PicoBlog

For the last 6 years, the Rihanna Navy has been feeding on the crumbs of rumors and TMZ footage of her leaving studios, awaiting a whisper for her next album to drop. The fandom had nearly abandoned all hope, when just last month she announced her headliner gig at the 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show, as a ‘don’t call it a comeback’ kind of return. Two weeks ago, she released a new song “Lift Me Up,” a melancholy ballad, as part of Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack.

Quantum Criminals is the first book I've seen that really captures the galactic picture and microscopic fussiness, the words and music, and the unsettling but intoxicating vibe of Steely Dan. Written by Alex Pappademas with paintings by Joan LeMay, it is published by the University of Texas Press in Austin. Unlike previous books, such as Brian Sweet's The Complete Guide to the Music of Steely Dan, Pappademas creates inventive stories about almost-always louche, cryptic characters invented by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

To have something up your sleeve sounds a bit devilish, doesn’t it? But it can also mean “you have an idea or plan which you have not told anyone about.” Seemingly unrelated, several years ago I went through the extraordinarily expensive process of having the data recovered from the hard drive of our old and quite dead iMac, where the entire photographic history of my young family was trapped. In exchange for all my money I received a new external hard drive and a backup too, both theoretically with all the goods on them.

One of the first books on pirates came out in 1724 and was titled A General History of Pyrates. The book’s title had an interesting detail when you keep in mind that women were usually considered bad luck on a ship. (Blackbeard, for example, is known to have killed women just for being on his ship’s deck.) Here’s the full title: “A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE PYRATES, FROM Their first RISE and SETTLEMENT in the Island of Providence, to the present Time.

I want to start this off by stating bluntly that I do not care about the cheating scandal. To give quick context: in 2023, Ariana Grande began a rumoured affair with ‘Wicked Pt. 1’ co-star and Broadway actor Ethan Slater. This allegedly overlapped with both of their marriages and the birth of his first child with his wife of five years, Lilly Jay. Neither performer have publicly acknowledged the scandal prior to this song.

On the night of Sunday March 20, 2022, a particular WhatsApp group wouldn’t stop buzzing. Word had got out that a big story that would shake the Nigerian tech space was coming out the next day. Rumour had it that the story was about Nigeria’s highest valued tech unicorn and that the fellow working on it was a certain enfant terrible of Nigerian journalism. For an unspecified reason, this was very bad news.

Around 5,000 years ago, when the first pharaohs were flexing their muscles in Egypt and the city-states of Mesopotamia were competing with one another for power and prestige, writing was invented for the first time - at least, the first time we can be sure about. In these two places, Mesopotamia and Egypt, writing was essentially an administrative technology that grew out of the need to keep track of things and the quantities of those things.

Is your heart broken? Perhaps you will be interested in this club, which is not so much a club as a group of friends/co-workers/roommates/reluctant softball team who are all gay dudes who live in West Hollywood. Yes, today we are revisiting future Arrowverse creator Greg Berlanti’s The Broken Hearts Club. This 2000 “romantic comedy” is kind of a riff on The Boys in the Band, in that both center on groups of gay friends who psychologically torture each other.

Jim Simons, the legendary quant and founder of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, passed away this past week. “In every field, there’s only one person whose competitive advantage is 'I’m smarter than everyone else,” Morgan Housel once mused. “In finance, for the last 20 or 30 years, that person has been James Simons.” If that’s the case, what can we mere mortals learn from Simons’s life? A lot, it turns out, but perhaps not what you’d expect.