If you thought 2018 was tough for you, imagine being a staffer in Facebook’s public relations department. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg began the year by pledging to fix the company’s problems, but instead 2018 turned into 12 months of mea culpas, self-inflicted scandals, and screwups.
Madison Bloom, writing at Pitchfork:
Jackie Fuchs—who was the bassist for the Runways from 1975 to 1977 under the name Jackie Fox—is the current reigning “Jeopardy!” champion. As of last night, she’s on a four-win streak. Fuchs made her first appearance on Friday, December 14, but it wasn’t until her third appearance, on Tuesday night, when Alex Trebek finally acknowledged her tenure in the band. Fuchs won for the fourth time by correctly answering a question about the poet Dylan Thomas.
David Anthony, writing for Noisey:
All that love, and all that criticism, was only further proof of the impression that The Shape Of Punk To Come made. Even if it’s become cooler to deny the record its place in punk history, the actual shape of modern punk music would be drastically different without Refused. For a full decade, bands used The Shape of Punk to Come as a sonic reference point, and it became a stand-in for a bigger ideological shift within the genre. It’s become a way to describe punk and hardcore music that has a forward-thinking approach, one that sees the style as an open space where anything could be possible. So while it may not be easy to find a band that accurately replicated Refused’s sound, the fact that they became the baseline for an entire artistic approach speaks volumes.
Sebastian Murdock and Jesselyn Cook, writing at Huffington Post:
Hendry’s story is disturbingly familiar. HuffPost spoke to a dozen women who said Torres sexually assaulted them between 2006 and 2015. We also spoke to a girl, now 16, who said Torres started grooming her when she was 13 and he was 30. Most of the women said they were under 18 at the time of their alleged assaults.
After the article came out, Big Cartel have (finally) removed Torres’s merch store.
Taylor Lorenz, writing for The Atlantic:
Taylor Evans took the fake-“sponcon” game one step further, once faking the entire purpose of a trip to Miami. Technically, she was just there on vacation, paying her own way for everything, but on Instagram she positioned it as an exclusive press trip. “I took a lot of pics at restaurants and posted ‘Thanks so much XYZ restaurant for the hospitality!’” she said. “You say it in a way that people could interpret it as you having an established relationship with that brand … The hope is that it’s perceived in a way that looks like there’s a reason you’re in a different city and state, not just enjoying a weekend vacation.”
We live in interesting times.
Casey Newtom, writing for The Verge:
Twitter is offering users another escape hatch from its ranked timeline. The company said today that it will introduce a prominent new toggle in the app to switch from the ranked timeline to the original, reverse-chronological feed. The company says the move comes in recognition of the fact that Twitter is often most useful in real time, particularly during live events such as sports games or the Oscars.
Kelly Weill, writing for The Daily Beast:
YouTube has become a quiet powerhouse of political radicalization in recent years, powered by an algorithm that a former employee says suggests increasingly fringe content. And far-right YouTubers have learned to exploit that algorithm and land their videos high in the recommendations on less extreme videos. The Daily Beast spoke to three men whose YouTube habits pushed them down a far-right path and who have since logged out of hate.
We built all these tools, we wrote the code to keep people engaged, to keep them watching and clicking ads, and pushed it out into the world without ever thinking about the consequences. The other day I opened up YouTube in a browser I never use, via a VPN in incognito mode, and it was about six videos before I started getting recommended anti-feminism shit from known bigots. This is bad.
Shirley Wang, writing at NPR:
When Charles Barkley’s mother, Charcey Glenn, passed away in June 2015, Barkley’s hometown of Leeds, Alabama, came to the funeral to pay respects. But there was also an unexpected guest.
Barkley’s friends couldn’t quite place him. He wasn’t a basketball player, he wasn’t a sports figure, and he wasn’t from Barkley’s hometown. Here’s what I can tell you about him: He wore striped, red polo shirts tucked into khaki shorts and got really excited about two-for-one deals. He was a commuter. He worked as a cat litter scientist in Muscatine, Iowa. In short, he was everyone’s suburban dad. More specifically, he was my dad.
This was a great read.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have announced the 2019 class. Congratulations to The Cure, Def Leppard, Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Radiohead, Roxy Music, and The Zombies.
Lauren Levy, writing for Vulture:
But despite the artist’s problematic pasts (and, for some, present), the labels have come running. That’s because these musicians have acquired relevance and cultural cachet, but even more so because of their financial potential. They bathe in an ocean of endless streams, the most valuable currency in today’s music industry.
Kaitlyn Tiffany, writing for Vox:
Looking at the past several years of the charts, this polarization looks like more than garden-variety cultural sexism — it looks like something new that our algorithm-based platforms have wrought. The biggest question facing Spotify in the coming year should be whether it can do something about it.
Bobby Olivier, writing for NJ:
It’s being swept under the stage, gig after gig, weekend after weekend, in the bars, clubs and basements that weave together New Jersey’s local music scene.
Female musicians say they have been stalked, groped and relentlessly demeaned in an arts community with no controls in place to report such abusers. They feel collective frustration and invalidation. They are sick of being diminished and ignored.
I thoroughly enjoyed this post:
On Netflix, the artwork is personalised based on your viewing history. An Uma Thurman fan will see the classic Pulp Fiction poster showing Uma, but a John Travolta fan will be shown a different image.
Fortune Cookie Advertising is exactly what you’d expect, and it works because “when [customers] see the ad on the back, they are likely to feel they received it for a reason”.
A Chinese podcast called “How to Make Your Voice More Attractive” has 218,000 paying subscribers. Overall, the market in Chinese self-help subscription podcasts was worth $7.3 billion in 2017, compared with just $314 million for all advertising-funded podcasts in the US.
There’s a common misunderstanding among business owners that songwriters are only compensated by the purchase of their CDs, so that a business owner can freely play copyrighted music for customers. Not so, and Apple’s new trademark filing for ‘Apple Music for Business’ indicates that Apple will be entering this new business avenue for Apple music in the future as the company seeks to expand their services businesses.
Interesting.
Katie Notopoulos, writing for BuzzFeed:
A lot what Tumblr is banning is just gratuitous porn GIFs, and the internet is not lacking options when it comes to free pornography. But Tumblr is also a thriving place for the kind of sexual expression that you won’t find on Pornhub. “Tumblr sex sites created spaces for ALL KINDS of people who don’t have access to sexual community elsewhere,” wrote Steven Thrasher. It has always been a safe haven for young people exploring and expressing their sexuality. There is tasteful erotica, supportive places for people to post their own bodies — including those that don’t look like typical porn bodies — and to consume and engage with the wide swath of human sexual experience that can’t be replicated by logging on to xHamster and being greeted with a blast of extremely aggressive heterosexual facials.
