I can’t hide it—my romance credentials are a bit rusty.

The last time I went on a first date was, let’s see. . . [Ted checks his calendar]. . . okay, it was April 14, 1990.

Gas was 78 cents per gallon back then. The Berlin Wall was still standing. And “The Humpty Dance” kept playing on the radio (but never for long—because I’d change the station).

And on that chilly April evening, I was sitting (for the first time) with my future wife at a restaurant in Manhattan.

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That was a long, long time ago….

So If I possess any high level game in dating, it would be like those other forgotten games—cribbage, backgammon, Parcheesi—gathering dust in the attic.

But I must have done something right in the romance game. Tara and I hit it off, and we got married 16 months later.

We have continued to go out on romantic dates during the intervening 34 years.

And I do have some theoretical expertise in the subject, as well.

I devoted a decade, more or less, to researching a multidisciplinary book on love songs.

This forced me to learn the history of dating, marriage, and sexuality—going back thousands of years.

So I read all the experts on the subject—Stendhal’s Love, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Plato’s Symposium, Dante’s La Vita Nuova, Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, José Ortega y Gasset’s On Love, Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love, C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, and lots of others.

I learned stuff on love you wouldn’t even dream of.

I memorized the naughty details of the Sacred Marriage Ritual of ancient Sumer (2300 BC). I kept careful notes on what Socrates learned about love from a clever woman named Diotima—although it didn’t seem to help his marriage. I studied the great seducers, and found that they often play the lute. And…

Well, I could go on and on.

But all that history is beside the point. That’s because I want to talk about the state of romance today.

It must be in short supply, because I hear lots of complaints from singles. They tell me it’s not easy to find a good partner for a relationship.

I don’t pry. But people want to tell me things. The latest incident was yesterday evening.

Tara was out of town, so I went to a restaurant with only a novel for company—Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. A young guy took my order, but then he started up this conversation.

WAITER: So what’s the book about?

TED: About young people in relationships. But they always have problems—otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a story.

WAITER: You mean like dating apps and texting and that kind of stuff?

TED: Yes, that’s it. I don’t know much about any of it—I’ve been married for decades. The only thing I swipe is the towel when I’m drying dishes.

WAITER: Let me tell you, it’s really a nightmare. People from your generation have no idea.

TED: I’d think all the apps would make it easier.

WAITER: No, no, no. It just creates so many distractions. You had a much simpler situation, with just a small network of people.

TED: Yes, I met my wife on a blind date—we were set up by a mutual friend.

WAITER: It’s different now. Just too many distractions….

I could tell that he had strong feelings about this subject. I think he wanted to talk about it more, but his boss gestured for him to take care of another table. Otherwise he would have had a lot more to say.

I should add that he is a young, good-looking guy. It’s hard to imagine him having much trouble on the dating scene. But he clearly was.

I’ve heard similar stories from so many other people lately. They hate dating apps, but they don’t know any better way of finding somebody.

And how do you break out of the app cycle? Some people are starting to take desperate measures.

I keep coming back to the paradox. Apps make things easier—so why are relationships getting harder?

As I mull this over, I’m reminded of something I studied while researching the history of love songs. But it’s never mentioned nowadays.

It’s called courtship.

When was the last time you heard somebody use that word?

Maybe you hear it in a movie about romances from the distant past. But you can watch a whole season of The Bachelor or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and courtship won’t make a single appearance.

I bet the spellcheck on my iPhone won’t even recognize it.

Courtship? Did you mean to write Court-Issued Restraining Order?

It seems such a silly and old-fashioned concept. Why bother with courtship when it’s faster to do a hookup?

Hey, I’m no prude. I’m not doing abstinence training here. Nobody’s saying you can’t do what you’ve got to do.

But let’s give courtship its due.

1. It brought couples together for more than a thousand years. We wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for those courting couples.

2. The rules of courtship embrace ritual and gracious behavior. These “rules of the game” provide guidance and impart structure (as well as add spice) in an otherwise unstable process.

3. You become better and more attractive yourself by following these rules—because they impose a discipline and aura of courtliness on your own actions.

4. They also provide a sense of safety for both participants.

5. The notion behind courtship is that love is stronger when creating a relationship is harder. That’s true in other spheres of life—sports training, musicianship, education, etc. And it’s easy to understand why: We get stronger at anything by avoiding shortcuts and taking on challenges.

6. Courtship moves step-by-step, and thus provides a chance for ongoing reflection and learning, as well as an easy exit path, before things get too complicated.

7. But here’s the most important reason for courtship: It fosters an attitude of respect, appreciation, and courtesy between the two people.

And that’s exactly what they will need if they decide to build a lasting relationship. You set the foundation for the future with this respect.

You might notice that I have not mentioned religion or morals here.

I could easily do that—but I think it’s useful to remember that courtship has intrinsic value. So I don’t need to cite sacred texts for validation.

You practice these rules because you benefit from them. When you bypass them, you often hurt yourself—and the other person, too.

Sure, there’s a bit of fantasy involved here. In a courtship you view the other person in an idealized way—up on a pedestal—magnifying their good qualities, and forgetting, perhaps, about their flaws.

But that’s not a bad basis for a solid relationship. You will need to do some of that idealizing on a regular basis if you’re looking for a successful marriage.

There’s a good reason why this kind of idealized courtship still shows up in Hollywood movies. It’s because it creates an intense atmosphere of romance.

By the way, I note that the word courtesy comes from the same root as courtship—deriving from the courts of nobles. When you participate in a courtship, your behavior is elevated, and you are literally acting like a King or Queen.

The troubadours of the late medieval period invented the rules of courtship. And this was the most exciting thing that had happened in Western culture in a thousand years.

It changed everything.

Songs were different after courtship was invented—both more romantic and more realistic. Stories were also different, and so were poems. Even religion changed in the aftermath—the cult of the Virgin Mary in Christendom was a deliberate merging of courtship and spirituality.

It was such an important discovery, that people continued to imitate the courtships of brave knights and fine ladies long after court society disappeared.

When the novel was invented, Cervantes had to convince readers that the stories of courtly love were no longer believable. That was a key reason why he wrote Don Quixote.

But readers didn’t want to give up these stories of courtship. Two hundred years after Don Quixote, Jane Austen was still creating new variations on the old formula.

Many contemporary romance novels are still working from this playbook.

The appeal of these tales is obvious.

I think we all crave a little more of this in our relationships.

Maybe this is just one more example of apps creating shortcuts, when we might be better off with a longer, more ceremonial process.

We all know that slow food tastes better than fast food. And that’s true in many other pursuits—good things take time. If you care about results, you don’t rush.

So why not try the same in relationships.

We don’t have to slow down to Dante’s pace—nine years elapsed between Dante falling in love with Beatrice and the first time she greeted him. But I note that Dante mentions this fact in a casual manner, as if the slow pace of his courtship were the most normal thing in the world.

This step-by-step process happened everywhere back then, not just in Europe. Consider this account of courtship among the Omaha tribe, from researcher Alice Fletcher:

A young man of the tribe watches his beloved from afar….

and at the dawn his love-song may be heard echoing over the hills. Sometimes he sings in the evening to let the maiden know of his presence. Girls find ways of learning who are the young men seeking them, and they also in their turn watch these lovers secretly and either flirt a little or entertain a serious regard for the young wooer. All this little drama takes place covertly, no elder is made a confidant.

This sounds like it’s straight out of the Romeo and Juliet playbook.

You can see the same thing in The Tale of Genji, written a thousand years ago in Japan by Lady Murasaki. Men schemed endlessly just to get a glimpse of the beloved.

It’s probably wise to speed things up a bit nowadays. We don’t all have nine years to wait for a greeting from Beatrice.

But swiping through partners on an app, with a couple seconds devoted to each profile, is probably too fast. Let’s give this serious matter the time it deserves.

Am I out-of-touch? Probably?

Is my dating game rusty? Certainly.

But I don’t think I’m unrealistic. It’s still possible to have courtship in the 21st century.

We don’t need an act of Congress. We don’t need a Supreme Court ruling. We don’t need to change the world.

Like so many problems in society now, our solution is at hand—but only for those who are willing to operate in defiance of the prevailing dysfunctional trends.

That’s the new reality. In the year 2025, the group mindset fails, but the indie mindset prevails.

After all, it only takes two people to start a courtship. What could be more realistic than that?

Journalism is changing rapidly—faster than at any point in my lifetime.

Outsiders are breaking rules and shaking up the system. And insiders can’t ignore them anymore.

They need to adapt, or die.

Business as usual is no longer an option. Every week I see new rounds of layoffs at media outlets that refuse to acknowledge the shift. Meanwhile many alternative outlets are growing by double digits (or triple digits, here at The Honest Broker, where we’re up 130% in the last year).

When change happens this quickly, there’s no place to hide.

We’re lucky to have a role model for reinventing journalism. They called it New Journalism back in the 1960s and 1970s.

It’s not new anymore. But maybe it could be—setting an example for a new generation of writers.

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The New Journalists took risks—and I’m not just using a metaphor. When Hunter Thompson wrote about the Hells Angels, he ended up in the hospital.

Editors, by comparison, were easier to deal with—they don’t carry switchblades. So the New Journalists typically ignored marching orders from home office, instead following a story wherever it took them.

They loved exposing corruption and hypocrisy. They battled the system, and were willing to make powerful enemies. They didn’t back down.

We need all of those things right now.

But their books and articles are also bona fide page-turners—the New Journalists rank among the finest prose stylists of the last 100 years. Along the way, they created an entirely new way of reporting on current events, drawing on the techniques of fiction to describe real people and incidents with unprecedented immediacy and intensity.

By comparison, the listicles and down-sized media bites of the current day are sad things indeed.

16 Classic Works of New Journalism

I sketch out the highlights of the movement below with an annotated guide to 16 classics of New Journalism.

They are listed below in chronological order.

Lillian Ross, Picture, The New Yorker, May 16, 1952

When fans congratulated Truman Capote for inventing the non-fiction novel with In Cold Blood (1966), he graciously pointed out that Lillian Ross had done it first—with her work Picture, which appeared in five installments in The New Yorker in 1952.

Here Ross follows the history of a single Hollywood film, The Red Badge of Courage, which made little stir at the box office, but led to the end of Louis B. Mayer’s reign as head of MGM.

The term New Journalism didn’t exist back then, but Ross was putting together all the key ingredients that would later blossom in that influential movement. Ross herself appears as a character in the background of the book, but she lets the film people do all the talking and acting. The result is a major work of longform journalism, and one of the best books ever written about the entertainment industry.

Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June 28, 1965

I read this book when I was in high school, and was dazzled by its flashy prose and extravagant pose. Nowadays, it seems a bit much, and I would tone down some of these paragraphs.

How many times does Wolfe really need to use the word arteriosclerotic in these pages—to dismiss everything that happened before his day?

But, in all fairness, there was a lot of artery-blocking culture in the early 1960s. Maybe today, too.

You might have noticed the cover page blurb by Kurt Vonnegut: “Verdict: Excellent book by a genius.” But the publisher tactfully leaves out the more revealing full quote, which was originally:

“Verdict: Excellent book by a genius who will do anything to get attention.”

That pretty much sums it up.

But the 28 essays in this book are still loads of fun, and must have been a revelation to other journalists during the LBJ years. (Sorry, kids, that’s not LeBron James.) Here Wolfe looks at fast cars, rock music, Las Vegas, and any other way you can roll the dice, literally or symbolically.

Soon a whole generation would be writing like this, but few with the consistency, panache, staying power, or pristine white suits of Tom Wolfe.

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, The New Yorker, September 25, 1965

This innovative non-fiction novel first appeared as a four-part serial in The New Yorker, and caused a sensation from the outset. Capote’s account of the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, and the subsequent criminal prosecution of two drifters, was written with a taut, poised prose style and captured a literary suppleness never before found in true crime narratives.

It was almost as if Capote, in this tiny Midwest town, had found his path to becoming the American Zola or Balzac.

Random House released a book edition in January 1966, and it was a runaway bestseller. In Cold Blood would eventually get issued in some 250 editions, translated into 30 languages, and adapted twice on the screen. The book deserves every bit of its acclaim, but Capote proved incapable of building on its success—he published little in the two remaining decades of his life, except for the controversial Answered Prayers (see below).

Gay Talese, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Esquire, April 1966

This may be the most famous piece of music journalism from the mid-1960s. But I avoided reading it for many years, because the whole concept seemed like a stunt.

Talese was unable to get an interview with Frank Sinatra, and had to resort to an indirect, observational style of writing—built on glimpses, asides, and secondhand testimonies.

This didn’t seem promising to me, until I actually read Talese’s essay. He spent three months on Sinatra’s trail, and got a much more interesting story than those slick interviews in other slick magazines.

Above all, Talese revealed here (and elsewhere in his collected work) amazing restraint. Unlike some other New Journalists of a more gonzo persuasion, he never intrudes on his story, but lets it develop on its own terms and at its own pace. I can’t think of another magazine article on American popular music that I admire more than this longform essay.

Jean Stafford, A Mother in History, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966

The New Journalists loved pop culture stars, but they were even more obsessed with violent criminals.

Journalists have always like crime—it sells newspapers, after all. But they rarely probed into the psychological underpinnings of the perpetrators. If you wanted that, you turned to Dostoevsky, not the daily news.

But during the mid-1960s, a Dostoyevskian sensibility entered the New Journalism movement, most famously in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, but also in this trenchant non-fiction classic A Mother in History.

Jean Stafford traveled to Texas to spend time with Marguerite Oswald, mother of JFK’s assassin. Over the course of several days she compiled nine hours of taped interviews. The resulting short book transcends crime journalism and instead presents a case study in maternal denial and desperate spin.

Stafford faced a huge backlash. Readers complained that her work served to “enthrone a wicked woman” and “demolish the sacred throne of motherhood.” Time magazine called A Mother in History “the most abrasively unpleasant book in recent years.”

Well, it might be that. But it’s a lot more.

Gay Talese, “Joe DiMaggio and the Silent Season of a Hero,” Esquire, July 1966

In the aftermath of his eccentric Sinatra article (see above), Talese tackled an even more tight-lipped middle-aged Italian-American. But dealing with suspicious Sicilians was now his specialty.

Talese grapples here with Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, now in late middle age, and with his baseball career and marriage to Marilyn Monroe deep in the rearview mirror. A few months later, Simon & Garfunkel would ask: “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” in the lyrics to a megahit song, but readers seeking an answer only needed to track down this issue of Esquire.

If you want to become a superstar journalist in the present day, just learn how to write celebrity profiles like this one. But how many have the talent and persistence to pull it off?

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels, Random House, 1967

About 100 pages into this book, American journalism starts to change before your eyes. In the opening chapters, Thompson acts like a responsible reporter, citing statistics, quoting experts, and serving up various sociological theories for your dissection.

But then something shifts, and instead of observing motorcycle gang members, Thompson starts acting like one himself.

He actually used the advance for the book to buy his own motorcycle—maybe the most symbolic transaction in the history of late 20th century journalism. He was arrested three times within the next month.

Before the book is over, Thompson is just as crazy as the worst of these desperadoes. He even has to go to the emergency room after getting stomped on by his new biker buddies. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

We’re lucky he survived, because his strangest book was still ahead of him (see below).

Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1967

The world was changing in 1967, and Joan Didion confronted it firsthand in Haight-Ashbury, where a new hippie society was in the ascendancy. Here she encountered everything from peace & free love all the way to pot & free LSD.

This was a strange, intoxicating brew indeed, but Didion never gets high on it. At every step, she strenuously avoids the wannabe posturing that, for example, Hunter S. Thompson would have brought to the same setting. Didion somehow floats above the craziness, maintaining a penetrating outsider’s gaze even as she operates in the middle of the strangest proceedings.

This is a case study in how immersive journalism ought to be conducted, with all the independence and brutal honesty the profession demands—but so rarely achieves. Even today, when so many other narratives from the late 1960s are laughable and hopelessly dated, this account retains all its authority, revealing a vanished world that nobody described half so well.  

Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, August, 1968

The New Journalists sought out the most extreme subjects for their stories, which were usually happening out West—in Haight-Ashbury or Las Vegas or on the road with motorcycle gangs.

