Offline Recs: Algorithmic anxiety, drunk robots, agnostic dentists
Plus, space rock, the vibecession, Hot Line Cook Summer, and other things we're obsessing over this month
Welcome to Offline Recs, The Culture Journalist’s monthly digest of articles, music, tv shows, and other cultural ephemera we can’t stop thinking about — regardless of where they fit in the news cycle.
First up, though, some online recs to get you started, because we know that’s where you probably spend the most of your time.
This edition of Offline Recs is free for everyone. For the full version of our recs — plus podcast episodes, essays, and more — sign up for a paid subscription.
Online Recs
Kyle Chayka on algorithmic anxiety, or the discomfort we feel when we can’t figure out whether we consume things because we like them or because the algorithm is telling us to
Macroeconomics guru Kyla Scanlon asks, Are we in a Vibecession?
Amanda Mull on how data-driven trend forecasting created a world where “so much of the clothing that ends up in stores looks uncannily the same”
Trend forecaster Ayesha A. Siddiqi and New Inquiry editor Charlie Markbreiter conduct an extended post-mortem on millennial culture/mumblecore/Sally Rooney vibes, which means that even if we do not identify with these particular trappings of millennial culture we are now officially old
Jon Blistein on Rashida Tlaib’s proposed congressional resolution calling for the creation of a “statutory streaming royalty program” that compensates musicians on a per-stream basis, in cooperation with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers
Drew Austin on how the internet killed the music snob and replaced her with ahistorical Kate Bush revivals rolling on into infinity
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst propose the term “spawning” — a “21st century corollary to the 20th century process of sampling” — to describe the surrealistic visuals that internet denizens are churning out with DALL-E
Max Collins, a.k.a. Eve 6 Journalist, landed the first interview with singer-songwriter and would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley following his unconditional release; Emilie wrote about the online drama surrounding Hinckley’s canceled show at Brooklyn’s The Market Hotel, and we invited Max onto the pod to talk about it
Hannah Black penned a deeply psychoanalytic take on the phenomenon of televised couples therapy
John Ganz wrote an essay about the vibe shift that is better than most essays about the vibe shift
Friend-of-the-pod Will Gottsegen reported on how crypto-industry power players are trying to shill their way out of a bear market; Metalabel co-founder and recent TCJ guest Yancey Strickler wrote about how we should probably start thinking about what comes “after crypto” at this point
Lila Shapiro profiles Nathan Fielder and his confounding and cringe-inducing new HBO series The Rehearsal, approaching her subject with a critical nuance that eschews the dichotomy of reverence vs. repulsion that Fielder tends to inspire; instead — much like he does — she prods us to consider what this tells us about ourselves
Offline Recs
Listen
Panda Bear x Sonic Boom, “Edge of the Edge”
TCJ subscriber Prince Andrei made us smile when they posted the following comment to our mid-year music discussion thread: “Somehow the dirty algorithm did me correct yesterday and a Panda Bear/Sonic Boom collaboration appeared out of nowhere. It was a good day on the internet.” Today is perhaps an even better day, because we have another single from the psychedelic frontiersmen (of Animal Collective and Spacemen 3, respectively), “Edge of the Edge.” And we’re just a week out from Reset, the first proper album from the longtime collaborators.
A buck from each physical album sale of Reset will go to environmental nonprofit Earthisland.org, and $10 of the translucent pink LPs on sale via Bandcamp goes towards MAPS, a nonprofit researching the development of psychedelic therapies into medical mental health treatments.
Side note: In a year in which we’ve been blessed with (excellent) new releases from Spiritualized, Animal Collective, and now this, is it naive to hope for an ever-elusive Spacemen 3 return? —Andrea Domanick
Yuri Beats, “Legend (Holy Shit)”
You kind of have to hear it to believe it, but this 2016 mash-up of Drake’s “Legend” and Father John Misty’s “Holy Shit” by friend-of-the-pod Yuri Beats is probably even more epic than its component parts. For years, it was hard to track down a high-quality version of it online. But it recently experienced a second life, in the form of an NFT experiment about remix culture and intellectual property. —Emilie Friedlander
Jenn Morel, Abel Romijin, and Zach Britt, “Chaos”
We couldn’t include this song in our mid-year playlist because it’s part of a project meant to posit a more musician-friendly alternative to DSPs: Chaos, a 77-artist “headless band” that conducted an extraordinarily ambitious music NFT experiment earlier this summer. But it slaps, and we can’t wait to tell you more about the project on an upcoming episode ;-) —EF
This fascinating narrative podcast tackles some of the most thought-provoking chapters in the history of sound, from the evolution of accents, to why “alert” tones sound the way they do, to the stories behind pirate radio and Simlish. If you even remotely identify as an audiophile, you’ll love it. If you don’t, check it out anyway for the deeply human stories. —AD
Read
Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
Back 2014, Joshua Ferris wrote a surprisingly gripping novel about a Park Avenue dentist that doubles as an incredibly moving examination of atheism, agnosticism, and what it is we believe in when we believe in something larger than ourselves. I read it at a family beach vacation a few weeks back, which somehow made the experience even more psychedelic.—EF
Jacek Dukaj, The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams
This work of experimental electronic literature, published in 2015 by Polish sci-fi author Jacek Dukaj, posits a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk future in which all biological life has been wiped out by an extinction event. Instead, the earth is populated by robots and mechs, many of which are inhabited by the digitized consciousnesses of humans whose physical bodies did not survive the cataclysm.
At once profound, witty, and wildly imaginative, The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams contemplates the nature of the soul and what it means to be human. One early scene depicts the robot-humans attempting small talk at an abandoned Tokyo bar, pouring vodka shots they cannot drink while “Blade Runner” plays on a perpetual loop behind them. Another involves a nuclear submarine that’s been commandeered by the IRS’ AI.
Just as imaginative is the format. There’s no traditional paper version of the book. It’s a digital-only novel featuring a narrative layer, a hypertext footnote layer, and a multimedia layer that includes beautiful illustrations, 3D-printable models of main robotic characters, and a promotional video. All that for the cool price of $2.99. A word of caution: There are two mediocre-to-bad Netflix series that claim to be based on the book but have next to nothing to do with it. —AD
Watch
The Bear (FX/Hulu)
A couple people I know had extremely negative reactions to The Bear, but I was absolutely delighted by this tale of a fine dining chef who takes over his dead brother’s Italian sandwich shop in Chicago. It includes an unexpected side plot about Al Anon, prompted The New York Post to herald the arrival of a “hot line cook summer” in New York (???), and for some twisted reason has caused me to start daydreaming about how fun it would be to go to culinary school. Relatedly, should I go to culinary school? —EF
Deadwood (HBO)
If you haven’t watched this ahead-of-its-time HBO classic, chances are someone has told you you should. I am here to do that again, and confirm that it is just as good as everyone says it is.
Set in a post-Civil War, pre-Annexation, and thus literally lawless town built on stolen Sioux land, this Western historical fiction drama boasts the kind of consummate acting and airtight writing that make television feel more like literature. The lawlessness and the discovery of gold in the region draw people to the town who are looking to capitalize on those things, along with those who end up being capitalized upon. At its core, it’s a brutally timeless story about how humans behave when there aren’t pre-imposed rules and social norms around to tell them otherwise.
Sadly, because prestige TV wasn’t really a thing yet, Deadwood was abruptly canceled in 2006 after just three seasons, with a coda film released in 2019. Perhaps more tragic than the show’s fate, though, is that of its ailing creator David Milch, who recounts his story in a memoir due out on Sept. 13. —AD
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I like this letter a lot