Weekend Reads (June 14): Weird Al, Brian Wilson (RIP), Christian Music, Apple’s “Liquid Glass,” “Andor”
Recommended weekend reading material for June 14, 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.
“Weird Al” Yankovic is currently prepping for his biggest tour ever, which just makes his longevity all the more impressive.
The world, Yankovic knows, is also not the same as when he first became famous. “I got a record deal, I got on MTV, and I kind of had the market to myself,” he reflects. “Now the playing field has been so leveled that anybody can upload their material to YouTube or various portals like that. And if the stuff is good, chances are people will eventually see it. I’d like to think that if I was coming up now, I’d still do OK, but it would just be more of a challenge.”
It’s a generous sentiment, a reminder that, as Miranda puts it, one of Yankovic’s many talents is also “reading the room.” But in its humility, it’s also a reminder that, flooded as the market may now be with funny people on the internet, none of them, still, are doing it like Weird Al: the 65-year-old who once thought he’d play accordion at weddings and Italian restaurants, who’s about to make his Madison Square Garden debut.
Brian Wilson, who co-founded the Beach Boys and was one of the most influential pop songwriters of all time, died earlier this week. No cause of death has been announced, but Wilson has been previously diagnosed with a neurocognitive disorder. He was 82 years old.
A panic attack induced by a heavy touring schedule led Wilson to decide to stop touring with the band in 1964, and he instead focused his time on what would become one of The Beach Boys’ landmark albums, 1966’s Pet Sounds. The band’s 11th studio record, it was promoted upon release as one of the most progressive and experimental pop albums ever produced, but was deemed something of a commercial and critical flop at the time. Today, it is widely regarded as one of the most influential albums in music history.
Watch the official video for “God Only Knows,” which Paul McCartney once called “the greatest song ever written.”
Related: Tributes to Wilson have come pouring in from the likes of Sean Ono Lennon, John Cusack, Questlove, Mick Fleetwood, and many, many more.
Also related: Back in 2012, legendary bassist Carol Kaye shared her experiences of working with Wilson on albums like Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!). “He was a bright, quiet, nice kid, with a subtle sense of humour, who heard music in a different way.”
Sly Stone, leader of the legendary funk outfit Sly and the Family Stone, died earlier this week. He was 82 years old.
Sly and the Family Stone were known for wearing flamboyant stage attire, as well as their adventurous blend of funk, R&B, soul, and Motown arrangements. Their music tackled a range of subject matter; from free-spirited dance tracks to songs confronting discrimination and political unrest.
Check out their legendary 1968 performance of “I Want to Take You Higher” on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Related: Ben Greenman reflects on Stone’s legacy. “Sly’s work was, while he was making it, whether with the band or on his own, already larger than one single life, and that does not and will not change simply because he has departed.”
Also related: The Roots’ Questlove pays tribute to Stone. “Sly was a giant — not just for his groundbreaking work with the Family Stone, but for the radical inclusivity and deep human truths he poured into every note.”
The sexual assault allegations surrounding Michael Tait (formerly of Newsboys and DC Talk, two of the biggest Christian bands of all time), highlights the flaws of the Christian music industry and the danger that it presents to fans looking for moral, spiritual entertainment.
The Christian music industry has its own subculture, and that subculture includes radio stations, awards shows, industry magazines, labels, and writers like me. It has all the trappings of the mainstream entertainment industry, celebrity culture included. And it has provided a context for Christian artists and audiences to have the star-fandom interplay.
But Christian music fans have wanted too much from this entertainment ecosystem, believing that their version of it could be free of many of the scourges of the mainstream (exploitation, abuse, greed, substance abuse, narcissism). They have lifted up a set of celebrities who seem to offer safe fandom, free of the moral entanglement of throwing in one’s lot with someone who might be the subject of scandal.
But here’s the inconvenient truth of fandom: there is no guilt-free version.
Related: Michael Tait has confessed to abusing cocaine and alcohol, touching other men “in an unwanted, sensual way,” and “living two distinctly different lives” for the last two decades. He now faces additional allegations that some of his victims were minors at the time.
Thanks in part to some changing demographics, Christian music is currently enjoying a significant burst of mainstream popularity, especially on streaming and social media.
Last year, CCM had its biggest streams on Spotify, where the genre experienced a 60% growth rate globally over a five-year period as artists reached beyond the confines of the Christian market to occupy sparsely-held mainstream space. And now, for the first time in 11 years, two CCM songs — Forrest Frank’s “Your Way’s Better” and Provident’s own Brandon Lake’s “Hard Fought Hallelujah” featuring Jelly Roll — have been charting simultaneously for weeks on the Billboard Hot 100.
Related: Brandon Lake and Jelly Roll’s “Hard Fought Hallelujah” is arguably the most popular example of “barstool conversion rock,” which sits at the intersection of Christian aesthetics and conservative country music values. “Barstool conversion rock is meeting a social and political moment with a message and aesthetic geared toward conservative-leaning men. It’s seeker-sensitive, faith-flavored music for the spiritually curious and possibly inebriated.”
