I’m just catching up with Björk’s podcast, Sonic Symobolism. One album per episode. Unsurprisngly, it’s excellent. On a few walks today I listened to a deep dive into the lush and intimate “Vespertine”, which she made after acquiring her first personal laptop. Loved this part:
And I still meet journalists today that always have this, ‘If it’s done with a computer it doesn’t have a soul’ — that argument. But it’s not about the tool. You cannot rely on a guitar to put the soul in a song. Or a violin. Or a laptop. If there is not soul in it, it’s because the human did not put it there.
I said Wow out loud while listening to this epic media move via The Rebooting Show podcast: The new owners of the 95-year-old publisher Flying are building a 1,500-acre air park to center itself in the lives of its pilot-readers. They’ve already pre-sold $27 million worth of property. Not bad for an old niche media brand. (As host Brian Morrisey responds, “You’re not gonna webinar your way to that $27 million.
“I had a post that went absolutely viral on LinkedIn,” said the influencer, who uses the name Natalie Rose in her work. The post, a crying selfie with a caption about anxiety and the reality of being an influencer, got over 2.7 million impressions. “That led to me having some business opportunities with anxiety apps, things like that,” she said. “I got a lot of connections and followers from it, all because I chose to be vulnerable in a post.''
The US Open with Sagi Haviv — A Change Of Brand: An enjoyable episode of what’s become one of my favorite podcasts. Interesting to hear how confidently (and, ultimately, triumphantly) the experienced Haviv answered a prospective client’s unreasonable request.
If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 PM. trilobitee swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day the first land creatures follow.
Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great Carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdrawal. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger.
A Beethoven mic drop, as chronicled in Stuart Isacoff’s new book, “Musical Revolutions”:
The fiery Beethoven fared better in 1800 against challenger Daniel Steibelt (1765–1823), a man known for depicting storms at the keyboard by means of broad tremolos (quivering chordal effects executed with a rapid rotation of the wrists). Steibelt went first, tossing a page of his music aside with a dramatic flourish. When it was Beethoven’s turn, he simply picked up Steibelt’s discarded sheet, turned it upside down, and proceeded to improvise variations on the overturned manuscript while picking apart Steibelt’s music in a totally humiliating way. The challenger hurriedly left, vowing never to return to Vienna as long as Beethoven was still there.
Being a decade-long Monocle subscriber and a fan of exploring how agencies document their work, I was happy to get my hands on Knowing Wink, first published in 2018 by Winkreative, the media org’s sister agency. Turns out it was as easy as sending them a nice email and asking how I could order it; they popped one in the mail with thanks for the interest. The chunky, nice-to-the-touch volume highlights 20 years of work from the boutique firm.
In his concise and incisive book What Tech Calls Thinking, Adrian Daub examines and punctures a range of tech proclamations and tropes that many of us have just gotten used to hearing in recent decades.
That may sound sober, but it was an engaging read. Here’s Daub — a Stanford professor who’s primarily focused on the humanities — on Ayn Rand (whom he writes about in the context of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Pixar):
In other words, there is a weird (and acknowledged) tendency here to treat an effort like architecture, which by definition requires a group and—dare I say it—collectives, as though it were the art that an individual makes in the solitude of a studio or a favorite writing nook. This is what historians of ideas call a ‘genius aesthetic’: it describes our tendency to think that the meaning of a work of art comes out of the specific mind of its creator, not out of the preexisting rules that creator worked within nor the broader spirit of the society and time. When you’re talking about a novel, that makes a certain amount of sense. But Rand extended this sense of individual brilliance to some of humanity’s most communal undertakings. Have you ever looked at a rail line and thought, I wonder what the one genius who decided to build a bridge over this valley was thinking? Rand has. And notice that, thanks to Elon Musk, we actually finally do have a billionaire whose weird tunnel-boring projects are basically a form of performance art—a pure emanation of individual genius, and sort of useless to anyone else.
I’d been told I’d be wow’d by Venice, and I was. The light, the water — everyone was right. The textures, the weathered colors. Everything snug. The dimensions of every view. Already, just two weeks home, I’m thinking of how and when we can return.
Really enjoyed Rethink the Business of Creativity by Ian Grais, Tom Shepansky, and Chris Staples, of Canada-based Rethink agency. Smart, crisply written guidance on how to lead a profitable, good-hearted creative organization. Especially valued these lines on the conditions for valuable work:
Sadly, advertising is like most creative industries in its cult-like celebration of the hard-core creative life…. Many of the most celebrated creative businesses almost seem to fetishize chaos and overtime as the only way to achieve greatness.
Enjoyed the new book “Build” by Tony Fadell, of Apple and Nest. He’s got strong, proven points of view on management (“Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement”), communication (“Honesty is more important than style”), the importance of having a beginner’s mindset when tackling a problem or assessing new work, the value of great storytelling, and the need to understand and establish the “why” of a product (“The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins”). 📚
What a supremely fine and lovingly crafted book this was. Astute, admiring, and entertaining scrutiny of decades of rap lyrics. Huge kudos to author Daniel Levin Becker. A few especially great passages I drew circles around in my copy:
I will go to my grave wishing my self-conscious rhetorical throat-clearings could sound so cool. What Nas seems to toss off here is not just a very efficient overview of the themes he’s spent his career elaborating—decadence, gunplay, activism, divinity—but also a rare window onto his composition process, his creative deliberations, the whole inner monologue around medium and message that is at once so tantalizing in a rapper and so often viewed as beside the point.
“An Ode to Hotel Rooms” — Terrific studied riff by James Parker for The Atlantic, in which he explores that “sense of your self-in-waiting”:
The old gravity asserts itself, the old you-ness; you spread out your things, you build your shrines, you start making your little traditional messes. You arrive, and then you arrive.
“Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” — Jonathan Haidt’s bleak, incisive essay in The Atlantic about social media and society. (Interestingly, the print piece I read in my issue this evening has the less clickbaity headline “After Babel.” Was that replaced because it would have performed less well on social?)
Favorite recent podcast find: The Rebooting show from Brian Morrison, who was president and EIC at Digiday Media. Informed, in-depth conversations about media and publishing, from start-ups to the HBRs of the world.
Continue to be highly impressed with Puck. In such a short time, they’ve established an upper-tier, intelligent, vibrant brand, one where the sum and the parts (elite writers heading up the various sections) coexist so nicely. Seems likely I’ll be another one of the readers willing to pony up $100 a year.
BxW
