As I shared in the most recent installment of my newsletter Just Three Things, the above image is a digital photo taken on April 27, 2020 of a cyanotype (“Sun Art“) photogram (made the same day or day before) of a 4×5 inch litho inner positive (date of origin lost to history) of a 35mm Kodak Tri-X 400 black and white negative exposed in the summer of 1987.
Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash
I decided to conduct an experiment in 2018 and embrace the coming age of the bots. Throughout the year, I culled songs from Spotify’s Discover Weekly¹ recommendations, music heard in the wild (thanks Shazam), songs surfaced by Apple Music, and tracks played on local radio (esp. KUTX).
I say that I embraced the coming age of the bots because well over 80% of the ~500 - 2,000 songs I listened to (and tracked) during the year were purposefully based on algorithm-generated recommendations. Of these, I saved 228.² I then filtered for only those songs released in 2018, reducing the count to a reasonably compact 45 (clocking in just under 3 hours of total play time). And in one final nod to letting the computers do the thinking, I sequenced the song order on “shuffle.” I’ve published the final playlist on Apple Music.
It should be noted that I was inspired to share these results by a friend of mine who regularly posts his favorite songs and albums of the year. Interestingly, though a couple of artists (CHVRCHES, Courtney Barnett) found their way on both of our 2018 lists, not a single song was duplicated.
As a point of comparison, I also installed Federico Viticci’s Siri Shortcut “Apple Music Wrapped”, which attempts to capture the spirit of Spotify’s year-end listening trends summary for Apple Music customers. The 25 songs that comprise my resulting “Wrapped (2018)” playlist are not limited by year of release, as the experiment above, but are selected solely based on play frequency. As Apple further embraces services, one can hope they will bake-in these kinds of features in the future.
¹ Spotify serves up 30 songs a week to “discover” based on an algorithm which assesses your listening habits, saved songs, and, from what I have read, songs others on the network are sharing, saving, and what not.
² 90%+ of the down-selected songs originated with Discover Weekly.
Sue Halpern commenting on Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris (2017):
If you want to understand why the Trump administration eliminated federal funding for libraries in its 2018, 2019, and 2020 proposed budgets, it’s on display in this film: public libraries dismantle the walls between us.
Physical retail, TV, and, by extension, advertising at a tipping point (written roughly two years ago).
Pamela Paul on the anesthetizing effects of boredom:
Once you’ve truly settled into the anesthetizing effects of boredom, you find yourself en route to discovery. With monotony, small differences begin to emerge, between those trees, those sweaters. This is why so many useful ideas occur in the shower, when you’re held captive to a mundane activity. You let your mind wander and follow it where it goes.
Willy Ronis, The Lovers of the Bastille (1957)
Pamela Druckerman on how to survive your 40s:
These days, when I think, “Someone should really do something about that,” I realize with alarm that that "someone” is me.
Two lists, from her book I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, "What I Won't Miss" and "What I Will Miss." RIP.
Language has lived, lives, and will live on.
What's a librarian to do with an "ocean of ephemera?”
The Economist weighs in (paywall) on the challenges (future) historians face with preserving our increasingly digitized/digitalized present and avoiding a "404 - Not Found" past.
