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2020 has been a terrible year. But that hasn’t stopped Bill Gates (as is his custom) from choosing, he says, “five books that I enjoyed—some because they helped me go deeper on a tough issue, others because they offered a welcome change of pace.”
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World,by David Epstein. I started following Epstein’s work after watching his fantastic 2014 TED talk on sports performance. In this fascinating book, he argues that although the world seems to demand more and more specialization—in your career, for example—what we actually need is more people “who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress.” His examples run from Roger Federer to Charles Darwin to Cold War-era experts on Soviet affairs. I think his ideas even help explain some of Microsoft’s success, because we hired people who had real breadth within their field and across domains. If you’re a generalist who has ever felt overshadowed by your specialist colleagues, this book is for you. More on the book here.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. Like many white people, I’ve tried to deepen my understanding of systemic racism in recent months. Alexander’s book offers an eye-opening look into how the criminal justice system unfairly targets communities of color, and especially Black communities. It’s especially good at explaining the history and the numbers behind mass incarceration. I was familiar with some of the data, but Alexander really helps put it in context. I finished the book more convinced than ever that we need a more just approach to sentencing and more investment in communities of color. More on the book here.
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, by Erik Larson. Sometimes history books end up feeling more relevant than their authors could have imagined. That’s the case with this brilliant account of the years 1940 and 1941, when English citizens spent almost every night huddled in basements and Tube stations as Germany tried to bomb them into submission. The fear and anxiety they felt—while much more severe than what we’re experiencing with COVID-19—sounded familiar. Larson gives you a vivid sense of what life was like for average citizens during this awful period, and he does a great job profiling some of the British leaders who saw them through the crisis, including Winston Churchill and his close advisers. Its scope is too narrow to be the only book you ever read on World War II, but it’s a great addition to the literature focused on that tragic period. More on the book here.
The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, by Ben Macintyre. This nonfiction account focuses on Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer who became a double agent for the British, and Aldrich Ames, the American turncoat who likely betrayed him. Macintyre’s retelling of their stories comes not only from Western sources (including Gordievsky himself) but also from the Russian perspective. It’s every bit as exciting as my favorite spy novels. More on the book here.
Breath from Salt: A Deadly Genetic Disease, a New Era in Science, and the Patients and Families Who Changed Medicine,by Bijal P. Trivedi. This book is truly uplifting. It documents a story of remarkable scientific innovation and how it has improved the lives of almost all cystic fibrosis patients and their families. This story is especially meaningful to me because I know families who’ve benefited from the new medicines described in this book. I suspect we’ll see many more books like this in the coming years, as biomedical miracles emerge from labs at an ever-greater pace. More on the book here.
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The legendary acrimony of the Beatles’ break-up comes through in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 film Let it Be, which documents the recording of their last studio album and their famous rooftop sendoff concert, joined by keyboardist Billy Preston. Things got so tense that George Harrison left the band during the sessions. He later called them “the low of all time.” Lennon went further: “hell… the most miserable sessions on earth.”
Though some of the worst moments of those sessions were cut in editing, there’s no doubt Lindsay-Hogg built the film around studio drama instead of “the monotonies, the lackluster workaday yawns, of four people who know each other too well,” wrote Jonathan Cot and David Dalton in a 1970 Rolling Stone review. “We only get a few moments because with 300 hours of footage, only the highlights, the more dramatic scenes, and the funnier dialogue are shown.”
In the film, the band ends their last performance together with “Get Back,” then Lennon famously jokes, “I hope we’ve passed the audition.” Let it Be, Cott and Dalton revealed, was originally titled Get Back, the name Peter Jackson—yes that Peter Jackson—has chosen for his upcoming Beatles film, which will finally see the light next year, after the COVID delays that have slowed down every production.
