FYI #47

• Silicon Valley, the new lobbying monster, by Charles Duhigg, via the New Yorker.

• Fighting for our web, Molly White’s talk at XOXO, via White’s newsletter [citation needed].

• South Korean author Han Kang wins the 2024 Nobel prize in literature, via the Guardian. Details on the Nobel Prize website.

• Interesting piece about writer Gerald Murnane, who was being talked about as a possible recipient of the prize, via ABC News.

.. Murnane also plays the fiddle for one hour each day and regularly revises the Hungarian language using tens of thousands of cue cards, which he began doing as part of a mission to read Gyula Illyes' novel People of the Puszta in its original language. He has three large archives worth of filing cabinets in his lean-to bedroom at his son's house. The letters and essays inside are something akin to an objet d'art within literary circles and scholarship. The archives, named the Chronological, Literary and the Antipodean, will only become public once he, along with his brother and sister, dies.

• List culture, via One Thing.

• South Summit cover The Police 'Roxanne' for Like A Version, via Triple J.

• On being open to everyday inspiration, musician Sam Amidon, via the Creative Independent.

• Eames Shell chair aims to get "the best to the greatest number of people for the least", via dezeen.

• All things nice: designer Tom Bartlett's converted spice factory is a lesson in decorating with feeling, film via the Modern House.

• Broad Radio, new radio network, ‘We are radio for women, by women’, created by Jo Stanley.

• Currently reading: Ben Shewry’s new memoir, Uses for Obsession: A Chef's Memoir. Loved the chapter on kindness and Yo La Tengo. In the spirit of the playlists Shewry puts together, I listened to the band’s 2013 Tiny Desk Concert, via NPR.

• Came across this video podcast, Follow the Rabbit, via The Maintainers Quarterly-Ish Newsletter… Ungrammable Hang Zones and Neo-Third Places with Kelly Pendergrast.

• Podcast listening highlights this week:

  • Deborah Levy's "The Position of Spoons: And Other Intimacies" on the LARB Radio Hour. I’m looking forward to Levy’s new book.

  • The new season of Julia Loius-Dreyfus’ podcast, Wiser than Me, starts with Jane Goodall

  • Is AI creative? Meghan O'Gieblyn, the author of ‘God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning’ on The Gray Area with Sean Illing

  • Uses for Ben Shewry, via Read This, with Michael Williams

  • Ep 250 Election Stress w/ Reggie Hubbard, Metta Hour with Sharon Salzberg