Albums in Stores – August 12th, 2016

Jason Tate

Today brings us the first volume of the Stranger Things soundtrack, so I’m gonna be playing that a whole lot. There’s also the release of the new Young the Giant album, which I think is really solid and worth a listen. If you hit read more you can see all the releases we have in our calendar for the week. Hit the quote bubble to access our forums and talk about what came out today, what albums you picked up, and to make mention of anything we may have missed.

Read More “Albums in Stores – August 12th, 2016”

Inside the Mind of Steven Spielberg

Jason Tate

Jon Mooallem, writing at Wired, with a giant profile on Steven Spielberg:

That’s just how it is: all your feelings bound up together. You are scared of so many things but simultaneously drawn to them. You are infatuated with airplanes but terrified of flying. You love Disney films but later describe the shooting of Bambi’s mother as giving you PTSD. Outside of your bedroom window in New Jersey, across a long, empty field, is a tremendous tree. “I was terrified by the tree. It was a huge tree,” you’ll later remember, and at night you watch its dark silhouette morph into horrible, demonic things. “Every single night my imagination would find something else to fear.” And still, you stare at the tree every single night. You revisit the things that scare you until they don’t scare you anymore. You love that cycle of tension and resolution; it will become another trademark of your films.

Cards Against Humanity Launches Political Expansion

Cards Against Humanity
Jason Tate

Cards Against Humanity has launched their “America Votes” expansion packs for sale:

Today, we’re letting America choose between two new expansion packs about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

At the end of this promotion, Cards Against Humanity will tally up the sales of both packs, and depending on which pack gets more support, we will donate all the money in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Inside Tim Cook’s Apple

Apple
Jason Tate

Fast Company has a fantastic, and in-depth, profile on Apple:

With Macs, iPads, and software applications and services, Apple isn’t a one-trick pony like BlackBerry, to use an example cited by those most freaked out about the recent iPhone slowdown. It recorded $50.6 billion in sales during that “disappointing” quarter, more than the combined revenue of Google parent Alphabet ($20.3 billion) and Amazon ($29.1 billion) over the same period. Its $10.5 billion in profits outpaced not just the combination of Alphabet ($4.2 billion) and Amazon ($513 million) but also Facebook ($1.5 billion) and Microsoft ($3.8 billion).

“I don’t read all the coverage on Apple that there is,” Cook tells me a few days after my lunch with Cue and Federighi. “The way that I look at that is, I really know the truth.” And he’s ready to talk about it.

The piece is written by one of the the authors of Becoming Steve Jobs, which is the book I most recommend (even over his own biography) people read to understand Apple and Steve.