Building on the archival and restoration skills he refined during the making of They Shall Not Grow Old, Jackson and his team have combed through those hundreds of hours of film, cutting together 56 hours of “never-before-seen footage,” notes Brenna Ehrlich at Rolling Stone. “The film promises to be ‘the ultimate ‘fly on the wall’ experience that Beatles fans have long dreamt about,’” as Jackson says. “We get to sit in the studio watching these four friends make great music together.”
The film will also “present a much sunnier vision of the Beatles’ breakup” and has been made with the full permission of surviving members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr as well as Yoko Ono and George Harrison’s wife Olivia. As Starr put it, “There were hours and hours of us just laughing and playing music, not at all like the version that came out. There was a lot of joy and I think Peter will show that. I think this version will be a lot more peace and loving, like we really were.”
As if to prove the point, McCartney, who just dropped his latest album, McCartney III, tweeted out the five-minute clip above yesterday, in which Jackson introduces what he calls a “montage” from the film’s editing process so far. The vivid lifelikeness of the images is a result of Jackson’s digital processing, and it does not seem intrusive. What stands out most of all is the joy the band clearly still took in each other’s company, “just laughing and playing music,” as Ringo remembered. Get Back is slated for release in theaters on August, 2021.
This past fall David Sedaris published his first full-fledged anthology, The Best of Me. It includes “Six to Eight Black Men,” his story about bewildering encounters with European Christmas folktales, but not “The Santaland Diaries,” which launched him straight into popular culture when he read it aloud on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition in 1992. True to its title, that piece is drawn from entries in his diary (the rigorous keeping of which is the core of his writing process) made while employed as one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s Herald Square in New York. Not only was the subject seasonally appropriate, Sedaris captured the varieties of seething resentment felt at one time or another — not least around Christmas — by customer-service workers in America.
According to a Macy’s executive who worked at Herald Square at the time, Sedaris made an “outstanding elf.” (So the New Republic’s Alex Heard discovered when attempting to fact-check Sedaris’ work.) Whether or not he has fond memories of his time in “green velvet knickers, a forest-green velvet smock and a perky little hat decorated with spangles,” he holds “The Santaland Diaries” itself in no regard whatsoever. “I’m grateful that I wrote something that people enjoyed, but because it was my choice what went into this book, I was so happy to exclude it,” he says in an interview with WBUR about The Best of Me. “I wanted its feelings to be hurt.”
Over the past 28 years he has seized numerous opportunities to disparage the piece that made him famous.“I have no idea why that went over the way that it did,” Sedaris once admitted to Publisher’s Weekly. “There are about two early things I’ve written that I could go back and read again, and that’s not one of them.” And by the time of that first Morning Edition broadcast, he had already been keeping his diary every day for fifteen years. “When you first start writing, you’re going to suck,” he says in the Atlantic video just below. In his first years writing, he says, “I was sitting at the International House of Pancakes in Raleigh, North Carolina with a beret screwed to my head,” and the result was “the writing you would expect from that person.”
Since then Sedaris’ dress has become more eccentric, but his writing has improved immeasurably. “I want to be better at what I do,” said Sedaris in a recent interview with the Colorado Springs Independent. “It’s just something that I personally strive for. Which is silly, because most people can’t even recognize that. People will say, ‘Oh, I loved that Santaland thing.’ And that thing is so clunkily written. I mean, it’s just horribly written, and people can’t even see it.” Much of the audience may be “listening to the story, but they’re not paying attention to how it’s constructed, or they’re not paying attention to the words that you used. They’re not hearing the craft of it.” But if you listen to “The Santaland Diaries” today, you may well hear what Ira Glass did when he and Sedaris originally recorded it.
