“Walking someone through a complex task without being in the room is an incredibly tough nut to crack. Labo does it so well and with so much charm that it seems effortless. This aspect of the kits will likely be invisible to the folks who have an easy time building their contraptions, never having to consider the alternate universe in which the build is joyless and frustrating. The tutorials, in this way, are an impressive feat of design, writing and execution.”
Read More“Next month, the world will commemorate the 50th anniversary of one of the most prominent premature deaths in the history of the black liberation struggle, that of Martin Luther King Jr. And whereas he died from an assassin’s bullet at the age of 39, dying young continues to rock social justice activists today.”
Read More"Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when the United States was the world’s good-hearted superpower, riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler’s darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May."
Read More“When K.O.D. dropped last Friday, on 4/20, it broke both Spotify and Apple Music streaming records for most streams in a day — 36.7 and 64.5 million, respectively — knocking out the previous record-holder, Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” In the real world, too, it made a splash. Cole couldn’t find a copy anywhere. “They sold out,” Cole says, having come up empty at his local Target in Raleigh, North Carolina. “This is the first time I couldn’t cop like 40 physical copies of my own shit.””
Read More“On and on it goes: whatever your station in life, you got there by following some course of action. But even if that course of action were wholly your doing, you still had to be the kind of person able to pursue it; and even if you became that kind of person by the sweat of your brow, you still must have already been the kind of person who could raise that sweat…”
Read More"Saudi Arabia sees itself as the center of the Islamic world: the king is customarily known as the “custodian of the two holy mosques,” the sacred sites in Mecca and Medina. But, as M.B.S. gained power, he was aided by an ally from outside the kingdom: Mohammed bin Zayed, of the United Arab Emirates. Bin Zayed, or M.B.Z., is the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the most politically important of the country’s seven emirates. Flush with revenue from oil and from the booming city-state of Dubai, M.B.Z., the country’s de-facto leader, has helped build the Emirates into a kind of Middle Eastern Singapore: rich, efficient, and authoritarian."
Read More"The internet has always contained the seeds of postmodern hell. Mass manipulation, from clickbait to Russian bots to the addictive trickery that governs Facebook’s News Feed, is the currency of the medium. It has always been a place where identity is terrifyingly slippery, where anonymity breeds coarseness and confusion, where crooks can filch the very contours of selfhood. In this respect, the rise of deepfakes is the culmination of the internet’s history to date—and probably only a low-grade version of what’s to come."
Read More"Khosrowshahi talked about Uber’s future, including its plans to go public in 2019 and its goal of growing to between twenty and thirty times its current size. Then his voice became sombre. “The company brought me on board because of a lot of things that happened in the past,” he said. “We were probably trading off doing the right thing for growth, and thinking about competition maybe a bit too aggressively, and some of those things were mistakes.” He didn’t need to list the mistakes, many of which had been widely publicized. “Mistakes themselves are not a bad thing,” he went on. “The question is, do you learn from those mistakes? 2017 has been a really tough year, but this is going to result in us being a better company.”"
Read MoreFor a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom.
Read More“Prince was the most courageous person I ever met,” Rogers explains. “He realised he had to socially handicap himself to be the artist he wanted to be, and that to do that without being an asshole he had to be a complete enigma. My gut feeling is that everything he recorded should be released, so that people can understand where he came from and keep his memory alive.”
Read More"As soon as the planes had passed, Mrs. Nakamura started back with her children. They reached home a little after two-thirty and she immediately turned on the radio, which, to her distress, was just then broadcasting a fresh warning. When she looked at the children and saw how tired they were, and when she thought of the number of trips they had made in past weeks, all to no purpose, to the East Parade Ground, she decided that in spite of the instructions on the radio, she simply could not face starting out all over again. She put the children in their bedrolls on the floor, lay down herself at three o’clock, and fell asleep at once, so soundly that when planes passed over later, she did not waken to their sound."
Read More"The use of disinformation—“active measures”, in the KGB jargon of Mr Putin’s professional past—to weaken the West was a constant of Soviet policy, one that the would-be victims fought back against with similar weaponry. In the 1960s the KGB-funded Liberty Book Club published the first title alleging that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy. Later the KGB forged a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald in an attempt to connect the plot to the CIA. Mostly this had little effect. In the 1970s forged pamphlets designed to start a war between the Black Panthers and the Jewish Defence League failed to do so. But some worked. The CIA did not invent HIV in a biological-weapons lab, but the KGB did invent the story, and many people still believe it."
