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- Factual Dispatch 40b - The Best Things I Read This Decade (Part II of III)
Factual Dispatch 40b - The Best Things I Read This Decade (Part II of III)
Words & Sounds from 2014-2016
Time to kick back and keep supercruising with an abbreviated selection of the best things I read and heard in 2014, 2015, and 2016. And now, on with the show!
2014
An alternate history of sexuality in club culture (Resident Advisor) by Luis-Manuel Garcia - Critical look at the real history commercialized dance music has largely discarded, a wonderful piece done by Resident Advisor.
We Are Less Than Rational (RPSeawright) by Robert P. Seawright - We are all so much less ordered and rational than those who exploit us say.
How the US Military Turned Santa Claus Into a Cold War Icon (Gizmodo) by Matt Novak - We all got tricked into thinking NORAD tracking Santa was anything but advertising the military-industrial complex. Merry Christmas!
Graffiti: 40 Years of Hacking New York (Medium) by Tim Maughan - Splendidly interesting idea related to that Banksy meme about advertising taking the piss out of you.
This American Bro: A Portrait of the Worst Guy Ever (Vice) by John Saward - Every iota as good as you’re hoping.
Street Fighter: The Movie - What Went Wrong (Polygon) by Chris Plante - The oral history of the Street Fighter movie. Yes, the one with Raul Julia, Peak JVD, and somehow, Kylie Minogue.
The Origins of RoboCop (The Dissolve) Everything you wanted to know about RoboCop from writer Ed Neumeier. Given how prescient it was, this is an eery read.
Words, Words, Words: On Toxicity And Abuse in Online Activism (Quinnae) by Katherine Alejandra Cross - You know how toxic online discourse has become? A bunch of women have been sounding the horn about this for over five years now. (Also here)
Let Me Live That Fantasy (Grantland) by Justin Heckert - Everyone should see Puddles Pity Party perform at least once. This is one of my favorite portraits of the decade, I am genuinely enraptured by Puddles the Clown.
How Different Cultures Understand Time (Business Insider) by Richard Lewis - An examination of how differing cultures (generally) experience time. Quite fascinating especially if you don’t do business overseas.
A Better Way To Say Sorry (Cup of Cocoa) by JoEllen - We force a lot of fake apology in this society, with lots of children & adults never really understanding what “sorry” means. This helps with that.
Thug: A Life of Caravaggio in Sixty-Nine Paragraphs (The Millions) by Stephen Akey - Long-form digestive with the work to match, of one of history’s true lunatic badasses, Caravaggio.
How Poor Young Black Men Run from the Police (Vice) by Alice Goffman - I urge everyone to read this and try to understand what it’s like, living in an environment where the police are your enemy your whole life.
The Other “Moby Dick”: Melville’s “Benito Cereno” Is an Analogy for American Empire (Mother Jones) by Greg Grandin - First, I had no idea Moby Dick had a spiritual sequel. Second, I had no idea it was massive dunk on our burgeoning empire of destruction in the Pacific.
The Big Lobotomy (Washington Monthly) by Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards - Newt Gingrich and his doltish brethren made Congress stupid, and we are all worse off for it. (Related: The Twin Insurgency - “The postmodern state is under siege from plutocrats and criminals who unknowingly compound each other’s insidiousness.”)
Science Is Not About Certainty (New Republic) by Carlo Rovelli - A theoretical physicist argues forcefully that STEM, the humanities, and curiosity need to re-connect to push the boundaries of our understanding forward.
Revealed: Apple and Google's wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees (Pando) by Mark Ames - Remember when we found out that the biggest tech companies in the world were fixing wages, affecting more than 1mill employees? Remembering things is fun.
The Case of the Closely Watched Courtesans (Slate) by Nina Kushner - So, detectives tracked elite sex workers in the 18th Century. And you wonder where cops get their surveillance instincts from.
