culture

To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body... See more

Who doesn’t love a good manifesto? A manifesto is a form of magic. You take mere words, mere gushes of air, mere lines and curves, mere tokens, and you alchemize them into something tangible. Manifest, manifold, manumission—from the Latin manus, meaning hand. Hands point and hold. Hands waive. According to Derrida, we cannot use our hands and look... See more

In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major... See more