Tag: linksread

“this is definitely just me following my mind down a certain set of possibly logical steps. And longer term, one can’t but think that the publishing industry per se needs to contract, if its most loyal constituency is dwindling. It should become harder to get a book contract. There should be fewer jobs in publishing. There should be fewer creative writing programs. Monographs should not be required for tenure. Etc, etc—topics, again, that are not new, and the shifts have been in place for awhile. A certain kind of book—say those reviewed in the NYRB—will become like opera, or theater, or ballet, and their readers like their patrons. It’ll be an increasingly minor art”

https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/my-friends-arent-reading

“These songs and more (“Infinity,” “If the Earth Is Spinning” featuring Sia) may have you contemplating the sanitized way Las Vegas lobby culture changed dance pop; the centrifugal pull of corporate raves are one thing, but something about the chlorine smell of a casino has wafted too heavily into the studios where many such songs are being crafted”

https://www.hearingthings.co/paris-hilton-infinite-icon-review/

“It was impressed upon me regularly that ‘scapegoating’ – the practice of laying blame for a society’s woes upon an identifiable minority – was one of the great recurrent evils of mankind’s history, and a moral failing that pretty much meant you were responsible for Holocaust-level evil. Is this no longer a term of shame and disgrace in our society? The GOP, and others, have never fully stopped scapegoating of course, but it was so clearly shameful one had to be coy about it”

https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/i-know-what-happened

“I would actually be quite interested if any of the current objections to flexible work ever get repurposed for the AI revolution. “If all these tasks are done by AI, how will our junior staff serve their apprenticeship?” “This is a relationship business and you can’t build trusted relationships with AI content”. Will we ever get CEOs sending all-staff emails saying “It has been a valuable experiment and I appreciate that some colleagues feel that AI has improved their productivity, but we work best when we work as a team, and that means a team of human beings. So, allowing six months notice for those colleagues who need to adapt their arrangements, we will be a no-AI company once more starting from Labor Day”. I have an intuition that they won’t”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/a-more-subtle-cost-disease

“Just as smell, our most nebulous, non-literal sense, has the ability to take an indefinable scent and trigger precise memories, there is something specific about certain images that are so imprecise that they pull from our entire consciousness to organize meaning”

https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/our-camera-rolls-our-selves

“For the first time in many years, I was participating in a system where I was acutely aware that there were adults in the room. Adults who do not have recourse to blaming Deloitte when things go wrong, for whom the phrase “post-mortem” means something decidedly more serious than yet another flaccid meeting on why the tenth project in a row has failed”

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/why-i-will-always-be-angry-about-software-engineering/

“It’s absolutely true that the tone and content of the videos people consume on TikTok or Instagram affect their understanding of the world around them–but so too do their non-phone experiences, their relationships, their jobs, their mental states, their social worlds, their spending habits, etc. Why do doomers and reactionaries so thoroughly dominate the feeds of young men? Is it something about the specific form of the TikTok feed? Is it billionaire astroturfing? Is it that videos like this are what that audience wants, for reasons largely external to TikTok?”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-electorate