Weekend Reads (April 19): Tiki Culture, Bruce Springsteen, Internet History, Katy Perry
Recommended weekend reading material for April 19, 2025.
Every week, I compile a list of articles in order to give subscribers like you something interesting and thought-provoking to read over the weekend.
Michael Warren explores the enduring appeal of tiki culture.
The allure of tiki remains strong well into the second decade of what might be called the “tiki revival,” a rediscovery of this country’s tiki obsession from the post-World War II era that imprinted itself on countless parts of the culture, from cocktails to architecture. This revival is of a piece with the broader craft cocktail movement but also so much more, including the millennial generation’s embrace of the midcentury modern aesthetic and the increase in international travel by Americans over the past few decades. Since the COVID pandemic, the heightened interest in making cocktails at home has brought in new and younger converts to the tiki lifestyle. These days, you can find tiki bars in places as untropical as Tulsa, Minneapolis, and Cleveland. Your neighbor may be drawing up plans right now to transform his basement into a magical tiki oasis.
The Polygon staff have shared their picks for the best movies, TV series, video games, anime, and board games of 2025 (so far).
After years of resistance, Bruce Springsteen explains why he was finally OK with someone filming a documentary about his legendary performances with the E Street Band.
“I didn’t believe that the magician should look too closely at his magic trick, that it might alter it in some way,” Springsteen tells Variety’s Awards Circuit Podcast, in the Emmy season kickoff episode. “And we were doing fine… It’s really amazing that we have the films that we have from when we were a younger man, because I was pretty much against filming.”
Although I’ve always appreciated humor with a darker streak, bleak jokes can prove especially important when confronting oppressive regimes.
“It’s a way of expressing solidarity in the face of overwhelming malice. Authoritarians depend on an appearance of inevitability, and satire and mockery at least help to undermine that, a (very) little bit,” the cartoonist Dan Perkins, better known as Tom Tomorrow, wrote to me in an email. “Satire provides an outlet, for both creator and reader — at the very least, you can laugh at the malevolent incompetence of it all.”
In the first of three in-depth articles, Ars Technica chronicles the history of the internet.
The year was 1966. Robert Taylor was the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Processing Techniques Office. The agency was created in 1958 by President Eisenhower in response to the launch of Sputnik. So Taylor was in the Pentagon, a great place for acronyms like ARPA and IPTO. He had three massive terminals crammed into a room next to his office. Each one was connected to a different mainframe computer. They all worked slightly differently, and it was frustrating to remember multiple procedures to log in and retrieve information.
In those days, computers took up entire rooms, and users accessed them through teletype terminals — electric typewriters hooked up to either a serial cable or a modem and a phone line. ARPA was funding multiple research projects across the United States, but users of these different systems had no way to share their resources with each other. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a network that connected all these computers?
Via Six Colors.
I owe much of my current life — my job, certainly, but also many of my friendships as well as much of the music, movies, etc., that I enjoy and write about — to the actions and decisions of internet pioneers like Robert Taylor, Larry Roberts, Steve Crocker, and Vint Cerf. Their work forever changed the world, and more people ought to know their names.
Needless to say, I look forward to reading Ars Technica’s other two installments.
Speaking of pioneers, Bandcamp Daily pays tribute to the pioneers of computer music.
The first instance of what could be considered “computer music” dates back to 1951, with room-sized machines in Australia and England programmed to play existing songs—the first recording of computer music (restored about 10 years ago by the British Library), is a grinding, cello-like voltage sound playing “God Save the Queen” as directed by a computer program. Before the decade was out, Max Matthews, Lejaren Hiller, and others were experimenting with how to turn the computer into a complete musical instrument through writing programs that could algorithmically produce performances and also to synthesize sounds out of binary digits.
That work was part music and part research. The important centers—Bell Labs, the University of Illinois, Olivetti — possessed some of the most expensive and enormous equipment of that time, thereby enabling them to compile commands into sound. For many years, this process did not happen in real time; musicians would write and configure programs and scripts, uploading them, then waiting hours — even days — for the computer to finish calculating and to execute the results.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the speed and convenience of today’s computer technology. And I don’t want to give in to mindless nostalgia. That said, I sometimes miss the “old days” of computers, when it was a real commitment of time and effort to get those circuits and kilobytes of memory to do what you wanted them to do. Well, I don’t know if “miss” is the right word, but when I read about what the original programmers went through, computers still seemed magical and arcane compared to today. (Of course, I’d probably quickly change my tune if I actually tried my hand at what original programmers did.)
As tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai continue to cozy up and kowtow to Donald Trump, that’s led to a growing political divide with their employees.
The tech industry’s political allegiances remain divided. But as some in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley began shifting to the right politically, many of the tech industry’s everyday workers have remained liberal — but also increasingly nervous and disillusioned. Their mood is in stark contrast to the prominent tech leaders who have embraced a conservative populist ideology.
“I think you’re seeing a real gap between the leadership elite here in Silicon Valley and their workforce,” said Ann Skeet, senior director of leadership ethics at an ethics institute at Santa Clara University and a longtime observer of the industry.
When I discovered the internet back in the mid-to-late ’90s, there was a real sense of utopianism about this exciting new frontier. There would be no gatekeepers, knowledge would flow freely, all of the old social divides and biases would be washed away, and so on. Looking back, it was pretty naïve, but at the time, it really did feel like humanity was on the cusp of something new.
Of course, human nature being what it is, that was bound to fail. Even so, it’s particularly frustrating to see just how much things have changed in the last 30 years, and how tech — which once seemed like this great tool of liberation — has become increasingly comfortable with elitism and autocracy.
At this year’s Breakthrough Prize ceremony, which honors scientists, doctors, and researchers, Seth Rogen made some pointed comments about tech billionaires and the Trump administration. Rogen’s comments, however, were deleted from the version of the ceremony that was uploaded to YouTube.
Emboldened by a dirty martini backstage, Rogen jumped in with a none-too-subtle reference to past attendee and current DOGE mastermind Elon Musk. “And it’s amazing that others [who have been] in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science,” he said, clearly making Norton uncomfortable. The comment underlined the irony of Silicon Valley’s increasingly cozy relationship with the Trump administration, which has cut federal science funding and defied scientific consensus. “It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr, very fast,” Rogen continued.
Via Kottke.
Katy Perry, Gayle King, and several other women recently flew to space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin flight. Elizabeth Lopatto explains why so many people are seeing their excursion as little more than a stunt (and proof of the downsides to privatizing space exploration).
Even under normal circumstances, Perry, Sánchez, and the other women would be guilty of delivering stale rhetoric about how doing space tourism was reclaiming science for the girlies. But here, it was all happening against the insistent drumbeats of budget cuts at actual NASA, while the other rocket entrepreneur, Elon Musk, rearranged the agency to benefit himself.
It’s nice that Perry, King, et al. got to have a really cool experience. But let’s be honest and stop pretending that it was something more than an exercise in privilege — especially when the Trump administration is hurting America’s scientific endeavors, forcing NASA to minimize the contributions of women, propping up billionaires, etc.
Related: Katy Perry reportedly regrets making a “public spectacle” of her Blue Origin flight. “The insider revealed that the ‘Roar’ hitmaker feels uncomfortable about the in-flight moments that were later broadcast, including scenes where she floated in microgravity, held a daisy up to the camera as a symbolic tribute to her four-year-old daughter, Daisy Dove Bloom, promoted her upcoming tour setlist, and sang ‘What a Wonderful World.’”
Also related: Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy says that, according to the FAA, Perry and her Blue Origin crew mates do not qualify as astronauts. Not so fast, writes Eric Berger. “The bottom line is that there is no relevant federal definition of an astronaut. Duffy’s own agency certainly doesn’t claim responsibility for making that designation.”
This post gets a bit technical, but it does a really good job of highlighting some of the fundamental issues with Twitter-like social networks (e.g., Bluesky). Consider, for instance, the restrictions on editing one’s posts.
By withholding an edit feature, Twitter chains people to their mistakes, and cemented immutable mistakes have the potential to cause problems. For instance, in 2013, the formatting of the hashtag Now Thatcher is Dead allowed it to be misinterpreted as Now That Cher is Dead, provoking a premature outpouring of grief from her fans. Typos and autocorrect can easily transform a friendly message to into a rude one and generate misunderstanings. During an emergency, inaccurate information can propagate farther than subsequent posts issuing corrections, potentially even putting people in danger when health and safety are on the line. These are all scenarios where people deserve to be able to edit their own posts once they realize the problem.
Via Manton Reece.
X/Twitter does offer editing functionality, but only for users who upgrade their account. Threads only gives you 15 minutes to edit your post. Currently, it’s only possible to edit Bluesky posts through a third-party app, but that might change when Bluesky rolls out their own subscription model.
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