Category: Reading

  • Why Are Voice Assistants so Dumb?

    The voice assis­tant seemed so cool and made so much sense. What happened? If you fol­low Inter­net of Shit, you already know. This Bloomberg sto­ry about Alexa adop­tion sug­gests even the biggest play­ers in voice-enabled hard­ware are strug­gling to find their why.  We have sev­er­al Echos in our house, all of which are used for extreme­ly…

  • Stereogum on Pitchfork Music Festival

    Stere­ogum’s Tom Brei­han on the Pitch­fork Music Festival: I find some­thing quizzi­cal and hon­or­able in this: A whole fes­ti­val built around music that is not, in any way, designed for par­ty­ing. In a way, isn’t that the log­i­cal end­point of a decade-plus of inter­net music con­sump­tion? We’ve all spent all this time find­ing music on…

  • Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon

    The way MTV Geek’s Alex Zal­ben described Hawk­eye to Jesse Thorn on Bulls­eyemade it sound like Amer­i­can Splen­dor with a bow and arrow. He was­n’t wrong. I just fin­ished read­ing #10 and I’m ready for more.  Beau­ti­ful­ly drawn and bril­liant­ly writ­ten, Hawkeye’s life out­side the Avengers is pos­i­tive­ly spell­bind­ing. The issue ded­i­cat­ed to Hur­ri­cane Sandy may…

  • The Thermals — Desperate Ground

    The Ther­mals have a new album out in April on Sad­dle Creek. It’s called Des­per­ate Ground. I’m real­ly excited.

  • Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

    Free­dom will be remem­bered as a sto­ry that cap­tures a very strange chap­ter in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. It’s hard to put a fin­ger on it, but the mood of the last decade is some­thing Franzen nails. His char­ac­ters rep­re­sent the amoral fugue state we drift­ed off into col­lec­tive­ly after 2003. I’m not even sure his hol­lowed…