Weekend Reads (July 5): “Little House on the Prairie,” AI Music, Lorde, Soviet Anime, Jimmy Swaggart
Recommended weekend reading material for July 5, 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.
Note: If you’re a paid subscriber, then I hope you’re enjoying this month’s playlist, which I shared earlier this week.
Netflix is currently working on a reboot of the beloved Little House on the Prairie TV series, which was originally based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved novels. But a modern adaptation may find it difficult to thread the needle between accommodating modern sensibilities and becoming “woke.”
The series recently began filming in Canada with Rebecca Sonnenshine (The Boys, The Vampire Diaries) serving as showrunner. Netflix is pitching its Little House as “part family drama, part epic survival tale, and part origin story of the American West,” while promising “a kaleidoscopic view of the struggles and triumphs of those who shaped the frontier.” It’s hard to see how incorporating third-rail subjects like the origin of the American West (built off the displacement and slaughter of millions of indigenous people) and a ‘kaleidoscopic” view (read: a wide range of POVs) can be pulled off in a way that’s faithful to the books, satisfies the broadest possible fan base and does not irritate someone.
Bob Fischer interviews Ben Holton, one of the leading lights of the “nostalgist” genre due to his work in bands like Epic45, The Balloonist, and Birds in the Brickwork, and the Wayside & Woodland Recordings label.
Afternoons used to last forever. Stillness would pervade, a sense of sweet torpor punctuated only by the pattering beats of a BBC test card or the austere parps of an Open University module. Raindrops might trickle down the window panes, motes of dust might float in rays of pale sunlight peeping through the front room curtains. The aftermath of illness often hung in the air: a sniffle, a cough, perhaps even mumps or chickenpox.
These listless feelings are captured perfectly in A Quiet Day, the second album by The Balloonist. It’s a project helmed by Ben Holton, who has been making music for over 20 years under an impressive collection of aliases. He has recorded as My Autumn Empire and Birds in the Brickwork, and also as the frontman of epic45, a band he formed in the 1990s with schoolfriend Rob Glover. And, since 2006, he has run Wayside & Woodland Recordings, a label whose releases have become synonymous with a very pastoral take on fuzzy childhood memory.
I’ve been a fan of Holton and his contemporaries’ music for over two decades now. And though there’s something distinctly British about much of their music, with its references to specific locales, etc., and I’ve lived my entire life in Nebraska, their songs still resonate deeply with my own childhood memories of growing up in the ’80s.
If you’re on Spotify, you could be jamming to an AI-generated band and not even know it.
While many artists are vehemently opposed to using AI, some have leaned into the trend to assist with music production. However, it doesn't seem like there's an artist behind this group. In less than a month, The Velvet Sundown has released two albums on Spotify, titled Floating On Echoes and Dust and Silence. A third album is releasing in two weeks. The tracks have a classic rock vibe with a cacophony of echoey instruments and a dash of autotune. If one of these songs came up in a mix, you might not notice anything is amiss. Listen to one after another, though, and the bland muddiness exposes them as a machine creation.
The Velvet Sundown vehemently denies being AI, however, even though no one’s been able to find any actual evidence of the band members’ existence. The band has supposedly agreed to do interviews with journalists, but to date, this looks more like a stunt than anything else.
Related: Popular music YouTuber Rick Beato uses AI to determine if The Velvet Sundown’s music is AI-generated or not.
Also related: It’s getting more and more difficult to avoid AI-generated music on Spotify, YouTube, and other streaming platforms. “AI slop is flooding every single digital platform, and music streaming services are no exception — so much so, even someone who generally avoids AI might find themselves unknowingly listening to a robot hornily singing about butts.” (Now that’s a lede.)
Also also related: Pitchfork’s Kieran Press-Reynolds reveals how AI wreaked havoc on the lo-fi beat scene. “Longtime heads who fell in love with lo-fi beats and delicately craft it themselves are starting to panic. Obsessives on the Reddit forum for lo-fi beats, which banned AI submissions late last year, recently despaired about how the scene has been ‘overtaken’ and ‘lost its soul.’”
Indie-rock band Deerhoof has decided to remove their music from Spotify in protest of Daniel Ek’s military investments.
Along with being the the co-founder and chief executive of Spotify, Daniel Ek is the founder of an investment fund called Prima Materia. It was reported earlier this month that Prima Materia led a new round of investment in Helsing, a defense company that sells software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to inform military decisions. Prima Materia has been investing in Helsing since 2021, and the new round of funding amounts to 600 million euros ($693.6 million). Helsing currently operates in the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.
Other artists who’ve pulled their music from Spotify include Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and India.Arie, but they’ve since returned to the streaming giant.
Lorde’s new album, Virgin, was released on a transparent plastic CD that’s fully recyclable. Which is nice and environmentally friendly, but there’s just one little catch: it won’t actually play in CD players.
One TikTok user demonstrated that her car CD player was unable to recognize the disc and said that forcing the CD inside resulted in automatic ejection, mirroring similar reports made in Reddit comments. “Whoever decided to design this is an idiot,” said elyxirtalkssmack. “Cars can’t read this CD, Walkmans can’t read this CD. You need to create CDs that are fit for purpose for the medium in which they are played on, which is older technology.”
Back in the ’70s and ’80s, the Soviet Union fell in love with Japanese animation, and even started producing its own anime.
By the early ‘80s, Japan’s animated features had “firmly established themselves on the adolescent silver screen,” according to author Alexei Khanyutin. And he felt that Phantom Ship, in particular, had “thrown down a challenge to our animation.”
The Soviets tried to answer that challenge — with a sci-fi feature that might appeal to the adolescent crowd.
