Top Tens
September 30, 2022
Approval and ranked-choice voting systems compared – this has a very Seattle focus given there is an upcoming vote, but could be valuable for anyone
Emily the Criminal – taut thriller which is also a cri de cœur in the same way Parasite was
2017 arrangement of King Crimson’s Discipline – the mark-VII lineup of Crimson is more interesting when you can see the three-drummer interplay
Riotsville, USA is a Chris Markerish documentary that reveals the mindset of the Sixties more than many others
The new Zappa box: two 1974 shows and one 1976 one, just glorious, improvisational jams packed with bonhomie that are largely free of latter-day Zappa strident prurient doggerel
The best explanation I've heard for the US ‘strategic ambiguity’ posture vis-a-vis Taiwan
Somebody had to say it: Mental Health Is Political
Mal Waldron’s work with Steve Lacy I’d been aware of, being a big Lacy fan, but now spending time with Waldron’s solo piano LPs: Meditations from 1972, Searching In Grenoble from 1978, Plays Satie from 1983 ...
Paris Police 1900, which has been on BBC for a while and will eventually make it Stateside
JACK Quartet plays Xenakis’ Tetras (1983) – incredible performance of a still-astonishing piece
September 17, 2022
Power and Politics in Today’s World absolutely essential lecture series at Yale from 2019
Hikers nearly trapped in a wildfire
“Incarceration cannot be justified on the grounds it affords public safety by decreasing recidivism”
The iPhone 14 Index, a modernization of the Economists’ Big Mac Index
Alt Shift X’s House of Dragon-explaining videos – he remembers so much backstory lore which completely escapes me while watching the show
Why Aren’t You Voting in Your Financial Self-Interest?
A modest proposal for queueing for the Queen’s coffin
Men of Iron, engrossing 2004 documentary on Victorian engineering mostly focusing on Brunel: part 1, part 2, part 3
Is Ron DeSantis the Future of the Republican Party?
September 10, 2022
The New York Review of Books and The Economist with two good overviews of an impending federal collapse/schism in the US
Lars Vogt, a man staring down the barrel of his own imminent death, plays late Brahms
AI-generated imagery continues to exponentially improve: stable diffusion, outpainting (via Benedict Evans)
Wild theory about a clandestine use case for SpaceX’s Starship
1983 documentary on the Spanish Civil War
The elaborate plans laid for the death of Queen Elizabeth II
1986–87 ECM supergroup Bass Desires with Jon Scofield and Bill Frisell: 1986 gig, 1988
Russell Crowe as Zeus in the latest Thor movie
September 3, 2022
Brilliant Kipling poem noted by Neil Gaiman in an NYT profile
Recent Cassandra Miller composition performed by Explore Ensemble
Sibelius symphonies performed by the Oslo Philharmonic conducted by Klaus Mäkelä
Michael Heizer’s City prepares for its first visitors after 52 years
David Pepper on antidemocratic state legislatures
Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid which features routinely in art history texts and suffers in reproduction but in life at the National Gallery is stunning
Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe
Yellow fever epidemics as a feature, not a bug, of New Orleans society
Thirty Years’ War film The Last Valley
July 30, 2022
The NYT's 2018 proposal to overhaul the House of Representatives: part one, part two
Omar El Akkad’s American War from 2017 – reviewers get hung up on the details of the novel’s future history and miss the brilliance of the book, which is to put Americans in the position of Iraqis or Syrians
Build Back Better, Dead Again (somewhat obviated by Manchin’s recent and sudden acquiescence to what I would consider moderate tax and climate legislation, most likely prompted by a deal that would advantage a pipeline from his state of West Virginia)
The Denver Post and the PBS NewsHour on the imminent end of the Colorado River
“Seeing the dystopias of your own imagination being created is not the best thing you could wish for”: A flood of absurd marketing for the Brobdingnagian NEOM project which has its antecedent in Superstudio’s Continuous Monument from 1969
Carter Scholz’ Radiance from 2002 – very indebted to William Gaddis and a joy to read, this is one of the few things Scholz wrote (along with music composition)
June 29, 2022
Barry season 3 – now escaping further from its black-comedy box and plumbing Lynchian depths of dreamlike intensity
How space debris threatens modern life
Twisted tale of an inspirational coach-cum-cult-leader The Deep End – relatedly How to Start a Cult
Alexa the oracle speaks in the voices of the dead: “The goal is to ‘make the memories last’ after ’so many of us have lost someone we love’ during the pandemic”
Infrastructure challenges in moving to zero-emission energy sources
Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy
Absurd visualization of an unworkable New Gilded Age elite playground
Cassidy Hutchinson’s January 6 hearing testimony
June 12, 2022
Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms and History of Mass Shooters – two studies that contradict but contain interesting detail and argument
Panel discussion on Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West
Thane Gustafson interviewed on Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change – mentioned in the interview is a primer on hydrogen energy from the Economist
Never did I think we'd get a fourth season of Borgen but we have and it's terrific
Quentin Tolimieri’s Monochromes – maybe the most significant piano repertoire expansion since Ligeti’s Etudes (recorded recently by Danny Driver), and so far the record of the year
The endless parade of hilarious and absurd DALL•E mini creations
Footage of a Min Tanaka-Derek Bailey performance
Fascinating “conversation” with an AI – language processing has become so good this is no indication of sentience at all, but it's compelling reading
There Is No Antimemetics Division – coming very late to this (from 2015) but still fantastic
May 26, 2022
Col. Roger Cirillo hilariously slagging Patton
Real-time bidding considered harmful – adtech-derived info on people gets sold to China, which is busy compiling a massive data trove on Westerners to aid in recruiting assets (h/t the Seriously Risky Business newsletter)
Jon Anderson with tales of topographic Vangelis (RIP)
Nuclear Fusion Is Already Facing a Fuel Crisis
The Russian military, press-ganged into impossible tasks with unclear aims, does excel at terrorizing civilians – “They’re Armed to the Teeth, But They’re Not An Army”, “Such Bad Guys Will Come”: How One Russian Brigade Terrorized Bucha, “We Will Never Be the Same”: Bullets and Blindfolds in a Ukrainian City Under Siege
Roche’s metabolic pathways and cellular and molecular processes maps
Il Giardino Armonico plays Sonata Jucunda
From 2016, an excellent intellectual history – Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism
Gun control being an issue captured by a vocal minority isn't supported by the data – the status quo is reified by the majority, despite their expressions to the contrary when polled (via David Shor)
Amazing visualization of a proton – more from Jefferson Labs and MIT on the project (via Martin Bauer)
May 17, 2022
Ascension doc on the deranged hustling in the hyperreal of modern China; filled with bizarre and hilarious images
When I Went Away from the World
Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia plays on the intellectual ferment of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Why is it so hard to see any Stoppard production that's not Rosencrantz?
