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One thing the Radiolab guys are really good at doing is re-visiting stories to see what’s changed - which is particularly important with science and technology (they did a story on CRISPR when it was fringe science, then revisited when it had gone mainstream). 

This episode is a pretty good snapshot of AI and robot-ethics across a number of industries. They touch on Turing tests, chat bots, toys that can feel pain and psycho-analysing yourself in VR. Essential listening.

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If you wanted to go into extra depth with Ex Machina, Cinematography Database Fan does hour-long technical cinematography analysis on all kinds of films. He combines behind-the-scenes stills, key shots and production information to deconstruct film aesthetics. He talks a-mile-a-minute, knows a LOT about lighting set-ups and lenses and does really well to demonstrate how creative/visual storytelling choices manifest in film-making.

In a glut of film analysis video-essays, this channel is comfortingly technical and long-form - really feels like it’s come from inside the industry. 

During one aside he mentions a restaurant in LA ‘Ketchup’ where they ‘serve ketchup...for food’. 

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E3 trailer for Death Stranding.

Someone on twitter described Japanese renegade game-developer Hideo Kojima’s newest baffler as looking like a ‘post-Anthropocene hiking simulator’.

Doesn’t look like it would be particularly fun to play, but boy is it a mixed bag of world-building...

Stay to the end of the trailer to see some uncannily realistic chewing from Lea Seydoux,

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Cory Doctorow - journalist and science fiction author talks piracy, privacy and the internet of things. He’s long been embedded in the tech community and speaks with authority about the hardware and encrypted languages involved in computing and networks. In this talk he proposes the idea of ‘metaphor debt’ - the collateral damage incurred by seeing digital imprints not as what they are, but what they masquerade as. 

When comparing the internet age to Feudalism he says “...the only property owning class are trans-human, immortal colony organisms called Limited Liability Corporations, that treat human beings as their inconvenient gut flora and food source.”

This talk was given to a bemused older audience at the pretty new-agey looking ‘Bioneers’ conference in, you-can-probably-guess-where, California. Skip to 3:30 for the talk.

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Liliana Segura’s episode on the Longform Podcast. She writes chiefly on wrongful conviction and the death penalty in America - from a distinctly abolitionist standpoint.

This harrowing article gets discussed in-depth, but check the show-notes for an extensive list of her work.

She’s currently working at The Intercept and putting together her own podcast (as she mentions). She’s a legend.

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Ross Anderson, reporting for The Atlantic, visits China’s new satellite dish (custom-built to listen for extraterrestrial chatter) and meets with Cixin Liu - China’s foremost sci-fi writer - who’s The Three Body Problem.

Really makes you think what non-Western space exploration/science fiction might look like - especially given different civilisations’ approaches to colonisation.

The Atlantic’s audio articles are great. I’m gonna post more of the greatest hits.

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Naive To The Bone -  Marie Davidson

From French Canadian Marie Davidson’s banging ‘Adieux au Dancefloor’ of last year. Her sultry style of spoken word spans most of the album.

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Imaginary Worlds Podcast - hosted by Eric Molinsky

This episode is about how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein and the hitherto overlooked meteorological factors that may have contributed symptomatically to it’s bleakness.

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Sorry to Trumpspam but I feel that this is an important takeaway from 2016′s various political disasters. Campaigns are hiring Big Data companies like Cambridge Analytica to target individual personality types - types gleaned with chilling accuracy from Facebook likes - signalling a move away from the traditional view of demography-as-voter-base and into the highly contentious use of psychometrics to manipulate individual voters.

This will be the model from now on - no more mass communication, no more blanket advertising. Instead, highly tailored messaging based on psychography, the harnessing of pre-existing bias will rule. This is utterly antithetical to any ideal of an open, rational democracy, and as we’ve seen (CA were also hired by the Leave EU campaign in the UK), it’s deadly effective.

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Vox does a lite history of Kanye’s use of vocals in his oeuvre. Not a particularly in-depth examination but they do lay out a couple of good examples. What’s missing (and I’m sure you’re eager to fill in) is what these techniques say about music in a greater context and what it means to capture, bottle, mutate and re-purpose the human voice... 

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My favourite War on Drugs song is also my favourite Grateful Dead song...

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Following the Inuktitut train of thought - here is an experiment in lean language. Rare, ancient and small language like Toki Pona beg the question; does a language need to be vast of vocabulary to be the most inter-personally communicative? English, French and Russian are often touted as the most ‘expressive languages’ but that really only accounts for information out. How much is being received of the intended message after all that expression had taken place? This is a heady question tied up in authorship, semantics and probably post-structuralism, but one finds that the splitting of hairs that occurs with a language replete with synonyms and almost-synonyms perhaps occludes communication - on a social, biological, emotional level.  

Toki Pona is a refreshing solution because it’s minuscule vocabulary makes what few words it does contain flexible, categorical and syntax dependent. With a bit of body language and a healthy dose of context you’d probably be able to get by.

I’m not saying it’s practically applicable in a world where jargons power society but at a vernacular level, like with internet dialects, maybe we could say less and mean more...

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Don’t be fooled by the click-baity thumbnail; here Tom Scott gives a very brief but very intriguing introduction to the Inuktitut language of Northern Canada and the writing system that was developed for it. Unlike English, for example, where the spoken and written language has been co-evolving for hundreds of years (with cross-pollination from languages around it), Inuktitut’s written form was designed specifically to transcribe the spoken word in the most efficient and pragmatic way possible - taking full advantage of the ‘abugida’ to capture the language’s stoccato nature.

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Quiet Fire - Mammal Hands (2016)

Track one from the wonderful Floa by Mammal Hands - a trio who met whilst busking in the streets of Norwich. It’s rhythm, keys and saxophone have a beautiful meandering quality that draws influences from Middle Eastern and African classical and jazz. It’s minimal and vast in equal measure - a very cohesive sound.

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A fascinating exploration of fungally activated teas by Nordic Food Lab. The way they go about isolating and classifying flavours and their causes is so satisfyingly methodical. I might be crazy but this post was poetry to me. 

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Evocative, oceanic synth-drone. Abul Mogard has one of those backstories that bears repeating any time his music is mentioned; he was a metal-worker on a production line in Serbia his whole working life, and upon retirement set about re-creating the factory’s sonic textures impressed upon him through the years with an assortment of electronic organs and synthesisers. The results are magnificent.

Each piece on this album, ‘Circular Forms’, slowly rises and falls like the massive crest of ocean waves. Threaded through them are emotional, almost lyrical transmutations of sound, synths like light beams dispersing and refracting, vast sheets of metal expanding and contracting in kaleidoscopic shifts. Industrial sounds, but with naturalist movement. Immerse yourself in this overwhelming elegy for the industrial age.

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The film-analysis video essay format has taken flight over the last year or two. Lessons From The Screenplay uses the formula developed by Tony Zhou to analyse the art of editing, and applies it to what’s inarguably the most vital component of a film - the script. These are all worth watching - they offer illuminating comparisons between shooting scripts and what appears on the screen, with stylish editing and a keen understanding of how good storytelling works.