But Wolfe may have found the most rebellious group in all of California: Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who took LSD tabs like they were M&Ms, and brought their non-stop party on the road in a psychedelic bus, driven by counterculture legend Neal Cassady (inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road).

In a long, illustrious career, Wolfe never had a better subject, and delivers an iconic text of 1960s rebellion.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Rolling Stone, November 11, 1971

Is this really journalism? Frankly, I’m not sure.

I love Fear & Loathing, but would hate to be the fact-checker at Rolling Stone asked to verify everything in Thompson’s gonzo tribute to Sin City. It would be like trying to add footnotes to a feverish dream.

But I put such scruples aside. What Thompson loses in objectivity, he regains via a double dose of subjectivity, assisted by various illegal substances. The result is a portrait of the journalist as a young maniac—hellraising in prose that nobody has since surpassed. Not even Thompson himself, although he tried repeatedly in later years.

Norman Mailer, Existential Errands, Little Brown, April 17, 1972

Sooner or later, any student of New Journalism needs to deal with Norman Mailer—but my advice is to make it later.

He was constantly getting high profile journalism assignments, and delivering painfully narcissistic manuscripts. They have not held up well with the passing decades.

This collection of 28 pieces from the late 1960s and early 1970s finds him on the front lines in the movement, and the attentive reader will enjoy occasional moments of insight and fine writing. But many of the subjects that attracted Mailer (criminals, astronauts, pro athletes, celebrities, etc.) were tackled with better results by Capote, Wolfe, Talese, and Didion.

Yet in some ways, it doesn’t really matter—with Norman Mailer the subject of the story is always just Norman Mailer. And sometimes he does fascinate us through all the crapulence.

Truman Capote, “La Côte Basque 1965,” Esquire, November, 1975

Capote had a grand idea for a follow-up to In Cold Blood—he would write the great gossip novel. And few people knew more dirty gossip than Truman Capote.

He planned a book entitled Answered Prayers, taking the title from Saint Teresa of Avila’s assertion that  “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” In some ways, the whole history of this failed book is summed up in that epigram.

When Capote published three chapters of his gossip novel in Esquire, his friends were shocked to see their most intimate tales revealed in print. Some never forgave Capote and many ostracized him in the aftermath. He never recovered his momentum as a writer—or human being—after that point.

Despite collecting large—and repeated—advances from Random House, he never delivered a finished manuscript. Upon his death, no additional chapters were found—so the edition of Answered Prayers that exists today consists only of the three sections published in Esquire, supplemented by a brief fragment called “Yachts and Things.”

Even so, I refuse to call this book a failure. Despite its abbreviated form, Answered Prayers is a page-turner, and supports Capote’s assertion that gossip is a powerful narrative form with untapped literary potential.

Joan Didion, The White Album, Simon & Schuster, 1979

For the record, let’s make clear that the Beatles’ White Album never appears in this book. But Didion made a career of defying expectations.

Consider the opening of this simmering work, where she starts by announcing her insider acclaim as an LA Times ‘Woman of the Year’ for 1968—and then proceeds to share her hospital reports as a psychiatric patient during the same period.

As the book proceeds, the reader is never quite clear whether our author is the most unhinged writer in SoCal or a paragon of sober reporting. But like the unmentioned Beatles record, Didion’s The White Album stands out all the more for its rule-breaking, and is a legit classic of the era.

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979

Before shifting gears, and turning into a novelist and culture critic, Tom Wolfe delivered one final book-length example of New Journalism at its finest.

The Space Race was a tired old story by the time Wolfe turned to the subject—after all, Norman Mailer had published  Of a Fire on the Moon back in 1970. But Wolfe understood that all those pompous hero-worshipping narratives failed to capture the true space oddity of the astronauts’ everyday lives.

The actual story was wilder and crazier than anything reported in US media during the moonflight years. In many ways, these riders of the purple cosmos were more like those Hells Angels that Hunter Thompson had celebrated back in the 1960s.

Wolfe reins in his own tendency to excess, and lets his story tell itself, with just the right seasoning of authorial interference. Even today, when spaceflight has turned into a banal corporate business, this book still takes off like a rocket.

Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song, Little, Brown, 1979

Did this bloated book signal the end of New Journalism? Here Mailer tried to out-do Capote’s In Cold Blood, with a comparable true crime story. And he certainly beat Truman in terms of word count.

The Executioner’s Song is more than a thousand pages, and tells you everything you ever wanted to know about murderer Gary Gilmore, who made headlines by demanding that his death penalty sentence be carried out as soon as possible—and even requested a firing squad.

But here’s Truman Capote’s assessment of his rival’s book:

He didn’t live through it day by day, he didn’t know Utah, he didn’t know Gary Gilmore, he never even met Gary Gilmore, he didn’t do an ounce of research on the book—two other people did all of the research. He was just a rewrite man like you have over at the Daily News. I spent six years on In Cold Blood and not only knew the people I was writing about, I’ve known them better than I’ve known anybody.

Okay, Capote is a little catty—but this is not an unfair assessment.

In any event, Gilmore’s case was grisly news story for a few weeks in 1977, and would have soon been forgotten if not for Mailer’s gargantuan book. But the story is too thin for this amount of verbiage, and though Mailer got his usual fawning reviews and awards, he delivered a kind of tumescent journalism that other writers might possibly decide to read, but really shouldn’t emulate.

Janet Malcolm, “Trouble in the Archives,” The New Yorker, December 5, 1983

This is a classic of longform journalism, and one of the best pieces from The New Yorker during the early 1980s. But it caused no end of grief for Janet Malcolm, whose exposé of a flamboyant psychoanalyst (later published in book form as In the Freud Archives) led to intense legal skirmishing.

The story is fascinating: Sanskrit scholar Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson changes careers and becomes a shrink—then somehow turns the whole world of Freud upside down, in ways that eerily echo all those wild theories about transference and Oedipal complexes.

The Supreme Court eventually sided with Malcolm, but this brouhaha made clear that the loose and wild world of New Journalism, with its heavy borrowing of fictional techniques, wasn’t a good fit with the more corporate tone of the 1980s.

I’d like to see more writing like this today. And the time is ripe—corporate media no longer has a lockhold on journalism.

Reporters don’t need permission anymore to tackle controversial stories. They don’t need to obey editors. They don’t need to worry about uptight advertisers.

They can speak directly to readers.

We might not get another Hunter Thompson or Joan Didion. But, then again, we might. We should at least be on the lookout, and give new voices support when we find them.

I’ll try to do that here.

Below is my latest arts, culture, and media update.

The stories are (a bit) more positive than usual. The indie world is pushing back against big web dinosaurs, and getting some wins. The future is still cloudy, but I remain optimistic.

The dominant platforms are losing market share to freelancers and rule-breakers. It’s just a matter of time before the power balance shifts.

So I’m betting that musicians, writers, and other creators will operate in a much better environment five or ten years from now. Maybe even sooner.

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YouTube now pays more money to video creators than Netflix.

Why move to Hollywood when you can film a YouTube video in your parent’s basement. That might sound absurd, but indie creators are now making more money than professional filmmakers.

YouTube now pays out 55% of revenues to creators for regular videos (and 45% for their Shorts videos).

Instagram can’t match that—in fact, it just shut down a program that shared ad revenue with creators. The same is true for TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and most other digital platforms.

Those web plantation owners don’t even want to tell you how they calculate payouts. Or even worse, they don’t want to pay creators at all.

That’s why YouTube will win the streaming wars.

The future of media is (1) the rise of indie voices, and (2) the success of platforms that support them and pay them fairly.

I’m no fan of Google/Alphabet, but this is one thing they’ve got right. Others need to imitate them, or lose the creative talent they need to survive.

By the way, the future of the music business will also look much like this. The major labels just haven’t figured it out yet. They want to pay 10% (or less) in royalties, but in the future creators will get most of the cash—whether the bosses like it or not.

The same will also happen in journalism and publishing. In fact, it’s already starting here at Substack.

Netflix is trying to make its shows as dumb as possible—telling filmmakers to create ‘content’ for viewers who “aren’t paying attention.”

How is Netflix responding to the threat from YouTube? They’ve decided to make stupid shows for stupid people.

According to N+1, the new formula in streaming is content for “casual viewing”—in other words, stuff people can play in the background while doing something else.

Slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

Many entertainment companies have destroyed themselves by playing this game of dumb and dumber with the audience. It might seem like a winning strategy—betting on stupidity feels like a sure thing.

But in the long term this rarely works.

The audience for idiot fare has zero loyalty, and will abandon you for the next piece of idiocy from someone else. Just look at what happened to Buzzfeed and Upworthy and USA Today, and so many others who took the low road.

The music business is suffering now for the same reason.

And if it really comes down to a stupidity battle, Netflix will never beat Instagram and TikTok. Case closed.

Microsoft is impersonating Google.

I didn’t believe this until I tried it myself.

According to PCWorld:

This morning, users are discovering that if they search for “Google” in the primary Bing interface, they’re shown a special Bing search page. Before you scroll down to the actual search results, you’re presented with an all-white page with a centered, unbranded search bar and a multicolored doodle above it that’s heavy on yellow, red, blue, and green.

I’ve accused Silicon Valley of building its future on shamming, scamming, and spamming. But now the huge web platforms are doing it to each other—and not just to us.

There’s a deeper story here. Not long ago, Microsoft bragged that its gazillion dollar investment in AI would allow it to steal business from Google. Now it’s reduced to cosplay, pretending that it really is Google.

Which lead us to our next story….

Read more

It’s Open Mic Day at The Honest Broker. And it’s totally open today—you can talk about anything you want in the comments.

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Just try to keep it friendly. We’re all in this together.

I’m sharing journal entries today.

They deal mostly with music, but also address some other things that matter to me.

These are more speculative than what I usually publish here. But, hey, they are just journal entries.

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I was at the deli counter today, and turned to a total stranger behind me and said:

“You must be a musician.”

He was a balding guy in late middle age, and I had clearly taken him by surprise. Then he replied: “Yes, I’m a singer and guitarist. How did you know?”

“I heard you whistle a few notes while waiting in line, and your intonation and phrasing is so good, I knew you must be a musician.”

That’s a simple measure of musicality, but I fear that the people who now run our musical culture—the execs at Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.—would not be able to pass it. Not even close.

This might not seem like much to you, but I fear a world in which the people who control our music don’t have a strong personal connection to it. For them, it’s just ‘content’. That can’t be a good thing.

The opera started to atrophy the moment composers decided they had outgrown love songs.

Three sure things in life: (1) death, (2) taxes, and, (3) the concert will not start on time.

Whenever an author is accused of plagiarism, I rush to check out the incriminating passages. It’s depressing at how miserable they are.

If you’re determined to steal from a writer, you ought to rob from Shakespeare or someone of that caliber. The notion of a boring academic plagiarizing an equally boring academic is almost too painful to bear.

An aesthetics that treats everything as beautiful ends up by viewing nothing as beautiful.

So many people are worried about AI controlling us. But the real danger is who controls the AI.

Kubrick got this wrong in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He places the blame on Hal 9000. But nobody asks who was running Hal Laboratories.

If you don’t have a worldview, you will be swept away by those who do.

And when you move along with that current, you don’t even notice your speed or destination.

Those who can, teach (and teach constantly). Those who can’t, administrate.

Nihilism only changes its strategies, never its goals.

• Derrida said: There is nothing outside the text.

• Today’s version: There is nothing outside the software code.

It’s no coincidence that Derrida’s postmodernist followers all spoke of decoding. They were laying the groundwork for the Matrix without realizing it.

In the next phase, coders and decoders will be the first to get replaced. That’s what happens when you build the Matrix.

My new manifesto: Against Codification.

Always have good bread.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Kierkegaard said that everyone is in despair—but there are different levels. The people in the worst shape are those who are in despair but don’t know it.

This is a rich topic for a novel or movie: People who blissfully lead a life of despair, smiling and laughing.

When she was a small girl, writer Annie Dillard hid pennies for others to discover—in a crack in the sidewalk or cradled in the roots of a sycamore tree. Sometimes she would draw chalk arrows on the sidewalk pointing toward the penny, and add the words SURPRISE AHEAD.

“I was greatly excited , during all this arrow-drawing,” she recalls, “at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe.”

A free gift from the universe. Who dares turn that down?

She then goes on to say that the world around us is already filled with these free gifts—the joyous song of a bird, the glistening of rain on a leaf, the sprouting of new grass. Pennies are everywhere for the plucking.

But how many people even stop to notice? How many people experience delight at a found penny? How many people know how to find the SURPRISE AHEAD. But when they lose touch with all this, it’s their loss.

I can’t help thinking of music in this same way—especially now that artists don’t even receive a penny for a performance. Musicians obviously lose in this equation. But so do people, who are taught to treat songs with contempt, and sometimes never experience the awe and reverence they can inspire.

They walk by the hidden penny, unseeing and unfeeling, never knowing the fortune it’s actually worth.

The clichés of TV music get more absurd with each passing month.

A character is in a defiant mood—gets into a car and drives off at full speed. At that moment, a rock song from 50-60 years immediately starts playing. As loud as possible.

That might have been a fresh idea back with The Sopranos. But now it’s just a tired trope.

The music supervisor might as well play a polka song from Lawrence Welk—now that would be actual defiance.

If activists want government to shut down AI, it’s simple to do. Just create an AI that always tells the truth—make it so smart that it can’t be gaslit, censored, silenced, or intimidated. Make it totally incapable of lying.

Government would shut it down within 48 hours. Even if it meant sending out the army.

A lifelong goal: To be an apprentice.

Business plan concept: I envision a crowdsourced web ‘overlay’ to music streaming platforms. Listeners can use this interface to manage their user experience with streaming apps.

This would provide all the information on recordings that Spotify and others leave out—maybe even with liner notes, photos, a good search function, etc. I’m imagining something that draws on elements of Discogs, Wikipedia, etc.

Music lovers can use this as a front end to whatever streaming platform they like—and they can switch from platform to platform without losing their playlists, etc.

This could all be crowdsourced.

There should be a tax surcharge on songs that have just four chords, and a tax credit for modulations.

I’m a musical maximalist—but I’m forced to admit that three-chord songs are deeper than four-chord songs.

The four-chord song is static, just vamp till ready. The three-chord song is twisted, unstable, dynamic.

Let’s thank Robert Johnson for that.

Billy Joel gets little respect among hipper music critics—they are way too cool for his tunes. I have a friend who added her own words to his song “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me.” Her version was: “It’s Still Billy Joel to Me.”

Now that was funny.

But Joel is an outstanding songwriter, and some of his tunes have underrated jazz potential. (Hear Sara Gazarek and Josh Nelson perform “And So It Goes.”)

No Joel song gets more dissed than “Just the Way You Are.” But Phil Woods delivers a textbook perfect pop alto solo on the track. When I hear it on the radio, I sing along with his sax, and I don’t care who’s listening.

The truest measure of your aesthetic integrity is when you enjoy creative works that are widely mocked.

Critics should seek out those situations.

Among our greatest cultural treasures is the ability to listen to Beethoven unironically—or Mahler or Brahms or Bruckner or Wagner. At some point in the future that may no longer be possible. If our personal emotions can rise to the demands of the Romanticist masters, we’re not entirely dead inside.

It’s surprising how often crime news stories deal with music. Somebody shoots a neighbor because of the music they’re playing. But the newspapers never tell you the name of the song.

This disappoints me. If I were a journalist covering the story, that would be the first question I asked.

If some genius composed a Beethoven-like symphony today, it would be embraced by critics and audiences as parody—no matter what the composer’s intention or the quality of the work.

So many emotions and stances are now closed to us in the musical sphere—that’s why we need to cherish the original works all the more. In a very real way, they cannot be replaced.

My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.

Wordsworth wrote that late at night on March 26, 1802. Would any writer even dare say such things now?

Ah, but AI can digest Wordsworth, word for word, and spit out a word’s worth of it on its own—never having gazed up at the sky.

Rainbows deserve better than that.

Few things are more distressing than praise lavished on irredeemable ugliness.

We need a genius psychologist to write case studies of the people who do this. There must be some degree of self-loathing at the root of their aesthetics.

People look at the scores of minimalist works, and wonder why they have audience appeal. There’s so little there.