Soviet Storm, a 2011 Russian documentary on WW2 depicting the immense struggle in the East; less friendly to Stalin than you might think, but also less nuanced than you might hope
Dylan tries to figure out what key Not Dark Yet is in – he gets a lot of stick for screwing around with his arrangements but it's not just perversity or boredom prompting that, the song is always being discovered (which in typical Dylan style Dylan himself says can’t be done)
Pinning down the source of the Wow Signal – the star being offered is 1800 light-years away, which would mean the transmission occurred in 177 CE
Fantastic documentary on Claude Shannon: The Bit Player – the doc makes the case for him as a modern Newton and the comparison seems apt
Battlefield – PBS series with long, detailed episodes on WW2 battles and campaigns
Tooze on the reasons for inflation – not what you think it is, and unfortunately this information will do nothing to prevent inflation from being politically weaponized over the next few years
Wonderful, detailed musical genre exegeses with historical context from Road Jack
April 13, 2022
Drone vid of Tesla’s Berlin “gigafactory”
Lectures and interviews on early Christianity – Why Invent the Jesus? and The Gospel According to Carrier – and the science of the ancient world from Richard Carrier
The search for an octopus amenable to study
Microplastics will become more and more a pressing concern: in the oceans, in the Salish Sea, in our blood
Jef Raskin, he of Apple user interface guideline fame, came up with great input tech for his Canon Cat
Marc Sabat’s Euler Lattice Spirals Scenery – on the Another Timbre label
Ukraine could be the second-largest supplier of natural gas
One man and his singing-Torah software
DALL•E 2, art generator – giant leap forward and in some examples indistinguishable from a human-created illustration
Carbon offsets “really are a distraction from true progress toward net zero”
April 2, 2022
Ingrid Fliter playing Schumann
Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia's New Nationalism – and a lecture from the author
Making the point that you have to invest in the military you need
The Cruelties of Self-Help Culture
Hours-long Theo Parrish mixes on NTS and his first LPs First Floor and Parallel Dimensions
The films of Sergei Loznitsa – his Donbass from 2018 is remarkable, grueling and absurd
Drones in the Ukraine and the prospect of more
Tour of the International Space Station and more on the ARED exercise device
Visualization of the Kyiv offensive
March 21, 2022
Translation of an FB post on Ukraine that whether or not it was actually written by an FSB analyst is fascinating
Schiff playing Haydn on Haydn’s own fortepiano
Stephen Kotkin on current events and the Hoover Institution generally
David Torn’s Splattercell project from 2000
Radical Interoperability is a Political Agenda
Terrific performance of Prokofiev's String Quartet No. 2 in F Major, Op. 92 in a lecture on Prokofiev living in the USSR
Annotated lyrics to the Fall’s “Free Range”
The collapse of higher education
Raised By Wolves, which has been gradually impressing me more and more, might be one of the all-time best SF shows
March 6, 2022
Mesmerizing Couperin from Atsushi Sakai, Christophe Rousset, and Marion Martineau
Interview with Fiona Hill re Putin from Feb 22
David Runciman on Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man – seen once as triumphalist, then hopelessly naive, really neither of those but more prescient
Stanley Cursiter’s Scottish Futurism from 1913: The Sensation of Crossing the Street, Synthesis of the Supper Room at an Arts Club Reception, Rain on Princes Street
Long Covid-19 as the fast track to homelessness
Russia, Ukraine and the 30-year quest for a post-Soviet order – I would have liked the article to trace US policy past 1994, but still worth reading
Ransomware for industrial coercion rather than extortion
Tone Glow returns with a John Oswald interview
March 3, 2022
Kagan and Richter play Medtner in 1980
Tiny coral-like (but unlikely coral; more likely, salt) structure on Mars
Condemnation of the American left's abasement, in which the US is more to blame for enabling bad actors than the actors themselves: The New Strategic Narcissists, “anti-imperialism of idiots”
Vice extensively covering Ukraine post-2014: a collection of 2014–15 dispatches including Donbass In 2014 – Donbass in 2016, the new Cold War, volunteer militias, Crimea in 2017–2019, Russian and Ukrainian far-right extremism as a magnet for right-wing extremists worldwide
Center for Strategic and International Studies Ukraine brief from January and a discussion from March 1
Game in which you sort Wikipedia entries chronologically – gets deviously more difficult the longer a game goes on
Institute for the Study of War Ukraine briefings
Severance – a show that’s closer to Philip K Dick’s work than many actual Dick adaptations
February 24, 2022
Finance capital, unwilling to incur losses, impedes addressing climate change: “[the] problem, in the models and in our current reality, is the arrogant fidelity to growth.” Daniela Gabor as well on the boondoggle of carbon pricing
PT Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, an absolute delight
