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Month: August 2016

It’s About Passion, Not Algorithms

Jason Tate

Mark Sullivan interviewed Apple Music’s Bozoma Saint John for Fast Company:

We should be paying attention to all of the ways that people want to listen to music, I mean, truly. Each point of interest is equally important as the other. I really like R&B from 1993, but I really like R&B that I just heard last week, too. How do I get served both of those things, because I am a complex music listener? By the way, you don’t have to be a music-phile in order to have that experience. Even a casual listener at the end of the day does not want to listen to the same thing again and again and again. You do want fresh; you want to be served something. I have learned that the balance of all of those things between the security of listening, to everything I want to listen to, and being served something new, the experience of U.S. consumers or me as a consumer, all those things should be rated equally.

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The Phenom: A NYT Profile of Katie Ledecky

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Jason Tate

The New York Times’ profile of swimmer Katie Ledecky is great:

Ledecky’s competitiveness is apparent at practices and in meets, even if it is expressed quietly. About 15 minutes before their events, swimmers gather in a “ready room” that usually consists of a few rows of chairs and a TV showing the races. Ledecky invariably sits in a kind of trance with her parka zipped up and her hood pulled over her head. The intensity she radiates causes even friends to keep their distance. “At practice, she’s a nice girl,” Anna Belousova, a 19-year-old Russian breaststroker who trains with Ledecky, told me. “At meets, I’m afraid to go near her.”

BitTorrent Launches Discovery Fund

Jason Tate

BitTorrent has announced the “Discovery Fund:”

Over the next year, BitTorrent aims to partner with 25 creators by providing cash grants and promotional support to build impactful releases and discover new fans. We are looking for artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers and other creators working on uncompromised projects representing a diverse, original perspective seeking global distribution. This open, international initiative has a rolling call (so you can apply when your project is ready) and provides $2,500- $100,000 in marketing and distribution funding to use at your discretion.

Artists an apply here.

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The Stoner Arms Dealers: The Story Behind ‘War Dogs’

Rolling Stone
Jason Tate

The movie War Dogs is coming out next week and I finally sat down to read the Rolling Stone piece by Guy Lawson from 2011 about the story the movie is based on. A gripping read.

Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. “It was surreal,” he recalls. “Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn’t know anything about the situation in that part of the world. But I was a central player in the Afghan war — and if our delivery didn’t make it to Kabul, the entire strategy of building up the Afghanistan army was going to fail. It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn’t know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.”

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