Amy Westervelt: Content Used to Be King. Now It’s the Joker.
Maybe we can even get back to a place where media outlets run fewer, better stories, written by journalists who are paid fairly, edited by staff who aren’t being asked to edit an insane amount of copy every day, and read by people who appreciate quality over quantity and are pretty tired of the endless content cycle themselves.
Leigh Alexander: But WHAT CAN BE DONE: Dos and Don’ts To Combat Online Sexism
As you know, sexism is bad, and when bad things happen, you might have feelings about it too. But how can you help? What should be done? Here is a guide.
Mark Richardson: Led Zeppelin / Led Zeppelin II / Led Zeppelin III (Pitchfork)
There is no arguing with a riff. It’s a conversation-ender, something resistant to analysis that strips away the intellectual to situate the music in a purely physical space. Of the 100 greatest guitar riffs in the history of rock music, Jimmy Page might have written 20, and a good number of those can be found on Led Zeppelin’s second album from 1969.
In a culture that expects women to be happy, shiny objects, sadness can become its own form of defiance. Lindsay Zoladz details the perfectly gloomy online teen-girl aesthetic, typified by the all-encompassing sorrow of Lana Del Rey.
Maria Bustillos: Marc Andreessen and the Inevitability of Catastrophic Ideas (The Awl)
It's not false to say that some crumbs perforce will fall from the tables of the rich onto those of the poor. It in no way follows, however, that that is the way bread should be shared.
Perhaps what is going on is a kind of power that has less to do with owning the means of production thereby controlling the value cycle, as in capitalism. Perhaps it is more about owning the means of mediation, thereby controlling the means of production and hence the value cycle. The actual production can be outsourced, and manufacturing firms will have to compete for the privilege of making products with someone else’s intellectual property embedded in it, and sold under some else’s brand.
If you want to call yourself a data journalist, there is one shortcut you can never take: you must validate your data. Even the cleanest looking data might contain flaws and omissions stemming from its methodology. It’s not enough to run checks on the data itself. You must also lift your nose out of the database, ask the serious questions about how the data was collected and even use the well-honed tools of a traditional reporter to call experts when—never an if—you find questions about the data.
It’s tempting to speculate on how the record would have been received at the time and why it might have been shelved. James was moving fast in those days, so it’s possible that this album felt too much like where he’d been before, especially given the new ground he was breaking with SAW II. By the following year’s I Care Because You Do his sound was again changing rapidly, and the rest of the decade saw him attaining the status of a serious composer. Given all that, Caustic Window LP probably wouldn’t have left a significant mark, and would have been heard as second-tier James. Twenty years later, though, we’re hearing it with that aura, that extra bit of longing that comes from how scarce music from James has become. And in that light, second tier is still very good indeed.
Laura Hudson: Curbing Online Abuse Isn’t Impossible. Here’s Where We Start (Wired)
Think about how social networks might improve if—as on the gaming sites and in real life—users had more power to reject abusive behavior. Of course, different online spaces will require different solutions, but the outlines are roughly the same: Involve users in the moderation process, set defaults that create hurdles to abuse, give clearer feedback for people who misbehave, and—above all—create a norm in which harassment simply isn’t tolerated.
John Twells: A Beginner’s Guide to Angelo Badalamenti (FACT Magazine)
Whether it was Moby’s sampling of Badalamenti’s unfathomably influential ‘Twin Peaks Theme’, James crooner Tim Booth’s desire to collaborate (the two ended up releasing full-length Booth and the Bad Angel), or German band Bohren & Der Club of Gore’s relentless fetishism, the unmistakable blend of wavering strings and sluggish, pitch-black jazz has made an indelible mark on contemporary music.
Divya Manian: We Can Finally Talk About Sexism in Tech–So Let’s Be Honest (TIME)
Ultimately, Spiegel’s emails reveal more about the tech culture that embraces such behavior. These emails are not revelations from a silly incident 20 years ago but rather happened a mere five years ago, when Snapchat was being created. It reveals how Silicon Valley’s fascination with self-obsessed youth has led us down a treacherous path that is unsafe for women and people of color. There’s an urgent need to provide safe spaces for women and people of color online. On the whole, I’m witnessing consistent conversation about discrimination and diversity. My hope is that these conversations lead to significant changes in team culture, demographics and how VCs choose to fund startups.
Unless we collectively choose to pay for a safety net, technology alone isn’t going to make it happen. Though technological progress has sped up over recent decades of capitalist expansion, most people on the planet are in need of a safety net today. The market hasn’t been there to catch them. Why is this different in Awesome Robot Future? Did I miss one of Asimov’s Laws that says androids are always programmed to be more socially-minded than neoliberals?
Meanwhile, we don’t need to wait until a hypercapitalist techno-utopia emerges to do right by our struggling neighbors. We could make the choice to pay for universal health care, higher education, and a basic income tomorrow. Instead, you’re kicking the can down the road and hoping the can will turn into a robot with a market solution.
Christopher Michael-Martinez’s Father Gets It Right
Christopher died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. That’s true. That the killer in question was in the grip of a mad, woman-hating ideology, or that he was also capable of stabbing someone to death with a knife, are peripheral issues to the central one of a gun culture that has struck the Martinez family and ruined their lives.
Garann Means: June 16, 2014 (The Pastry Box Project)
We need more engineers and more productive engineers. We don’t need to send people on quests through the dark woods of our issue tracker to have them prove their worth. We need to get them running the project locally, finding tasks to do, and fixing issues as quickly as we can. We know lots and lots at this point about how to do good engineering: intelligent, predictive, and, ultimately, easy for the end user. At some point we’re going to have to drop the fantasy that putting up with bad engineering is evidence of a good engineer.
[…] the full gamut of a true sharing economy[—]from the controversial Lyfts and Airbnbs to the individuals who run home businesses knitting scarves and baking pies without traditional employment safety nets or the corporate muscle of Big Sharing. While the former wields the power to get its way, defining “the sharing economy” at the expense of workers and consumers, sole proprietors and nonprofit collectives are often the ones facing real legal problems that they can’t afford to solve. The benefits big disruptive “sharing economy” players might be making for themselves are not exactly trickling down.
Jared Keller: A Mysterious Sound Is Driving People Insane — And Nobody Knows What's Causing It (Mic.com)
"The Hum" refers to a mysterious sound heard in places around the world by a small fraction of a local population. It's characterized by a persistent and invasive low-frequency rumbling or droning noise often accompanied by vibrations.
Adrienne LaFrance: The Library of Congress Wants to Destroy Your Old CDs (for Science) (The Atlantic)
But this kind of obsolescence has a way of creeping up on you. Even the researchers involved with CD preservation efforts at the Library of Congress say that academics started thinking about this kind of work later than they should have. "We really haven't focused as much on 20th-century media because you just think there are multiple copies of things. People just assumed it's more widely distributed."