Magdalena Kožena sings Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” with Abbado – lyric translation
The very extreme weather of a “hot Jupiter” 850 light-years away
Prof John Mearsheimer on Ukraine now and Ukraine in 2015 – our strategy, such as it is, reaping predictable rewards
Protons striking dust were likely source of Earth’s water
Playlist of Afghanistan-campaign Russian popular music
February 19, 2022
Marilyn Crispell and Tyshawn Sorey in 2014
Cory Doctorow on Uber and transit
1994: Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future
Previously unissued 1973 Cecil Taylor
When your implants are abandonware
Asset manager capitalism – “when government conceives its role as being essentially to derisk investment by gigantic private asset managers”: executive summary, longer survey of the topic from Tooze
Stan Getz and his excellent 1972 wardrobe – along with Stanley Clarke, Chick Corea, and Tony Williams
Given NIMBY activism against wind farms, the changes that would need to happen for the US to reach net zero emissions will most likely never happen, tragically – the US is a vetocracy while China is defining and building its future (h/t Albert Pinto)
George Packer on Afghanistan: The Betrayal
February 7, 2022
Ian Leslie on the Get Back documentary
23 years later, finally finishing Jason Lutes’ Berlin comic set during Weimar, a tremendous achievement (here as well is the obligatory enormous Comics Journal interview with Lutes)
Caspian Report summing up Russian rationale and military options
Radio image of our galaxy reminds me of 1990s Twombly
A useful synonym/paradigm for 'procrastination' and 'avoidance', Ugh Fields
Socialist realism: Stalingrad – the 'prequel' to the better known Life and Fate – and music lecture series Music Under Stalin
A Disaster In Plain Sight – empathetic fentanyl reporting from the SF Chronicle
Gonzo travelogue in the FT that should be put in a time capsule: How Miami became the most important city in America
January 27, 2022
Voice acting, music: synthetic performances are nigh
#BIGJAZZ archival music streaming on Twitch Wednesday evenings
Against Identity Politics by Francis Fukuyama – Richard Rorty foresaw most of this and had largely the same remedy in 1997
Michael Hudson on the history and present of debt, which summarizes his 2018 book ... and forgive them their debts
The 30-Year Mortgage is an Intrinsically Toxic Product
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – marvelously restrained filmmaking
“Making the world safe for autocracy” – Russia and China’s plans for a new world order
January 19, 2022
Single-room-occupancy hotels (SROs) were the last housing option for the now homeless
Michael Kofman on the Russian military buildup around Ukraine
soClassiq, online classical-music reference
Another terrific art-piece deep dive in the NYT, this time on Jasper Johns’ 1961 In Memory of My Feelings – Frank O’Hara – more along similar lines in Artforum
England's Reformations and their Legacies
Excellent F1 car diagram-exploded-view animation
Allan Adams’ introductory quantum mechanics lectures at MIT
Complete William Byrd keyboard music performed by Davitt Moroney
Like SQL, a technology that has never been bettered and finds ever-new applications: the turboencabulator
January 9, 2022
HBO’s Station Eleven adaptation – the apocalypse while suitably scary has a sweet, elegiac, tentatively hopeful tone reminiscent of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō
The lovingly curated James Tenney YouTube channel, better assembled than most biographical Wikipedia pages
“Green nickel is not green for us” – the NYT is doing a great job following tech-manufacturing-materials mining
James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love – why Meek is not better known I’ll never understand; astonishing and gripping novel
Earth, a film by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
Living In Expectation of the Unexpected Gift
The tenth volume in the complete-Haydn-symphonies project (and the Haydn2032 project more broadly)
Preparing for an authoritarian America
Nikolai Medtner – terrific Scriabin/Rachmaninoff contemporary unjustly forgotten, championed by Horowitz to no avail
The Big Misconception About Electricity
December 24, 2021
Daniel King recapping Game 6 of the 2021 World Chess Championship
Fossil Fuel’s Downfall Could Be America’s Too
1982 Rigoletto production with Pavarotti
World War I doc The Great War
We reached Peak Rationality in the mid-1970s – it's been downhill since then and got steeper in 2007
Surveying a US democracy at risk from minoritarianism
James Meek on Russia and Ukraine
Jason Hickel on degrowth, post-capitalism, and human survival: part 1, part 2
Walter Reed has been developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine and the tests look good in primates
All about the James Webb Space Telescope – addendum after its successful launch: Where is the JWST, and another great explainer focusing on what might be achieved
December 2, 2021
András Schiff lectures on Schubert’s D960
Keith Jarrett’s Sun Bear Concerts – excerpt
Joe Biden’s Big Squeeze: “The Koch brothers are strategic; their voters are bananas,” one leading Democrat confided. “Our voters are moderate, but our funders are crazy.”
