Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Is Spotify Moving Music to Mush?

Jeremy Larson offers a long reflection on how streaming services have changed the ways that we listen to music. He reflects on a decade of using Spotify as Pitchfork’s chief reviewer, and he concludes, “I’m addicted to a relationship that I know is very bad for me”:

The more time I spend on Spotify, the more it pushes me away from the outer edges of the platform and toward the mushy middle. This is where everyone is serviced the same songs simply because that is what’s popular. Four years ago, while the app’s algorithmic autoplay feature was on, I was served the Pavement song “Harness Your Hopes,” a wordy and melodic—and by all accounts obscure—B-side from the beloved indie band. As of this writing, the song has over 72 million streams, more than twice as much as their actual college rock hit from the ’90s, “Cut Your Hair,” the one Pavement song your average Gen X’er might actually recognize. How did this happen?

2. Apple’s Painful Perfectionism

Tripp Mickle’s new book, After Steve, explores how Apple thrived after the founder’s death. The New York Post’s review of the book focuses on the special role of designer Jony Ive, whose powerful aesthetic helped launch the iMac, iPod, and Apple Watch. But even at Apple, Ive’s design sense could irritate colleagues:

His perfectionism led him to see flaws others couldn’t. While sitting with his VP of manufacturing design at a Hong Kong airport lounge, Ive glanced at the stainless-steel bar and quietly announced, “I can see every seam in this bar.” His friend and colleague, who saw nothing irregular in the bar’s smooth silver metal, just shrugged and said, “Your life must be f–king miserable.”

3. Should We Build More Subways?

Four years late and £4bn over budget, Crossrail is being opened in London to connect the city’s east and west sides. The rail line is being heralded as “an engineering triumph.” But does it even make sense? The Financial Times reports that, even before Covid-19, urban transport systems were stagnating in global capitals. And in London, the value is murkier:

In the 13 years since construction began, builders have dodged the existing London Underground lines, medieval plague pits, Victorian sewage pipes, Tudor castle foundations and a lattice of gas and telecoms pipes buried in often porous honeycomb soil beneath one of the world’s oldest cities…Crossrail is finally arriving, but it does so at an inauspicious moment — when the business case for mega-sized urban infrastructure projects is facing unprecedented uncertainty from shifting ways of working and new technologies that had set in even prior to the pandemic. “Crossrail was built for a completely different world,” says Tony Travers, a government expert at the London School of Economics.

But don’t write the obituary for the crowded metropolis just yet. This interview with urban economist Edward Glaeser makes a persuasive case that cities – and face-to-face contact at work – have an “essential learning component that is valuable and crucial for workers who are young.” ​​​​​

4. Snookered

The year that snooker legend Ronnie O’Sullivan turned pro, his father was jailed for life. At one point in his career, both of his parents were in prison. Even if you don’t know the difference between snooker and billiards, this Spiked profile of O’Sullivan is a remarkable read:

Seven World Championships. Seven Masters. Seven UK Championships. Thirty-nine ranking titles. O’Sullivan has made more maximum breaks than anyone else (15). He made the fastest maximum break ever (five minutes and eight seconds, a record that will almost certainly never be beaten). He is the only player to have made a thousand career centuries (1,170 and counting). At the age of 17, he became the youngest player to win a ranking event and he is now the oldest person to have won the World Championship.

5. What Makes Good Storytelling?

When true crime journalist Katia Savchuk submitted a 19,000 word piece about a series of home invasions to The Atavist, an online literary magazine, the editor, Seyward Darby, had to figure out what to do with it. In this interview, Darby explains his response, and he illustrates why it takes structure to make a good story:

When Savchuk turned in the first draft, I spent a lot of time staring at it and writing notes on Post-its and trying to think about how we can order them in the story such that the reader never feels like, “I have everything I came for — why are there still 10,000 words left?” Figuring out that structure where things didn’t really feel front-loaded was maybe the most important decision we had to make. Trying to figure out, you know, how to not just organize things, but pace things. Pace was just really, really crucial here.

6. Is the Start-Up Party Over?

Earlier this month, Sequoia Capital released a 52-slide PowerPoint deck with a dire forecast about the economic climate for start-ups. In Silicon Valley, it was as if someone had taken away the punchbowl. But Fast Company points out that the downturn might finally make it easier to hire:

Because FANG companies are instituting hiring freezes, the talent pool is about to become deeper and recruiting should be easier for those companies that are in a position to grow, even in a limited fashion.

Nor does everyone share Sequoia’s view. Crypto-evangelist Chris Dixon announced last week that he’s launching a new $4.5b fund as we enter “the golden era of Web3.0”.

Websites Worth Reading

The 666 Greatest Novels: Novels for summer reading

The Atavist: Long-form writing

The Blog Prize: Prizes for the best ideas posted in blogs

Feeds We Follow

@bgurley: Superforecaster

@bwob_io: Monitoring Russian TV

@awgaffney: Tribute to the late hockey icon, Guy Lafleur