themarginalian.org

Meteor of Joy: The Young People’s Chorus of New York City Sings Bird Divinations

To hear children sing the secret wisdom of the heart is to be in the presence of something truer and more transcendent than any of our poems and postulates can touch — the ultimate affirmation of our aliveness, emanating Richard Powers's beautiful and bittersweet assertion that "the use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body."

readtheprofile.com

Who Is Krishna Rao? The CFO Taking Anthropic Public

I study those cartoons. I watch about an hour of Looney Tunes a day. That's like going to the gym for me.

currincy

I Profiled Neil Young and Dinosaur Jr. and Interviewed Sturgill Simpson—Plus, an Old Record I Now Love

Listening feels a little like watching a river move through a cluster of rocks, breaking apart for a moment and then merging. But the rendition that really gets me, that I keep playing again and again, is a slowed version of Landis' original—about 32 minutes, or five times the initial length. To go back to that river, it's like the water is half-frozen now, moving between the chutes of rock with the speed of a slurry.

personalcanon.com

varieties of attentional experience

Certain things seek to be next to other things. When I would flip through these books, I would see an image, which was demanding to be emancipated from the context in which it found itself and placed next to where it was supposed to go. It's a kind of ordering or things emerging and demanding to be themselves.

whyisthisinteresting

The Olodum Edition

Stars, by definition, fade out. But if we're lucky, some of the supporting casts they lean in can be enjoyed for a little longer.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: Meta Muse Wonder + How Brooke Lacey is scaling video with AI

Creators need to understand the craft before they can delegate it. Brooke could teach Claude to edit in her style because she already knew what a good cut sounded like, where a zoom should land, and why the timing mattered. AI amplifies that judgment, but it does not replace the experience required to develop it.

themarginalian.org

Nineteen Truths and One Beguiling Lie about Life from 20 Years of The Marginalian

The process itself is a lovely reminder that life is like language — it is not the words you have, your givens, but how you configure them that makes meaning, makes beauty, makes poetry. And the loveliness of life is that we are endlessly reconfigurable, brightly capable of rewriting the story with each sentence of living.

jefftweedy

I’m Imagining (first draft)

I'm imagining Something in a cherry Splits the atom I'm imagining Patches of sun Sewn inside my pockets Gets in my blood

themarginalian.org

The Map to the Route of Your Life

This Möbius strip of longing is the root of everything we suffer in the fangs of the Wanting Monster, but it is also the root of our creative vitality: the restless urge to make, to leave a mark that says "I AM," a monument to having been. It is our incompleteness that maps the territory of the possible in us.

honest-broker.com

Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song

The decades that are most popular right now are those with the most chords. It's hard to escape the obvious conclusion: By killing song form, the music industry destroyed its own future.

honest-broker.com

Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain. And that value chain is all that matters anymore.

themarginalian.org

Probability Theory Pioneer Mark Kac on the Unpredictability of Creativity and the Two Types of Geniuses

In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the "ordinary" and the "magicians." An ordinary genius is a [person] that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: How Meta designed Muse with Alex Cornell

Designing non-deterministic systems requires a different relationship with craft. Alex has spent his career controlling exactly how interfaces appeared, but Muse looks different for every person and cannot guarantee pixel-perfect outputs. Learning to judge the results by usefulness rather than visual precision has been one of the most liberating shifts in his career.

themarginalian.org

Vincent van Gogh on Fear, Taking Risks, and How Inspired Mistakes Propel Us Forward

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas IS AFRAID of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of "you can't."

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 123

"My idea for this site is to build an exhaustive, authoritative compendium of every art project that uses time as part of the work."

jefftweedy

The Park (Feist cover)

I love Iggy so much. He's so smart and so dumb, and elemental. He's the essence of something eternal to me that is only described, efficiently and accurately, as rock 'n' roll to me.

themarginalian.org

James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

currincy

I Profiled Neil Young and Dinosaur Jr. and Interviewed Sturgill Simpson—Plus, an Old Record I Now Love

Both the original and the adaptation are magnificent, taking a melody that is by now familiar and surrounding it with time-stretched and phased mutations of itself. Listening feels a little like watching a river move through a cluster of rocks, breaking apart for a moment and then merging.

whyisthisinteresting

The Streaky Vinyl Edition

This is a much smarter idea than inventing another artificial flavor. The company takes the unavoidable residue of production that's normally discarded or cleaned away, and sells it as a mystery. A transitional record is the same thing, except it gets listed on Discogs, with somebody claiming that 'the black streaks make it sound warmer...'

honest-broker.com

The Most Dangerous Thing in Culture Right Now is Beauty

He had identified the one thing that possesses the most potential for disruption and transgression in the whole cultural hierarchy. The funny thing is that many people assumed that Hickey's defense of beauty was reactionary—or sentimental or nostalgic or some other backward-looking thing. But if they paid any attention to him, they knew that Dave Hickey consistently celebrated the most shocking and controversial works of art.

themarginalian.org

Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace

Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.

jefftweedy

KC Rain (No Wonder) [demo with Sammy and Spencer]

One of the great, truly mysterious gifts in my life is that my children want to hang out with me at all, much less participate in the most sustaining thing I do throughout my life. And enhance it and help me grow, and let me be part of how they grown into musicians—to help them achieve being musicians in a way that allows them to express themselves, and hopefully keep music central to their lives in a way that's not just based on commerce or notoriety, but centered on the joy that comes with being able to play music with other people, and listening to other people when you play.

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.

themarginalian.org

Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy

Pulsating beneath the story is a reminder that whether the poem is made of words or of mathematics, it is only ever made in the mind — that strange and solitary place where ideas are born like new stars out of the fertile cosmic darkness, molecules of thought pulled together by the gravity of feeling to become light.

honest-broker.com

AI-Generated Movie Star Has a Total Meltdown on TV

The audience does not want AI-generated movie stars. They find Tilly creepy. They will launch protests and boycotts. She will achieve even less lasting renown than Hawk Tuah, Harambe, and the Harlem Shake.

themarginalian.org

Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity

Let's face it — artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can't see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.

themarginalian.org

J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life

Enchantment — wherever we may find it (as in nature, poetry, music), or wherever it might find us (as in love) — is not escapism but a truer realism than cynicism, pessimism, or optimism. In allowing us to touch the extraordinary, enchantment — which asks of the courage of the encounter — returns us to our lives more in love with the so-called ordinary world, which, we must also not forget, is itself an extraordinary triumph against probability.

lennysnewsletter.com

60+ new creative growth ideas

Attention always goes to what people don't see coming. The unexpected gets shared for free, remembered for months, and usually costs less than one week of ad spend.

lennysnewsletter.com

🎙️ How I AI: How two SpaceXAI designers use Grok Bot to do their jobs

AI is making previously inaccessible creative skills available to more people. Claire could not illustrate. John wanted to create motion he could only describe with his hands. Peng wanted to produce 3D renders. In the past, each of those gaps would have required a specialist or years of practice. Now they can begin with a prompt.

themarginalian.org

How to Change Your Life

You may have to kneel for days or decades in a pool of silence blue and lonely as a heron but it will be there, the small green stone lying at the bottom lustrous with a peace larger than joy.