Kickoff For April 14, 2025
Another week, another set of links. I hope you enjoy them.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The Ghosts in the Machine — Wherein we're introduced to the generic, stock music flooding streaming services like Spotify, and to the effects that has on actual musicians, on listeners, and on music in general.
From the article:
Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living. Or perhaps the company was aware that this project to cheapen music contradicted so many of the ideals upon which its brand had been built. Spotify had long marketed itself as the ultimate platform for discovery—and who was going to get excited about “discovering” a bunch of stock music? Artists had been sold the idea that streaming was the ultimate meritocracy—that the best would rise to the top because users voted by listening.
The Journalist Who the Nazis Could Not Silence — Wherein we're introduced to Carl von Ossietzky, a crusading journalist and editor who became the bane of successive German governments in the 1920s and 1930s, about the efforts to silence him, and about the efforts of Ossietzky's supporters to help him.
From the article:
The suggestion first appeared in the pages of the Pariser Tageblatt, produced by and for German exiles in France. On April 16, 1934, editor in chief Georg Bernhard made the case that Ossietzky should be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Days earlier, the Nobel committee had announced that there would be no winner for 1932. It had been a relatively common occurrence since 1914; in the chaotic years after World War I began, eight passed without a winner.
Casual Viewing — Wherein Will Tavlin explores the history of Netflix and discovers how the streaming giant helped change the face and economies of TV and film production, mainly to the detriment of the people who helped make those productions happen and to the quality of those productions.
From the article:
Netflix has created a pyramid scheme of attention, with no end in sight. And yet if the streamer admitted how little impact its movies make, it would undermine its long-running pitch to audiences, Hollywood talent, and their business representatives that the company is a grand star-making enterprise that produces great cinema with commercial appeal. This was always the logic behind Netflix’s superficial foray into funding established auteurs like Alfonso Cuarón with Roma, Jane Campion with The Power of the Dog, and Alejandro Iñárritu with Bardo.
The Rise of the French Fry Cartel — Wherein we learn how a small number of companies came to control the lucrative market for frozen potatoes, what that's meant for businesses and consumers, and the wider implications of that cartel behaviour.
From the article:
In the popular imagination, price-fixing agreements might be struck at a secret meeting of rival executives — the deal made in the classic “smoke-filled room.” But the case against Big Potato argues that the frozen potato companies have accomplished such a tacit agreement through other means: a third-party tech platform.
Edwin Cohn and the Harvard Blood Factory — Wherein we learn how a chemist, despite encountering failed and dead end projects, created one of the most successful (and least heralded) research and development labs that had an impact during World War Two and on applied research methods in general.
From the article:
[W]e should not disregard the lessons we can learn from Edwin Cohn. Cohn was a protein chemist who did everything possible to rapidly translate his methods so that doctors could determine their efficacy, industry could manufacture his products easily, and the powers that be could allocate material as they saw fit. Cohn’s expert integration of his pilot plant into his lab’s work demonstrates just how productive his approach can be in areas where research insights are great, but the manufacturability and efficiency of methods seem major bottlenecks.
Tokyo drift: what happens when a city stops being the future? — Wherein Dylan Levi King looks at a city that once embodied the ideas tomorrow and Japan being a global economic powerhouse, how those ideas have crumbled since the 90s, and how that's changed the complexion of not only the city, but of Japan.
From the article:
As Tokyo’s economy has become a client of the service industry, it has drained its reservoirs of young people to run cash registers and deliver food, meaning guest workers must be tolerated. The ruling centre-right Liberal Democratic party acknowledges them as their sole defence against shoshi koreika – “fewer children and ageing”. Until automation takes a stronger hold – we’re only now phasing out floppy discs, fax machines and employment for life – or the economies of Vietnam and Nepal surpass Japan’s, the only way to keep salad wraps in 7-Eleven is to import staff.