How Japan Copied American Culture and Made It Better (Smithsonian) by Tom Downey - Wonderful little trio of stories about how Japanese businessmen studied, then refined central facets of American culture: Bourbon, Denim, and Burgers.
The Secret World of Fast Fashion (Pacific Standard) by Christina Moon - The definitive history/read on Fast Fashion, which has invaded our textile purchases in a Borg-like startling way.
Behind the Scenes in Putin’s Court: The Private Habits of a Latter-Day Dictator (Newsweek) by Ben Judah - This remains the best thing written on Putin I’ve encountered. It shaped a lot of my thinking on how they were able to pull off Brexit & Trump, and is worth any foreign policy or Russia buff’s time.
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup (Slate Star Codex) by Scott Alexander - SSC is one of those long-reads that really undersells the word long, but this discussion of how we argue so fiercely with people that have extremely similar views to us, is one of the better things I read this decade by far.
Meditations on Moloch (Slate Star Codex) by Scott Alexander - This one just as long and even more in the clouds, but it is the only writing I’ve seen anywhere that begins to grapple meaningfully with this trend towards wicked tribalism, despair, bureaucracy, accelerationism, and weaponized nihilism.
Nightmare on Connected Home Street (Wired) by Mat Honan - Suburban sci-fi about the dystopian ways our connected homes and smart devices will be hilariously messed up in the near future.
2015
How the Vietnam War Brought High-Tech Border Surveillance to America (Gizmodo) by Matt Novak I had no idea the Vietnam War was a testing ground for early/hysterically stupid surveillance tech.
Grandma’s Experiences Leave A Mark on Your Genes (Discover) by Dan Hurley - Everyone who told me Epigenetics didn’t exist owes me a dollar.
The Birth of the Philly Cheesesteak (Priceonomics) by Zachary Crockett - Priceonomics did an oral history of the cheesesteak. Now I’m hungry for one of them jawns.
Hollywood’s Bad Arabs (The Cairo Review) by Jack G. Shaeen - Critical look at how Hollywood looks at people who look like me, and how that’s changing.
How Mountain Dew Came to Perpetuate a Deep-Seated Appalachian Stereotype (Eater) by Sarah Baird - Touching look at how habits, and the class we associate those habits with, can haunt us no matter how far we travel. The Shut-In Economy (Medium) by Lauren Smiley - One of the few articles that nails the growing dichotomy in tech-first cities, with two classes of jobs. The tech workers that drive the companies pushing the economy, and their attendant working-class helpers.
40 years ago, the US sent Mexico into a financial crisis - and it transformed the narcotics industry (Business Insider) by Carmen Bollusa & Mike Wallace - With Volcker’s recent death and the opioid crisis continuing to ravage the country, this story has resurfaced a bit, but it’s important to emphasize just how much his decisions fucked a bunch of the global south.
Yankees Suck! (Grantland) by Amos Barshad - Wonderful story about making a buck on hating the Yankees, which is a perfectly cromulent business. Except when it’s not.
A Dent in the Universe (Ribbon Farm) by Venkatesh Rao - A compelling argument that above a certain level of post-scarcity, imagination is more important for surviving/thriving than self-actualization. This read has stuck with me over the years as I’ve seen a lack of imagination become the worst enemy of the rich.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (Github) by Andrej Karpathy - While quite technical, this is a great read on why these things called “neural networks” are so good and basically taking over the world.
The Conservative Case for the Welfare State (Dissent) by Bruce Bartlett - Does what it says on the tin.
Kickstarter Math is Weird by Marian Call - One of the more practically useful articles on the list, a detailed explanation (with spreadsheets) on how to make sure you don’t bone yourself if you ever do a Kickstarter/Crowdfund.
Under Watchful Eyes (Lapham’s Quarterly) by Amanda Power - Did you think surveillance started with sex workers in the 17th Century? Try medieval times, and I don’t mean that place you watch jousting in Jersey.
