Meta note: decided to change the continuing title here from “Media Summary”, which made sense to me when I first started it in 2016 but just sounds a bit odd now.
So, some stuff I read last month that I liked:
- A review of a high-quality, high-production car factory in China
- On “bullshit jobs”
- The story of tear gas
- On the brief and bizarre “Oprah for president” fad
- Bookstores, unlike video stores, might stick around (gives me hope!)
- The current obsession over self-improvement may not be good for health
- A random overview of Jodorowsky’s work (“psychomagical realism”) because … I like it
- Readers of this “series” know that I only keep my New York Times subscription for the archives access, so here is the historical interest piece: there was actually a moment, in 1979, when the then-chairman of the Federal Reserve, said quite frankly in an interview:
“The standard of living of the average American has to decline,” he said. “I don’t think you can escape that.”
Chew on that for a bit
- And here is the weird-stuff-presented-without-comment piece: a video-recorded, successful remote viewing experiment to find a sunken ship, in 1977
- Followed by the depressing-current—news-piece, with the title “Why America Feels Like Rome Falling All Over Again” and the second-thoughts-removing subtitle “What Happens When People Can’t Afford Democracy Anymore?”
- Mark Frost and co. wrote a couple of very interesting “background-world-building” books on Twin Peaks
- Story of a courageous prosecutor taking on the Calabrian Mafia
- A couple of Bob Dylan-related links: the intro to Watchmen , and an amazing video from 1964 where he comes on stage to play Tambourine Man(I love these old YouTube videos, doesn’t get any more real than this …)
- Minor aside: this might be one of the first presentations of the song, since as far as I can tell the first official recording only happened the next year.
- Something for a niche audience: a short introduction to Erik Satie
- And another one: Amsterdam’s Ritman Library is going to be digitized and fully available online
- Another entry in the despair section asks if technology is making the world indecipherable
- Finally, William Gibson (of Neuromancer) and Timothy Leary (of … LSD) in a sort of joint interview from 1989
Abacus Noir 