whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jeremy Smith

All of that fell away when I started to understand how that media diet was constraining my thinking and perspectives. Nothing I was attempting to create was coming from the heart; it felt mostly like I was trying to build something to fit the shape of the world I was observing through that lens. Trying to build for now, and not for the future, and doing that oriented around external aesthetics and ideals kept me frustrated for an unnecessarily long time.

honest-broker.com

YouTube Videos I’m Recommending Right Now

But a much more intriguing idea is to solicit responses from living legends who know the music better than anyone else—because they helped make it in the first place. This is my type of reaction video, and shows what happens when you go straight to the source. And you should always go straight to the source.

themarginalian.org

A Life of One’s Own: A Brilliant Young Woman’s Forgotten Field Guide to the Art of Knowing What You Really Want

Let no one think it is an easy way because it is concerned with moments of happiness rather than with stern duty or high moral endeavour. For what is really easy, as I found, is to blind one's eyes to what one really likes, to drift into accepting one's wants ready-made from other people, and to evade the continual day to day sifting of values. And finally, let no one undertake such an experiment who is not prepared to find himself more of a fool than he thought.

jefftweedy

Giving Up on Gravity (Live a Little) [demo]

It's a real place, one of the last places with a genuine regional atmosphere. It hasn't been completely beaten into a strip mall, or a "galleria," or something that looks like anywhere else. And the people have maintained a lot of pride in their uniqueness.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Sanchita LaMore

I have a theory that people recommend books that flatter the version of themselves they want to present, not the one they actually finished. I've seen too many friends pretend to be knee-deep into some boring academic text when what they want, and what they'd be better off with, is a trashy beach read.

honest-broker.com

The Best Gospel Music Happening Right Now

I note that Jelly Roll spent time behind bars himself. That comes across in his powerful connection with the inmates.

platformer.news

The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief

I think there is a real dirty secret right now, which is that almost every writer is using it. Just, most of them are not saying so.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: America’s favorite capitalist villain & the investor betting on the rebels

By the end of several days together, I found myself wondering whether Mr. Wonderful was the real Kevin O'Leary — or simply the most successful role he ever played.

themarginalian.org

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

honest-broker.com

Authenticity in Music

The musicians who strike me as most authentic never realized that inauthenticity was even a choice—they wouldn't know how to arrive at that destination, even if you gave them a map and GPS coordinates. Discovering this kind of authenticity is a gift, but it's an unusual kind of gift—defined as much by what you relinquish, not what you gain.

jefftweedy

Let's Build a Car (Swell Maps cover)

The best rock stars, in my opinion, are the true believers who put themselves together for the sheer joy of inventing themselves.

honest-broker.com

Can You Run the Music Industry without Musicians?

The album covers have a persuasive vintage look, even with some evident wear-and-tear on the margins, as if they had been part of a record collector's personal archive for many years. Sometimes the musicians even look familiar.

whyisthisinteresting

The Real McCoy’s Edition

The goal was never to deliver a replica, but rather each style's ideal final form: The piece the wartime factory would have made if it hadn't been racing to meet a quota.

honest-broker.com

How to Destroy a Literary Reputation in One Move

The world's most respected sports magazine gave up on Hemingway and Faulkner, and started publishing AI slop. The editors clearly wanted to hide this—they pretended that the articles were written by actual human beings. They even created fake bios with photos for the non-existent authors.

longreads.com

This Literary AI Scandal Changes Everything

Knowing that detection platforms are fallible—proving AI use isn't as simple as proving, say, plagiarism from another author's work—writers could be discovering an enforcement loophole.

honest-broker.com

An Uncanny Moment for Jazz Lovers

But the permanence of vinyl can't hide the larger fact—namely that jazz history of this sort can no longer be experienced live and in-the-flesh.

longreads.com

I Spent Months with an AI Companion. It Was Worse than Being Alone

You can't customize your friends. You screen for certain traits, but what you're drawn to, as much as the trait's performance, is the 3D process that forms it: your friend's life story. We surmise, based on our affinity, it will be a story we share. We choose our friends because we want to live in the universe of their personality: its past, present, and future. What gives a personality dimension is time, the gathering of experiences.

themarginalian.org

How to Keep Criticism from Sinking Your Soul: Walt Whitman and the Discipline of Creative Confidence

each point of E.'s statement was unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more complete or convincing, I could never hear the points better put — and then I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way.

jefftweedy

I Wish I Was Your Mother (Mott the Hoople cover)

Such an evocative and weird lyric. Beautifully empathetic and sad. I tried to do an acoustic version, where I don't really scream it, but it just doesn't communicate. So I had to stand up and sing full-throated.

honest-broker.com

The 10 Most Popular Articles from The Honest Broker (2021-2026)

When you start writing directly for readers, without intermediaries, that begins to happen naturally. Above all, I decide to treat the reader as a trusted friend—with the hope that you might extend the same courtesy to me.

longreads.com

Who Is Black Comedy For?

Black comedy's revolutionary potential is strongest when it ignores the other eyes upon it—or, as Collins puts it, "Black comedy that primarily serves Black audiences." Where Bennett errs, however, is in holding up the era of crossover appeal as the apex of Black comic achievement.

themarginalian.org

George Saunders on the Antidote to Regret

At the end of my life, I know I won't be wishing I'd held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.

3quarksdaily.com

Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters

as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.

themarginalian.org

Do Not Spare Yourself

there is no damnation greater than spending our allotted days in the catatonia of comfort and certainty, our inner lives automated by habit and halogen lit by convenience.

honest-broker.com

I'm Recommending 14 New Albums

Most of them are hidden from view in the stagnant mainstream culture of our time, where tired formulas and AI slop prevail. These are the real deal, and give me reason for optimism about the future of our music culture.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The $30 billion AI startup & the Mango founder’s mysterious death

We are not who we say we are. We are how we move through the world. This is something I notice more and more when reporting. The truth usually lies in the small, in-between, seemingly ordinary moments.

themarginalian.org

The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

currincy

Whatever Else You’re Doing Today, Listen to Annahstasia’s New Live Album

Her voice welds might with vulnerability, finding profound strength by admitting that there are things she is still seeking.

themarginalian.org

How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship

What is worthwhile, is friendship… this profound mutual confidence between [two people], and this joy of knowing that the other exists.

honest-broker.com

AI Actress Tilly Norwood Drops a Video—and It's Cringe on Steroids

The video not only looks fake, but creepy too—Tilly has a seasick smile and her nausea is palpably felt by the viewer.

themarginalian.org

Doris Lessing on How to Read a Book and How to Read the World

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement.

currincy

How E Street Keyboard Giant Roy Bittan Played on David Bowie’s “Station to Station”

So many of my interviews these days feel like jousting with someone's soul, trying to get to the personal core of what makes them an artist.