Music | What if Spotify pays fairly after all?

Deep dive into the economics of the music industry as downloading gives way to streaming. Music was the first media format to be upended by digital; record labels have had decades to adjust; but they are far behind their counterparts in video, publishing and gaming. Their cultures and cost structures are stuck in the vinyl era. “What is the underlying value of music? Did streaming erode this value or correct it?” (Jason Hirschhorn & Liam Boluk, LinkedIn 6,800 words)

Language | ‘Worry’ only dates back 150 years

The use of ‘worry’ as an intransitive verb dates from the 1860s. Before then you might ‘worry’ at a tooth, but you didn’t just ‘worry’. Was it previously called something else, or did people not think of themselves as doing that sort of thing? Worry seems to be mainly a European invention, which took off in a big way after the First World War, to judge from the explosion in self-help books at that time. Americans prefer anxiety. (Josephine Livingstone, New Republic, 1,860 words)

Literature | ‘I think Tolkien was a crypto-fascist’

Interview with Michael Moorcock about fantasy, science-fiction, life, London and his latest novel, The Whispering Storm. “We live in a Philip K Dick world. The technology-led, military-led big names like Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur [C Clarke] got it wrong. They were all strong on the military, on space wars, on rational futures, and none of these things really matters. Look at Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google. These are Philip K Dick phenomena.” (Andrew Harrison, New Statesman, 2,815 words)

Writing | Journalists: Don’t dumb it down

Advice to journalists. “There’s no sense in writing down to the level of the readers you think are out there. Half the time they aren’t really there, and the rest of the time, they’re not interested in a watered-down version of the real product. Better to write the piece that you want to read yourself, which means pitching the technical content at a level slightly higher than you were comfortable with when you started thinking about it.” (Dan Davies, Medium, 877 words)

Literature | What Genji and The Bible share

Author discusses his current reading habits. “Although I have found some books unspeakably dreary, there is no book I wish I’d never read.” “I try to avoid any book that praises instantaneous electronic communication, although I might make an exception for something pornographic.” Favourite books: Tale Of Genji and The Bible. “The parables of Jesus are haunting in the fashion of certain Zen koans.” (Sunday Book Review, New York Times, 2,020 words)

Technology | A ‘Library of Babel’ can’t exist

What you can learn from using a computer to generate the digital equivalent of Borges’s Library of Babel: a near-infinity of books containing every possible combination of every alphabetic character. “The librarians in the story encounter far more rational text than would ever be possible in a truly random universal library. After endless days searching through random books the longest legible title I’ve encountered by chance is dog.” (Jonathan Basile, Paris Review, 1,360 words)

Poetry | How poets predicted the future

Lyrical essay about the interplay between modernist literature and information overload. “While avant-garde poetry may not figure prominently in the global information glut, the global information glut figures prominently in avant-garde poetry”. Writers were information theorists before information theory was invented. TS Eliot posed the central question in 1934: “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” (Paul Stephens, Guernica, 4,800 words)

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