As a young freelance radio producer who had yet to create This American Life, Glass first saw the thoroughly non-famous Sedaris when he read from his diary onstage at a Chicago club. Glass knew instinctively that Sedaris’ distinctive voice as both writer and reader would play well on the radio, as would his even more distinctive sense of humor. But it wasn’t until a few years later, when he called on Sedaris to record a holiday-themed segment for Morning Edition, that Glass understood just what kind of talent he’d discovered. “I remember we got to the part where you sing like Billie Holiday,” Glass told Sedaris in an interview marking the 25th anniversary of “The Santaland Diaries.” “I was a pretty experienced radio producer at that point, and I was like, ‘This is a good one.’ ”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
One of the most pernicious, “dangerous, anti-human and soul-crushing” myths in the business world, writes Liz Ryan at Forbes, is the “idiotic nostrum” that has also crept into government and charitable work: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The received wisdom is sometimes phrased more cynically as “if you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen,” or more positively as “if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
But “the important stuff can’t be measured,” says Ryan. Don’t we all want to believe that? “Can’t Buy Me Love” and so forth. Maybe it’s not that simple, either. Take happiness, for example. We might say we disagree about its relative importance, but we all go about the business of trying to buy happiness anyway. In our hearts of hearts, it’s a more or less an unquestionable good. So why does it seem so scarce and seem to cost so much? Maybe the problem is not that happiness can’t be measured but that it can’t be commodified.
Happiness is measured across urban and rural environments and according to environmental quality and sustainable development metrics. The report uses six rubrics to assess happiness—levels of GDP, life expectancy, generosity, social support, freedom and corruption, and income. Their assessment relied on self-reporting, to give “a direct voice to the population as opposed the more top-down approach of deciding ex-ante what ought to matter.” The last chapter attempts to account for the so-called “Nordic Exception,” or the puzzling fact that “Nordic countries are constantly among the happiest in the world.”
Maybe this fact is only puzzling if you begin with the assumption that wealthy capitalist economies promote happiness. But the top ten happiest countries are wealthy “socialist friendly” mixed economies, as Bill Maher jokes in the clip at the top, saying that in the U.S. “the right has a hard time understanding we don’t want long lines for bread socialism, we want that you don’t have to win the lotto to afford brain surgery socialism.” This is comedy, not trenchant geo-political analysis, but it alludes to another significant fact.
Most of the world’s unhappiest countries and cities are formerly colonized places whose economies, infrastructures, and supply chains have been destabilized by sanctions (which cause long bread lines), bombed out of existence by wealthier countries, and destroyed by climate catastrophes. The report does not fully explore the meaning of this data, focusing, understandably, on what makes populations happy. But an underlying theme is the suggestion that happiness is something we achieve in real, measurable economic relation with each other, not solely in the pursuit of individualist ideals.
If the name of Napoleon Bonaparte should come up in a game of charades, we all know what to do: stand up with one foot in front of the other, stick a hand into our shirt, and consider the round won. Yet the recognition of this pose as distinctively Napoleonic may not be as wide as we assume, or so Coleman Lowndes discovered in the research for the video above, “Napoleon’s Missing Hand, Explained.” Asked to act out the image of Napoleon, not all of Lowndes colleagues at Vox tried to evoke his hand in his waistcoat, opting instead for grand posturing and an approximation of the (probably apocryphal) modest stature for which that posturing supposedly compensated. Yet enough of us still picture Napoleon hand-in-waistcoat that we might well wonder: how did that image take shape in the first place?
Representations of the most famous statesman in all French history, from paintings made in his life time to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, include countless examples of the pose. This has given rise to bodily-oriented speculations — a manual deformity, internal organs pained by the cancer that killed him — but the form came with historical precedent.
“Concealing a hand in one’s coat was a portraiture cliche long before Napoleon was painted that way in the early 1800s,” says Lowndes, in reference to Jacques-Louis David’s The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, a portrait definitive enough to head up Napoleon’s Wikipedia entry. Notables previously depicted with one conspicuously hidden hand include George Washington, Mozart, and Francisco Pizarro.
