Weekend Reads (Oct 22): The Cure, Tolkien, Kanye West, TikTok
Recommended weekend reading material for October 22, 2022.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
In light of the upcoming 30th anniversary reissue of The Cure’s Wish, Damiano Gerli reflects on the album’s relationship to the rest of the musical world at that time.
Wish recorded a unique historical moment for The Cure, while still being hitmakers, they were starting to have to play catch-up with other bands. While its status as a rock album lies probably more in its intentions than the actual finished product, Wish remains one of the better records from the time. Especially when compared with similar efforts from the time, R.E.M.’s Monster, for example, Wish stands out among the best artifacts from the short lived “hard” rock renaissance of 80s bands trying to keep their places in the charts.
Wish’s 30th anniversary edition will be released on November 25 (it was originally scheduled for an October 7 release).
Related: My review of Wish, which just so happens to be the first Cure album I heard. While Disintegration remains their finest album, Wish (along with its various B-sides) is the Cure album that I probably reach for the most, and that stirs up the strongest emotions still to this day.
One of my favorite critics, Steven D. Greydanus, assesses the first season of The Rings of Power. and in particular, its treatment of Orcs.
Given the prominence of the Gandalf and Sauron reveals (among other elements) in the finale, I have to say season 1 ended for me closer to the quiet end of the whimper-bang spectrum than I had hoped. Yet the highs of the season’s second half offer ongoing reason for sustained interest. Among these is the exploration of conflicting ideas about the nature of the Orcs — as seen, at least, through the eyes of Galadriel and the Orc leader Adar (Joseph Mawle). Adar’s name in Elvish Sindarin means “father,” and he is said to be one of the first fathers of the Orcs: an Elf captured, tortured, and corrupted by Morgoth to produce a warped race of slaves. Adar tells Galadriel that he rebelled against Sauron and that he wants the Southlands as a home for Orcs to live in freedom. Delightfully, he also repeatedly indicates that the Orcs “prefer Uruk,” their name in the Black Speech, to “Orc” (which is morphologically closer to the Sindarin form “Yrch”).
After getting kicked off Twitter and Instagram for making antisemitic comments, Kanye West has announced that he’s buying Parler, a right-leaning social media platform that’s been accused of aiding the January 6 insurrection.
In recent years, Ye has expressed increasing support for right-wing causes, but his statements also frequently tip over into controversy and conspiracy. Earlier this month, he was criticized for, along with Owens, wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “White Lives Matter” at Paris Fashion Week and for comments made during a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson. Unaired segments of the interview showed Ye making antisemitic statements and espousing various conspiracy theories, including stating that fake children are being used to manipulate his own offspring.
Related: In their zeal to announce the sale to West, Parler accidentally doxxed some of its most important members.
TikTok has grown increasingly popular in recent years, but the platform is embroiled in security issues, including allegations that it planned to surveil U.S. citizens.
[I]n at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company, the materials show. It is unclear from the materials whether data about these Americans was actually collected; however, the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users’ devices…
[T]he material reviewed by Forbes indicates that ByteDance’s Internal Audit team was planning to use this location information to surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes.
As the article points out, however, TikTok is not the only social media platform that targeted specific users: both Uber and Facebook have been accused of something similar.
Robert Rackley reflects on the disturbing rumor going around some right wing circles concerning litter boxes in high schools, and what that says about our larger society.
Theoretically, the proliferation of media should have brought about easy dismissals of stories like this after simple fact checking. Many news outlets have looked into these claims and found no evidence of their veracity. However, that is not a barrier to the spread of even the silliest rumors in a post-truth society. This isn’t totally new. As P.T. Barnum once said, “Many people are gullible, and we can expect this to continue.” Now, though, false beliefs appear to be moving faster than ever.
As I wrote on Twitter, I suspect people spread these rumors, not because they actually believe they’re true, but because they dovetail nicely with all of their assumptions that public schools are a bastion of secularism, liberalism, political correctness, etc. Also, if they’re an elected official, such rumors are a good way to keep their base outraged and on their side — and get themselves re-elected.
One of my own state’s senators, Bruce Bostelman, helped to spread these rumors, claiming that schoolkids “dress up as animals… during the school day; they meow, and they bark… And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use.” He later backtracked, but unfortunately, he’s the only elected official to do so as far as I know.
For years, the humble GIF enjoyed a position of prominence thanks to its use for memes and “reaction” GIFs. But with the rise of Instagram and TikTok and improvements in video compression, the GIF is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Most popular sites—including Twitter and Imgur—convert GIF uploads and serve the animations as MP4 videos. As Kohler explained to me, video compression has improved so much over the years that many video files are much smaller than GIF image files. He pulled a GIF from a movie and a graphic-art GIF to show me the difference. The GIF from the movie was nearly 4.5 megabytes, and the MP4 translation of it was about 20 times smaller, at less than .23 megabytes. “MP4 is the right choice for this kind of image,” he said. “Much smaller, very similar visual effect.”
The Internet Archive has announced a new initiative: Democracy’s Library.
Democracy’s Library brings together more than 700 collections from over 50 government organizations, archived by the Internet Archive since 2006. With more than half a million documents (and counting) from local, regional, and national governments, we’re just getting started!
A few samples include a report on organized crime on Wall Street from 2000, a guide to Canada’s edible and poisonous mushrooms, a reference for mountain-lion trapping from 1933, and a 1915 guide to dry land farming in the Southwest.
From the Blog
The first season of Amazon’s The Rings of Power is finished. And while it’s not without flaws, it’s faithful to the spirit of Tolkien’s beloved mythos.
On a related note, I really appreciated the series’ religiosity. Once thing I feared would be a downplaying of the Valar and Valinor despite being set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, when such things had more presence in the world. But I had no reason to be; the series is practically filled with acknowledgment, if not worship, of Middle-earth’s great powers.
Nowhere is this better seen than in this fantastic line by Galadriel: “Ours was no chance meeting. Not fate, nor destiny, nor any other words Men use to speak of the forces they lack the conviction to name. Ours was the work of something greater.” (This Twitter thread does a good job of exploring the evidence and implications of divine intervention in The Rings of Power.) Considering that Tolkien’s legendarium is inseparable from his Christian faith, such lines were a delight to hear.
In other words, I’m looking forward to season two, which actually began filming earlier this month.
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