Things you can do with Starship’s enormous payload size
The Met's 2013 production of Parsifal
Testimony of Jeffrey Clark to the House Select Committee on January 6th
The Journal of Universal Rejection
November 20, 2021
The Slip live in 2011: part 1, part 2, part 3
The case of Wilhelm Fürtwangler – there was a film adaptation made of Ronald Harwood's play about the post-war investigation into Fürtwangler
New Steve Reich – a rare vocal composition; interview
Destruction of a satellite as part of an anti-satellite weapons test created a debris field 40km wide that ISS astronauts had to protect themselves from ... the inevitable Kessler Syndrome apocalypse approaches (extra credit: NASA's documentation listing historical debris as of 1999 – via the excellent Orbital Index)
Bits About Money newsletter – terrific financial-literacy education
Colburn School lecture series on composer Erwin Schulhoff
Nash Ensemble plays Ravel's Piano Trio
The Science of the Solar System
Niskanen Center on state capacity
November 11, 2021
The last-mile problem in electrical infrastructure
A new, improved version of Fisher-Price's phonograph toy
John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58): a jam-packed dedicated website for the 2020 project about it featuring a player creating your own version of the composition, pod featuring Martin Iddon on the piece and the project, Philip Thomas's recording of its Solo for Piano
How Imaginary Numbers Were Invented
The story of Cassini: part 1, part 2
Widows – terrific 2018 remake of an 80s UK series
October 24, 2021
Joséphine Olech plays Steve Reich
Tooze on the futility of West Virginia and coal
Reconciling Social Media & Democracy
sitelen sitelen, a sort of Sanrio-meets-Mayan script for Toki Pona, an artificial language
The business and life of escorting
Solti recording the Ring – also Anna Russell summarizes the Ring
Thorough walkthrough of the Chinese social credit system
October 12, 2021
Physics at the End of the Universe
The Most Important Device In the Universe
Matthias Goerne sings Schubert: D700, D933
Sohei Nishino's fractal photocollages
Tesseracts explained as much as they can be
This Real Estate Bubble Won't Pop
Theatrical production derived completely from Reality Winner's interrogation – NYT review
The Next Conflicts Will Be Fought Over Sand
Rethinking housing to ward off loneliness
October 1, 2021
Review of a 1989 Jasper Johns exhibition by William H Gass, Jerry Saltz on Johns, also Redo an Eye, the monograph which accompanies Johns’ catalogue raisonné
Dover Quartet playing Beethoven – a revelation
As More Workers Go Solo, the Software Stack Is the New Firm
The new Foundation adaptation – there's also an excellent 1973 BBC radio adaptation which hews a lot closer to the books
Why everything is becoming a subscription
Barbados PM at the UN speaking for everyone left out of the First World
Taylor Ho Bynum on the new Seattle Love Supreme
Seeing so many divisive binaries in the world – opinions, political parties – makes me wish Brian Eno's 'axis thinking' became a common heuristic (also: review of The Scout Mindset which exhorts us all to be good Bayesians)
Mitchell & Webb – Identity Theft and Dr. Glaucomflecken – Who Do You Work For
September 22, 2021
Matthew Shipp – Symbol Systems, Strata, Equilibrium ... the Shipp discography is full of riches and variety
4-voice polyphonic piece of music generated by 210 bytes of C – more background
Grassy Knolling the 2021 Italian Grand Prix
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Possible explanation for the legend of Sodom's destruction
Why Equality Is Unhelpful as a Political Goal
September 16, 2021
“I helped destroy people” – the FBI and the War on Terror
“The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.”
Two Jasper Johns exhibitions: at the Whitney and in Philly
Will Powers – Dancing for Mental Health
David Runciman on Max Chafkin's bio of Peter Thiel
September 6, 2021
Better outcomes with a fraction of the resources: the public-health emphasis of Costa Rica
Navalny interview, the first since being jailed
Solar system at Moon:1px scale
Igor Levit plays Beethoven at Wigmore Hall
David S. Ware, 1999 documentary recording the recording of Surrendered
Excellent 1975 analysis of the US depression somewhat marred by bad OCR; via Rick Perlstein
Yet another grandiose libertarian planned community
One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps
Space Opera Clichés – so much more comprehensive than the headline suggests
August 23, 2021
Contrasting F1 and Formula E: Motorsport In the Electric Age
A Chinese intellectual observes America Against America in 1991
The mysteries of modern obesity
Darren Byler on Chinese biometric surveillance
Gastropod on cannabis – biology, economics, jurisprudence, and why CBD-in-everything is a scam: 1, 2
Contronyms – words which are their own opposites
Afghanistan: The Great Game (2012) – part 1, part 2; also How Afghanistan Became a Failed State
White-collar-crime support groups: “The elements that made them successful are also the elements that contributed to their demise.”