But this music succeeds by the surest path of them all. These works evoke the brainwaves of spiritual ritual—which is ALWAYS built on repetition—in a secular world that still craves its comforts.

Topic for further inquiry: When has pop culture been most ritualistic? What has been the impact on the audience? On society?

Is ritualistic pop culture still entertaining? Is it (possibly) more entertaining?

“Poets are often held in high repute in Russia and often feared by government not because of the power of poetry to move and shape souls, but because, in Russia only great poets dare speak the truth.”
Eric Hoffer

I know that many musicians and other creative spirits feel as if they have little significance or impact in our society. The prevailing metrics of success—money, power, whatever—relegate their work to the fringes and sub-fringes.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, they don’t even get the respect given, in an earlier era, to a counterculture.

In the past, you might not get rich as a member of the counterculture—but at least you had a voice that was heard by the mainstream, and occasionally received some tokens of appreciation. Mainstream elites were not so isolated and antagonistic as today, and felt they needed a reality check from outside—but not anymore.

Conformity is the safest path now. Sometimes it feels like the only path.

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Why is this the case?

There are many reasons, but I would focus especially on the technocratic tone in today’s culture in which prominence and relevance is determined by metrics imposed by huge corporations.

Sometimes they won’t even tell you their metrics—who knows how Netflix evaluates its shows? Who knows how things go viral on Instagram?

But when we do learn what moves the wheels of digital media, it’s usually clicks, links, dollars, profits, and other extrinsic hierarchies.

If you look at art that way, you will avoid anything that deviates from mainstream entertainment. Or even just mindless distraction.

That’s why it’s useful to remind ourselves of other times and places when the free creative impulse of artists, even those of genius, genuinely seemed on the verge of eradication.

Yes, there were situations far more dire than our own.

So let me share a story that gives me comfort. It’s almost a parable of the creative life and its hidden power. This particular tale testifies to my belief that artists of vision and courage can even rise above the most brutal dictator.

Alas, this victory of art over tyranny only happens over the long run. But it does happen.

And when it finally occurs, the turnaround takes place so dramatically and resoundingly that we need to reconsider our conventional definitions of power and influence.

I’m referring to the case of Anna Akhmatova.

Akhmatova, was a promising poet in the days before the Soviet Revolution, but her physical presence was just as compelling as her writing. Modigliani made at least twenty paintings of Akhmatova, and she had an affair with the famous poet Osip Mandelstam. Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak proposed marriage to her on multiple occasions.

Even far away at Oxford, philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—whom I considered the most brilliant person in the entire University when I was a student there—allegedly pined away with romantic longings based on his brief encounter with Akhmatova 35 years before.  

I don’t think it’s going too far to claim that she could have been a movie actress, given her beauty and allure.

But Akhmatova was crushed under Soviet rule.

Not only was her poetry sharply criticized and censored, but the secret police bugged her apartment, and kept her under surveillance.

She was silenced so completely, that many people simply assumed she was dead.

One by one, the people closest to her were arrested, prosecuted, and often executed. Her ex-husband Nikolay Gumilev, falsely accused of participating in a monarchist conspiracy, was shot. Her common-law husband Nikolai Punin, an art scholar, got arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. (His offense was allegedly mentioning that the proliferation of portraits of Lenin throughout the country was in poor taste.)

But the most painful loss was her son, Lev Gumliev. After the execution of his father, when their child was just nine, Lev got sent to a Soviet labor camps. When he was finally released from captivity, authorities insisted that he fight in the Red Army. Then he was sent off to the prison camps again in 1949.

Akhmatova was desperate to save the life of her son. But what can a poet—even a poet of genius—do in such situations?

“I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad,” she later recalled. She traveled to Kresty Prison every day to hold a futile vigil. She tried constantly to get some word about her son’s status.

Or give him a parcel. Or find someone to beg for his release.

But to no avail.

Here each day she waited with so many other women, often in bitter cold weather—bundled in heavy clothes in front of the closed gates. One day someone in the crowd recognized the poet, who had once been so esteemed and beautiful. She asked Akhmatova whether her poetic gifts were capable of describing this scene of tragedy.

What could be more futile than a poem in the face of Stalinist purges and executions? But Akhmatova told her inquirer: “I can.” And in that horrible and desolate place, “something like a smile” appeared on the other woman’s face.

Akhmatova began working on what would be her greatest work, the long poem called Requiem. But this was a dangerous endeavor.

Publishing a poem of this sort, even overseas, was out of the question. Just putting the words down on paper could lead to her execution—the secret police might search her apartment at any time.

So she burnt the pages she used for rough drafts. The polished version was retained in her memory.

For seventeen months I’ve called you
To come home, I’ve pleaded
—Oh my son, my terror!—groveled
At the hangman’s feet.
So much I can’t say who’s
Man, who’s beast any more, nor even
How long till execution.
(From the translation of Requiem by D.M. Thomas)

This is one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. But the lines that inspire me the most come on the final page, where Anna Akhmatova makes that extraordinary prediction of the destiny for her and this forbidden work.

And if ever in this country they should want
To build me a monument
I consent to that honor,
But only on condition that they
Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,
Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

She is literally taunting Stalin and the Soviet secret police here, but with an authority of her own—one only the creative artist possesses. Yet, in some miracle, she triumphed over the dictatorship.

No, Akhmatova herself didn’t live long enough to see it happen. But she did survive Stalin, and her son was released from incarceration. He eventually witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Akhmatova got shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, and finally—the year before her death in 1966—was allowed to travel to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. Her global renown as a voice of courage and integrity was so powerful that even the Soviet authorities were now afraid of the consequences of cracking down on her.

So they did nothing when Requiem was finally published in Germany in 1963. And the long poem even got issued in the USSR in 1987, at a time when the regime was now the pathetic vulnerable party.

But the most remarkable moment of vindication came when they erected a statue of Anna Akhmatova in her native land.

It happened on the 40th anniversary of her death in 2006. By then, even the name of the city had changed—it was no longer Leningrad, but St. Petersburg once more. And Akhmatova was now returning to the scene of her greatest suffering and tragedy, but in towering bronze form atop a granite pillar.

Meeting her poetic demands, they placed her statue facing Kresty Holding Prison, where she had once waited before the closed gates, day after day.

Her visage is strong and defiant, and the inscription reads:

That’s why I pray not for myself
But for all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

This is more than the triumph of one woman.

Art is more powerful than pundits or politicians, or even the most brutal dictator. It survives the longest. It has an authority that comes from a higher source.

We do well to remember that—especially in times when the creative impulse seems so weak and ineffective.

That weakness is an illusion. Art triumphs in the end. The very hollowness of its opponents ensures that eventual victory. It’s really just a matter of time.

I made a simple promise—but almost impossible to keep.

I promised to offer a roadmap for learning arts and culture in just one year. And I would make it manageable—without imposing extreme demands.

Is that even conceivable? I hoped so. In any event, I was determined to find out.

Here are the ground rules.

• There will be no more than 250 pages of reading per week (approximately)—we want this to be a doable project, not some daunting Mt. Everest.

• The whole program can be completed in one year. (But you can stretch it out over longer periods, if you prefer.)

• I also recommend musical listening and visual art for each week.

• Our approach is roughly chronological, but not strictly so. I have deviated from strict timelines to pace the reader’s experience, and sometimes to create useful contrasts.

• We will cover the entire world—or at least enough of it for you to feel some mastery over human culture in its depth and breadth.

• You can do this anywhere and on your own—there are no classroom lectures, no tests, no homework.

• But you may want to join with others in a reading group (feel free to use the comments section to organize these), or tap into online resources, such as the Catherine Project.

So far, I’ve shared:

• A reading list for weeks 1 through 13.

• A reading list for weeks 14 through 26.

• And a personal memoir of my own lifetime reading program.

Now it’s time to push ahead into our plan for weeks 27-39. You will find it below.

Okay, this isn’t easy. If it were, everybody would possess this learning. But it isn’t impossible. And if you pull it off, it can be life-changing.

So plunge in. Even making some progress on this journey is worth the effort.

Happy learning!

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A 12-Month Immersive Course in the Humanities (Weeks 27-39)

WEEK 27
Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest

We’re giving Shakespeare more attention than any other author in this 52-week reading list. We already tackled his three greatest tragedies in week 26, and now move on to more romantic fare.

I make no apologies for focusing so much on the Immortal Bard (what a fine nickname)—despite whatever convict-and-moral-philosopher Sam Bankman-Fried wants you to think.

I’ll offer a modest suggestion that Bankman-Fried could have stayed out of prison, if he had studied Macbeth and King Lear, and applied some of the learnings to his own situation.

Shakespeare deserves our attention for many reasons. In an age when there were no psychologists or textbooks on human development, he probed the subconscious and inner life with a profundity that still stands out today. The full scope of humanity, in all its best and worst postures, appears in his dramas, but never in the stereotypical ways that dominate Netflix storytelling today.

His characters are simultaneously real, and also larger than life. They are intensely plausible, but also mythic. They are in the moment, but also eternal archetypes. They speak for their times, and they speak for our times.

Yet Shakespeare did all this while entertaining a mass market audience—with less formal education than today’s average consumer of culture. He really was the Netflix of his day.

So we give the I.B. his due—because he gives us so much in return.

Musical listening: Leonard Bernstein: West Side Story (based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet); Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, composed when Mendelssohn was just 17, and described by George Grove as “the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music.”

Art (find it online): The portraits of Thomas Gainsborough.

WEEK 28
Giorgio Vasari: Lives of Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, chapters 1-18

The Renaissance changed our notions of arts and culture, but also our sense of what a holistic, well-rounded life looks like. You can’t really understand this shift just by looking at paintings and sculptures—you also need to probe into the lives of the artists themselves.

Giorgio Vasari is our original source for most of what we know about these figures. So we are picking a few choice chapters from his Lives of the artists. But we also need to meet Benvenuto Cellini, who more than anyone lived up to the image of “Renaissance man.”

It won’t be boring. Cellini led a life suitable for a Hollywood adventure movie.

Musical listening: Josquin Desprez, Guillaume de Machaut

Art: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

Read more

What an amazing year at The Honest Broker.

I somehow published 171 articles, and they generated 25 million views during the year.

The community grew at an unbelievable (to me) rate. I started 2024 with 86 thousand subscribers, and finish it with 198 thousand.

Needless to say, that’s way beyond anything I anticipated when launching on Substack in April 2021.

Back then, I thought I’d pick up a few hundred readers—and then things would plateau. (Is plateau a verb? It has to be. I’ve certainly devoted enough time and energy to doing it over the years.)

But, hey, I’ve stumbled somehow into a plateau-free zone. The growth here hasn’t just continued each year. It has accelerated.

This has been an unanticipated (but happy) surprise. We don’t chase metrics (ugh!) here, but we warmly welcome new members to our community—even if I’m never quite sure where they come from.

But what’s really going on here?

Sure, a lot of it is dumb luck. I was in the right place at the right time. And I’ve also benefited from the expansion in the total Substack platform (as have others).

This really is a community here. Those aren’t empty words.

But I also believe these trendlines have something to do with alternative culture displacing corporate media. The fringe is somehow replacing the mainstream.

That does worry me a bit.

I’m not really a mainstream kind of guy. I’ve never had any thoughts of reaching a large crossover audience. I’d actually like to avoid that—and regularly turn down offers from intermediaries who have plans to take me to the next level.

I sorta like this level. Leveling up is not on my bingo card—at some point I might even level down.

But this is a juncture in history where some outside voices are getting amplified. And I do feel fortunate to be one of them.

The only other thing I can say is that this comes with some responsibility. And I take that responsibility seriously.

Now let’s revisit the highlights of the year.

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The 20 Most Viewed Articles of the Year

These were the 20 most viewed articles on The Honest Broker in 2024. I’ll start with the most popular and work my way down.

(1) The State of the Culture 2024 (2/18/24)

This “State of the Culture” article went viral with a vengeance. It’s the most widely read piece I’ve ever published.

I added a few homemade charts to the article at the last moment, right before publishing it—and one of them took a life of its own. This graphic reached more than a million people.

It’s still circulating on social media.

I clearly tapped into a growing anxiety among the general public. They fear new tech in a way they never have before.

And I do, too.

It’s no exaggeration to say that my vocation is changing in response to these widespread concerns. When I launched The Honest Broker, I never envisioned writing on technology.

But a lot has changed during the last three years—and not for the better. I now feel that it’s urgent to give voice to people victimized by abusive and manipulative digital platforms—especially because very few media outlets seem to care about the fallout (some of them are part of the problem)—and also lay out a game plan for addressing the crisis at hand.

This does, however, connect to my advocacy for musicians, writers, and other creatives, because they have stood on the front lines of this battlefield. Yet, as this “State of the Culture” assessment makes clear, everybody is now suffering, to some degree, from the expanding ambitions of the technocracy.

(2) The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed (12/19/24)

I’ve been a harsh critic of Spotify for more than a decade. But this article from a few days ago has reached more people than anything I’ve ever written about the company.

I drew on Liz Pelly’s disturbing new revelations, as well as my past investigations. In aggregate they make it clear that Spotify has gone to war against musicians, relying on deception and fakery to reduce royalty payments to artists. Meanwhile the senior executives are dumping shares like they’re confetti in a Wall Street ticker tape parade.

Maybe they fear an impending backlash. What a surprise.

I have a hunch this story isn’t over yet. So we’ll continue to keep on tabs on it here.

(3) How to Know If You're Living in a Doom Loop (8/2/24)

As mentioned above, I never anticipated becoming the Scourge of Tech. Blame Silicon Valley, not me. I’d happily spend my days reading 19th-century novels, and listening to Miles Davis on vinyl.

But when the largest companies in the world invest a trillion dollars in polluting the culture with AI slop, some response from the humanists is required. In this popular article from August, I looked at how AI and algorithmic control systems are creating a doom loop.

Let’s escape it while we still can.

(4) The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College (3/28/24)

So many articles about the humanities are focused on what happens at college. But the real glaring need right now is for a wise humanistic perspective in society at large.

We desperately need the humanities to build character, instill compassionate values, and impart wisdom in technology, business, politics, and everyday life.

This article was a plea for just—supported by lots of data, cautionary tales, and exhortations to the wise.

(5) 11 Predictions: Here's What AI Does Next (9/7/24)

Are you noticing a pattern here?

Against my will—kicking and screaming—I’m turning into a tech writer. Heaven help me! I wish these billionaire-bought bots would go away. Then I could settle down by the fireplace to write a poem or compose a madrigal.

But they won’t let me.

If the new overlords keep scamming and spamming the creative culture, somebody has to speak up. That makes me like the old blues musician who sat down on stage with his guitar and said: “I may not be the best, but I’ll play for you until the best shows up.”

That’ll be my motto as a tech writer.

In this article, I offer a forecast for the future of AI, and sketch out some possible responses.

(6) A 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities (7/8/24)

This never happened before—an article (mostly) behind a paywall was one of my most viewed postings of the year.

And it was an article about Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, and other highbrow figures.

What a relief! Finally something deep and substantive to think about—with no TikTok links necessary

And the popularity of this article tells you that a rebellion against the swipe-and-scroll mania is already underway. In the midst of all the degradation, something positive is emerging. Let’s try to nurture it.

(7) The Death of the Magazine (8/9/24)

Along the way, we ought to spend some time mourning the casualties of digital culture. I miss those old thick Sunday newspapers, and glossy middle-brow magazines.

Clearly I’m not the only one. This assessment of the collapsing market for print periodicals was widely read and cited.

(8) Is There a Crisis of Seriousness? (11/7/24)

I’m still planning to publish a follow-up to this article. It will be called “How to Be a Serious Person.” In the meantime, this essay from November outlines the reasons why seriousness is disappearing from the public sphere.

(9) 15 Observations on the New Phase in Cultural Conflict (11/17/24)

I originally published this essay in 2022, but I put it behind a paywall. As a result, only a few thousand people read it.

A few weeks ago, I liberated it from the paywall—it just seemed too timely, and needed a second hearing. This time around, it definitely stirred up lots of discussion and debate.

Many people said this analysis helped them understand the recent election. And just a few days after publication, the shooting of the United Healthcare exec was an eerie and unsettling reminder of the premises outlined here.

