Media & Culture
Using media to think deeply about complex issues
Tara McMullin and
Media & Culture
the stakes for preserving our relationship to things that cannot immediately be had have never felt higher. After all, yearning is a subset of authenticity––a specific type of authenticity that comes from wanting. It’s the thing that we turn to after too easily “having” causes us to lose our way. Yearning isn’t like wellness in the way Gwyneth Paltrow or Andrew Huberman would sell wellness because it often feels like unwellness, but then it also feels like healing.
I suspect the rise of inspiration-sharing platforms might be making me, and everyone else on the collaborative internet, more focused on publicising our taste rather than feeding it. It’s easier to go viral on Twitter (err, X) by posting “vintage design inspiration” than it is by posting your own work. New sites like PI.FYI, a social network from... See more
Elizabeth Goodspeed on the Importance of Taste – And How to Acquire It
Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy.
The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.
The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.
Gurwinder • 30 Useful Principles
Reaching wide audiences requires all-terrain language, and the urgency of the present moment, amplified by chronological feeds, doesn’t allow for much stylistic variety. Efficiency is key — compressing as much information as possible to the least amount of words is the ideal of all communication.
While I do agree that many areas of interaction, like... See more
While I do agree that many areas of interaction, like... See more
Too Much to Know by Ann Blair
Collin Brooke
But here's the thing: being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement . Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have... See more
“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement - Anil Dash
What my students seek is what I sought: not just a place to publish, of which there remain plenty, but a place to aspire to, the kind of established, vital ecosystem within which a writer can learn, play, feud, create meaning, spark conversation, make sense of herself and her world. Rare by definition, such things grow more elusive by the day.
Michelle Orange • How the Village Voice Met Its Moment
By the time the Voice had assumed its current semi-undead form, following a 2020 resurrection, the creeping irrelevance of any bounded and singular context—including that of a town, much less “the biggest media town in America”—had become the kind of thing a person might fail to notice while engaged in the ruthless business of noticing everything... See more