August 19, 2021
Beautiful article on a Seattle-area Japanese garden
Excellent interview with Spencer Ackerman re the War on Terror
Simplistic but compelling review of China's strategic motivations
New box set of Cage number pieces from Another Timbre
Is Planet Nine a black hole? – don’t miss the illustration of a five-Earth-mass black hole at 1:1 scale
Lawfare/Brookings on the fall of Afghanistan
Highlights of the WA GOP’s election-fraud rally: 1, 2
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
August 5, 2021
Two great lectures by Adam Tooze on Germany: 150th Anniversary of German Unification: Bismarck, Realpolitik, and Birth of a Nation and The Wages of Destruction
Excellent explainer vid on the recent ISS docking problems – also How the Space Station Moves In Orbit Like A Spaceship
RIP Chicago house legend Paul Johnson
Legal Systems Very Different Than Ours
Is Taiwan Next? and relatedly a Caspian Report on the likelihood/challenges of an invasion
Being held hostage by the stupidest person: the Food and Drug Administration
Terrific NYer profile of the artist Kerry James Marshall
American incarceration has a lot more to do with class than race
The smooth sounds of Stanley Clarke
July 24, 2021
Algorithmic redistricting via David Shor
Saariaho’s incredible new opera Innocence, premiered in Aix – NYT review, NYer
Excellent review of Delta and a good conversation with Dr. Ashish Jha
“Falling psychiatric biodiversity” – noted within, post-traumatic counseling considered harmful
Exquisite riches are to be found in obscure symphonies: Atterberg’s Third, Magnard’s Fourth Langgaard’s Fourth, Martinů’s Fourth
William Carter’s edited Moncrieff translation of Proust
Making criticism of textbooks into a political career in 1966
July 3, 2021
Tone Glow talks to Terre Thaemlitz
Steven Isserlis & Thomas Adès – Lieux retrouvés, an evocative program (filled with diacritical marks) of Liszt, Fauré, Janáček, Kurtág, and Adès – NPR review
The World Is Wrong podcast features lesser-known film recommendations which I'm checking out (like 2012’s The Paperboy which was excellent and haunting)
“There are, of course, no shortage of analyses that relate the climate crisis to the dynamics of capitalism. A good case can be made that rather than the Anthropocene, we should be discussing the Capitalocene”
The Most COMPLEX Pop Song of All Time
The machines are coming: writing your code, sorting your Legos, blocking your videos
Every so often a performance comes along that makes you hear compositions in a completely new, exciting way – this was definitely true for me listening to Garrick Ohlsson’s Brahms recordings on Hyperion
Soderbergh’s latest No Sudden Move – like the Ocean films any objections you might have about the plot or script are made irrelevant by the fantastic cast (the 50s Detroit setting is also terrific)
I’ve linked to a lecture by Ed Baptist before about his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, but I’m finally getting around to the book and it’s marvelous
June 24, 2021
The outsider and the insider perspectives on taxes and the absurdly wealthy – I await Matt “Everything Is Insider Trading” Levine’s take
We don’t have a drinking problem, we have a social disconnection problem
Tone Glow interviews George Lewis
John Eliot Gardiner’s podcast on Monteverdi and the world of 1600 – also Harnoncourt’s Monteverdi productions are subtitled on YouTube: L’Orfeo and Poppea
Russia’s Adaptive Authoritarianism
When Graphs Are a Matter of Life and Death
“Neither the evolutionary nor the technological changes to our social systems have come about with the express purpose of promoting global sustainability or quality of life. Recent and emerging technologies such as online social media are no exception — both the structure of our social networks and the patterns of information flow through them are directed by engineering decisions made to maximize profitability […] The emergent functional consequences are unknown”
Relatedly: Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media
The Underground Railroad – I was unfamiliar with the source material, only knowing it was highly regarded, so I was unprepared for how fantastic this adaptation is. The magic-realist tone (reminding me of Exit West) is a daring choice, and should not work but succeeds brilliantly and adds layers of emotional depth. It's a nightmarish experience to watch – the closest thing I can think to its unflinching cavalcade of horror would be Come and See. (There's a film the director Barry Jenkins uploaded featuring static shots of Railroad’s characters which is also remarkable.)
June 7, 2021
What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed
The Brazilianization of the World
Can Elites Start the Climate Revolution?
Another great art exegesis by the NYT, this time on Morisot
People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners via the excellent NYT interview promoting The Alignment Problem
Wittgenstein’s experience as a teacher may have determined his later work
Are We Entering a New Political Era?
The Man Who Put Out Fires with Music
Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz – prefigures Twin Peaks for me: dreamlike tone, emotionally labile (swerving between horrific and saccharine), every character in some ways is reprehensible, baffling mystical conclusion, drags on insufferably in parts but unforgettable
June 1, 2021
Interbrain synchrony – “a tour de force in bioengineering”
Not quite comics but comic-adjacent: Yuichi Yokoyama and Ilan Manouach
Terrific backgrounder on Israel-Palestine by Mohammad Alsaafin
2003 documentary The First World War
Lozenges that regenerate tooth enamel
The history of the “individual mandate”
Hardware/Software Co-design: The Coming Golden Age – note: presenter’s business is selling server hardware
All Quiet on the Western Front
Russian Piano Masterpieces: Prokofiev
May 24, 2021
John Richardson may be dead, but the fourth volume of his Picasso bio arrives in November
Jim Woodring talks about David Lindsay’s bizarre 1920 novel Voyage to Arcturus – an edition featuring Woodring’s illustrations is out via Beehive Books
Napoleon may be a collective delusion via Ted Gioia’s Substack
Excellent explainer vid on the recent events in Gaza – it’s a shame news outlets can’t package the conflict in such an understandable and even-handed way as this
“Geometrical and Topological Analogues of Rubik's Cube”
Poulenc’s Sonata for Two Clarinets (FP 7, 1918) perf. Ronald van Spaendonck & André Moisan
Washington state’s long-awaited capital gains tax and how it came to be
Review of Peter Zeihan’s book The Accidental Superpower
Cambridge’s Prof. Christopher Clark on the 1848 Revolutions
May 13, 2021
Sean Carroll on the recent muon experiments
React framework Remix beta walkthrough
Josquin Depres / des Prez’ Dice Mass – and an NYT article on the composer
“Class, you have permission to kick him in the balls”
How to Draw a Line, one of Heydon Pickering’s hilarious web-tech-explainer vids Webbed Briefs
Bittman on the folly of artificial meat
Hubert Dreyfus’ lectures on Heidegger’s Being and Time: Division I, Division II
Safari really is the new IE nb: written by Chromium dev
“MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain” – fiction, but for how long
April 25, 2021
Russian Piano Masterpieces lecture series
Open source vaccines from the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative
Brandon Magner on the Amazon-union defeat
“Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it”
In-the-trenches, no-spin view of historical events in El Salvador, Angola and Afghanistan from the oral history collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, cited as part of the Afghanistan Papers
John Plowright plays Bach and Brahms
A utopian libertarian charter city embedded in Honduras
Ken Russell’s short film The Strange Affliction of Anton Bruckner
April 5, 2021
Understanding Heidegger on Technology
Graham Lambkin reissued – reviewed by Geeta Dayal
Excellent Napoleon documentary: 1, 2, 3, 4
Mark Viner lectures on Charles-Valentin Alkan, contemporary of Chopin and Liszt
Examining works of art in a new way online: Mughal miniatures
Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi Have One Last Job
The Great Reversal: How Neoliberalism Turned the Economic Aspirations of Liberalism Upside Down and another version of the same talk, again with an excellent Q&A
The Many Lives of Grandmaster Jay
March 27, 2021
The lost IDM of Beaumont Hannant: mix
The Unnatural Endurance of Bipartisanship
SpaceManT’s series of IDM mixes
Yoann Bourgeois’ The Mechanics of History and another take
March 8, 2021
On the infamous boondoggle Space Launch System – SLS: Is cancellation too good?
