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FEATURES, BLOGS, & REVIEWS
2016 Holiday Gift Guide
With the holidays rapidly approaching, I wanted to steal an idea I’ve seen on other websites and put together a few gift ideas that I think are pretty great to give and receive. Since I already have recommendation posts for albums, movies, tv shows, books, software, podcasts, blogs, audio-equipment, and random miscellaneous tech and around the house items, this list is focused mostly on things not included in those posts and more geared toward things I’ve come across in the past year or so that I think are worth checking out and that I think would make good gifts. As always, I only recommend things I’ve personally used and loved.
I used my Amazon affiliate link when the product showed up there, which gives our website a slight percentage back if you make a purchase, and therefore helps fund our continued existence. I hope you’ll find something cool, and feel free to drop your own recommendations in the comments.
Quarter Life Crisis (Encore Episode 138)
This week’s episode of Encore has us making plans to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, talking a little bit about Thanksgiving, and then looking at A Day to Remember’s lawsuit, a screenplay based on The Menzingers, Brand New’s TDAG 10-year anniversary, and some listener questions about ticket scalping, Christmas/holiday music, and our favorite holiday cover songs.
Review: Yellowcard – Yellowcard
With goodbye comes reflection. This reflection is often bittersweet as it drifts between that which has filled us with joy and that which has caused us pain. There’s a cauterization of once open wounds that necessitates a search for meaning in the steps that led us here. And it’s within this reflection that we try and attach understanding to our history. Why does saying goodbye make us feel this way? What is it about this specific action that leads to an emotional cluster-fuck? A perceptible and undeniable bond between love and sadness? I keep asking myself these questions as I prepare to say goodbye to one of the best bands that ever came from our music scene. A band that has soundtracked my highs, soundtracked my lows, and has been a constant musical mirror to the love, and sadness, that life has brought. As I walk into this realization, I can’t help but reflect on just how many of my goodbyes have been punctuated by a Yellowcard song. Goodbye to friends, goodbye to family, goodbye to relationships, goodbye to states, goodbye to innocence, goodbye to youth. And with that I realize that I don’t want to become numb to goodbyes. I want them to sting. I want them to hurt. I want the goodbye to be a remembrance of everything that led to that moment. Yellowcard’s final self-titled album is that pinprick. It’s that puncture against the consciousness that reminds me why I listen to music, it’s the melodic pull that has dominated my life for all these years. It’s between this intense feeling of familiar and new that I find the closing Yellowcard album lays itself to rest.
The Constitution Lets the Electoral College Choose the Winner. They Should Choose Clinton.
Lawrence Lessig, writing at The Washington Post:
The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that “the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president].” But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people’s choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people’s choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton’s words, “a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice” — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about “winner take all.” It says nothing to suggest that electors’ freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule “the people” or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel.
I agree, but the odds of this happening are infinitesimally small.
Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons
Reproduced on Kottke:
Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.
1) Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
2) Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
3) Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.
Read the whole thing.
For Helping Immigrants, Chobani’s Founder Draws Threats
By many measures, Chobani embodies the classic American immigrant success story.
Its founder, Hamdi Ulukaya, is a Turkish immigrant of Kurdish descent. He bought a defunct yogurt factory in upstate New York, added a facility in Twin Falls, Idaho, and now employs about 2,000 people making Greek yogurt.
But in this contentious election season, the extreme right has a problem with Chobani: In its view, too many of those employees are refugees.
As Mr. Ulukaya has stepped up his advocacy — employing more than 300 refugees in his factories, starting a foundation to help migrants, and traveling to the Greek island of Lesbos to witness the crisis firsthand — he and his company have been targeted with racist attacks on social media and conspiratorial articles on websites including Breitbart News.
Scale of Loneliness (Encore Episode 137)
This week’s episode of Encore looks at a variety of listener questions, things like: favorite music for road trips, recent albums we think may end up being classics, and music we turn to for the specific moods we may be in. We also talk about new music from Japandroids and The Menzingers and our desire to listen to something “new” versus falling back on old favorites. We’ve also got a contest to win the new book from Laura Jane Grace, and Thomas gives details on that in the middle of this episode.
Thanks for listening!
Brett Ayala Jones – “Not One of You” (Song Premiere)
Brett Ayala Jones, the former guitarist for Fireworks, will be releasing his second solo EP on November 18th. Today we’ve got a premiere of the new song “Not One of You” — which you can stream below. This is the first release from Brett since the end of his former band and he was joined in the Detroit studio by Teddy Roberts (Fireworks) on drums and electric bass, Adam Mercer (Fireworks) on keys, and Sam Harris on upright bass.
You can pre-order the new EP, San Pedro, right now over via Save Your Generation Records.
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Facebook Needs to Get Their Shit Together
The most obvious way in which Facebook enabled a Trump victory has been its inability (or refusal) to address the problem of hoax or fake news. Fake news is not a problem unique to Facebook, but Facebook’s enormous audience, and the mechanisms of distribution on which the site relies — i.e., the emotionally charged activity of sharing, and the show-me-more-like-this feedback loop of the news feed algorithm — makes it the only site to support a genuinely lucrative market in which shady publishers arbitrage traffic by enticing people off of Facebook and onto ad-festooned websites, using stories that are alternately made up, incorrect, exaggerated beyond all relationship to truth, or all three. (To really hammer home the cyberdystopia aspect of this: A significant number of the sites are run by Macedonian teenagers looking to make some scratch.)
An American Tragedy
David Remnick, at The New Yorker:
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
Speak the Truth Even if Your Voice Shakes – “Go for the Throat” (Song Premiere)
Today we’ve got the premiere of Speak the Truth Even if Your Voice Shakes’ second new song. The track is called “Go for the Throat” and comes from a two-song self-titled 7” that will be coming out via Bad Timing Records.
The band will also be playing their first show on January 13th at the Constellation Room in Orange County, CA. Those details can be found below and tickets are available now.
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