Even ancient Greek orator Aeschines “claimed that restricting the movement of one hand was the proper way to speak in public.” According to one 18th-century British etiquette guide, “keeping a hand in one’s coat was key to posturing oneself with manly boldness, tempered with becoming modesty.” It eventually became common enough to lose its high status, until David captured Napoleon’s use of it in his masterly propagandistic portrait. But the extent we think of Napoleon keeping a hand perpetually in his waistcoat today surely owes much to the many caricaturists and parody artists who took up the trope, including Charlie Chaplin — who, after trying a mustache and bowler hat for a role, knew what it was to be turned iconic by a seemingly minor stylistic choice.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
From Elvis’ “Blue Christmas” to Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” to the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” the most honest Christmas songs freely acknowledge the holiday’s dark underbelly. There are always those for whom the holidays are times of heartbreak, which, as we know, makes for better songwriting than tinsel, elves, and stockings. Near the top of any list of miserable Christmas songs sits Joni Mitchell’s holiday classic “River,” in which she laments losing “the best baby I ever had” over the season.
“River” is not really a Christmas song; it just happens to be set during the holidays: “It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees,” Joni sings, “They’re putting up reindeer, singing songs of joy and peace.” This tranquil scene provides a tragic foil for the song’s true subject. “Ultimately,” writes J. Freedom du Lac at The Washington Post, “‘River’ is a bereft song about a broken romance and a woman who desperately wants to escape her heartbreak, saying repeatedly: ‘I wish I had a river I could skate away on.’”
Mitchell’s “despairing drama” has “long been a popular cover among musicians, hundreds of whom have recorded it for commercial release.” (According to her website, it has been recorded 763 times, second only to “Both Sides Now” at almost twice that number.) Last year Ellie Goulding’s cover rose to No. 1 in Europe. First released on Mitchell’s 1971 classic Blue, the song deliberately evokes the holidays with strains of “Jingle Bells” in its opening bars before descending into its deeply melancholy melody.
“River” did not enter modern Christmas singalongs until the 1990s. In the Polyphonic video at the top, “Joni Mitchell and the Melancholy of Christmas,” we begin all the way back in the 1880s, with the first recordings of “Jingle Bells.” The history frames Mitchell’s use of the melody, almost a form of sampling, as radical protest of a tune that has become “synonymous with Christmas joy.” It has been recorded by virtually everyone, and was even broadcast from space in 1965 “when astronauts aboard NASA’s Gemini 6 played it as part of a Christmas prank.”
No, says Mitchell, there are real people with real problems down here, and sometimes Christmas sucks. There’ll be no dashing through the snow: “It don’t snow here / Stays pretty green.” The story behind the song is well-known: Mitchell ended her two-year relationship with Graham Nash in 1970, then “skated away” to Europe to escape the “crazy scene.” While in Crete, “she sent Nash a telegram to tell him their relationship was over,” notes Tom Eames. No one should try to force a happy holiday in such times. If you’re craving a little realness with your cheer, consider adding “River” to your playlist.
The machine learning experiment takes its cues from four opera singers—soprano Olivia Doutney, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble, tenor Christian Joel, and bass Freddie Tong—who provided it with 16 hours of recorded material.
The result is truly an all-ages activity that’s much easier on the ears than most digital diversions.
Click and drag one of the gummy-bodied blobs up and down to change its pitch.
Pull them forwards and backwards to vary their vowel sounds.
Once all four are in position, the three you’re not actively controlling will harmonize like a heavenly host.
You can disable individual blobs’ audio to create solos, duets and trios within your composition.
Press record and you can share with the world.
The blobs don’t sing in any discernible language, but they can do legato, staccato, and shoot up to incredibly high notes with a minimum of effort. Their eyes pinwheel when they harmonize.
As Li describes to co-producer Google Arts & Culture below, it’s not the original singers’ voices we’re channeling, but rather the machine learning model’s understanding of the operatic sound.
Click the pine tree icon and the blobs will serenade you with the most-searched Christmas carols.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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