Read More"To understand why many conservatives in rural America believe this, you must start with first principles, because the argument ultimately isn’t about guns; it runs even deeper than the Second Amendment. At a 2015 campaign event during the Iowa caucuses, J. C. Watts, the former congressman from Oklahoma, spoke about perspectives on original sin. It helps illuminate the differences in worldview between many conservatives and liberals. Mr. Watts said Democrats think people were born basically good, so when good people did bad things, something in society (in this case, guns) needed to be controlled. Republicans think the fault lies with the person — the perpetrator of the evil. Bad choices result in bad things being done, in part because the perpetrator lacks the moral guidance the Christian faith provides."
Read More"They’d come to mingle with thousands of affiliate marketers—middlemen who buy online ad space in bulk, run their campaigns, and earn commissions for each sale they generate. Affiliates promote some legitimate businesses, such as Amazon.com Inc. and EBay Inc., but they’re also behind many of the shady and misleading ads that pollute Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the rest of the internet."
Read More"Wow. The big difference is digital technology. We had digital back then but it was limited to drum machines and samplers. Pro Tools was just coming in. So it was basically an analog effort. We had tape running, we mixed through the console, we used what outboard was there. We didn’t have plug-ins and all those wonderful tools. The introduction of digital changed the game for everything. [Q-Tip’s] process now is never ending, because you can keep changing right down to the last minute, which was essentially what was going on. It really was quite a long process to actually stop producing. While we were mixing, we were still doing over vocals, changing drum kicks, changing snares and timing. All these things were still going on. If it didn’t feel right, it wasn’t right. That was a luxury that digital afforded us, but I think it loses a lot in terms of audio. I didn’t really like how The Love Movement sounded. I think this was one sounds and feels a lot better. I’m sure the production and the headspaces were totally different. In terms of the audio, this is a better-sounding album.
Read More"As important as Mercer’s business investments is his hiring of advisers. Years before he started supporting Trump, he began funding several conservative activists, including Steve Bannon; as far back as 2012, Bannon was the Mercers’ de-facto political adviser. Some people who have observed the Mercers’ political evolution worry that Bannon has become a Svengali to the whole family, exploiting its political inexperience and tapping its fortune to further his own ambitions. It was Bannon who urged the Mercers to invest in a data-analytics firm. He also encouraged the investment in Breitbart News, which was made through Gravitas Maximus, L.L.C., a front group that once had the same Long Island address as Renaissance Technologies. In an interview, Bannon praised the Mercers’ strategic approach: “The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution. Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.”"
Read More"The great cities of the 21st century not only need more density in their urban cores, but more distributed density—the kind of continuous density that allows great global cities like London, Tokyo, Paris, and New York to scale and accommodate larger and larger populations without expanding ever farther outward. For future-oriented cities, the cranes dotting downtown skylines may be only the beginning."
Read More"These crackdowns are the latest sign that Kenya, the most vibrant economic power in East Africa, is slipping off its democratic path. Kenya rewrote its constitution and election laws over a decade ago, after election-related violence between two of the country’s largest tribes, the Luo and Kikuyu, killed more than twelve hundred people. But the laws failed to prevent clashes after last year’s Presidential election, in which Kenyatta, the incumbent, was declared the winner with fifty-four per cent of the vote. Police and security forces used tear gas and water cannons against protesters in opposition strongholds who were supporting Odinga, killing dozens. In a move widely regarded as a milestone for judicial independence in Africa, Kenya’s Supreme Court voided the election results on September 1st, citing irregularities in the voting process, and ordered a new election within sixty days."
Read More"Discogs has not only changed the way records are bought and sold, it's changed the way many people think about music. Launched 17 years ago, the site now has over 8 million releases listed, making it an unrivalled and invaluable source of information. It's likely the world's biggest secondhand music marketplace, with almost 5 million sales in 2016 alone."
Read More"By now, the story of Facebook’s all-consuming growth is practically the creation myth of our information era. What began as a way to connect with your friends at Harvard became a way to connect with people at other elite schools, then at all schools, and then everywhere. After that, your Facebook login became a way to log on to other internet sites. Its Messenger app started competing with email and texting. It became the place where you told people you were safe after an earthquake. In some countries like the Philippines, it effectively is the internet."
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