About five years ago I stopped using Overcast as my podcast player because it would not play more than one show at a time. I could set up a queue, but it would not play the queue. (Many users were complaining about this at the time.) I just downloaded it again to give it a try and… It will only play one show at a time. (Many users are still complaining about this.) I really don’t want to use Apple Podcasts because it defaults to promoting crappy shows it likes rather than just letting me see my own library… but I may be stuck with it.
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Revised this post to point out that the most crucial difference between Thomas Pynchon and Terrence Malick is that the former has been on The Simpsons while the latter hasn’t — but hey, Terry, it’s not too late!
WSJ:
Vibe slop happens when coders replace the hard work of designing and testing a system with the shortcut of prompting AI to whip it up … and the resulting software won’t stand the test of time. It’s become a big enough problem that the world’s main repository of open-source code — GitHub — has instituted new policies and features to combat it. […]
These systems are supposed to make senior engineers so productive that companies can lay off junior engineers, but in reality, many companies are trading near-term productivity for long-term woes. Not only does the pipeline of junior talent dry up, but residual effects include buggy software, service outages, security vulnerabilities and mounting technical debt.
Finished reading (for the first time in 30 years): Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee. If you’re new to McPhee, this might be the ideal place to start. It’s the book in which he perfects the narrative method he would follow for the rest of his career, and the first one in which he explores the geological themes that would later become his obsession. Nobody is better than McPhee at illuminating difficult questions by showing how real peropla engage those questions, and engage each other. 📚
“Minerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them. A mine cannot move. It is fixed by nature. So it has to take precedence over any other use. If there were a copper dep...
The Political Threats of Vanishing Culture and the Need to Protect Our Future Memory:
This article presents this phenomenon of “vanishing culture” as a first-order political crisis by surveying several social contexts wherein that crisis hinders people’s ability to educate ...
Watched: Lumière, Le Cinéma! What an absolute delight: a series of more than 100 early (1890s) films by the Lumière brothers — each 50 seconds long — beautifully restored and commented on. Louis Lumière was an absolute genius of composition, and I could watch his tiny movies all day. 🍿
The problem with the theory of the “uni-context” is that it’s an explanation of the behavior of Extremely Online People masquerading as an account of “everyone” or “the world.”
Absolute tactical idiocy by Tuchel. 🏴-🇦🇷
Don’t park the bus, England. DO NOT DO IT. You will pay. 🏴-🇦🇷
Watched: Eno. What a wonderful documentary: a film about a person who does generative art that it itself generative. 🍿
Back cover of the forthcoming.
In my previous post I used the line “Can you dig it? I knew that you could.” It’s a line I've been using for fifty years, since I heard Billy Crystal deploy it in a routine on Saturday Night Live in which he portrayed an old jazzman called Face.
Crystal’s routine was based on people he knew from his childhood, jazz musicians who came into the Commodore Music Shop on 42nd Street in Manhattan:
That’s Billy Crystal’s father Jack in the plaid shirt on the right. Larger image here.
Currently listening: Count 'Em 88, by the Ahmad Jamal Trio. Can you dig it? I knew that you could. ♫
Finished reading: A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson. Thomson is the best living writer on the movies, but this is his worst book, by miles. He seems to be judging movies for what was done to us by TV and the internet. Dyspeptic without being insightful. 📚
Dan Cohen:
Call me an optimist, but I believe that the majority of scholars, despite being under enormous pressure to publish, would prefer to be more engaged than removed from the fundamental pursuits and texture of their discipline. They enjoy wrestling with sources, data...
When Oklahoma! was near the beginning of its staggeringly long Broadway run, the great Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn saw it and spoke to Richard Rodgers afterwards. Goldwyn thought it was the best show he had ever seen, brilliant and riveting from the first notes of the opening number to the very end. He had never seen anything to approach its greatness. “And,” he added, “I know what you should do next.”
Rodgers: “What?”
Goldwyn: “You should shoot yourself!”
Yesterday I stopped at the McDonald’s in Burnet, Texas, and the young man who brought me my food said “Here is your luncheon, kind sir!“
Francis Young:
Religions are as significant for what they leave unmapped and open to the imagination in the supernatural world as for what they rule on definitively – and religions are often pretty bad at drawing definitive conclusions beyond their core tenets. So I don’t s...
I like to think that the imaginary crowd has a similar salutary effect on more complex thoughts. The audience does more than just make me imagine I might be wrong. It invites me to consider, from the diverse perspective of the audience members, the multiple dimensions along which I might be wrong.
Phenomena like these mean that thinking is never really a solitary activity. It is fundamentally social. Even when we are talking to ourselves we are using the socially orientated mechanisms of language to externalise our thoughts and feed them back “into” our minds.
Someone should write a book about this idea that thinking is “fundamentally social”! Oh wait.
I tried to log in to Bluesky the other day and was told that, because I live in Texas, I have to verify my age through some process Bluesky does not explain, though it is clear that the process involves some third-party site that might or might not be a reliable custodian of … well, of whatever information it demands. The page also said that if I don’t want to verify my age I can delete my Bluesky account. In the extremely vague circumstances that seemed the best option.
What is the very pinnacle of American music? I can answer that question: it’s this.
- Possibly Richard Rodgers’s most gorgeous melody (which is saying a great deal)
- Lorenz Hart’s masterpiece of a lyric, at once funny and heartbreaking
- The elegant and tasteful arrangement by Buddy Bregman
- And a vocal performance to die for by the incomparable Ella
There’s nothing to match it.
Here is the first in a series of four essays on the Second World War: Why has it been so central to the American imagination for so long? And how much longer will that centrality last?
Freddie on “Our Poptimist Dystopia":
Aesthetic hierarchy of any kind has become the last obscenity, the one judgment we’re no longer permitted to make, because to say that one thing is better than another is to admit that better exists. And if better exists out there, in the world of songs and books and movies, then it exists out here for us too, in the world of our lives, and that way lies the intolerable thought that we might have gone too easy on ourselves. Anti-elitism is the snobbery of those who have decided that the glory of great art is not worth bearing the thought that someone else might have better taste than we do. So we haven’t democratized taste; we abolished it so no one ever has to come in second, so that no one ever must face the implied judgment of other people’s preferences.