Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving! A few weekends a year I like to unlock some of my favorite Numlock Sunday interviews to the whole readership. Given that it’s “put stuff on sale” season, for the next couple days an upgrade to be a paid subscriber is one of the biggest cuts of the year.
While it’s super appreciated when folks are able to subscribe, if that’s not for you, that’s totally okay. It’s a huge help when readers tell their friends about Numlock so never hesitate to forward one you particularly enjoy, or email an invite to a friend to sign up.
Also, if you want to put Numlock on your Christmas list, gift subscriptions are available here.
With all that out of the way, here are some unlocked reads for the long weekend, I hope you enjoy!
Priyanka Runwal on the guitar wood crisis
I spoke to Priyanka Runwal who wrote “Climate Change Hits Rock and Roll as Prized Guitar Wood Shortage Looms” for Scientific American. One specific kind of ash wood — marinated for a little while, but not for too long, in the Mississippi River — is strong but low-density, and highly sought-after by musical instrument manufacturers. It’s in trouble.
These areas of the lower Mississippi that I've written about haven't seen the beetles come to their ash trees yet, but everybody understood that it's only a matter of time. In 2015, they decided that, "Look, this is going to happen one way or the other." It makes sense to start taking down any ash trees that are around. That's where this part fits into the shortage: you're seeing the shortage because of flooding, climate change, but then there's this other threat that may not have reached them yet, but it's a preemptive measure that people have to take. That plays into that story about the wood shortage as well.
Kofie Yeboah on The Fumble Dimension
I reached out to one of my absolute favorite internet creators, Kofie Yeboah of SB Nation, to talk about his work. Since the medium he works in is video, I’ve never actually been able to include his work in the newsletter, but I watch everything that Kofie puts out there pretty much immediately, and he’s one of my favorite creators on the internet. His stuff is statty, it’s fun, and and looks great.
What's your favorite thing that you've worked on?
My favorite thing I did was a documentary on the history of high school sports mixtapes. That's on my YouTube channel. It's about two hours, It took me to me maybe six months to do, and the reason why it stuck so close to me is because you see all these basketball highlight websites now and all these YouTube channels and whatnot, but back when I was just starting in high school, those sites weren't all around to document them. You had Ball Is Life and Hoopmixtape to just document highlights or whatever.We talked about Ball is Life, Hoopmixtape, we talked about John Wall, the NBA lockout, and then we talk about the media landscape now. Not only were those sites changing and helping out the high school sports media landscape, but they actually changed the sports media landscape in general, and I don't think a lot of people know that. It was good to document what's happened over the course of 10 years, and sports media highlight culture now, what influences have come from mixtape sites, and all the athletes that have come through that circuit.
Matt Yglesias on One Billion Americans
I spoke to Matt Yglesias, author of the new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Matt needs very little introduction, has the podcast The Weeds and just launched a newsletter, Slow Boring. His new book takes on the radical idea that the United States needs to undergo a massive, determined campaign to increase the number of Americans
The family fun pack is an idea I picked up from Matt Bruenig and Liz Bruenig. She's a New York Times opinion writer, he runs a kind of one man think tank, People's Policy Project. And his basic idea there was like, "Okay, what if we just wrote down what do kids need, what do families with kids need, that is uncontroversial?"
When they're infants, they need somebody to take care of them, somebody from their family. They need diapers. They need food. All kids need healthcare. All kids needs some kind of daycare and childcare situation for years. And what if the government just provided all of that? And it costs money to have a comprehensive welfare state for ages zero to five, but at the same time, why not do it?
Some things, you could be like, "Well, does everybody really need a microwave?" I don't know. I have one, I like one. But we have to do something with kids. We didn't do it traditionally because it didn't seem like there was a crisis. Once kids reach school age, unless we give them schools, they're not going to learn to read. And so America was early in thinking that people should read.
Julia Alexander on The Mouse
I spoke to Julia Alexander, a writer for The Verge who’s appeared regularly in Numlock and who also writes a really interesting newsletter about Disney called Musings on Mouse. We spoke about what’s going on in the Magic Kingdom, how a gigantic cultural force got bigger than ever, and what’s happening with streaming, not just in the U.S. but worldwide.
Disney's shift to direct to consumer and going all in was something that we would have seen happen over the next five to six years, but as with everything in the pandemic, it's just been accelerated. They had to do it now. If we were going to break down Disney's revenue over the last year, it's only direct to consumer, because every single other vertical's been hit. Theatrical has been hit, their TV networks have been hit by advertising problems and content delays and production delays. Their parks business is obviously floundering right now. Cruises are basically out of the question. You can go through each one, all of them, and there's a problem here because of the pandemic. The one area that was going to grow anyways, even without this, but was just forced to grow faster was streaming. And it feels like what we're seeing is Disney figuring out on the fly what works and what doesn't.
Author Tim Hwang on the subprime attention crisis
I spoke to Tim Hwang, author of the book Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet. We spoke about how advertising fuels the tech business, how lots of the splashy cutting edge research coming out of Silicon Valley was funded by ad revenues, and how an issue in the ad market could reverberate through the beating heart of innovation in the U.S.
What is the potential peril if people start to ask some serious questions about what's going on in their ad space?
So, some people have argued about this on the book, and I do think it's an interesting debate to have, which is: if advertising is in crisis, who cares? Is Zuckerberg going to just be like a billion dollars poorer? No one cares about that. But I think the argument I try to make in the book is that modern advertising and the wealth that modern advertising has produced is just tied up in all the parts of the economy now.
For example, I spent the last few years doing a lot of work in machine learning and AI and thinking about the public policy of those technologies. The leading labs doing the most cutting edge work are at companies like Google and Facebook. It's not like those labs are making money. Those are loss leaders for the company. In some ways, advertising is subsidizing the most cutting edge scientific research out there. You have to think that actually there's this unexpected thing where, if the advertising economy is at risk, there's all these other things that have now become tied to the advertising industry through these technology companies that are also at risk.
Lenika Cruz on Dynamite and BTS
I spoke to Lenika Cruz, a culture editor at The Atlantic, who wrote BTS’s ‘Dynamite’ Could Upend the Music Industry. Cruz’s story was a deeply interesting take about what it takes to succeed on the American music charts and why that’s different than succeeding in music, a situation where what’s measured and the measurement is disjointed.
Again, the music industry is kind of notorious for having very perilous carrot and sticks and for better or worse, the English hit is the one that did hit.
Yeah, absolutely. The bittersweetness that I described in that story was something I wasn't even consciously really thinking of. And when I was talking with my editor, she pointed out like, "Oh, there seems to be this conflicted feeling and on the part of the fandom." I felt this and I was so caught up in wanting to be happy about this and celebrating this milestone, but it does make me kind of sad. Like you said, the success of “Dynamite” makes sense to a lot of fans.We know on some level that if BTS sung entirely English, that they would be much more accepted and played on the radio and just treated differently in Western media and in American music in general. Seeing the success of the song, which I know some fans had mixed feelings about when it was first announced, seeing it pay off in such a dramatic way, a lot of people are split.
Have a great long weekend! Guitar image by Valeria Benítez Fernández on Scopio