Apple’s WWDC 2025 took place this week, and the company unveiled some pretty big updates across its line of software, including a complete visual redesign that they’re calling “Liquid Glass.”
Apple packed a bunch of major updates into its annual Worldwide Developer Conference keynote. During the event, the company showed off the sleek design refresh coming to its operating systems, as well as a mix of new features for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, and more.
I’m really intrigued by “Liquid Glass.” The demos that I’ve seen look promising, but it’s hard to tell until you actually see and experience it in person. John Gruber’s a fan so far, but other folks have concerns about its readability and usability. If past OS redesigns and updates are any indication, though, I suspect Apple will gradually tone down the glossiness and/or give users the ability to reduce or disable it entirely.
As is the case with many folks in the history of computing, you probably don’t recognize the name Bill Atkinson. However, it’s impossible to imagine how today’s computers would look and function without his groundbreaking work. Atkinson died earlier this month of pancreatic cancer. He was 74 years old.
Atkinson’s contributions to Apple read like a greatest hits of fundamental computing innovations. His work on the Lisa Window Manager introduced overlapping windows and the pull-down menu bar (for which he received a patent) to personal computing. His aforementioned QuickDraw graphics primitives powered both the Lisa and Macintosh interfaces after Atkinson discovered algorithms for drawing shapes like rounded rectangles (“roundrects”) quickly on limited hardware.
He also invented the selection lasso and “marching ants” (an animated dotted line that marks a selection area) while creating 1984’s MacPaint for the original Macintosh, which established the conceptual framework that image editing apps like Adobe Photoshop would later follow.
“His code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised,” wrote [John] Gruber in his tribute. “The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware.”
Atkinson also created HyperCard, a “hypermedia” authoring tool that predated and influenced the World Wide Web. I had friends who developed in HyperCard back in junior high, and I remember it seeming so magical and futuristic. And of course, I used MacPaint all the time in school.
Related: Bill Atkinson’s 10 rules for making interfaces more human. “He knew the mark of great interface design was when a user could stop thinking about the tool and focus entirely on the work itself.”
Millions of people converse with ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots concerning all manner of topics. But for some users, those chatbots encourage wild conspiracy theories and delusional thinking.
In recent months, tech journalists at The New York Times have received quite a few such messages, sent by people who claim to have unlocked hidden knowledge with the help of ChatGPT, which then instructed them to blow the whistle on what they had uncovered. People claimed a range of discoveries: A.I. spiritual awakenings, cognitive weapons, a plan by tech billionaires to end human civilization so they can have the planet to themselves. But in each case, the person had been persuaded that ChatGPT had revealed a profound and world-altering truth.
Journalists aren’t the only ones getting these messages. ChatGPT has directed such users to some high-profile subject matter experts, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and an author of a forthcoming book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman A.I. Would Kill Us All. Mr. Yudkowsky said OpenAI might have primed ChatGPT to entertain the delusions of users by optimizing its chatbot for “engagement” — creating conversations that keep a user hooked.
In the end, “engagement” will be the doom of us all.
Given that video games are an inherently visual medium, the thought of blind people playing them seems a little, well, odd. But Ross Minor is both blind and a devoted gamer, and he’s trying to make video games more accessible to the visually impaired.
To the outsider, this sounds nonsensical. The “video” part of “video game” comes from the Latin for “see.” Isn’t it a bit unreasonable, expecting such a visual medium to be made blind-accessible? But Minor is making progress. He’s even becoming something of a celebrity in his field, with some impressive credits to his name: He consulted on Rare’s Sea of Thieves and the Xbox game As Dusk Falls, narrated the audio description track for Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, and is now working on a number of titles from well-known studios whose names I can’t print, due to nondisclosure agreements. Because of people like him, and a handful of sympathetic allies in the industry, there are now more options for blind gamers than ever.
The second and final season of Andor — aka, the best thing to happen to Star Wars in a looong time — wrapped up last month. Its story of tyranny and resistance feels nigh-prophetic given the current headlines, but I wrote about the thought-provoking fate of one of the series’ minor characters.
It’s easy to look at Perrin and Mon and say that we’d unquestionably be like the brave senator. We’d obviously speak out against tyranny and readily sacrifice everything for a just cause. But Andor’s forceful storytelling and moral clarity implore us to really consider the truth of that.
Finally, The Playlist is counting down the 100 greatest television shows of the 21st century (so far) and highlighting just how much televised entertainment has changed in the last 25 years.
It may be hard for many to believe, but we are now 25 years into the 21st Century, and it’s time to pause and consider what has been a transformative period in modern media. Since 2000, the internet has reached almost every corner of the globe, social media has overthrown governments, and over 88% of Americans are subscribed to at least one streaming service. A technology that was a pipe dream on Dec. 31, 1999. In this context, the television industry experienced the explosion of the “Peak TV” era, which gave rise to a goldmine of new programs and gifted voices. Many have referred to it as the second Golden Age of television, and while it’s effectively over, it pushed episodic television to unexpected new heights.
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