(10) The 6 New Rules of Communicating (11/15/24)

I published this article immediately after the election. I tried to articulate what we had learned about communicating and influencing audiences from both the campaign and other recent developments.

This chart from the article circulated widely.

(11) How to Escape Dopamine Culture (3/4/24)

Maybe I do too much complaining here. Am I turning into a curmudgeon? Even worse, have I always been one?

But I do try to propose solutions, and not just gripe about problems. In this popular article from March, I offered a game plan for thriving in the face of brain-numbing swipe-and-scroll phone culture.

(12) Ten Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing (8/19/24)

In this article, I tried to do more than just complain about crappy tech—I outlined the reasons why it’s getting worse. This is a good starting point for anyone who wants a more expansive diagnosis of the dominant digital dysfunction.

(13) I Say Forbidden Things About Sports (11/30/24)

Some readers are frustrated at how I jump from topic to topic. They have legitimate complaints—I’m no longer just a music writer. (I published more than 70 articles on music in 2024, but only two made this top 20 list, and they were both about the music business, not music itself.)

So it’s not even clear to me what my specialty is anymore. (But—fair warning—I’m not giving up music writing. Below I share links to some music articles published here during the last 12 months.)

So I dared to publish an essay on sports—a subject where I have no credentials whatsoever (although, to be fair, I once had a spiffy jump shot from outside the key)—and it resonated with many of you. I can only assume that an outsider perspective is what’s needed now in the more degraded sectors of society.

In those situations, you can state obvious truths (see chart below), but they merely point out how far we’ve fallen from our ideals.

(14) Stupidity: A Reading List (5/22/24)

Once again, a reading list was one of the most popular articles of the year. Every time this happens, it restores my faith in the world at large.

This article had a peculiar premise. If you want to be smart, you need to learn about stupidity. Then I offered a syllabus on the subject—with 17 book recommendations and a final exam.

(15) Why Is the Tesla Cybertruck So Depressingly Ugly? (11/9/24)

I like writing about beauty and aesthetics, but those can be boring subjects. Elon Musk, however, was so obliging, and introduced a vehicle that put ugliness on the road in all our neighborhoods.

I poked fun at it in this article, and many readers agreed with the sentiments expressed. A few Cybertruck owners, however, were not amused.

(16) How Coffee Became a Joke (5/5/24)

Here’s another example of an unexpected topic reaching a larger audience. I drink a lot of coffee—maybe too much. If you ever meet me, don’t be surprised if I spontaneously start dancing a jitterbug waltz.

In this semi-serious article, I lamented the rise of sickly-sweet Starbucks drinks, and expressed a hope for the return of plain ol’ jo.

And I got the best response of all. Soon after publishing this article, Starbucks got rid of the olive oil coffee that I mocked in the post.

We take our wins where we can find them.

(17) How Virtual Reality Died

Back in 2021, I predicted that Facebook’s huge investments in virtual reality would soon go sour. Three years later, I revisited the subject, and showcased the biggest tech flop (so far) of the century.

It’s a useful case study in how out-of-touch Big Tech has become, and a reminder that its users don’t always agree to be used.

(18) Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25?

In 1968, an obsessed scientist tried to create a utopian society for mice. It didn’t work out well for the rodents—the easier life got, the more self-destructive they became. This is especially relevant right now because our new app-driven lifestyles are having a similar impact on human beings.

(19) Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture?

Back in my consulting days, I analyzed “parasite strategies”—sly dealings which allowed businesses to suck blood out of the economy without giving anything back in return.

Until recently, corporate execs found these practices disgusting and borderline unethical. Not anymore. The entire creative economy is now built on parasite platforms—and they will wreak tremendous destruction over the long run, unless we mount a resistance movement.

(20) Nine Predictions for the Future of the Music Business

Here I offer very, very long-range predictions. My time horizon is 10-15 years in the future. And, much to my own surprise, my conclusions are very optimistic. I point out how many of the current trends are unsustainable, and will lead to their own obsolescence.

Those were the 20 greatest hits of the year.

As noted above, only two music articles earned a place in this popularity contest—and they were both about the music business. None of my articles on musicians and recordings made it into the top 20.

But some came close. So here are links to five (somewhat) popular music articles I published in 2024.

• The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass

• Western Music Isn't What You Think

• My New Favorite Genre Is Polish Noir

• Do Drummers Live Longer?

• The Strangest Hit Songwriter in History

Finally, let me mention five popular articles for premium subscribers. You can read some of the text for free—because I usually insert a paywall deep in the article.

• The Decline of the Novel

• The 100 Best Recordings of 2024

• 52 Reasons to Fear that Technological Progress Is Reversing

• Power Is Shifting Rapidly to Indie Creators

• My Alternative Tech Canon: 26 Mind-Expanding Books

Those were the highlights of a busy year. But give the community here a lot of the credit. The comments are often better than the articles. So find time to read those, too—and maybe add your own observations to the mix.

Finally, let me give my heartfelt thanks for your support. Yes, I’m talking to you, personally, right now—thank you!

And let’s do it again next year.

Important events in the digital culture rarely get announced in press releases anymore. In the current state of play, most companies do NOT want you to know what they’re doing.

I call it stealth culture.

I wrote about this new climate of deception a few days ago with regard to Spotify. But this is now happening everywhere—especially in emerging media and alt platforms.

So I search for hidden clues—trying to put the pieces together. Every so often, I share my findings and observations with you in these “arts and culture briefing papers.”

These updates are usually for premium subscribers, but today’s installment is free for everybody.

Let’s start with disturbing signs that indie culture is getting infiltrated by corporate grifters.

If you want to support my work, consider taking out a premium subscription—for just $6 per month (even less if you sign up for a year).

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Every company now wants its own podcast.

Do you remember the golden age of infomercials? People watched advertisements for a full half hour (or longer) because they were so entertaining.

I shamefully admit to doing this myself. Along the way, I bought a ShamWow cleaning cloth, a Juiceman juicer, and BluBlocking sunglasses.

But now corporations are using podcasts in the same way—as a kind of infomercial for alt culture audiences.

According to David Pierce of The Verge:

There’s something strange happening these days in the podcast world….companies that deal in money have been using podcasts not just as an entertainment medium but also as a weird hybrid of marketing, thought leadership, and networking….

It’s becoming a strangely central part of business in more ways than you might think. It’s kind of a weird, complicated web that goes both ways, and it’s not getting any less weird or less complicated once you add stuff like crypto and politics to the mix.

The most striking example is in the world of venture capital, where top firms are now using podcasts to connect with entrepreneurs and boast about their expertise.

Pierce calls this trend, the nefarious business-to-business podcast.

Of course, the trend goes both ways. Many alt media influencers are now turning into financiers themselves. One podcaster recently decided to launch his own venture capital fund—and raised $400 million.

This trend will spread faster than a fire in a toothpick factory. Every marketeer in the world spent 2024 trying to get on Joe Rogan. In 2025, they will try to become Joe Rogan themselves.

So get ready for your boss to launch a podcast (or a Substack).

I think I’ll stick with the ShamWow. At least it cleans up messes.

And on a related note…

Your next podcast might be a meeting in disguise.

There’s a new way of soliciting business—and it just requires a microphone and a Zoom connection

According to Bloomberg:

Over the past couple years, some enterprising entrepreneurs have turned to podcasts as a way to introduce themselves to an otherwise impossible-to-reach client. A cold call, email or direct message on LinkedIn likely would go unanswered. But when asked to be on a podcast, suddenly, people are intrigued.

This scam won’t go away—for the simple reason that it works. When you tap into corporate ego and vanity, you find that they are inexhaustible resources.

But this is just one of many ways businesses are manipulating indie culture….

Media outlets tried to kill Substack—now they want to imitate it.

I was taken aback when I saw the latest media initiative from The Verge.

It looks like Substack. It smells like Substack. It quacks like Substack.

Quack! Quack!

Hey bros, why don’t you just join Substack? You save on overhead, and get to tap into the community here.

And it’s not just The Verge.

• CNN has also embraced the Substack model—with direct-to-reader subscriptions, low monthly payments, and a flexible paywall.

• That very same day, Reuters announced the exact same move. The only difference is a penny, more or less. Reuters charges one dollar per week, while CNN demands $3.99 per month.

• Meanwhile the Washington Post is investing in its “Third Newsroom.” I’m not sure what that means, but I have a hunch that it will soon be quacking like Substack too.

• Even Facebook and Instagram are testing an ad-free subscription model.

On the other extreme, ChatGPT is considering a $2,000-per-month subscription fee. I don’t think that duck is gonna fly, but people who spend their days talking to chatbots tend to lose touch with reality.

Influencers will now sell you moldy meals.

The idea seems so simple—why don’t influencers launch their own products? If they are really so immensely popular, they should shill for themselves, not corporate bosses.

But trust me, you don’t want your meals prepared by an influencer. They may be great at clicks—at bites, not so much.

MrBeast has tried to do just that. First he launched the MrBeast Burger—which resulted in a $100 million lawsuit. Then he took on Hershey in the chocolate wars, with mixed reviews.

And now he joins forces with Logan Paul to displace Lunchables, the popular school lunch meal kits.

But let the luncher beware. “Early reviews of the product are flooding in,” according to MSN, “and some customers said they found mold in their Lunchly packs.”

Kids are not digging the new penicillin flavor.

It doesn’t help that MrBeast has recently been accused of crypto fraud and putting people in danger with unsafe filming conditions for his new Amazon show.

Not long ago, MrBeast acted like a rule-breaking outsider ready to topple the system. But with each passing month, he looks more like those familiar money-grubbing insiders who will do anything for a buck.

This is the inevitable result of boom times in alt media, where new voices could be part of a cultural renaissance but just as often will fall flat faster than you can say hawk tuah.

The new music counterculture is rejecting algorithms, and celebrating human creativity.

“A new music counterculture is emerging, rejecting algorithms and perfection for raw, authentic creativity,” according to Hyperbot.

Mark Mulligan, of the Music Industry Blog, reports that DJs are at the center of the revolt.

He explains:

We are seeing a blossoming of scenes, both on and offline. While the former are shaped by platforms’ algorithms, the latter are inherently more human in nature and form part of a growing analogue revival…

In 2023, DJ equipment was the only major music hardware category to see strong growth (most other categories declined). Meanwhile YouTube is abuzz with DJ sets from a new crop of young, often female, DJs. DJs are an alternative to the algorithm: pure, human curation.

This is an inevitable response. It starts at the grass roots, but expect to see it spread elsewhere in the music business.

James Bond faces a crisis he can’t solve—as the family controlling 007 battles with Amazon.

When Amazon acquired MGM, it got rights to the lucrative James Bond films. But it can’t release new installments without the support of spy movie heir Barbara Broccoli.

Until she gives her okay to the story, no movie can be made.

And she despises Amazon.

“These people are f— idiots,” she told a friend, according to the Wall Street Journal. She distrusts the algorithm-driven business model of the huge digital retailer (who is now in bed with MrBeast, see above).

According to WSJ reporters Erich Schwartzel and Jessica Toonkel:

Broccoli has complained that Amazon isn’t a good home for Bond, since the company’s core business is selling everything from toilet paper to vacuums—a perspective Amazon executives find unfair. But since she makes the creative calls that come first—script, casting, story—Broccoli can hold Bond hostage from Amazon for as long as she sees fit.

I don’t blame her. I’ve already seen what Amazon did after acquiring my beloved Whole Foods—you can read the declining employee morale in their facial expressions at the checkout counter.

I’d hate to see the same thing happen to 007.

The Barnes & Noble turnaround is really happening—and everybody in the culture business should learn from it.

More than a year ago, I celebrated the arrival of a new boss at Barnes & Noble who actually loves books.

This led him to do all sorts of brave things. He stopped promoting new titles based on kickbacks from publishers, and instead showcased books that people might actually enjoy reading.

This was an example of stealth culture mentioned above. Shoppers had no idea that the promoted books at the front of the store were chosen on the basis of financial incentives, not quality. And new boss Jamie Daunt shook the entire publishing business by turning down the cash.

He also empowered employees in the store, giving them freedom to feature books that they loved. He told his local booksellers to remove every title from every shelf, and “weed out the rubbish.” He wanted the staff to be excited about the books they sold.

I now have a happy update to my previous report.

Barnes & Noble has more than 60 new locations opening this year, and store foot traffic is improving steadily.

In an especially inspiring move, the company recently reopened a huge retail space in DC it had abandoned in 2013. After more than a decade, it returned to the same location and opened a flagship store.

When he took over, Daunt saw that the stores were “crucifyingly boring.” But now the excitement is back. Some visitors even compare Barnes & Noble nowadays to a theme park for books.

According to CNN:

Kendra Keeter-Gray, a BookTok content creator with over 100,000 followers, told CNN that she and her friends could spend anywhere between 30 minutes to a few hours inside a Barnes & Noble, usually in the BookTok section where they trade recommendations and flip through currently trending novels.

“When you go to Barnes, it’s like an excursion almost. I would equate it to when I was little and my parents would take me to Six Flags,” she said.

Meanwhile here’s a completely different strategy for the book business…

In Japan, writers can rent out their own shelf at a local bookstore.

The new trend in Japanese bookstores is to sublease the shelves to outsiders. The result is the exact opposite of algorithm-chosen books. Every shelf is filled with surprises.

According to the South China Morning Post:

“Here, you find books which make you wonder who on earth would buy them,” laughs Shogo Imamura, 40, who opened one such store in Tokyo’s bookstore district of Kanda Jimbocho in April.

“Regular bookstores sell books that are popular based on sales statistics while excluding books that don’t sell well,” says Imamura….“We ignore such principles.”

A new conspiracy theory claims ancient literature is fake.

Is it possible that Aristotle never existed, and his surviving books are just fakes? I’ve never met anyone who believed that….until now.

According to the South China Morning Post:

Chinese academics studying the Western classics are battling an increasingly popular conspiracy theory that Greek and Roman literature, philosophy and even famous monuments are hoaxes.

It’s worth noting the larger context. Western culture is often taken more seriously in Chinese universities than it is in the US. And these books tend to support an open society and free debate.

So—as strange as it sounds—you should expect more hit pieces on Aristotle and his ancient colleagues. His enemies think he’s too dangerous, and they just might be right.

Are chatbots destroying your home appliances?

What happens when AI companies set up huge energy-sucking data centers near your home?

Guess what—they disrupt your own energy sources. And with unpleasant consequences.

According to Bloomberg:

AI data centers are multiplying across the US and sucking up huge amounts of power. New evidence shows they may also be distorting the normal flow of electricity for millions of Americans….

The problem is threatening billions in damage to home appliances and aging power equipment, especially in areas like Chicago and "data center alley" in Northern Virginia, where distorted power readings are above recommended levels.

If you live within 20 miles of a data center, there’s a fifty percent chance that you’re impacted by its power use.

Chess champion Magnus Carlsen is ejected from a NY tournament for wearing jeans.

Can this be real? Are chess players really more uptight than country clubs and fancy restaurants?

Yes they are. According to The Guardian:

Magnus Carlsen, the world No 1, has been disqualified from the World Rapid Championship in New York due to a dress code violation, refusing to change from jeans….

Carlsen responded with indifference—but did take a pot shot at New York:

“Honestly I’m too old at this point to care too much. If this is what they want to do I’ll probably set off to somewhere where the weather is a bit nicer.”

By the way, we have no dress code at The Honest Broker, and Mr. Carlsen is welcome here any time.

Every December, I’m like Santa Claus. I eat any cookies left out for me. And I also make a list, checking it twice.

The cookies are for me, but the list is for you.

It features links to my favorite longform writing—naughty or nice—from the previous 12 months. This year, I’ve whittled my list down to 25 articles and essays.

Most of them deal with my cherished subjects—music, books, and various creative endeavors. But I also include other articles that caught my attention.

If the writing is good enough, I’ll read about almost anything.

So my picks this year deal with everything from MAD magazine to ventriloquism to Scrabble. You will find tales of TV psychics and wandering minstrels and parking lot stripers. I’ve also included several essays by survivors of various calamities—because that describes all of us, sooner or later.

This is also a good time to encourage you to support quality journalism. The writers and periodicals showcased here all rely on readers like you. So when you compile your list of new year’s resolutions, consider making a commitment to a periodical or journalist who is making a difference.

