in Saudi Arabia. We built several custom virtual items in both his favorite team colors and their opponents, just to sell to this one guy. You better believe he bought them. And these are just vanity items. We will flat out adjust a game to make it behave just like it did last time the person bought IAP. Was a level too hard? Well now they are all that same difficulty.

Without an overhaul of how we understand student benefits, making college free would boost the wealth of college attendees without any egalitarian gains. The goal of free college should not be to help students per se, but instead to bind them to a broader welfare benefit system. By presenting their tuition subsidies and living grants as indistinguishable from benefits for the disabled, the poor, the elderly, and so on, it may be possible to encourage wealthier students to support the welfare state and to undermine students’ future claims of entitlement to the high incomes that college graduates so often receive. After all, the college income premium would only be possible through the welfare benefits to which the rest of society—including those who never went to college—has contributed.

Here is every dog Hallie Bateman saw today, as described by their human companions.

Notes on Kim Kardashian and the most important videogame of 2014. Anyway, high/low, camp/class, feminism/exploitation: It’s all breaking down. The digital revolution has made our hierarchies diffuse, and in some cases, defunct. So while Kim may be seen as a sign of end times to those who feel they must protect some temple of good taste, she has become something of a folk hero to a new generation that doesn’t see old-guard institutions as anything but obstacles to disrupt and shatter.

Comic about a classic experiment into drug addiction science: Rat Park. Would rats choose to take drugs if given a stimulating environment and company?

A truly bizarre story of Marlon Brando, who loved eggs, and Joe Flynn, who was convinced that ‘personal eggs,’ or a spigot in your kitchen that dispensed cracked eggs, were the end to world hunger.

"That is, can we fix homelessness in SimCity, or because we haven't fixed homelessness as a problem in real life, therefore we are bound to lose?" Bittanti asked. "Is SimCity a reflection of what's happening in reality, and therefore is very realistic, or is it a programming issue?"

I find it particularly disturbing the way that we try to find excuses for killings, the way that we seek to deprecate a person when they have been killed rather than insisting that they deserved to remain among the living.

French photographer — Landscapes & Street Photography

There is a timidity that the country can no longer afford. This was not an unthinkable act. A man may have had a rat's nest for a mind, but it was well thought out. It was a cool, considered crime, as well planned as any bank robbery or any computer fraud. If people do not want to speak of it, or think about it, it's because they do not want to follow the story where it inevitably leads. It's because they do not want to follow this crime all the way back to the mother of all American crimes, the one that Denmark Vesey gave his life to avenge. What happened on Wednesday night was a lot of things. A massacre was only one of them.

Its openness and magnanimity are what make the black church vital in the quest for black self-regard. When I stand in the house of God to deliver the word I embrace the redemption of black belief — a belief in self and community.

What if, instead of teaching women that they have to raise their hands to speak at meetings, we taught men to be more reflective and circumspect; instead of telling women to tamp down their emotions at the office, a man was told that he didn’t appear committed enough to the job because he’s never shed tears over it; instead of pushing women to take public credit for their work, we publicly admonish men who don’t properly acknowledge others’ contributions? I was just invited to a seminar on public speaking skills for women — where’s the class on listening skills for men?

What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins. They want absolution from their silence in the face of all manner of racism, great and small. They want to believe it is possible to heal from such profound and malingering trauma because to face the openness of the wounds racism has created in our society is too much. I, for one, am done forgiving.

My unwillingness to forgive this man does not give him any kind of power. I am not filled with hate for this man because he is beneath my contempt. I do not believe in the death penalty so I don’t wish to see him dead. My lack of forgiveness serves as a reminder that there are some acts that are so terrible that we should recognize them as such. We should recognize them as beyond forgiving. … Forgiveness does not come easily to me. I am fine with this failing. I am particularly unwilling to forgive those who show no remorse, who don’t demonstrate any interest in reconciliation. I do not believe there has been enough time since this terrorist attack for anyone to forgive. The bodies of the dead are still being buried. … The call for forgiveness is a painfully familiar refrain when black people suffer. White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is, and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present. … What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins. They want absolution from their silence in the face of all manner of racism, great and small. They want to believe it is possible to heal from such profound and malingering trauma because to face the openness of the wounds racism has created in our society is too much. I, for one, am done forgiving.

With the requisite context in place, it's easier to understand why any of us who are praised or recognized as "Good Guys" have to not believe the hype, no matter how seductive the idea of such praise may be. If fixing tech becomes the domain of just those who are perfect avatars of the ideal activist, none of us will ever be ready to participate. Worse, if we require (seeming) perfection or ideal traits in all of those whom we recognize, we make the overall movement vulnerable to being attacked when any of us is revealed to have our inevitable human flaws and foibles.

Some people do very well with traditional interviews and they should stick with what works for them. However, I’d urge any company to really look hard at what their interview process is screening for. Does it accurately produce employees that do great work and fit well with the team? Does it select people who have heard your particular brain teasers before? Are you just going through the motions on interviews and then going with someone’s gut? Maybe that manager is really good at guessing, but what happens when they leave? Think about whether or not the short term contract approach might give you a better idea about a candidate’s value.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just live your life knowing that benefits for retirement, disability, unemployment, paid leave, health insurance, and education are there for you? Wouldn’t it be nice not having to spend your finite time on this earth trying to coordinate tons of different accounts and employment relationships (and bear the risk and uncertainty of those accounts and relationships) in order to meet these kinds of needs? I think it would be nice and I think free college advocates miss opportunities to justify it on these grounds.

Instead of preventing trauma and crisis, resilience discourse makes it a prerequisite that everyone must experience in order to demonstrate that they are healthy and normal. Resilience discourse treats trauma and crisis as compulsory experiences. In turn, this lets society off the hook for systematic problems like poverty, climate change, and sexism. Resilience discourse outsources the work of addressing, surviving, and coping with the harms of systemic, institutionalized inequality to private individuals. If you still feel the negative effects of, say, sexism, it’s your fault because you’re just not resilient enough. Society doesn’t have to spend any resources solving or alleviating harm, nor does it have to put any more effort into reproducing the relations of inequity that cause these harms. If everyone has to experience some loss and damage, the people who began with more resources and more access to privilege will always have an easier route to recovery–and often a more successful outcome–than those without.