Links
A big ol’ bag of links to get you through the day.
An amazing, super in-depth profile of Robyn.
Listening to her music, you’re not enveloped in the minutiae of her emotional universe, as you are with someone like Taylor Swift. Rather, Robyn will extract from her universe the simplest of plots—a pure love, thwarted—and then expand it to encompass everything. Her voice, tensile and clear, is an ideal delivery system for longing; it makes me picture melted sugar hardening on ice.
The Ringer’s fantastic Brian Phillips goes back in history to see how our airports became such a mess.
Newly elected President Ronald Reagan, who’d supported the controllers throughout his campaign, decided to fire almost all of them and issue lifetime bans on their rehiring. Eliminating almost the entire pool of trained air traffic controllers had several negative consequences that no one could possibly have foreseen, such as the entire country suddenly having no trained air traffic controllers. Whoops!
The Chaotic Timeline That Led to America’s Great Airport Meltdown
This is a really well done piece about how sports gambling has exploded in recent years, and the many effects it has across society.
But as a society, we are making an enormously risky bet: that we can reap the rewards of a runaway gambling industry without paying any price; that the litany of social ills long associated with this vice—addiction and impoverishment, isolation and abuse, cheating and chasing and corrosive idleness—can, this time, be kept in check; that, unlike every civilization that came before us, we can beat the house.
What are the odds that we’re right?
Sucker: My year as a degenerate gambler
There was tons of coverage of Apple’s 50th birthday last week. Some of the best was at The Verge, which had an entire series dedicated to the event. All those pieces were good, but I really enjoyed David Pierce’s look back on the “iDecade,” when Apple dropped something new and cool every few months.
The company that once couldn’t even manage to improve on the Apple II was now inventing product after product, forcing competitors to play catch-up, then reimagined these new classics all over again a few years or even months later, to somehow even bigger acclaim and bigger sales. We may live now in the world the iPhone made, but the iDecade was truly Peak Apple.
Steve Jobs and the greatest run of products in tech history
This Week In Baseball is coming back! It won’t compare to the original, because finding highlights of games is no longer a difficult task. But still cool it is returning.
Philip Michaels writes about what made the classic show so good. I had never heard about the process to put together each week’s show.
The production team ended up installing 3/4-inch tape recorders in each Major League stadium to capture footage from each game. The tapes would then be shipped via air courier to the show’s production offices in New York, where loggers recorded time codes for the key highlights. Editors would piece together the selections, writers would punch out a script, with narration and music added to the final version. Every week in those early days, the finished tape would then be sent out to various stations for broadcast over the weekend.
“It’s quite amazing we were able to get anything on the air, but it worked,” Belinfate said.
‘This Week in Baseball’ returns, but the original show still casts a large shadow
My schedule allows a lot more time for reading than most people. As this Instagram post shows, it is still possible to read a book per week even if you have a full time job, younger kids, and so on.