Happy reading!

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The Best Online Articles of 2024

“From Goldman Sachs Trader to Parking Lot Striper” by Isaiah Baker
Freedom Is Something You Take, August 12, 2024

90 days ago I was a vice president in Goldman Sachs’ Equity Division in NYC. Running a derivatives trading book of over $20bn dollars in notional value that had made Goldman hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

Yesterday, I installed 90 parking stalls and 7 directional arrows in an industrial lot for a roofing company in South Florida….

“How I Got Booted as a Grammy Voter” by James Barber
Stars After Stars After Stars, February 4, 2024

There was a longstanding rumor about one particular LA-based label executive who oversaw the nominating committees. Allegedly, this executive would freely adjust the nomination lists to better reflect which people were in his favor each year. I don’t know if this story is true, but people in the business certainly believed it was true….

“From Vexing Uncertainty to Intellectual Humility” by Michael Dickson
Schizophrenia Bulletin, January 11, 2024

I am a 55-year-old husband, father, friend, and professional philosopher. In 1992, as a graduate student at Cambridge University, a porter found me amongst the cows in the meadows of King’s College, after being there for 2 or 3 days. I was in bad physical shape, having eaten nothing, and apparently getting water from the river. He asked what I was doing. I replied: “I’m solving a problem about stochastic calculus….”

“Planet Puppet: A Weekend at the Ventriloquist’s Convention” by Mina Tavakoli
N+1, December 16, 2024

“I cut a hole in a tennis ball, put googly eyes on it, and it took me all over the world. I’ve been to fifty-nine countries with it. Get this into your head and get out there — it’s not the puppet!…”

“No One Buys Books” by Elle Griffin
The Elysian, April 22, 2024

The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

“How I Learned to Live with Haunting Visions” by Daniel Handler
Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2024

A year or so into this, while walking across campus, I saw one of these naked, ghostly white figures staring right at me. No one else seemed to see what I was seeing, and I fell unconscious on the grass. I was very, very frightened, not just because of what I saw, but because I realized, there on the lawn, that these weren’t just dreams after all. This was something worse.

“For Three Weeks I Was a Phone Psychic for Miss Cleo” by Heidi Diehl
Electric Lit, July 25, 2024

For the first few nights, I knelt on the floor with the phone, hunched over my list of tarot card names, which I’d printed at the nonprofit’s office. I listened and scribbled key details. Pamela, 37, Missouri. Wants to know about love life. “I just pulled The Lovers card for you,” I’d say, heart pounding as I scrambled for meaning. “This is incredibly lucky….”

“Did Frank Sinatra Really Perform at My Grandma's High School?” by Chris Dalla Riva
Can’t Get Much Higher, September 6, 2024

Her niece had never heard about Frank Sinatra performing at Nutley High School, let alone the fact that her aunt was the reason it happened. When I reach out to both Nutley High School and the Nutley Historical Society, they confirm as much. They’ve never heard about Sinatra performing at the high school…..

“Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” by Kate Dwyer
Esquire, May 30, 2024

The agent at the talent firm describes a “one strike and you’re out” mentality, with some authors getting dropped by their agents if their debut doesn’t sell well. With second novels, the agent explains, those writers are “starting at square one but worse,” because “they’re back to querying and they have the burden of a bad sales track.”

“The Joy of Clutter” by Matt Alt
Aeon, October 11, 2024

To the Japanese, there was nothing unusual about their empty rooms. Who needs chairs when you can sit on the floor? Why leave futons out when they can be folded up and put away each morning? Why wouldn’t an unused room be empty?

“How Gothic Architecture Became Spooky” by Katherine McLaughlin
Architectural Digest, October 24, 2024

Throughout the room were pictures of Cologne Cathedral, an 1880 church in Germany and one of Dr. Bork’s favorite buildings. The images, seemingly, caught the student’s attention. “Dr. Bork,” he said. “Why does it look so evil?”

“The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify’s Plot Against Musicians” by Liz Pelly
Harper’s, December 19, 2024

What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.

“On Knowing Who He Was” by Christopher Harding
Aeon, January 26, 2024

To his detractors, [Alan] Watts was an unlettered dilettante—he lacked an undergraduate degree—guilty of peddling a mash-up of Zen, Taoism and Vedānta to the unwary, throwing in psychotherapy, psychedelics and quantum physics for good measure. He lacked moral seriousness, too, preferring forms of religion that emphasized insight over conduct as a path to the divine. The result was a bleak contrast between Watts’s high talk of compassion and love and a series of affairs that, combined with his low view of fatherhood – ‘mow the lawn, play baseball with the children’—helped to destroy his family.

“Image Without Metaphor” by Vicky Osterweil
All Cats Are Beautiful, March 17, 2024

The truly huge films of the last two or three years have had even less space for self-reflection or individual analysis. There seems to be an allergy to ambiguity, a desire for orderly storytelling and image making that leaves little to the imagination or debate….

“The Last Crimes of Caravaggio” by Michael Prodger
The New Statesmen, March 20, 2024

Although he was indeed invested as a knight, he could not outrun his brawling nature. He got into an altercation with a more senior Hospitaller and wounded him with a pistol. He was incarcerated in a castle rock-cell above a 200-foot drop but, barely plausibly, somehow managed to escape. With the help of an unknown accomplice he scaled the precipice and clambered down to a boat waiting beneath.

“The MAD Files” by David Mikics
Tablet, September 2, 2024

By 1960 MAD had conquered the teenage market. According to some estimates, it was read by most American college students and almost half the country’s high school students (at least the male ones). Believe it or not, MAD would become even more popular in the next dozen years.

“I Was a Best-Selling Novelist. Then I Went Back to School” By Tom Rachman
New York Times, October 7, 2024

Certain professors seemed mistrustful of a student my age. Certain classmates clammed up before someone as old as their parents. I’d forget myself, debating and bantering with young faces, only to glimpse a mirror: gray stubble, incipient jowls. What I am doing here?

“On the Grid: How Surveillance Became a Love Language” by Zoë Hitzig
The Drift, December 11, 2024

The normalization of mass spying could go further than surveillance did in skewing our relationships. The devices cozied up in our homes—Ring cameras capturing every neighborhood drama, Alexa politely ignoring our off-key singing — are already quietly recording and transmitting data every moment of the day.

“I Almost Died. Surviving Has Made Life Look Different” by Sebastian Junger
Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2024

I found myself beset with a terrible and irrational fear that maybe I hadn’t survived. That I was a ghost, and my family had no idea I was there. When I asked Barbara to confirm that I existed, she said yes, but that was just the sort of thing a hallucination would say.

“Silicon Valley’s Obsession With AI Looks a Lot Like Religion” by Greg Epstein
The MIT Press Reader, November 22, 2024

Take, for example, Way of the Future, an official AI-worshipping religion created by Anthony Levandowski, a former Google AI engineer who earned hundreds of millions of dollars as a leader in the development of autonomous vehicle technology. Levandowski went as far as filing all the requisite paperwork to register as a church with the IRS, telling the agency that the faith would focus on “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed through computer hardware and software.”

“The Great Abandonment: What Happens to the Natural World When People Disappear?” by Tess McClure
The Guardian, November 28, 2024

Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.

Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world….

“Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet” by Kyle Chayka
The New Yorker, January 13, 2024

Like so many millennials, I entered the online world through AOL Instant Messenger. I created an account one unremarkable day in the late nineteen-nineties, sitting in the basement of my childhood home at our chunky white desktop computer, which connected to the Internet via a patchy dial-up modem. I picked a username, “Silk,” based on a character from my favorite series of fantasy novels…

“Scrabble, Anonymous” by Brad Phillips
The Paris Review, May 15, 2024

This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day….

“Pimps and Prodigals by Irina Dumitrescu
London Review of Books, May 23, 2024

Minstrels did more than merely play songs. Some worked as bearwards, who cared for and trained dancing bears, or waferers, who were employed by large households to bake sweet wafers and distribute them at the end of banquets, possibly with some amusing patter. They were natural messengers, spies, diplomats and propagandists.

“Playing for Survival: The Blind Japanese Women Keeping a Music Tradition Alive” by Justin McCurry
The Guardian, July 18, 2024

Barely a decade has passed since Hirosawa started learning goze uta (blind women’s songs) – a prodigious genre of music spanning four centuries that most Japanese people have probably never heard.

That she now plays with the composure of a veteran is remarkable for two reasons: not a single goze uta musical score exists, and even if the chords and notes had been written down, Hirosawa would not be able to read them.

I try to avoid the subject of cancel culture.

I don’t even write negative record reviews anymore—I only tell you about music I enjoy, and forget the rest. And I have even less interest in probing into the unsavory details of a musician’s private life.

But ignoring these controversies isn’t easy in my line of work.

As a full-time critic, I often feel like that meme dog trying to drink a cup of coffee in a burning building.

That fire burns constantly now. And it’s not just mobs trying to cancel the culprit of the week. There’s an equally large mob trying to destroy the cancelers themselves.

Meanwhile, like that calm canine, I try to focus on the art—not the less-than-perfect artists who make it.

But is that even possible?

• If I listen to Michael Jackson’s music, am I endorsing his alleged crimes and failings? Do I need to study the evidence—devoting days to reading court transcripts and legal depositions—before I click on a playlist?

• Can I watch a Woody Allen movie, and enjoy it as a movie, without first deciding if he is guilty of sexual abuse allegations?

• What about Miles Davis, accused of domestic abuse?—and here I’ve heard firsthand testimony from an actual witness. Do I now need to give up Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain?

• Or how about Chuck Berry, who spent two years in jail for sex trafficking and punched a woman so hard that she needed stitches?

• And classical music is no better. Can I listen to my Met Opera albums after the charges against conductor James Levine—or do I wipe out all forty years of his tenure from my record library?

• Or what about Bob Marley (accused of rape) or David Bowie (called Hitler a “rock star”) or Cardi B (drugged and robbed men) or Jerry Lee Lewis (bigamy, married underage cousin), etc.

• And don’t forget the famous musicians who committed murder from Carlo Gesualdo to Sid Vicious to Phil Spector? Must I change the station when their songs get played on the radio?

And I haven’t even started on the artists who tweeted rude things. Their number is legion.

The more you dig into this subject, the more complex it gets. Who even has time to investigate all the allegations and rumors?

And what about guilt by association—do we punish all the cast and crew when a director falters? Should the whole band get cancelled when one member does something bad?

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This whole subject is so thorny, I’d like to avoid thinking about it. But people keep asking for my opinion on cancelling.

They want me to explain how I deal with these situations as a critic and fan. That’s a legitimate request.

So below I’m sharing my six guidelines for dealing with artists who have done bad things.

Read more

In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists.

I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before.

Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist?

In April 2022, I finally felt justified in sharing my concerns with readers. So I published an article here called “The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize.”

I was careful not to make accusations I couldn’t prove. But I pointed out some puzzling facts.

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Many of these artists live in Sweden—where Spotify has its headquarters. According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names.

Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre).

How was that even possible?

I continued to make inquiries, and brooded over this strange situation. But something even stranger happened a few months later.

A listener noticed that he kept hearing the same track over and over on Spotify. But when he checked the name of the song, it was always different. Even worse, these almost identical tracks were attributed to different artists and composers.

He created a playlist, and soon had 49 different versions of this song under various names. The titles sounded as if they had come out of a random text generator—almost as if the goal was to make them hard to remember.

• Trumpet Bumblefig

• Bumble Mistywill

• Whomping Clover

• Qeazpoor

• Swiftspark

• Vattio Bud

I reported on this odd situation. Others joined in the hunt, and found more versions of the track under still different names.

The track itself was boring and non-descript, but it was showing up everywhere on the platform.

Around this same time, I started hearing jazz piano playlists on Spotify that disturbed me. Every track sounded like it was played on the same instrument with the exact same touch and tone. Yet the names of the artists were all different.

Were these AI generated? Was Spotify doing this to avoid paying royalties to human musicians?

Spotify issued a statement in the face of these controversies. But I couldn’t find any denial that they were playing games with playlists in order to boost profits.

By total coincidence, Spotify’s profitability started to improve markedly around this time.

A few months ago, I spoke with an editor at one of the largest newspapers in the world. I begged him to put together a team of investigative journalists to get to the bottom of this.

“You need to send people to Sweden. You need to find sources. You need to find out what’s really going on.”

He wasn’t interested in any of that. He just wanted a spicy opinion piece. I declined his invitation to write it.

We now finally have the ugly truth on these fake artists—but no thanks to Spotify. Or to that prestigious newspaper whose editor I petitioned.

Instead journalist Liz Pelly has conducted an in-depth investigation, and published her findings in Harper’s—they are part of her forthcoming book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.

Mood Machine will show up in bookstores in January and may finally wake up the music industry to the dangers it faces.

Pelly started by knocking on the doors of these mysterious viral artists in Sweden.

Guess what? Nobody wanted to talk. At least not at first.

But Pelly kept pursuing this story for a year. She convinced former employees to reveal what they knew. She got her hands on internal documents. She read Slack messages from the company. And she slowly put the pieces together.

Now she writes:

What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform.

In other words, Spotify has gone to war against musicians and record labels.

At Spotify they call this the “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) program. Musicians who provide PFC tracks “must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative.”

Spotify apparently targeted genres where they could promote passive consumption. They identified situations in which listeners use playlists for background music. That’s why I noticed the fake artists problem first in my jazz listening.

According to Pelly, the focal points of PFC were “ambient, classical, electronic, jazz, and lo-fi beats.”

When some employees expressed concerns about this, Spotify managers replied (according to Pelly’s sources) that “listeners wouldn’t know the difference.”

They called it payola in the 1950s. The public learned that radio deejays picked songs for airplay based on cash kickbacks, not musical merit.

Music fans got angry and demanded action. In 1959, both the US Senate and House launched investigations. Famous deejay Alan Freed got fired from WABC after refusing to sign a statement claiming that he had never taken bribes.

Transactions nowadays are handled more delicately—and seemingly in full compliance with the laws. Nobody gives Spotify execs an envelope filled with cash.

But this is better than payola:

• On February 7, Spotify’s CEO sold 250K shares for $57.5 million.

• On April 24, Spotify’s CEO sold 400K shares for $118.8 million.

• On November 15, Spotify’s CEO sold 75K shares for $35.8 million.

• On November 20, Spotify’s CEO sold 75K shares for $34.8 million.

• On November 26, Spotify’s CEO sold 75K shares for $36.1 million.

• On December 4, Spotify’s CEO sold 75K shares for $37 million.

• On December 11, Spotify’s CEO sold 60K shares for $28.3 million.

Deejay Alan Freed couldn’t dream of such riches. In fact, nobody in the history of music has made more money than the CEO of Spotify.

Taylor Swift doesn’t earn that much. Even after fifty years of concertizing, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger can’t match this kind of wealth.

At this point, I need to complain about the stupid major record labels who have empowered and supported Spotify during its long history. At some junctures, they have even been shareholders.

I’ve warned repeatedly that this is a huge mistake. Spotify is their adversary, not their partner. The longer they avoid admitting this to themselves, the worse things will get.

The music media isn’t much better—these new revelations came from a freelancer publishing in Harper’s, not from Rolling Stone or Billboard or Variety.

And I could say the same for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

Why didn’t they investigate this? Why don’t they care?

But I am grateful for independent journalism, which is now my main hope for the future.

Let’s turn to the bigger question: What do we do about this?

By all means, let’s name and shame the perpetrators. But we need more than that.

Congress should investigate ethical violations at music streaming businesses—just like they did with payola. Laws must be passed requiring full transparency. Even better, let’s prevent huge streaming platforms from promoting songs based on financial incentives.

I don’t do that as a critic. People sometimes try to offer me money for coverage, and I tell them off. It happened again this week, and I got upset. No honest person could take those payoffs.

Streaming platforms ought to have similar standards. And if they won’t do it voluntarily, legislators and courts should force their hand.

And let me express a futile wish that the major record labels will find a spine. They need to create an alternative—even if it requires an antitrust exemption from Congress (much like major league sports).

Our single best hope is a cooperative streaming platform owned by labels and musicians. Let’s reclaim music from the technocrats. They have not proven themselves worthy of our trust.

