Weekend Reads (June 22): Queen, Google Maps, Social Media Warnings, Donald Sutherland (RIP)
Recommended weekend reading for June 22, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Following the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and other artists who’ve sold their music catalogs, Queen is selling their music catalog to Sony Music for $1.27 billion.
Queen’s music catalog is among the most valuable of the rock era — with classics like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Radio Ga Ga,” “39,” “Somebody to Love” and “You’re My Best Friend” as well as the perennial stadium-shakers “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions,” the songs are globally popular and enormously lucrative. The success of the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody shows the potential for the group’s name and likeness rights, and the likelihood of a jukebox musical that could open in London or on Broadway and then tour indefinitely.
Sony Music would receive all revenue related to Queen’s catalog with the exception of live performances. (Brian May and Roger Taylor continue to tour as Queen with vocalist Adam Lambert.)
The Pitchfork staff have published their list of the summer’s most anticipated albums, including new releases from Dirty Three, Eminem, The Jesus Lizard, Kendrick Lamar, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (to name a few). As for me, I’m still waiting for The Cure to release Songs of a Lost World (though I’m not holding my breath).
Casey Newton’s feeling a bit gloomy about the state of the web, and parasitic AI companies like Perplexity are the reason why.
Any reporter who did what Perplexity did would be drummed out of the journalism business. But CEO Aravind Srinivas attributed the problem here to “rough edges” on a newly released product, and promised attribution would improve over time. “We agree with the feedback you've shared that it should be a lot easier to find the contributing sources and highlight them more prominently,” he wrote in an X post.
In person, Srivinas can come across as earnest and a bit naive, as I learned when he came on Hard Fork in February. But any notion that Perplexity’s problems stem from a simple misunderstanding was dashed this week when Wired published an investigation into how the company sources answers for users’ queries. In short, Wired found compelling evidence that Perplexity is ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which publishers and other websites use to grant or deny permissions to automated crawlers and scrapers.
But Newton also highlights alternative publishing models that take AI into account, and compensate authors whose work is utilized by AI — which is only right and fair — might be a way forward.
If you’ve ever found yourself wishing that Google Maps had a “nicest route” or “most scenic route” feature, Kasey Klimes explains why that might not be the best idea in the long run.
The current [algorithm] is basically objective.
Any shift towards “nice” or “scenic” routes is going to take some new subset of variables into account; beautiful architecture, street trees, etc.
This naturally introduces bias to the system (again, at global scale).
Via TLDR Web Dev.
America’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, is calling for warning labels to be placed on social media platforms, similar to those placed on cigarettes.
It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents. A surgeon general’s warning label, which requires congressional action, would regularly remind parents and adolescents that social media has not been proved safe. Evidence from tobacco studies show that warning labels can increase awareness and change behavior. When asked if a warning from the surgeon general would prompt them to limit or monitor their children’s social media use, 76 percent of people in one recent survey of Latino parents said yes.
He’s also calling for greater restrictions on “collecting sensitive data from children” and the usage of “features like push notifications, autoplay and infinite scroll, which prey on developing brains and contribute to excessive use.”
As a parent of three kids, I’m all for this sort of thing. As a developer, though, I can’t help thinking about the technical limits and privacy implications of Murthy’s recommendations. And of course, we all know that Facebook et al. would fight anything like this tooth and nail because it could dramatically affect their bottom line.
Keith Phipps reflects on watching movies with his mother, who died earlier this year.
I’d probably need only two, maybe three, hands to count the number of movies I saw with my mom after I turned ten, but the outings were usually pleasant. Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women went over well and I think she liked Titanic, apart from the dirty scenes. When my father died in 2009, I had no idea what would happen next or whether she’d be able to make it on her own and, in truth, the years that followed would not be easy. But when mom settled in next to me to watch The Princess and the Frog on her first Christmas as a widow, it felt, for a couple of hours, that everything was as it should be, that nothing had really changed even though everything had.
Celebrated actor Donald Sutherland — known for his roles in M*A*S*H, Don’t Look Now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Pride & Prejudice — died this week after a long illness. He was 88 years old.
