PicoBlog

For the past 15 years I’ve been a percussionist with the contemporary chamber-band Alarm Will Sound, and thus had a close relationship with the music of Aphex Twin — I’ve played his music all over the world and done various arrangements myself: including our forthcoming studio recording of minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]. It’s been a big week for the Aphex Twin fandom, so it seemed the the perfect moment to start what will undoubtedly be many articles mentioning the profound effect he’s had on my musical world.

Our very first story here on PTFO will be told with Stonetop. If you’ve never checked out Stonetop, by Jeremy Strandberg, I strongly recommend it. It’s a well-designed, narrative-focused RPG with some really rich worldbuilding that leaves a lot of room for its players to tell fantastical, heartfelt stories about their characters and the community they’re a part of. In this campaign, we’ll be following three such characters — Padrig, the Marshal, Vahid, the Seeker, and Anwen, the Would-Be Hero, as they live in, and fight for, a tiny, iron-age village named Stonetop.

Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a lunchtime-ish food newsletter. Read yesterday’s dispatch: On “the spectacle of life played out in public” In “Rice as Self,” Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s 1993 anthropological history of Japanese national identity, she argues that Japanese imperial leaders deliberately constructed the idea of rice as representative of the Japanese collective identity. She calls rice both a “metaphor and metonym” — both a symbolic representation and an embodied conceptual stand-in for Japan, Japanese people, and the idea of Japanese-ness.

Dudes, I’m on vacation. I’m at Cancun with my family enjoying unlimited beverages and sun. And I’m choosing to spend the next hour writing about Kate Middleton, rather than day drinking on the beach chair. It’s a crazy world indeed. So, some backstory. How did I, a serious policy and family writer with roots in Northern Ireland, become interested in the royal family? Age-related insomnia. Yeah, I turned 53, the hormones went weird, and I couldn’t sleep, so I started reading gossip blogs at 3am.

When people bait others into offering them praise, they are said to be fishing for compliments. An occasional fishing expedition is to be expected. All leaders and performers like to be validated and know that others are prideful of their talents. But those who crave admiration often go too far and seek attention in a way that reveals a deep insecurity.  Some may sense that frequently seeking to have others say nice things about them actually undermines their credibility.

Hello. I’m George Saunders, a writer, and a professor in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. My books include Tenth of December (a Finalist for the National Book Award) and Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize. I’ve also written magazine articles for The New Yorker and GQ, including reporting on Trump rallies in 2016, living incognito in a homeless camp in Fresno, and documenting the story of the Nepalese “Buddha Boy.

I was planning to start this post by telling you that Tesla was back in the news, but that would be misleading, since Tesla never leaves the news. Some of that attention comes from the company's products and innovations, but much of it comes from having Elon Musk as a CEO, a man who makes himself the center of every news cycle. That attention has worked in the company's favor over much of its lifetime, as it has gone from a start-up to one of the largest market cap companies in the world, disrupting multiple businesses in the process.

Bertrand Cooper is one of my favorite thinkers and writers for The Atlantic, Current Affairs and elsewhere; here on Launching Deeply he reveals the reality of being a working writer who comes from poverty and his concern that a true “poor Black experience” can’t actually penetrate Hollywood because so few figureheads actually hail from poor Black backgrounds like his (and we have a wide-ranging discussion on class). Cooper’s writing on the subject has gone viral in recent years, and he is one of the sharpest observers to pay attention to.

Transcript Eric (00:00): Okay. Hello, this is Eric Topol and this is a rare privilege for me to interview my favorite epidemiologist, Dr. Michael Osterholm. He is the Regents Professor of the University of Minnesota. He's director of CIDRAP, which is certainly one of the leading entities around the world for public health. And, we've been friends for the last few years, which we'll we'll talk about. So, welcome Michael.