Embassytown, terrific SF with clever things to say about language, meaning, politics
Cryptodamages: Monetary value estimates of the air pollution and human health impacts of cryptocurrency mining – and the relative energy cost of transactions
BBC4’s The Inquiry, giving much-needed deep context to events
Einojuhani Rautavaara – Piano Concerto No. 1 (1969)
In Oakland, the beginning of the end for leafblowers, an offense against God and man
John Edmark’s zoetrope sculptures
Mathematics in Music and Writing lecture series, via NYT
The problem isn't QM, it's you: Quantum Mechanics Isn’t Weird, We’re Just Too Big and The Zen Anti-Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
February 28, 2021
History of Ideas Series 2: Rousseau, Bentham, Douglass, Butler ...
Farmer grabs lynx by scruff of neck, scolds it for killing chickens
Fall of Civilizations does the Inca
Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society
Scott Ross, harpsichordist and a guide to the harpsichord
The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model
February 21, 2021
Backlisted, a podcast on lesser-known or cult fiction
Maintaining position in a hierarchy is more important than serving one's own needs
The Death of Yugoslavia and The Trial of Ratko Mladic
The alternate-history space-race series For All Mankind, back for its second season
The Politics of a Second Gilded Age – the Dems’ constituency is now a tax-avoidant affluent suburb
Gramophone's top Mahler symphony recordings
Eric Foner – Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
The helicopter Perseverance carries on Mars and the rover’s engineering generally
February 14, 2021
The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845–1877
Kris Davis Borderlands Trio at the Vanguard
Cryptocurrencies are horrendous energy consumers
Niskanen Center’s The Science of Politics: When Partisans Endorse Violence
The Slate Star mishegas: Cade Metz, Elizabeth Spiers, Scott Alexander, Robert Reinhart
Riding on a tram through Amsterdam
February 6, 2021
The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon
The future unemployment line gets longer: generating SQL from plain English using GPT-3
Tyshawn Sorey, Joe Lovano, and Bill Frisell at the Vanguard
January 30, 2021
Mayor: Ramullah seen through the lens of Tati
The original Manchurian Candidate, Henry Wallace – ‘Wallace would have created an American foreign policy run by Soviet agents he had installed in the White House’
Some reasons to hope re climate change: After Alarmism
James Meek's To Calais, In Ordinary Time – Guardian review
To Counter China’s Rise, the U.S. Should Focus on Xi
New Khashoggi doc The Dissident – relatedly an excerpt of an MBS bio and the beyond-parody Line city announcement
A History of Cities In 50 Buildings
Tony Bennett and Bill Evans via Iverson
‘I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his word’ via Scott Alexander
January 22, 2021
Mike Westbrook – live performance of Citadel/Room 315
Apartment House’s Morton Feldman concerts at Wigmore Hall: 1, 2, 3 via Steve Smith
Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us
Next-level 12-string from Rob Noyes
Huawei, 5G, and the Man Who Conquered Noise
‘Every Man Has His Breaking Point’: Reagan, Brainwashing and the Movies
Excellent mix of classic Franco tunes
January 5, 2021
Your Trip Is Short, imaginative and bizarre Dead/Phish covers by avant- and noise groups
The North Carolina Kid Who Cracked YouTube’s Secret Code – the world has become a Gibson or Stephenson novel now
Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis
Wanderers: Astrology of the Nine, truly epic black metal from Mare Cognitum and Spectral Lore
GA Sec of State refusing to carry water and/or break law
Philip Sherburne’s Best Mixes of the Month series
December 28, 2020
A Delicate Truth audiobook, read by le Carré himself
Trickle-down economics is a scam, but we knew this
A Portrait of 19th-Century Creole Culture
Christian Wolff – Exercise 15 from Wandelweiser
The butt pajamas will follow you forever
Streetwise and Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell
December 14, 2020
2020's What I Learned list from Tom Whitwell
ML reveals a previously unknown galaxy collision among the collisions forming our own galaxy, via Orbital Index
'60s European filmed jazz gigs (bonus: Paul Gonsalves nods off three times on the stand with Duke in '65)
Sometimes, by Olly Wilson via Tone Glow
Review of lesser-known GRM artists, with great links to documentaries
Monetizing the Final Frontier: The strange new push for space privatization
RIP John le Carré: the original, and by far the best, Tinker adaptation and Smiley’s People
Bandcamp's Best of 2020
December 8, 2020
Excellent review of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
The cosmic weirdness of Magnetars
I will always associate Arecibo with GoldenEye
The environmental consequences, including poisoning, of road tires
JACK Quartet via Library of Congress playing Rodericus, Seeger, Carter, and new Tyshawn Sorey
I didn’t buy the portrayal of Welles in Fincher’s Mank, but I didn't mind – it was a terrific film
Ferneyhough’s string quartets
November 30, 2020
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life Is Rare
Primer on mRNA vaccines via Zeynep Tufekci
Execute Program spaced-repetition courses
Romain Grosjean surviving a horrible crash
November 26, 2020
Sibelius’ Voces intimae, Op 56 (1909)
The insane engineering of Apollo’s computers and rope memory
A lecture on Kurtag’s musical setting of Beckett’s Fin de Partie, with the premiere in French with Italian subs, its libretto in French and Italian, and the text of the full play in English
Penguin Cafe Orchestra on the Beeb in ’89
I may or may not be responsible for destroying American working-class prosperity
The Grand Unification Proposal
Finnish Radio TV Symphony Orchestra playing Lutosławski
“We are not the leader of first choice because we’re always right, or because we’re universally liked, or because we can dictate outcomes,” he said. “It’s because we strive to the best of our ability to align our actions with our principles, and because American leadership has a unique ability to mobilize others and to make a difference.”
Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine
November 15, 2020
Excellent inside-the-NYT piece on its culture and business
Nice try, Elon – you can’t escape laws and regulations in space
From Peter Turchin – The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America
Excerpt from Obama’s memoir, on passage of the ACA
The brilliant compositional processes of Maya Verlaak
The Big Lessons from History, and regarding point 3, You Can’t Tell People Anything
Incredible visualization of the contents of a cell
November 10, 2020
The excellent David Shor from back in July on electoral trends
Steve Potts soundtrack reissue
A Theory of Justice: The Musical!
Democrats attempt to arrest the leftward moves of the party by preventing incumbents from being unseated by progressive challengers
Terrific BBC docu-drama on Beethoven in three parts: 1, 2, 3
New dates for the nearly-cancelled Guston retrospective
Two hours of spasmodically gyrating Deadheads in the hall outside a 1987 gig
The .org TLD won’t be sold to a private equity firm
November 2, 2020
‘Marbled crayfish, which travel across land and water at night and eat whatever they can, do not occur in nature and are banned by the European Union’
Einstein’s Bridge, OOP SF by John Cramer – set at a fully-functioning Superconducting Super Collider; in our reality, the SSC was abandoned a fifth of the way into its construction (this last piece also usefully functions as a management-culture cautionary tale) and the LHC went on to find the Higgs
Private press MI music via Inzane Michigan on NTS
Counterpart, nice Cold War parable SF show
Informed crash course in the Chinese tech landscape with contrasts to the US
Interactive infographics on voting methods that are better than first-past-the-post
Hilarious deep-fake-awareness vid from the South Park guys
Younger people abandoning democracy, via Talking Politics
October 25, 2020
More on the possibly-microwave attacks on US embassy personnel and diplomats
I never dreamed that I'd be eaten by a bear, says voter for the Freedom to be Eaten by Bears Party
Joe Frank: Somewhere Out There
Quintessence as an explanation of dark energy got some supporting evidence
October 18, 2020
360-degree video of orbiting around a black hole
Hacking former PMs using only a boarding pass
Measurement = entanglement – relatedly the Transactional Interpretation of QM in which waves travel back and forth in time to create the present day – I think
Seeing revanchist UK political trends through the lens of Morrissey
History of the Colorado Coalfield Wars in the early 20th c
Stressed Election NYT documentary series on electoral mechanics
Trial of the Chicago 7 – has problems, and a couple of scenes really grate, but worth seeing
Lachenmann-esque Clara Ianotta on Wergo, perf. Jack Quartet
October 13, 2020
Maybe the most insightful presentation you’ll see on the electorate in the 2016 and 2020 elections
'We fed the beast that ate us' – the GOP has been forced down a far-right populist road by its own hand
Niskanen Center on the OMB’s recommendations to expand health care – calling Medicare for All single-payer is a confounding misnomer
‘This is an emotional exchange between a human and an AI on a website with 430 million active users’ – GPT-3 bot has lengthy, numerous, undetected posts on Reddit
Breakdown of dark money in Supreme Court nominees and cases courtesy of Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI)
Terrific print of the spectacular 1970 recreation of Waterloo by the same guy who did the epic 1966 version of War and Peace
Serene Wandelweiser compilation of 9 diaphanous compositions and a combination of all of them
Excellent Feldmanesque tribute to ‘a French astronomer who had a particular talent as a comet hunter’
New Prana Crafter feels like a coherent whole rather than disparate tracks
October 5, 2020
Turns out time-restricted feeding is a good way to lose muscle mass, not fat
Fusion might actually be happening – technical presentation from 2019, technical presentation from 2016, 2014 article on fusion and ITER
Wire survey of Tashi Dorji's excellent improv
Another terrific Tone Glow interview, this time with Eiko Ishibashi
ML-generated death metal based on metal that already sounds ML-generated
The 1968 Monk gig at a high school in Palo Alto is finally released after some licensing disputes
Why we can’t fix infrastructure
Some apropos music for the season and of the times: Adès’ Totentanz, from 2013 via Alex Ross
September 27, 2020
Partially Examined Life on Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Part one, part two
Adding 127 states to amend the Constitution and avoid the tyranny of the minority
The horrible Expo 2025 logo may be one of the most memorable of all time
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
40 years since the Dead’s Fall 1980 run at the Warfield
Maybe the most adorable animal vid ever
'I’ve been ordered to find and destroy': the latest chapter in the insanity of Silicon Valley
Michael Sandel on the Case Against Meritocracy
Anand Giridharadas on tech’s billionaires: ‘Are they even on the same team as us?’
September 19, 2020
Astonishing 'good girl' Saturday Evening Post illustrator Edwin Georgi
Somewhat dated and un-PC but fascinating talk by ex-KGB on subversion
Quiz showing how hard it is to spot fake social media accounts
Relatedly, a service flagging suspected fake or disinfo-promoting accounts
Wildfire smoke clearing at long last
This generation will end up as ‘fascists or revolutionaries, one or the other.’