Born on July 17, 1935, in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, Donald Sutherland amassed some 200 film and TV credits spanning more than 60 years, from guesting on episodes of 1960s series including Suspense, The Avengers, Court Martial and The Odd Man to last year’s Paramount+ drama Bass Reeves. His big break in movies came with Robert Aldrich’s star-packed 1967 World War II drama The Dirty Dozen, playing Vernon Pinkley opposite Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, George Kennedy, Telly Savalas and others. A hit in theaters, it remains a seminal American war movie.
Numerous tributes and reactions have come in from Ron Howard, Joe Russo, Henry Winkler, Edgar Wright, and many others.
Netflix has announced that they’ll be opening a pair of “Netflix House” retail venues in 2025.
Details on what exactly will fill all that space and draw fans to the streaming giant’s first two permanent venues remain thin, but they will include “regularly updated immersive experiences” and “unique food and drink offerings,” according to Marian Lee, Netflix’s chief marketing officer.
Earlier this month, Sony Pictures acquired the Alamo Drafthouse theater franchise, the first time a Hollywood studio has directly owned a theater chain in almost 80 years.
From 1948 until 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice prohibited film distributors from owning an exhibition company under what was known as the Paramount Consent Decrees, which arose from a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The decrees essentially dismantled the old Hollywood studio system by forcing the majors to divest of their theater holdings.
At that time, the majors essentially controlled all aspects of filmmaking, from the talent to the productions to the theaters. The decrees forced exhibitors to stop practices like “block booking” (bundling multiple films into one theater license) and “circuit dealing” (entering into one license that covered all theaters in a theater circuit). The landscape was radically different then, however. There were no multiplexes, but rather one-screen theaters that could play one movie for months; a scenario that played into favoritism.
Given its rather idiosyncratic nature, one obvious question is whether “going corporate” will blunt the Alamo’s unique-ness, including its support of cult and underground cinema.
Related: One potential benefit of Sony’s Alamo deal could be more anime theatrical screenings.
Andrew Osenga’s reflections on the state of American Christianity, and in particular, the controversy surrounding pastor Robert Morris, are worth considering.
Leaders like Morris and songs like this, as well intentioned as the people behind them might be, are tiny parts of a larger Christian culture that has traded responsibility, kindness and humility for looking good, making money and being first to market.
The commercialization of Christian culture has led us to sacrifice wisdom for influence, and thus we are losing both.
[…]
In many ways it feels like the sun is setting on a particular era of American Christian empire. Its leaders are crumbling like pillars of sand and the institutions feel like empty shopping malls.
Finally, Luke T. Harrington tackles the age-old question: What does the Bible actually say about the existence of aliens?
This is one of those questions that puzzles me as well, since the Bible says nothing at all about the question of whether there’s life on other planets — which makes sense, since no pre-modern cosmology I’m aware of envisioned the planets as earthlike things that could be lived on. (Pick any ancient astronomer you want, and you’ll find a near-universal belief that planets and stars were all just incorruptible spheres of some “quintessence” circling the earth forever.) Nor does the question of whether there’s life on other planets strike me as something worth having a firm opinion on: until and unless I get abducted and probed, the question of whether extraterrestrials exist is something with very little bearing on my life.
From the Blog
Earlier this month, my wife and I read and enjoyed Hisashi Kashiwai’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives, in which a father/daughter duo track down long-lost recipes from people’s pasts. It got me thinking of the dishes and meals that I’d like to track down and rediscover, starting with my Grandma Morehead’s chocolate cake.
I occasionally go through a phase where I bake a lot of cakes, often employing the box mix hack. But nothing I make holds a candle to the chocolate cake that my grandma used to make 35+ years ago. It was dense and thick, and still good even after being stuck in the freezer for God knows how long, especially when topped with her homemade chocolate frosting. I did have her recipe at one point, having typed it out on her old typewriter, but I lost it many, many years ago. I sure would like to make it again, sometime, though.
Related: My review of The Kamogawa Food Detectives.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.