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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
3w ago
The true paradox of human freedom is that we are most ourselves when we are most constrained by the necessity of our circumstances.
3w ago
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet I would not exchange this sadness for the complacency of those who have ceased to be responsive.
3w ago
The paradox of teaching is that to teach it well you have to want to do something else. Any man who takes teaching seriously has always to resist the temptation to prophesy and to preach.
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.
4w ago
The true paradox of human existence is that we are condemned to be free; we are forced to choose, and yet there is no certain ground on which to base our choices.
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.
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.
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.
1mo ago
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge of the authenticity of being can save us.
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.
2mo ago
One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often. Yet I would not exchange this for the false comfort of those who have ceased to feel.
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.
2mo ago
The poet only asks to get his head into the world, but the world always strikes a poet down. It may be very hard in the world to live with the poet; but imagine how hard it must be to live with the poet in oneself and to be bound by him in chains.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a social media landscape where the difference between real and artificial has grown nearly imperceptible, the unmistakable humanity of real-time video is a refreshing draw.
