Hi again lovely email friends. Many and various treats for you this week.
🤳 Beauty filters are changing the way young girls see themselves: The most widespread use of augmented reality isn’t in gaming: it’s the face filters on social media. The result? A mass experiment on girls and young women.
🗝 Exploring the unreleased music in Prince’s vault: It’s been five years since Prince died, but his estate continues to churn out new music from the prolific artist. This article explores the 8,000 or so unreleased songs locked away in Prince’s vault.
🤖 Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords: Something happened to our fear of technology. Just a handful of years ago, it was common to see headlines warning uncontrollable machine self-improvement would one day overcome humanity. But today we fear a different threat, not the machines but their users. The terrifying influence unleashed by social media. We hear warnings that our collective ability to perceive reality is at stake, and that if we do not take corrective action we will lose our freedoms and way of life. See also: Reports predicting job loss via automation are overstating the case and Forget Boston Dynamics. This robot taught itself to walk with AI.
🎧 The FBI Investigated the Song ‘Louie Louie’ for Two Years: The question apparently had to do with the lyrics, which many find either confusing or simply impossible to understand.
📱 Having Your Smartphone Nearby Takes a Toll on Your Thinking: In two lab experiments, nearly 800 people completed tasks designed to measure their cognitive capacity. The results were striking: the closer the participant’s phone, the worse they fared on the task. Our smartphones’ mere presence is like the sound of our names or a crying baby — something that automatically exerts a gravitational pull on our attention.
🚥 Beatport’s Definitive Guide to Techno: As part of a series on the history of electronic dance music, this article explores the rich history of techno, from the 1970s right through to today.
🎶 Inside the Dirty Business of Hit Songwriting: Elvis Presley frequently told the press he’d never written a song in his life. Even so, his team set up an arrangement whereby he received one-third of the songwriting royalties for each song he released, no matter who wrote it. Presley recording your song was a sure route to success but, if a songwriter wouldn’t agree to these terms, Presley wouldn’t record it.
😬 If The Pandemic Has Made You Anxious About Returning To “Normal,” You’re Not Alone: Dozens of respondents to a survey about post-pandemic life expressed excitement about that return — travelling, hugging, seeing family again, an end to mass illness and death — but also a slew of concerns. See also: How Lockdown Loneliness Is Affecting Gen Z.
☎️ A booming industry based entirely on missed calls helped bring India online — and vanished overnight: In the age of expensive data, missed calls became more than just a cheap way to communicate. But in India, technology moves faster than you’d think.