Rob Harvilla, writing for The Ringer, with a retrospective look at bunch of the songs and artists that were “banned” after the events of September 11th, 2001:

But 15 years later, it’s the songs the radio wouldn’t play that tell you the most.

In the week after the attacks, Clear Channel Communications, the Texas-based radio empire then controlling nearly 1,200 radio stations reaching 110 million listeners nationwide, drew up an informal blacklist of sorts — more than 150 songs its DJs should avoid, so as not to upset or offend anyone. As a Snopes investigation subsequently revealed, adherence was voluntary, and many stations ignored it; at the time, sheepish anonymous employees described it to The New York Times as a corporate memo gone wrong, snowballing thanks to an “overzealous regional executive” who kept adding more songs and soliciting more input. A wayward reply-all email debacle made sentient.

Carimah Townes, writing for Think Progress, on prison labor in America:

People behind bars are forced to do grueling, back-breaking, and dangerous work for nickles and dimes, while corporations rack up billions of dollars in profit off the cheap labor. They are put to work under the guise of rehabilitation, but the reality is that few people leave prison with the skills, knowledge, or resources to succeed professionally. They are an enticing alternative for large companies that don’t want to pay minimum wage to workers on the outside. And they have had enough.

On Friday, prisoners all over the country launched a national labor strike that’s been months in the making. Their demand is difficult but simple: ending prison slavery for good.

Nathan Hall, writing on Medium, about the relationship between movies and music in 2016:

Sing Street is another film about a band, focused more on the actual lifestyle and artistic side than the killing skinheads aspect. It’s one of the most beautiful distillations of what draws us to music, what it means to us to hear things expressed musically in a way we’ve never felt before, and the development of one’s own expression through the same medium. Ferdia Welsh-Peelo plays Conor, a young teen whose parents are fighting and whose brother is a burnout and who just had to enroll in a new school where the headmaster would rather you didn’t wear shoes at all if you don’t have the dress-code approved black ones. Amidst this angst, there’s the music.