Iverson on 20th C American piano music
Gould in conversation on Schoenberg
Sublime solo Kayhan Kalhor performance
A highlight from The Heat Warps’ continuing survey of Miles electric bootlegs
September 14, 2020
Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss, winner of the Nobel Prize
Relatedly Rob Tomlinson’s reviews of White are excellent as well as his writing on books generally
Francis Fukayama’s 2014 essay America In Decay, using the Forest Service as an example of a dysfunctional institution, via Marginal Revolution
Incredible Economist piece on viruses: 'integrated viral sequences, known as endogenous retroviruses (ervs), account for 8% of the human genome'
Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet in Atlanta in 2002 on YouTube and in Chicago in 1997 on record
Thanks to people who make comprehensive appliance review videos
Recycling plastic is diversionary marketing
Carbon footprints are diversionary marketing
September 7, 2020
Foodman’s goofball juke/footwork house set from 2019
The note played in a 639-year Cage performance was changed September 5; the next is May 2022
Incredible illustrations from Ernesto García Cabral, from luscious film posters to classic Deco
Moving beyond the 'chemical imbalance' paradigm of mental illness and acknowledging biological, social, and financial reality – a long time coming, but a very welcome development
Bizarre rollerderby-WWE mashup from 1989; Fox now has the rights, so periodically uses episodes to fill time on its soccer channels
Information has mass (and therefore energy) – not sure if you can then say dark matter is information, but the paper's authors do via HN
Documentary on Wittgenstein and Schoenberg
The Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast series
The 2020 Italian GP, memorable madness that rescued the season from predictability
Connary Fagen’s impeccably crafted fonts
August 30, 2020
Radio show reviewing work of Terry Jennings, early minimalist composer
Intense live gig from the Santana-McLaughlin 1973 tour
A guy who's attempting to generate music through ML has reviewed every Dead show
Website for Alice Coltrane’s devotional recordings
Erin Jorgensen does soothing Sunday broadcasts of marimba improvisations
Archives of Tom Johnson’s avant-garde show reviews from the Voice, ’72–’82
Using ML to generate images of Roman emperors – not a position conducive to a long life after Marcus Aurelius
New free jazz from Alan Braufman
Rick Perlstein doing promotion for Reaganland
A great drone piece by Catherine Christer Hennix
August 24, 2020
Olly Chubb’s techno nostalgia shows on NTS
Feds swarming a giant yacht and arresting Bannon for grift
A story about hanging with Borges which will inevitably become a movie
The latest (and last? Say it isn't so) volume of Rick Perlstein's history of American conservatives
New Nonlocal Forecast on Hausu Mountain, evocative vaporwave reminding you of synthesizer LPs of yore
Ars subtilior, a polyphonic musical style of the 14th century, via Samuel Andreyev’s podcast with composer Jonathan Bell – a superb recording is Figures of Harmony’s 4CD set of songs from the Chantilly Codex
The Harvard Foundations of Physics lecture/debate series
Shit and Shine’s deep-fried Krautrock, which is a goofball melange of Faust/Can/Nurse with Wound/Butthole Surfers/Atari Teenage Riot
August 15, 2020
Lost Control’s house/techno shows on NTS
New Fall of Civilizations pod, this time on Byzantium
The Bureau series 5, still adult espionage of the highest order
The Flow State Substack of focus-music playlists
Chris Dench’s Piano Sonata performed by Peter de Jager – waiting for a recording of this, I'd be happy with just the take captured here which won an award
24-bit 96kHz Pat Metheny remasters
Microtonal pop from James Mulvale
RIP Julian Bream, classical guitarist extraordinaire
1996 production of Berg's Lulu, incredible in every way, the set design is particularly fascinating; unfortunately this video is truncated and other copies of it are only French subtitled
August 9, 2020
Line-by-line annotations for Finnegans Wake from the Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury – there are other annotated references, but I prefer this layout which combines both the notes and the text
The latest new age LP from Steve Roach, A Soul Ascends
Thomas Adès’ 2008 composition In Seven Days is on a great new record from Kirill Gerstein and the Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra
New Krallice, released on a Bandcamp Friday of course
Purcell’s Fantasias for Viols by Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XX
Historical montage of the Silverstone track for the 70th Anniversary GP (thanks to @Mattzel89)
Astonishing 68mm footage from 1902 of the still-running Wuppertal suspended railway
A hellishly optimized, inhuman megacity in SimCity 3000
Adam Tooze on China and a new Cold War and COVID and past economic crises
August 2, 2020
Minnie Riperton is inescapable in Bette Gordon and James Benning’s United States of America
Scorcese’s The Age of Innocence
New Philip Guston retrospective on tour in 2021, to Boston, Houston, Washington DC, and London, COVID permitting
Lando Norris' helmet design for the 2020 British GP weekend
Paul Jacobs’ Schoenberg piano music
Sean Carroll‘s Biggest Ideas in the Universe physics lecture series
Into Great Silence, currently bootlegged on YouTube, is an incredible documentary inside a silent monastery in the Alps; as the film goes on you realize the subject of the film is not the initiated but yourself and your own thoughts and reactions
Thanks to the people who like to post how-to repair videos
Lull's 1994 'dark ambient' LP Cold Summer
July 26, 2020
John Williams’ Butcher's Crossing
Igor Levit’s complete Beethoven piano sonatas
Robert Wright's Why Buddhism is True
Phish's Dinner and a Movie YouTube series
The New Age music of Al Gromer Khan
HN thread on meditative breathing techniques
Top Ten inspired by Greil Marcus’ long-running columns