Input
Reading:
I love this Shirt Pocket blogpost about experiencing music in its different formats:
But at each point, something was lost in the transition. Leaving cassettes aside, the transition from vinyl to CDs basically lost the album art and liner notes. The move to digital lost the physical media entirely, so even the size-reduced “cover” was gone, tactile experience lost. And streaming has been, well, awful for artists and completely eliminated the whole idea of “owning” an album…you almost don’t even care whether you’ve “selected” something…with no cost, there’s no need to engage, research, or even think about it.
and also
The whole experience of music stores; talking with a proprietor whose tastes help you find new things (hi, long-ago-closed Tom’s Tracks in Providence!; hey there, long-ago-closed Town and Campus in Plymouth!); flipping through bins of beautiful covers; reading Robert Christgau’s haiku-like descriptions of music in his guide; trying to figure out what the hell he was trying to say.
For me it was the Tower on Sunset in Los Angeles. Lots of great recommendations and many shopping trips that resulted in a lot of CDs – many of which I donated and gave away this summer…
This article in Scientific American was very interesting: Coming Out Autistic
Transgender or gender-fluid people are more likely to be neurodivergent, and vice versa. Here’s what that’s like
How much role playing do we all engage in? Probably a lot more than we imagine. This article fit with the below mentioned podcasts about diversity. It also reminded me of First Nations’ Talking Circles. Allowing everyone to speak and contribute.
Listening:
Two podcasts, each with a different female guest and different subject matter, and yet both mentioned the same thing. The subject of one podcast was politics and national security and the other one was about Artificial Intelligence and what the future might look like. The message of both women was that we need more diversity of thinking. One argued that in order to spot security concerns one needs to cover many angles and this would obviously best be achieved by people of different generations, genders and races. The other woman talked about creating the framework for AI and the need for there to be as many viewpoints as possible.
Link to Sway podcast
Link to Foreign Desk podcast