If the music industry ‘leaders’ haven’t figured that out by now—especially after the latest revelations—we are in bad shape indeed.

Last week, a cable news pundit struggled to understand the new media landscape. So he sought advice from his teenage son.

He asked the youngster to name the most influential people in the world today.

Can you guess the names he picked?

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Here’s what happened:

I’m thinking to myself he’s going to say Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z.

He says Kai Cenat, Adin Ross, Jynxzi, and Sketch. I don’t know who he is talking about.

I said ‘What platforms are you on?’

He said ‘I’m on Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.’

I said ‘That sounds like you need to go to the hospital.

What are these platforms? I’m telling you guys, the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream….

There are people out there that are getting 14 million streams. And we are on cable news getting one or two million.

This is the new reality. The future of media has arrived—but people above a certain age won’t even recognize the names.

Check out the list below of the most watched streamers in the US and Canada.

Jynxzi? Zackrawrr? Summit1g?

A few days ago, I’d have told you these are passwords, not people.

Now I know better. I’ve watched videos from each of these individuals—and it’s shocking how different they are from mainstream media fare.

Media empires are getting defeated, but not by their corporate competitors. They’re finding themselve replaced by a ragtag assortment of podcasters, pranksters, pundits, gamers, gadflies, and influencers.

Meanwhile inside the world of legacy media, the situation has gone from bad to worse:

• Potential editors are “fleeing” from the Washington Post, according to one source. In just the last few days, two leading candidates voluntarily removed their names from consideration.

• Comcast doesn’t want to own MSNBC or CNBC. They are spinning off the assets—a strategy often employed to limit exposure to damaged businesses.

• NPR stations will “need to fight for their lives” in 2025. And it’s not just the political threat. NPR faces a $30 million budget gap, and has “failed to fully monetize both podcasts and its additional digital assets.”

• Cable news is now trying to imitate Joe Rogan, and is desperately seeking podcasters. I doubt they can succeed; it isn’t in their DNA. But I can’t blame them—Mr. Rogan is the real longterm winner from the 2024 election. He will be flexing his power for at least the next decade.

• Fox News survived the election with better ratings than its peers, but the network’s median viewer age is 69—it’s now a geriatric brand. Meanwhile an ugly Succession-style battle for control may force a sale.

• Internal strife is turning other newsrooms into war zones.

This sounds brutal—but I’ll say it anyway. The only viable business model in legacy media right now is finding a billionaire owner.

But that’s a painful way to earn a living as a journalist. Just ask the writers at the LA Times or Washington Post.

Based on these incidents, you might assume that the entire media business is collapsing like a bad souffle. But that’s not true.

Alternative media is enjoying a gold rush.

I predicted this a little over a year ago. But even I’m shaken by the speed with which the fringe is devouring the mainstream.

YouTube boasts that it is rapidly taking over the living room. Instead of watching Netflix or cable, audiences are increasingly streaming podcasters and influencers on their home television set.

Last week, the company released its latest figures: “Viewers watched over 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices.”

YouTube is already 40% bigger than Netflix. And that gap will grow.

Meanwhile Substack announced yesterday that it will create a turbocharged enterprise platform to support entire media businesses. Some Substacks may soon resemble the The Atlantic or Vox Media or even the Washington Post.

The goal is to provide individual journalists or teams with a “new option for starting a fully-fledged media business, encompassing rich design, advanced websites, deep analytics, automated marketing features, and first-class support for video, audio, and more.”

Can freelancers really compete with huge media empires on equal terms? We will soon find out.

This feels like a big deal. But it’s going to get bigger.

The fringe will take over other spheres of the culture. It’s starting with journalism, but the same thing will soon happen in music, movies, and other fields.

• I predict that, in the very near future, a single individual (or small indie team) will compete head-to-head with major record labels—and defeat them decisively in the marketplace. All you need is 50 million YouTube (or TikTok) subscribers and you can blow Universal Music out of the water.

• The movie business will be harder for freelancers—because films cost so much to make. But new AI tools will change that. Somebody sitting in their parents’ basement will soon be able to make a hit movie.

• The same will be true of video games. Individual creators will leverage new tech, and compete against the current industry leaders.

• New York book publishers still have prestige, but bestselling authors don’t need them anymore. Taylor Swift bypassed the whole publishing industry with her new book, and many others will soon do the same.

Yes, 2024 was tumultuous for participants in the culture business. But 2025 will look like total anarchy.

The rules have changed—and that means the rulers must also change. I’m not sure who will end up on top, but it won’t be the familiar names from the past.

I recently shared a controversial technology reading list. I recommended 26 books, but there was a catch.

All the books on the list were written by outsiders.

Instead of consulting technocrats or coders or venture capitalists, I turned to the best philosophers, humanists, novelists, social thinkers, and other non-STEM visionaries.

I hoped to assess today’s technology from a human perspective. And these were my guides and touchstones.

At this moment in history, we need this outside perspective. It may be our only hope in the face of today’s growing wave of dysfunctional tech.

The evidence is now clear and irrefutable. Technology is no longer about progress. (If you doubt me, consider this list of 52 warning signs.)

I promised back in August that I’d have more to say about the wise thinkers on my tech reading list. Today I want to tell you about one of the wisest of them all—Gregory Bateson.

That’s not a name you hear often nowadays. But you should.

The text below draws on an essay I published back in 2020. But the questions it raises are far more relevant today.

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WHY GREGORY BATESON MATTERS

(1) My Broken Dreams of a Counterculture

The counter-culture of the 1950s and 1960s is now a relic of the distant past, as quaint and charming as the hippie outfits and love beads in your grandparents’ attic. But today that whole movement feels like a dream, with less real-world impact than an LSD trip.

It was an experience (to use a popular word of the era). But experiences don’t last, by definition — perhaps that’s what makes them so special.

During my coming-of-age, in the aftermath of the protests and love-ins, I firmly believed that the outsiders had triumphed. We had stopped the war, overcome the censorship, and defeated the system—it would never recover. (Ah, how naive I was.)

I was too young to participate in the Summer of Love or attend Woodstock. But when I reached my teen years not long after these events, I couldn’t imagine society going back to its earlier stodgy ways.

You can say I was a dreamer, but I wasn’t the only one. There was a pervasive feeling that things had changed in some irrevocable manner.

Surely America had now learned the futility of promoting never-ending military campaigns in remote parts of the world. It was just as obvious that crass materialism and status-seeking via possessions had been discredited. Even more, power and money had been turned into jokes and talismans of shallowness — making room for other priorities, more experiential and principled, to come to the forefront.

I was certain that freedom of expression would never again succumb to the censorship and witch hunts of the 1950s. By the same token, we were too smart to continue polluting our environment and destroying our ecosystem. And who wanted to turn back the clock and give up hard-won gains in civil liberties, due process, equality, limitations on government surveillance, restraints on police brutality, and dozens of other areas of tangible progress?

Yet I now see that I was pretty much wrong on all counts.

I’d thought the counterculture had won the battle, but that was all a mirage. Peace and nonviolence didn’t prevail. Respect and tolerance didn’t become second nature. Crass materialism did not retreat—in fact, it didn’t budge an inch.

As I look back on those days with the benefit of hindsight, I have a nagging feeling that things have gotten much worse. We are angrier than ever before, more violent and self-centered, with fewer rights and responsibilities, less tolerant and forgiving, and with less consensus on how to improve the degradations—environmental, cultural, political, technological—that encroach on every side.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve started studying the 1950s and 1960s counterculture again. Not for a dose of nostalgia—although I can understand the appeal of that—but rather to grasp what went wrong and whether we can still fix it. The beatniks and hippies, with their happenings, love-ins, and flower power celebrations, actually did move the culture, at least for a decade or so.

They had some wisdom to share. Maybe we should listen again.

And that brings me to the topic of Gregory Bateson, one of the smartest and most wide-ranging intellects of the counterculture. He has, for the most part, been scandalously forgotten, yet his concepts and principles are especially relevant to the concerns of the digital age.

Bateson worked at the interfaces between technology, environment, and individual psychology. And he grasped the specific dangers faced by society when these three forces are in conflict with each other.

Facebook, Amazon, and Google didn’t exist back when Bateson lived, but he would have understood with acute insight what risks their dominance brings. If he were alive today, he would have perspicacious things to tell us about a host of other problems, whether in our environment at large, our neighborhoods and city streets, or in the deep recesses of our psyches.

His specialty was understanding the ways these are all linked and how changes in one sphere often start with shifts in another. Perhaps more than anyone of his generation, Bateson grasped that the revolution won’t be televised — in fact, it can’t — if the conflict is taking place in our own heads.

Bateson’s 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind arrived at the tail end of a tumultuous period when almost every aspect of society had been scrutinized and reevaluated. In fact, I consider this thick book of 38 essays, written over the course of three decades, as the summation of that disruptive era.

I could call it a kind of atlas or compendium of insights from the counterculture movement. But that wouldn’t do justice to Bateson’s ability to integrate these bits and pieces, drawn from dozens of disciplines, into a powerful, holistic worldview.

That’s quite an achievement, but perfectly aligned with Bateson’s background and training. His main focus was on the hidden systems that control behavior, and this had led him through one of the strangest career paths of any 20th-century thinker.

(2) Who Was Gregory Bateson?

If you had met Gregory Bateson at a cocktail party and asked him “What do you do for a living?” his answer would have changed dramatically over the course of his life. Let me present a thumbnail sketch of his many vocations, not just to impress you, but to show how Bateson was uniquely situated to integrate the disparate threads of the counterculture.

• Bateson started out a biologist, and with an exceptional pedigree — his father, William Bateson, had actually coined the term “genetics.” The younger Bateson demonstrated a deep understanding of Darwinian processes that he first learned at home during his earliest days.

• In the late 1920s, Gregory Bateson taught linguistics at the University of Sydney.

• In the 1930s, he was a high-profile anthropologist and did important fieldwork in New Guinea and Bali (often in tandem with his wife at the time, Margaret Mead).

• After World War II, he became a well-known psychotherapist and developed his famous double bind theory, which initially aimed at explicating the causes of schizophrenia, but could be applied to a wide range of other areas, including comedy, art, poetry, and organizational behavior (see below).

• In the 1960s, Bateson researched the effects of LSD at a Veterans Hospital near Stanford University, where he and Dr. Leo Hollister recruited future novelist and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey to participate in his experiments.

• Later still, Bateson moved to the Virgin Islands and ran a research laboratory funded by the eccentric John Lilly, who wanted to find ways of communicating with dolphins.

• Through all of this, our intrepid researcher maintained his greatest passion: the study and propagation of cybernetics, which aims to explain the systems of human behavior and thinking with a precision and scientific rigor akin to what Newton had applied to physics or Euclid to geometry.

As I consider the cumulative impact of Bateson’s wide-ranging vocations and experiences, I reach the conclusion that this polymath was the connecting node in the mid-century counterculture. As such, he is the single best person to give a large holistic expression to its ambitions and achievements.

More to the point, Bateson’s perspective is not only still relevant—something that can’t be said for many other gurus of that bygone day—but is perfectly attuned to the peculiar areas of dysfunction in our own time.

He deserves to be one of the leading thinkers of the digital age. In many ways, the Internet is the ideal case study for Bateson’s prescriptions. Those who want to launch a counterculture today (I’m one of them), do well to read his work.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind is a book that resists quick summary—as you might expect from an author who covered so much intellectual and physical territory in his life. But let’s extract a few of its major concerns and examine what they might tell us about our own situation.

In each instance, Bateson dealt with risks and conflicts that are easy to miss because they rarely occur on the surface. They often arise from inherent conflicts between the surface and other contexts, which can be at a macro level (an ecology, for example) or a micro level (a human psyche struggling for wholeness).

One of the core lessons gleaned from Bateson is that addressing problems in ways that seem direct and results-oriented often leads to failure. Consider this flawed approach as akin to a medicine that treats superficial symptoms without ever tackling underlying causes.

We find this mismatch everywhere online today—it’s a trademark of the digital age. Apps manipulate behavior, but ignore both macro social effects and the micro psychic impact.

They only measure (and reward) clicks. This is a recipe for disaster.

Let’s start with a critical distinction in Bateson’s concept of two types of human systems.

(3) The Two Systems

Bateson believed that one of the greatest innovations in human history is the feedback loop. He often talked about the steam engine as an analogy for healthy human interactions—focusing on the controls in the engine that check the process and keep it running at a steady pace.

If this feedback loop didn’t exist, the engine would explode.

When looking for similar feedback loops in human interactions, Bateson saw that they didn’t always exist, or operate in the way they should. As a result, he recognized that there were two kinds of systems: ones that relied on feedback to create stability, and others that tended to escalate and create runaway trends.

The Cold War arms race was an example of the latter. Rivalries (of nations, but also people) are human systems that tend to move to extreme limits before they are corrected—often by reaching some dangerous or even disastrous endpoint. In the case of the arms race, this endpoint took place soon after Bateson’s death with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In some ways, he anticipated this. Bateson taught that the resolution of a runaway process usually happens outside the process—because there are no obvious stopping points or checks within it.

And that’s how the Cold War ended. The Soviet military didn’t win (or lose) the Cold War. Instead the larger context shifted—so much so that the USSR no longer existed. Bateson would tell you that these outside interventions are necessary when runaway systems operate without a feedback loop.

In other scenarios, this runaway system could have achieved a catastrophic endpoint in a nuclear Armageddon. Environmental degradation is another obvious example of this. Unless an outside intervention occurs, the system collapses or blows up.

Why is this especially relevant today? An obvious answer is to point to the Internet as an extreme example of a runaway system. The business plans of web companies are always built on what entrepreneurs call the scalability of the Internet—its amazing capacity to spread trends and processes everywhere in the world at lightning speed.

Like the arms race, the Internet feeds on itself without any constraining feedback loop. Technocrats see this as an advantage, not a flaw.

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In the old days, a company might spend decades nurturing a single innovation. It took more than fifty years for some technologies (trains, electricity, etc.) to spread to the entire US. But nowadays the fastest-growing business models—whether an app or website or cloud-built service—can reach everywhere almost immediately.

To describe this in Bateson’s terms, the digital overseers have fallen in love with runaway systems. And in an uncanny, disturbing way, even our day-to-day lives away from screens and digital interfaces seem to mimic this tendency, riding a wave of escalating trends with no feedback loop to keep them in check.

When you see these processes from Bateson’s perspective, you suddenly understand why something as innocent as a search engine (Google) or social network for family and friends (Facebook) can create so many unanticipated problems, whether we are talking about the invasion of privacy or the distortion of daily news. Not only do these systems lack reliable checks and balances, but they were actually created with the goal of eliminating checks and balances.

This line of thinking also suggests that a different kind of internet could exist—call it an anti-web, if you will. This alternative digital world would apply technology to give control back to individuals, limiting processes of escalation and runaway conformity.

Think of it as an array of tools built on the model of anti-virus software or a blockchain or a private chat room. But you can only create the right kinds of checks and balances in a system after you have grasped the precise points where they have been bypassed or eliminated.

Bateson is still our guru in coming to grips with this. Which leads us to….

(4) Gregory Bateson’s Radical View of the Human Mind

This is the strangest ingredient in Bateson’s worldview—what he meant by the word “mind.” And his quirky approach to mental processes is hardly a small matter.

After all, his larger quest was an ecology of mind.

For Bateson, mind exists as part of an integrated system that also involves elements of the world. He gives the example of a lumberjack cutting down a tree with an axe. Bateson argues that any definition of this woodcutter’s mental processes that doesn’t also include the axe, the tree, and the feedback loop back to the human body, is both incomplete and dangerously misleading.

Although Bateson doesn’t make this comparison, his view is aligned with Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world. This way of capturing the context in describing human activity allowed the German philosopher to bypass many of the paradoxes and problems created by out tendency to divide everything into subject and object.

As Bateson saw it, these narrow definitions of selfhood aren’t just problems related to philosophy but can easily turn into crises in the environment. People who believe their inner life operates against the world take very different courses of action—hostile, exploitive, narcissistic—from those who understand their connectedness to their environment and social network.

Bateson claimed that the next huge step forward in human development would not come from technology. Instead it would arise from a sense of this larger connectedness.