In 1981, Soyuzmultfilm put out The Mystery of the Third Planet. The project was a “counterattack,” in Khanyutin’s words. “It’s indeed an attempt to fill a certain vacuum in the area of adolescent films,” admitted Fyodor Khitruk. “The Japanese have actually proven to be more far-sighted and resourceful in this regard.”
AMC, one of the nation’s largest movie theater franchises, recently warned customers that they can expect up to 30 minutes of ads and trailers before movies actually start.
AMC Theatres is making it easier for moviegoers to know the actual start time of their film screening and avoid sitting through lengthy ads. A new notice has started appearing when people purchase tickets via the AMC website, warning that “movies start 25-30 minutes after showtime.”
I mean, sure you can adjust when you go to the theatre, or you can just stop going altogether. It’s almost like movie theaters don’t actually want our money.
David McNutt discusses the relevance that classic pagan works written long before Christ, like Homer’s Odyssey, can have for Christian readers.
Why should Christians bother reading works by non-Christians, including things written before Christ, especially when they are full of pagan gods, immoral heroes, and condoned violence? Why should we read this epic poem, whose protagonist is sometimes shrewd and self-sacrificial, but is also arrogant, duplicitous, and vengeful? Or, to put it rather bluntly, shouldn’t we just read our Bible? Over the years, I have found through discussions in both the classroom and the church that Christians sometimes want to read these kinds of books, but they’re not sure if they should read them and, if they do, how these works might relate to their faith.
On July 1, Jimmy Swaggart died at the age of 90. Throughout the ’80s, Swaggart was one of the world’s most popular televangelists, reaching millions of people around the world. His ministry began to collapse in 1988, though, after he was caught paying a woman for sex in a cheap motel.
People magazine called him “a spellbinding performer” who would “rant, weep, thrust his Bible high in the air,” using the whole stage and “whipping his followers and himself to a devotional frenzy.”
The TV ministry grew until, at its zenith, his sermons were reaching an estimated 510 million people in 145 countries. In 1987, Swaggart was receiving an average of $500,000 in donations every day.
Then came the spectacular fall. A minister named Marvin Gorman was mad at Swaggart for Swaggart’s role in forcing him to confess to an extramarital affair with a deacon’s wife. Gorman sought revenge, and his son Randy was a police officer who knew Swaggart was a frequent guest at a Travel Inn, where men rented cheap rooms for quick sexual encounters.
Technology has progressed to the point where newer phones, laptops, etc., only bring marginal improvements over their predecessors. Thus, writes Arun Venkatesan, it’s easier — and more preferable — to stick with older models when you prefer their aesthetics.
This isn’t just about Apple prioritized the longevity of their products. Yes, they do support phones for six years at least. iPadOS 26, releasing later this year, will support the seven-year-old 2018 iPad Pro.
This is about having real options across multiple product generations with little if no noticeable downside. For me, this offers the chance to pick devices for their design, specifically their use of materials and physical form. I won’t have to feel nostalgic about old devices that are no longer practical, because the “old” devices that I love the most are still viable today.
Via TLDR Design.
I feel much the same way about my iPhone 12 Mini. At five years old, it doesn’t have the nicest camera or screen, nor does it have the fastest processor. Even so, it’s perfectly adequate for what I need and I love its smaller form factor. I know I’ll need to upgrade to a newer (and bigger) phone some day, but I’m holding off on doing so for as long as I possibly can.
I really enjoy reading Jay Hoffmann’s efforts to chronicle the history of the Web. He recently wrote about 1995, the year the Web began to spread beyond its technical origins, and become embraced by the larger populace (e.g., GeoCities).
If you were fortunate enough to be working on the web in 1995, it may have felt far more insignificant at the time. Most people were just playing around the web because they thought it was cool, and when they got online they found an entire community just like them. People began to craft their online identities, and share links, words, and experiences with one another. The cumulative effective, though, was a web that began to spread into the hands of everyone. One by one, as users blinked online for the first time, the web gained a stronger foothold, a starting point that would soon be used to catapult the web into a large-scale commercial endeavor. For now though, it was a fun place to be with very little rules and near infinite possibilities. It was a home for many that had previously felt lost, and that is a powerful thing.
I discovered the Web in 1994 when I was a college freshman and made my first webpages during an internship in the summer of 1995. To call that life-changing would be a gross understatement. It’s impossible to imagine what my life would be like had I not started tinkering with HTML that summer.
Poet and priest Malcolm Guite defends the simple pleasures of pints and pipes.
On the mere input/output analysis, I should give up the convivial evenings in many-storied, oak-raftered pubs, where my friends and I, and often strangers who are welcomed into the circle of conversation, sit for a while and set the world to rights. I should give up the pipes I have collected and smoked over the years, each with its own beautiful pattern of grain, each with its own cluster of stories and memories of solitary musing or wonderful conversation. My body might be technically healthier for the loss, but I contend my whole being, my personhood, my sense of community, of participating in something immemorial, hallowed by the poets, endorsed by the sages, celebrated by almost all my favorite writers, my life, taken as a whole, would be poorer.
From the Blog
In light of the recent opening of Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention center (read: concentration camp), I wrote about Trump’s sadism.
Trump can often seem cartoonish at times, with his rambling speeches, baseless braggadocio, and awkward invocations of God. But then the veil drops, as it did this week, and we see Trump for who he truly is, and what he truly represents.
Unfortunately, many Americans have chosen to turn a blind eye to Trump’s sadism. Perhaps they’ve stopped caring, or more understandably, have become exhausted by the constant assault on norms and dignity. But many Americans have stopped caring because Trump’s cruelty allows them to indulge in some cruelty of their own.
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