Hey there lovely email friends, it’s getting pretty dark on the top half of the planet so I hope you’re getting enough light. I’ve been thinking a lot about the wonderful, sparkly life-giver that is popular music. So there’s a bit of that shiny shenanigans thrown in amongst your bunch of links this week.
🕴 Why the Year’s Most Popular Song Never Went to No. 1: Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” is 2021’s biggest song. It has hung around all year, spending most weeks in the Top 10, but in in Billboard’s Hot 100 it never got higher than No. 2. It’s a fine piece of pop, but Lipa, her label, radio programmers—everybody underestimated its potency.
🔭 Gravitational Waves Should Permanently Distort Space-Time: The “gravitational memory effect” predicts that a passing gravitational wave should forever alter the structure of space-time. Physicists have linked the phenomenon to fundamental cosmic symmetries and a potential solution to the black hole information paradox.
🤘 The Problem with Live Music: Leaving aside the pandemic, But there’s another, more longstanding problem with live music – its increasing reliance on larger and larger shows, and dominance by a very short list of corporations who produce nearly all of them.
Ⓜ️ How 77 Metro Agencies Design the Letter ‘M’ for Their Transit Logo: A subject close to my own heart. Mass transit agencies around the world face the same conundrum: How to make what amounts to four straight lines distinctive.
🤦♀️ Being single and living alone is incredibly expensive: Think about your household’s monthly expenses: big-ticket items plus all the smaller stuff. Now imagine paying for all those things completely on your own. When we talk about all the ways it’s become harder and harder for people to find solid financial footing in the middle class, we have to talk about how our society is still set up in a way that makes it much easier for single people to fall through the cracks.
💾 The Prince symbol has been salvaged from a floppy disk: In June of 1993, Prince officially changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph, largely to mess with his record label. There was immediate confusion, not to mention derision, as to how he would be referred to in the future, prompting Warner Bros. to send out computer floppy discs of the symbol so publications could use it in print.
🚙 How Has Car Safety Improved Over 60 Years? This is something called an infographic, showing the impact of various safety-related technologies. Although there are many more cars around today, vehicle-related fatalities are significantly lower than 60 years ago.
🥲 How the Beatles documentary ‘Get Back’ affected 13 songwriters: ‘I spontaneously burst into tears’: I will stop including things about this soon, probably, but the Washington Post spoke to more than a dozen songwriters about their reactions to the series, the viral moment when McCartney writes the backbone of “Get Back” in minutes, and the sometimes smooth, sometimes arduous process of how to craft a song in the first place. See also: Quietly Remembering John Lennon.
📸 The Year in New Yorker Photography: Looking back on 2021 through images. Proof, if needed, that just because we all have cameras doesn’t mean we’re all photographers.
🎤 Lyrical - Neil Tennant: I grew up loving synths and those who master them, but as time passes I’m developing more of an appreciation for their humanoid accomplices: the likes of Andy Bell, Alison Moyet, Annie Lennox and the Pet Shop Boys’ lyricist-in-chief Neil Tennant. Synth-pop in particular has a habit of serving up carefully-crafted social commentary served in a trojan horse of dizzy fun. Here, Tennant speaks to fashion mag Fantastic Man about his precise use of language.