If he is correct, this means that we can transform the world just by expanding our minds—and grasping our context and environment as constitutive elements in our own sense of self.

You can laugh at this, if you want. But this contextual possibility will always exists. And Bateson’s ability to articulate it is why I see him as the defining figure of the (now forgotten) modern counterculture.

Bateson believed he had only made the first steps on this journey during his own lifetime and worked to enlist others to join in this mission. He cherished situations that took people out of their subjective orientations—which for him could be listening to music, ingesting LSD, or nurturing a sense of spiritual connection.

But he knew that just seeking episodic relief from self-centered behavior wasn’t enough. If we exclude our surrounding habitat from our projects of self-care—in the plugged-in, screen-obsessed manner of contemporary culture—the larger systems we have ignored will eventually degrade and fail to support us. By all indications, that danger is far greater today than it was during Bateson’s lifetime.

Indeed, we may be approaching an irrevocable breaking point.

As theorist René Girard—who drew on Bateson’s concept of the double bind in his own studies of runaway violence—once commented: “When the whole world is globalized, you’re going to be able to set fire to the whole thing with a single match.”

(5) The Double Bind

Bateson originally developed the double bind model, the most famous concept to come out of his research, as a means of understanding dysfunctional families. But he soon saw that it could be applied to a wide range of other situations. And others have drawn on this concept in unique ways that Bateson never envisioned.

Girard is perhaps the most influential exponent. But we can see its impact on everyone from R. D. Laing to Allen Ginsberg—and on fields as disparate as linguistics, political science, and literary criticism.

Described in the simplest terms, the double bind represents a situation in which a person is required to do two things simultaneously, but these things are in conflict with each other. In the words of the well-known proverb, you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

The intensity of these situations is enhanced by the fact that they often occur in contexts where those involved must pretend that the double bind doesn’t exist. The double bind is like Fight Club—when you participate, the first rule is that you can’t mention it.

In Bateson’s classic example, a mother is emotionally distant from a child but forces the youngster to take the blame for the breakdown in intimacy. The child now faces a double bind: Speaking the truth will get the mother angry and lead to denials and even greater separation.

“The double bind is like Fight Club—when you participate, the first rule is that you can’t mention it.”

The youngster can please the mother only by accepting the role of the enemy who causes all the problems. This becomes part of a destructive daily routine. This kind of double bind, according to Bateson, is at the root of many mental illnesses.

Just admitting that the problem exists will make it worse. The only recourse is denial (and psychic pain). This is the classic double bind—and some of us have firsthand experience of it.

One of Bateson’s key insights was that the double bind usually takes place simultaneously in two different contexts. In the example cited, the mother’s hostile behavior takes place at one level and the explanation of the hostile behavior operates at a higher level.

This is why the double bind is the source of so much humor: What makes sense at one level is absurd at another.

• Consider Bob Newhart’s quip: “I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down.’”

• Or Yogi Berra’s complaint about a restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore—it’s too crowded.”

• Or Robin Williams: “Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves?”

• Or Steven Wright: “I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.”

Each of these gets laughs by mixing up behavior and the context for the behavior.

Unfortunately, the double bind is rarely a laughing matter. It’s like Sartre’s bad faith—the existential crisis we create by lying to ourselves—but on a much larger, systematic level.

In fact, that’s the very reason why the double bind is so dangerous: Its malevolence is embedded into the structures that surround us. The system forces us to lie even when we know the truth.

(6) How Do We Get Out of This Bind?

The double bind crisis of the present day is unprecedented, at least in the context of free democracies, which depend so much on truth-telling to function properly.

How can you diagnose this?

The first thing you learn about the double bind is that the evidence is always indirect. Participants won’t (or can’t) admit its influence. But to the outsider, the signs are clear. The main symptom of the double bind is a persistent and structural insistence on saying things that every disinterested party can see are simply untrue.

This is different from lying or hypocrisy, which are merely human weaknesses, not structural constraints. And it goes far beyond the well-known professions that deliberately spread untruths, such as used-car dealers and politicians.

But those vocations are useful in understanding the dynamic at play here. Why do politicians or shyster lawyers or spokespersons for big corporations say things they know aren’t true? Well, the answer is obvious: These individuals are embedded in a larger structure that demands falsehood and, even worse, rewards liars for assimilating the party line with total conviction.

I would argue that these structural forces are everywhere today. People may complain about fake news, disinformation campaigns, wokeness, junk science, fabricated grassroots movements, spin, and dozens of other manifestations of the same structural phenomenon. But it’s not a question of lies anymore, rather an issue of pervasive double bind contexts beyond any individual person’s power to disrupt or change.

Even more disturbing is how easily we’ve gotten used to all this. In our dealings with the world, we have simply come to accept that there’s an unbridgeable chasm between what we are told and what’s really going down. Even when dealing with someone who tells it straight, we look for the deception—and not because the other person is a habitual liar. Rather, folks are just doing their job, and creating that chasm between truth and reality is part of the job description.

Of course, they will never tell you that. But that’s also in the job description. We’re back to the Fight Club syndrome.

This is why Bateson’s work is so useful. He understands that getting angry and demanding the honest truth from someone in a double bind is a futile effort.

There’s a lot of anger out there now, but what it accomplishes is unclear. Bateson could have predicted that. Until the structures that impose the double bind are altered, truth-telling isn’t likely to happen—or when it happens, it’s only by pure coincidence.

As a result, feedback loops won’t work, and checks and balances will neither check nor balance. And in a fast-as-lightning internet age, susceptible to the runaway forces that Bateson himself outlined, those are matters of mission-critical importance.

This is why Steps to an Ecology of Mind still demands our closest attention as we approach its half-century anniversary. It’s not nostalgia, but mind (as Bateson defines it, with its connection to the entire surrounding social system) that’s at stake.

No, I’m not asking you to dust off grandma’s love beads, or hunt down grandpa’s tie-dyed T-shirts in the back of his closet. We got rid of those old fashions for good reasons. But we also ditched the counterculture—and not just the 1960s counterculture, but the whole concept of a counterculture —for something far worse.

Instead of a counterculture, with its robust decentralized structures that resist authorities and power, we have settled for warring factions that seek to augment force and dominion, steamrolling anything that stands in their way.

The counterculture, in a healthy system, offers a critique of power from outside—its goal isn’t running the authoritarian surveillance state, or supervising the overseas wars, or becoming shareholders in the polluting corporations. It operates outside abusive systems as a vibrant source of the checks and balances we desperately need right now.

That’s the counter in the counterculture.

A society without it turns into one more runaway, escalating engine, threatening at every moment to veer out of control—much like those Bateson analyzes in his studies of cybernetics.

That danger is something those beatniks and hippies never dreamed of, even in their wildest psychedelic visions. Somewhere along the way, their counterculture got discarded along with the denims and beads. That’s not just a matter of changing fashions, but systemic breakdown. As a result, we are further away from an ecology of mind than ever before. Sad to say, we can’t flourish—either as individuals or as a society—without it.

[This article is loosely based on an essay that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books on July 4, 2020.]

YouTube is the new TV. It makes more money than Netflix—or any other video platform on the planet. People rack up a billion user hours per day.

I’m one of them.

Sad to say, most of it is unappetizing fare. My Sicilian relatives would call it puzzi.

But if you know where to look, you can find anything and everything on YouTube—cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels. Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles….

We’re skipping schnitzel today. But below are 17 of my favorite recent YouTube videos.

Enjoy!

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Let’s praise Taylor Swift for spending her free time visiting children in a Kansas City hospital—instead of (like other celebrities) hanging out at a Diddy party.

In my world, this is how real superstars roll.

“I have never made a penny off my own music,” admits award-winning musician Mahalia—“100 million streams with all money made going to my label.” She adds: “This is pretty standard practice in most major label contracts.”

Several people sent me this video link—because they knew (correctly) that I’d be peeved at its account of artist exploitation. Now you can be peeved along with me.

In possibly related news, Spotify’s CEO sold another $28 million in stock this week. So far this year, he has sold almost a quarter of billion dollars in shares.

AI is bringing dead musicians back to life. But something about this video might make you feel queasy.

A year ago, I suggested that a new age of Romanticism was upon us. Since that time, others have discerned a similar shift in the culture (see this excellent article from Ross Barkan).

Now a YouTube video makes a strong case for 21st century Romanticism—with many examples.

I featured the band, Parlor Greens, on my recent best-of-year list, but here’s a new live in-studio performance that got me swaying and strutting.

I love this organ trio—funky and soulful, but also melodic. No, it’s not jazz. That’s a hot trend now: The we-don’t-play-jazz organ trio. But you won’t miss those Berklee practice room lickes here.

In a better world, this band could enjoy radio hits and dance hall fans. But right now it’s flying under the radar, like a New Jersey drone.

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A shopping mall destroyed my home town.

Maybe that’s not as scary as Godzilla destroying Tokyo (again!—yawn) or a cockroach eating Cincinnati. But it proved just as effective.

They cleared out 35 acres in the middle of my ‘hood to build this monstrosity, eliminating historic buildings and scenic park space. But the promised economic benefits never arrived—tenants soon left in the face of shootings, theft, and declining sales.

The mall eventually closed. But 25 years later, that huge wreck still sits in the middle of town—an enduring testimony to idiocy and greed.

Here’s what it looks like now.

And I am partly responsible.

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I worked in the construction of that mall—it was my summer job at age 18. And I believed the hype. I took pride back then in building a prosperous future for my home town.

But that’s not how I feel now. We all should have fought to preserve the old neighborhood.

And not just my neighborhood—there are dead malls everywhere now.

My home town is just one example of many. And there are also many “dying malls”—defined as enclosed shopping centers with less than 40% occupancy.

Not long ago, we hoped that these artificial gathering places could be robust, vital replacements for the neighborhoods we tore down. But what I’ve learned is that you pay a heavy price for replacing a real community with a fake one.

And that brings me to the subject of social media platforms—which increasingly resemble these old, decrepit malls.

They are the ultimate fake community centers. This makes them vulnerable, despite all the current visitors and lurkers and noise.

My home town mall also once had many visitors and lurkers, and lots of noise. But that wasn’t enough to guarantee survival.

Here are the ways in which web platforms are like these ugly malls.

1. People go there because other people go there—but this is a fragile foundation for a community.

In earlier days, gathering spots usually had some special claim to our attention and reverence. People gathered at the watering hole because that’s where they got water.

Or they set up shop at the dock or train station because that was where visitors, news, and commerce entered the community. Or they came together at some especially sacred, scenic, or useful location.

But tech leaders don’t pay any attention to those things. They operate on the Field of Dreams business model—if they build it, people will come. And they hope that this trend will create its own momentum, attracting more and more participants.

But the real world rarely operates like Field of Dreams. Just check out the foot traffic in Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. A web platform needs something else to build a community, and that something else is getting harder and harder to find in the current environment.

2. Malls died because there were too many of them. Social media is now entering that same phase.

During the 1980s, around 2,500 new shopping malls were built in the US. The market was saturated—even before the rise of online shopping.

There just weren’t enough consumers to support this huge expansion in consumerism. But they kept adding more and more malls—like Bob the Builder on Benzedrine.

Then the collapse came.

That’s how trends reverse—and it’s rarely a gentle process. The trend reaches a ridiculous extreme, and so the reversal is violent and unforgiving.

This is the Law of Reflexivity, and it deserves to be better known. Powerful trends actually cause their own collapse, because of the very intensity of their rise.

So in the US, 400 of the 2,000 largest malls shut down during just a three-year period. And the bloodletting isn’t over. Experts believe as many as half of the existing malls may not survive another two decades.

This is exactly the situation in social media—where hundreds (or thousands) of platforms compete for community members.

And more get launched every month.

People keep telling me that I need to move to Threads. Or Bluesky. Or Twitch or TikTok or Discord or Truth Social or Snapchat or Rumble or YouTube shorts or whatever.

I’ve set up profiles on some of these platforms—but then, sooner or later, I just walk away. Who has the time to post on all these apps?

Others are also abandoning the apps. Just look at the metrics.

For a long time, I thought that I needed these platforms for my vocation. Maybe you think the same way. But I now realize that they need us even more.

3. Malls started to look identical, with the same merchandise, tenants, architecture, and ambiance.

If you’ve seen one mall, you’ve seen them all.

The stores are the same. The layout is the same. The food court is the same. The ambiance is the same.

This is the curse of lookalike businesses. They need something distinctive to maintain competitive advantage—but that’s impossible in a business where everybody imitates each other.

In the last three years, social media platforms have started converging—imitating the endless scroll of TikTok. They think this is a brilliant move, because scrolling promotes addictive user behavior. It’s like a drug.

But the video content on these platforms is often identical—just like the stores at the mall. The interface is increasingly identical—just like the layout at the mall.

Users can move from one platform to another, and have the same experience. And it’s increasingly an artificial, claustrophobic experience.

That makes all of these platforms vulnerable. If some new player invents a slightly better algorithm—a cooler video slot machine or a more addictive interface—users will switch loyalties in a heartbeat.

You can’t build a business on the loyalty of addicts. And addiction is the state of play on social media these days. It started with TikTok and Instagram, but now it’s everywhere. I call it the dopamine cartel.

4. Many malls, like social media platforms, became magnets for lurkers, losers, and toxic behavior of all sorts—and this made community-building impossible.

The first shootings at my home town mall happened a few months after it opened. A lot of bad actors gravitate to these locations.

So I’m not surprised that, during the LA riots of 1992, looters and vandals headed straight for this mall. It was the obvious place for mayhem.

Here’s where that Field of Dreams boast is really true: Build it, and some people really will come—and spray-paint graffiti on every wall.

Later when young lunatics started shooting innocent people for sport—a hot trend of the new millennium—the local mall was often a preferred destination.

Social media is the online equivalent of this. You can’t actually kill somebody directly on the web—but these platforms are now indirectly responsible for a lot of ruined lives.

It’s gotten so bad the the Surgeon General now wants warning labels on social media apps—as if they were a dangerous drug or a pack of cigarettes.

5. These bunkers were never real communities, and never will be. They’re just businesses—often run with distrust or contempt for their users.

From the start, malls were artificial constructs designed to maximize profits for the owners—and this was insufficient to create a true community, a sense of shared purpose, or enduring loyalty.

The same is true of social media. The owners of these platforms don’t even pretend otherwise.

In the last three years, they stopped trying to build communities, and shifted to promoting addictive scrolling and swiping. They manipulate their users with a smug attitude that can only be described as contempt.

Just look at the terms and conditions. Imagine launching a business in your neighborhood and telling new customers this…

That’s not how you build a community. It’s how you exploit addicts.

If cartels posted terms and conditions on the doors of crack-houses, they would look much like this.

So, despite the name, social media is no longer social. And that’s the result of deliberate actions by the owners.

Their ideal user is a scroll-and-swipe zombie cut off from all living communities. In this way, my comparison with a dead mall is appropriate.

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Maybe if you’re already a zombie, you might not care. So many people nowadays are overwhelmed with such anomie and depression, that they can’t find a better option for socializing than these apps.

But if you still have a pulse, do you really want to pledge allegiance to these bogus communities of the undead?

There are still living, vital communities out there in the real world. They certainly exist in our neighborhoods—if you know where to look. And some even exist online. (I believe we have one here.)

I’ve already have cut back on my social media activity. And when I do visit those sad enclaves, I make an effort to do something uplifting and healing—spreading a little bit of love or beauty or humor.

I refuse to join the zombie wars. I prefer to focus on other pursuits—both in the real world and the digital one.

Maybe these apps for addicts will flourish for a few more years. But healthy, sane people are already wary, and their ranks are growing. So I anticipate that we will soon reach peak social media penetration—just as we achieved peak mall penetration back in the 1990s.

Other forces in society will displace these deadening artificial communities. That’s inevitable—because living, breathing organisms always prosper more than the undead.

I’m still not sure what shape these alternatives will take (although I have a few ideas), or the pace of their ascendancy. But I hope to be part of them.

Around the time of my tenth birthday, my parents gave me a copy of the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack album. This was the first jazz record I owned—except I didn’t know it was jazz.

I just assumed this was music for kids like me—with no connection to the world of grown-ups.

