I’ve got kind of a miscellaneous set of things to read for this month, without much of a theme, so I will just get right to it: 1) “The Rotting Internet is a Collective Hallucination”, by Jonathan Zittrain Once a year, I teach a class on technology and democracy. One of the ideas that I …
There’s a certain kind of person— usually, in my experience, a certain kind of middle-aged male— who will delight in telling you that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” and then nod sagely while they wait for your mind to be blown. This occurs to me because the point of this post, in …
Article: “Sunk” by Mitch Moxley A few years ago, I read somewhere that there are only four countries in the world where most of the music people purchase is made by artists from their own country: the US, the UK, South Korea, and Japan. I don’t know if that’s still true— it seems like China …
I have a mixed bag this time around. I’ll start with this video, which isn’t really a video but a sound file with an image attached so that somebody could put it on YouTube. Because of a film I watched recently, I’ve been listening to Chinese music played on theguqin, a seven-stringed zither played seated; …
Song: “KYBM” by Tunde Olaniran A producer/rapper/singer from Flint, Michigan, of all places, Tunde Olaniran is pulling together all kinds of different sounds on his debut album, which is one of the most interesting things I’ve heard this year. This track is fairly representative, to the extent that any one song could be. Article: …
Video: Time Lapse Video of the Eruption of the Cabulco Volcano in Chile There are many great photos of the recent Chilean volcano eruption available online, but this video allows you to see the process of the eruption on a timescale more readily grasped. It is, predictably, both frightening and beautiful. Article: “A Simple …