“The World Is Listening To Less Music In English” – Screentime (Bloomberg)
“The craziest stat of all? There are 45.6 million tracks that generated ZERO streams last year. There were 10 tracks that had more than 1 billion.”
Tag: email_newsletter
“The Future of Mining Might Be Smaller than You Think” – Caitlin Stall-Paquet (The Walrus)
“He cites S&P Global’s estimate that, in transitioning to green energy, manufacturers will need more copper in the next three decades than the world consumed over the past 120 years. Demand for copper is expected to roughly double between now and 2035, to make hardware such as rechargeable batteries, solar panel heat exchangers, and wind turbine generators. The question now is whether biomining can scale up fast enough to meet soaring demand”
“Bill Gates is bad for humanity” – Quinn Slobodian (New Statesman)
“Although Schwab’s book is a tale of frustration and even rage at the culture of secrecy and often incompetence inside Gates’s philanthropic world, it is also strangely heartening. Perhaps we are starting to solve the “Bill Gates Problem” by the creeping (if highly uneven) return of faith in the ability of public authorities to do better than private world-makers, alongside the ongoing discrediting of the tech saviours who enjoyed such a gullible audience in the early years of the millennium”
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/11/bill-gates-is-bad-for-humanity
“Cake and Casualties” – Christoph Reuter (Das Spiegel)
“A family stands at the grave of Danylo Boguslavskyi, born on April 7, 1990, and killed in action on October 16, 2022. “We always come on Saturdays,” says his brother Roman. “One Saturday, I drove him to the station. That was the last time we saw him. He was a lawyer and historian and was present at the Maidan protests in Kyiv in 2014. He volunteered after Russia’s invasion and was then wounded several times. For a while, he was in the hospital every month,” Roman recalls. It was almost as if the injured man maintained the hope that, by getting wounded again and again, he would be given a reprieve and would never be killed. Until he was”
“Zombie news: the strange resurrection of the local paper” – Will Dunn (New Statesman)
“It was not a real newspaper but a zombie – a piece of promotional material created for the local Conservative MP, Robert Largan, by a company in nearby Manchester. As such, it was just the latest example of how the local newspaper industry, which has been all but destroyed, is now being replaced. Freed from the oversight of local reporters and editors, businesses and politicians have begun to create their own information networks – they look like local news, but report only the things their owners want the public to see”