The Kansas Experiment (New York Times Magazine) by Chris Sullentrop - While we’ve never seen non-authoritarian socialism, Kansas has become a stunning example of the failure of Trickle-Down & Tax-Cut Economics.
Override: A Story About the Future of Work (Quartz) by Gideon Lichfield -Dystopian work fiction in the vein of Nightmare on Connected Home Street, but more bureaucratically sociopathic.
Between the World and Me (The Atlantic) by Ta-Nehisi Coates - Seminal work about race that he took quite a lot of heat for at the time, largely borne out as true during the Trump presidency sadly.
The Brain vs Deep Learning Part I: Computational Complexity — Or Why the Singularity Is Nowhere Near by Tim Dettmers - When technology hype men talk about how close we are to replicating a brain, just know that all they’re doing is communicating how little they know about what we’ve learned about the brain in the last 10 years.
2016
How Subarus Came to Be Seen as Cars for Lesbians (The Atlantic) by Alex Mayysi - And now you know. Because I sure as hell didn’t.
This is New York in the not-so-distant future (NY Mag) By Andrew Rice - Sobering look at long-term prospects for the tri-state metropolitan area as climate change continues to nip at our heels.
The Fateful Vote That Made New York City Rents So High (Propublica) by Marcelo Rochabrun and Cezary Podkul - Why the rent is too damn high.
It Could Have Been Any One of Us (KQED Arts) by Gabe Meline - While the Ghostship fire feels like a lifetime ago, this read is a crushing reminder of the sub-standard housing, illegal warehouse spaces, and how hard it is just to live in some places across the country.
The Trade of the Century: When George Soros Broke the British Pound (Priceonomics) by Rohin Dhar - This is a great write-up of why some people think George Soros is a Jedi Master. Now you’ll know how one man played against a country and won.
My Year in Startup Hell (Fortune) by Dan Lyons - First ballot hall of fame writing here from Dan Lyons, about the clash of cultures when a 52yr old tech reporter from Newsweek went to work at Hubspot, the (now-infamous) startup.
Modern China is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (LitHub) by Ning Ken - I haven’t quoted any of my links so far, but this series of sentences just needs to be shouted out:
Some of the things that have actually happened have surpassed novels and movies in their inventiveness. Let me give a few minor examples that reveal something of the current Chinese reality.
There is a major anti-corruption campaign underway in China as I speak, and all the examples I am about to give were made public by the official Chinese media. In China, corrupt officials like to keep huge amounts of cash in their homes. In the past, investigators might find a stash of one million or ten million, but these days such an amount would be nothing. Early in 2015, a department head at the National Development and Reform Commission was investigated for corruption. In his apartment they found more cash than they could count by hand. They got currency-counting machines so they could zip right through the counting, but they burned out four of the machines before they got a final tally, which was more than 200 million Renminbi, which is about 31 million US dollars. Second example. Guo Boxiong is a retired general in the People’s Liberation Army. When Guo was investigated for corruption, they found so much cash in his home that they couldn’t even try to count it with a currency-counting machine. They had to weigh it by the ton. They needed a truck to haul it all away.
Austerity and the Rise of Populism (Coppola Comment) by Frances Coppola - Forced austerity after the 2008 economic crash will be seen as one of the stupidest decisions made by the elites in centuries.
Valley of the Dolts (The Outline) by Emmett Rensin - When viewed through the lens of the classical robber baron, the patterns of the tech giants that run our lives become much more discernable.
Minimum Viable Superorganism (Ribbon Farm) by Kevin Simler - We are capable of so much more than what simple conspiracy theorists think when they conjure the illuminati and lizard people. Humans are a powerful superorganism.
One more to go! Which of these reads were your favorite?
Yours,
P.S. Addendum to last week’s email, can’t forget to mention one of the best things I’ve ever read on the Middle East, Save Your Kisses for Me by Adam Curtis on the BBC.
P.P.S This house track from 2016 sounds like sunrise in the Balearic Islands: