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Motivation If you are anything like me, you occasionally find yourself coming up for air after a long diversion clicking through artist biographies on Spotify. Often these biographies will list the artists other bands or people they have played with, and one thing leads to another and I have added twenty albums to my “new music” playlist folder. I found myself in this position one morning after listening to this episode of Casual Inference, a great podcast that has unfortunately gone radio silent of late....

Yes, it’s hyperbolic, but it’s not wrong I recently saw the following tweet comparing the Canadian and US housing markets. As an American Canadian permanent resident who experiences this phenomenon acutely, I was naturaly interested. What particularly got my attention was the claim in one of the comments that this was “70% Toronto and Vancouver”. I thought, “I wonder if I can verify that…”. So I went to the Statistics Canada website and found the New housing price index which has monthly data on the cost of new housing going back to 1981 for 26 cities across the country....

Branko Mataja It’s musicians like this that make me so grateful that reissue labels like Numero Group exist. Mataja’s approach to the guitar would be novel and exciting if he realeased it today, let alone fifty years ago. It’s not as if he’s going to be topping billboard charts anytime soon, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who never would have heard of him without a reissue. Really phenomenal stuff...

Finished Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie Macdonald Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante Babel, R.F. Kuang Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy Started The Jade Peony, Wayson Choy 2666, Roberto Bolaño Mythos, Stephen Fry Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave and Sean O’hagan Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves David Copperfield, Charles Dickens Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell A Heart So White, Javier Marias The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis Ongoing / Non-narrative The Complete Poems & Plays, T....

Kevin Kelly is a national treasure It’s true. For those who don’t know, here are some of his projects: The Technium is his main blog. Cool Tools is what it says it is. Reviews of cool tools of all sorts. Excellent Advice for Living is his latest book, which seems basically like a set of more intelligible and practical koans encapsulating his vision. These (and tons of other stuff he makes) are cool and all, but it’s not exactly the specifics of what he’s done / made that inspire me, but more his approach and attitude towards life and living....

Frank Martin uncrosses his arms and takes a puff on the cigar. He lets the smoke carry out of his mouth. Then he raises his chin toward the hills and says, “Jack London used to have a big place on the other side of this valley. Right over there, behind that green hill you’re looking at. But alchohol killed him. Let that be a lesson. He was a better man than any of us....

Music The more I listen, the more I like Kevin Morby’s new album, This is a Photograph. The prayer / toast toward the end is especially wonderful: to free the flame from burning up inside to thunder like a motorcycle headed down the line to eat to weep to lay me down so sweet to sow to reap oh to let our glasses clink to time to time to time to time to time to time to time to time...

Why did Gaspery-Jacques get sent to Ohio where he happened to run into Mirella? It wasn’t his decision, was it? Why would the Time Institute want to do that? Was it an accident? It seems too unlikely to be an accident… I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world....

Finished Recursion, Blake Crouch ⭐⭐⭐ Story of our life, Ted Chiang ⭐⭐⭐ Five Little Indians, Michelle Good ⭐⭐ Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Exit West, Mohsin Hamid ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Anomaly, Herve Le Tellier ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ American Gods, Neil Gaiman ⭐⭐⭐ Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy The Odyssey, Homer Unfinished >50% complete The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King ⭐⭐⭐ Shutdown, Adam Tooze ⭐⭐ <50% complete Crashed, Adam Tooze Neuromancer, William Gibson Split Tooth, Tanya Tagaq Beloved, Toni Morrison Sutree, Cormac McCarthy Check out The following are from this Hacker News thread:...

The world is a musem of passion projects Music This Ted Gioia newsletter on how TikTok is changing the incentives of the record business, shifting power away from record labels and into the hands of musicians who are able to find success on the platform. I would love to see this blow up into something. Covid fallout I’ve been seeing and reading more about the social and economic effects of Covid and pandemic related actions....