Review: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

A 4:3 crop of the cover of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

A middle-aged white woman smiled warmly at them from behind the till. “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?” she said, abiding by that ancient and most sacred British law of only ever starting a conversation with a comment on the weather.

Chapter 12 of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna
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Fighting Music Discovery Stagnation

Photo of the top of the lid of my laptop with several stickers on it one of which is a "I Power KEXP".
The recent addition of the KEXP sticker to my laptop is totally relevant to this blog post actually.

Last year in a blog post titled Recommended For You I talked about how I prefer human recommendations over ones made my machines. Today I saw a post shared by Nick Heer over on his blog about music discovery stagnation which linked to this post by Daniel Parris which made think about what I said in that blog post and how it applies to music discovery.

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Review: Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris

A square version of the front cover of Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris.
A square version of the front cover of Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris.

Starving the peasants into the factories is the classic narrative of proletarianization, the creation story of the industrial working class. California didn’t have the factories of a Manchester, UK; a Lyon, France; or a Lowell, Massachusetts, but the state took on a factory orientation towards what it did have, which was gold and land. Unlike so much of the world, California did not see capitalist economics evolve step-by-step out of feudal property relations. Capital hit California like a meteor, alien tendrils surging from the crash site.

Page 20 of Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris
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