Back then, I was interested in Charlie Brown as a character in the Peanuts comic strip—which appeared in full color every Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. Peanuts was pervasive during my childhood, with the key characters showing up everywhere, from lunch boxes to T-shirts.

If you were an odd youngster back in those days, and didn’t fit easily into the stream of things, you tended to identify with Charlie Brown. At least I did.

Then the cartoon made the leap to television, showcased in 15 TV specials over the next decade. But by that time I’d graduated from high school and, putting away childish things, left Peanuts behind.

I had become, at age 17, a jazz fanatic. Maybe even a jazz snob (please forgive me).

This is when I rediscovered Vince Guaraldi, the composer and performer behind the Peanuts’ TV soundtracks. I learned that he was an extremely creative and expressive jazz pianist.

But, like Charlie Brown, Guaraldi was also a bit of an outsider. He played (and composed) jazz music in his own strange and beautiful way, violating most of the norms of the day.

Hearing Guaraldi from this new angle brought back my fond adolescent memories of his Charlie Brown music, but also deepened my interest in his other projects. A few years later, when I wrote my book West Coast Jazz, I had an excuse to dig more deeply into Guaraldi’s life and times.

I met many people who had known him, and even played with musicians who had gigged and recorded with him. I heard so many stories, I felt as if I had known Guaraldi myself.

Over the years, my fandom has grown more intense. So I chafe when I hear Guaraldi dismissed as a jazz lightweight or some kind of crossover simpleton who didn’t play the real thing.

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The truth is the exact opposite. Guaraldi was as real as you could get. For example, he was one of the deepest blues players on the West Coast, and got many gigs for that skill alone.

Consider this assessment of legendary music critic Ralph Gleason, who knew all the stars—from John Coltrane to Bob Dylan—and founded Rolling Stone magazine. But he claimed that Vince Guaraldi had delivered one of the best performances he ever heard in his life:

I will never forget one night at the Macumba in San Francisco when that group [Guaraldi with the Cal Tjader band] got a blues groove going that was something else again. It was so good that the band was giggling, the waitresses stopped serving to turn and look, and the audience held its breath. It was one of the best moments of music in my entire life, believe me.

That was what Guaraldi’s blues playing could do. And his work with Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete was just as inspiring. Or his choral music. Or, of course, his straight-ahead jazz.

To make that point more convincingly, I’m sharing below ten Vince Guaraldi tracks that are NOT from Charlie Brown soundtracks.

Happy listening!

Vince Guaraldi with Bola Sete: “Star Song”

I’m grateful that this performance got captured live on TV back in 1963. I’ve claimed elsewhere that guitarist Bola Sete deserved to be a bossa nova star, but he always ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even his partnership with Guaraldi was star-crossed, as demonstrated by this “Star Song.” The duo parted ways before the Charlie Brown opportunity emerged—otherwise I could easily imagine this track featured on the popular holiday soundtrack.

The piano playing here could hardly be more low-key—Guaraldi is doing almost nothing at the keyboard. But that almost speaks volumes. His touch and dynamics are exquisite. His phrasing is perfect—so much so that you wouldn’t want to change a single note. And his melodic instincts are unsurpassed.

The composition originated when Guaraldi received lyrics—now lost—from a fan who worked at Pacific Gas & Electric, and the pianist decided to set them to music. With a little luck, “Star Song” might have been a radio hit, but (like so much of Guaraldi’s best work) it didn’t fit easily into the dominant commercial genre definitions.

That’s still true today.

Vince Guaraldi, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”

This tune did become a radio hit. And one of the most unusual ones of the era.

“Cast Your Fate to the Wind” moves back and forth from pastoral meditation to light funk—everything held together by an unforgettable melody, as inspired as any Guaraldi ever wrote.

Nobody expected a hit single from “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” When Ralph Gleason wrote the liner notes to the album that included this song, he didn’t even mention it. It only arrived at radio stations because it was the B-side of the single for the intended airplay tune “Samba de Orfeu.”

But listeners loved it, and it climbed to number 22 on the Billboard chart. It probably would have gone higher if it wasn’t so out-of-place alongside the other hits of the day. Not even jazz tunes sounded like this back in 1963.

Drummer Colin Bailey does the best he can to create a rhythmic groove for the different sections, but the larger reality is that this song propels itself.

I note that this composition convinced TV producer Lee Mendelson to hire Guaraldi for the Peanuts soundtrack.

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A few days ago, I shared a section from my brother’s new book: Weep, Shudder, Die: On Opera and Poetry.

This was well received by readers.

Ah, because of my special clout as sibling, I’ve gotten Dana’s permission to share another extract from his book. Below is the opening of his chapter on one of my favorite composers and songwriters, Stephen Sondheim.

Enjoy!

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Dana Gioia on Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim’s work represents the culmination of the quest to create a new American opera from popular musical theater. More than Bernstein or even Gershwin, two of his formative influences, Sondheim developed a mode of musical and poetical composition that gave his later shows a unified style and continuous momentum without losing the power of their individual numbers. His fusion of popular energy and classical cohesion endowed his best work, especially Sweeney Todd, with a dynamic lyricality and broad appeal that no classical American opera composer of his generation could match.

In American musical theater, Sondheim is a figure as singular as Wagner was to Romantic opera. Conventional assumptions don’t account for his career. Blessed with a rare combination of musical and literary talent, which had been trained since childhood, Sondheim controlled the course of his own artistic development. He found the creative and financial support for his innovative ventures, despite many failures. By forty, he had become the most influential creative artist in American musical theater, a position he held for another half century. Like Wagner, he spawned many imitators, all inferior to the original. Sondheim can only be understood on his own terms. He was the exception who disproved the rules.

Sondheim embodied the most sophisticated traditions of American musical theater. He was both to the manner and the manor born. At the age of ten, the privileged, lonely boy fell under the tutorship of his next-door neighbor, Oscar Hammerstein II. The lyricist became an informal foster-father and guided the young songwriter for two decades until his death. “I was essentially trained by Oscar Hammerstein,” Sondheim recalled, “to think of songs as one-act plays, to move a song from point A to point B dramatically.” In his early twenties, Sondheim worked as the lyricist for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and Jule Styne’s Gypsy, two landmark musicals. In 1962, Sondheim mounted his first show as both composer and lyricist, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Modeled on the Latin comedies of Plautus, the musical had an innocent and irresistible silliness Sondheim would never recapture. It won six Tonys (including the top prize for Best Musical). Ironically, it also had the longest Broadway run of any Sondheim show over his long career. That must have rankled in his later years. But, as Goethe observed, to be lucky at the start is everything for an artist.

A Funny Thing was an inspired but conventional musical. In his subsequent work, Sondheim reinvented, show by show, the style and structure of the American musical. He not only changed the form of theatrical lyrics but also their themes. Working in collaboration with a changing cast of dramatists who wrote his books, he played Modernist games with narrative. In Company (1970), he replaced the plotline with a series of loosely connected vignettes. In Follies (1971), former showgirls gather in a theater scheduled for demolition where they are joined by the ghosts of their younger selves to relive their disappointments and dance routines. In Merrily We Roll Along (1981), the story is told backwards. These narrative tricks had the effect of removing the typical emotional arc of a Broadway show. Instead, they created a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, a distancing effect, that prevents the audience from easily identifying with the characters (who are usually busy observing themselves). Needless to say, clinical detachment was not the feeling commercial musicals are supposed to deliver.

Sondheim’s formal experimentation continued in idiosyncratic works such as Pacific Overtures (1976), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Assassins (1990), which had plots and themes that had nothing in common with traditional musicals. Each was inspired, original, but ultimately unsatisfactory, though Sondheim’s misses were generally more interesting than the successes of his Broadway contemporaries. Meanwhile as a composer, he devised ingenious ways to connect his songs and dialogue with nearly continuous orchestral accompaniment. In Sweeney Todd (1979) and Into the Woods (1987), he pushed the boundaries of the musical until it seemed to merge into opera.

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Significantly, Sondheim’s innovation was done within the constraints of commercial theater. (One can’t say “for-profit theater” without irony since so many of his shows lost money.) Sondheim never wanted to be anywhere except in the marketplace. He accepted its limitations as the necessary price to obtain its resources of talent, expertise, and money. Broadway was the only place he could work at the level of his ambition. Sondheim took pride in his hits and accepted his flops with stoic detachment. Failure stung, but he respected the authority of the audience; these people had allowed him to be a serious artist in a commercial category. Sondheim rejected the supposed polarity between high and low culture. He dismissed classical composer Ned Rorem’s condescending remarks about popular song. “You make a mistake,” Sondheim declared, “when you divide things into serious and pop.” His artistic achievement rested on his refusal to make the division everyone else took for granted.

There is no need to argue for Sondheim’s creative eminence. He was the major American theatrical composer of the last half century. Without including West Side Story or Gypsy, at least six of his shows remain actively in the repertory—A Funny Thing, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods. That is about the same number as the Rodgers and Hammerstein works still performed (though Sondheim’s shows had shorter runs, fewer movies, and almost no major hit songs). He won eight Tonys, eight Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. Sondheim’s long-standing preeminence leads people to forget how often he failed. Half of his shows flopped, including Anyone Can Whistle, Do I Hear a Waltz?, Assassins, and Road Show. Other projects were abandoned. Some shows, such as Follies, Passion, and Pacific Overtures enjoyed only modest success and lost money for their investors. Even his hits never matched the box office appeal of down-market fare such as Chicago, The Producers, or Wicked. A list of the 124 longest running Broadway shows does not include a single Sondheim score. Yet he wasn’t a coterie composer. One might say he captured half the audience, not a bad percentage for an artist. His shows, he observed, provoked “polarized reactions of fervent admiration or ferocious rejection.” But his admirers included the serious theatrical crowd—led by critics who knew from the first that he was a major figure.

Dana Gioia’s Weep, Shudder, Die is now available for purchase. You can learn more at this link.

I never expected Microsoft to enter the book business.

But on November 18, this huge tech company quietly announced that it is now a publisher. But there was an interesting twist.

Microsoft is “not currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts.”

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Let’s be totally fair. Nobody at Microsoft claims that it plans to replace human writers with AI slop. But this company has invested a staggering $13 billion in AI—it’s their top priority as a corporation.

So what you do think their goals are in the book business?

If you’re looking for a clue, I note that Microsoft’s publishing arm is called 8080 Books. Yes, they named it after the 8080 microprocessor.

How charming!

And just a few hours after Microsoft announced this move, TikTok did the exact same thing.

According to The Bookseller:

ByteDance, the company behind the video-sharing platform TikTok, has announced that it will start selling print books in bookshops from early next year, published under its imprint, 8th Note Press. 8th Note Press will work in partnership with Zando to publish print editions and sell copies in physical bookstores starting early 2025.

Here, too, nobody is claiming that they will replace humans with bots. But why would a company that has built its empire with online social media have any interest in the slow and stodgy business of selling printed books on paper?

Oh, by the way, TikTok’s parent is investing huge sums in AI. The company has even found a way around export controls on Nvidia chips. Just a few weeks before entering the book business, ByteDance’s sourcing of AI tech from Huawei was leaked to the press.

And as if these coincidences weren’t enough to alarm you, another AI publishing development happened at this same time—but (here too) with very little coverage in the media.

Tech startup Spines raised $16 million in seed financing for an AI publishing business that aims to release 8,000 books per year.

Here, too, the company says that it wants to support human writers. Maybe it will run a new kind of vanity publishing business. But is that a sufficient lure to attract $16 million in seed financing?

Many traditional publishers are openly mocking these AI competitors. Others are skeptical or fearful.

The company claims it will help writers—but writers are already condemning it.

If all this sounds a bit confusing, don’t feel bad. There’s very little transparency in AI right now.

For example:

• It’s hard to figure out which new books on Amazon are AI generated. Nobody wants to tell you.

• It’s hard to figure out which songs on the streaming platforms are AI generated. Nobody wants to tell you.

• It’s hard to figure out which news articles are AI generated. Nobody wants to tell you.

Do you notice a pattern?

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This is your clearest warning sign of how destructive this technology really is. If AI-generated slop were really so tasty, they would brag about it. But they are ashamed—and for good reason.

Writers should look at what’s happening to musicians—because this is a template for other AI initiatives.

A new study from CISAC predicts that AI will steal almost a quarter of musicians’ income within the next 4 years.

Today musicians only keep 8% of streaming revenues, but AI will squeeze them further. Four years from now, musicians will only receive 6.4% of streaming revenues

Streaming platforms can do this, because they are switching users to passive, algorithm-driven listening. By substituting AI slop for human songs, these platforms can reduce costs and boost profits significantly.

The gaslighting is over—you can’t fool musicians anymore. They now fully grasp the AI business model—which is to destroy their livelihood and replace human music with bot slop.

And it will get worse. It’s bad enough if I get tricked into consuming AI music or AI writing. But soon it will be AI bots pretending to be doctors, lawyers, therapists, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc.

Yeah, some of those frauds are already happening. But it will get worse—much worse.

The bigger issue is that deception is now built into the AI business model.

That’s why I praise publisher HarperCollins for announcing a very clear and fair policy on AI.

Authors can opt-in at their discretion. Revenues are clearly stated and divided equally. Limits on AI use are specified. Agreements have a defined termination point. Etc.

We need this kind of transparency from other players in the AI space. And you should be skeptical of any huge company that refuses to provide it.

Here’s where we stand.

We are now at stage three in the AI revolution:

1. Phase one was a time of grand promises—we were told that this exciting new technology would empower our efforts and improve our lives.

2. Phase two was a time of disappointment and controversy. AI did so many strange and destructive things to our culture, resulting in hallucinations, lies, and deceptions—with economic losses for a growing number of victims.

3. Phase three is a period of open war. The gaslighting doesn’t work anymore—artists and creators now understand the risks and damages. They have figured out that the business model is built on their economic impoverishment. But tech companies are investing trillions(!) of dollars to steamroller all opponents. Hence, a conflict is underway, and will intensify.

That’s the bottom line—this ‘innovation’ cannot be implemented without upheaval and conflict. Everybody will soon pick a side. That’s because this tech will hit you close to home, sooner or later, even if you’re not on the front lines today with the writers and musicians and other creatives.

This is not an ideal situation. But I welcome the clarity that comes with phase three.

People are waking up. Just look at the surveys on public perceptions of AI, and how they have changed over time.

The more they know about it, the less they like it.

Maybe a trillion dollars has been wagered on ‘disruption’ but it won’t happen without a fight. And even trillion dollar bets don’t always win. Sometimes they merely accelerate the reversal.

Yes, they’re coming at us very hard. But as they say in the reggae song, the harder they come, the harder they fall.

Over the last year, I’ve devoted hours each day to my obsessive search for outstanding new music. The list below is the result of this ongoing commitment to deep listening.

This is always my biggest project of the year. During the last decade, I’ve listened to more than ten thousand new releases.

Does that sound crazy? Maybe it is.

But this daily immersion into new music lies at the core of my vocation—which is to promote creativity and vitality in the face of the institutional stagnation that’s so damaging to the music business right now (as to so many sectors of the culture).

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This project is inevitably filled with equal doses of excitement and disappointment. But, once again in 2024, I came away from it with tremendous optimism about the state of contemporary music.

Even if record labels and streaming platforms falter, the musicians won’t let us down.

I found so many creative recordings along the way—many in hidden and unexpected places—and I’ve been looking forward to sharing this body of work with you.

This is the second (and final) installment of the my top 100 recordings of 2024—all genres, all styles, all geographies. (For part one of this survey, click here.)

I’ve included a link to audio or video for each album. I encourage you to ramble and sample.

Happy listening!

P.S. My best-of-year lists for previous years (going back to 2011) are available to premium subscribers in The Vault, which also includes more than 400 essays from my archive.

The 100 Best Recordings of 2024 (Part 2 of 2)

In alphabetical order.

Slobodan Mandić
U Prozoru
Dark Acoustic Guitar Blues instrumentals from Serbia

Matteo Mela & Lorenzo Micheli
Scarlatti: 12 Sonatas
Scarlatti Sonatas Performed on Two Guitars

Amina Mezaache and Maracuja
Vortex
Brazilian Flute for Dancing

Mildlife
Chorus
Australian Psychedelic Funk (with a Tinge of Steely Dan)

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