Media

David Bowie was more than a multi-platinum rock and roller. He was also one of the more literate composers in the business. In conjunction with a career retrospective in 2013 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Bowie issued a list of the one hundred books he considered the most important and influential.

We’ve been testing weekly short fiction pieces scribed by GPT-2, a text-generating artificial intelligence algorithm originally built by OpenAI. We give the algorithm a sentence from a real article, and the algorithm iteratively generates what it thinks the next word should be.

This Hotel lists hotel, hostel and bed & breakfast recommendations from trusted experts like New York Times, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Frommers, CNN and many more.

As the father of industrial design, Raymond Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new.

Dirty Dancing’s setting, Kellerman’s, is based on the numerous all-inclusive vacation spots aimed at Jewish travelers that dotted the upstate New York landscape throughout much of the 20th century—a constellation of resorts commonly known as the Borscht Belt.

The background music industry – also known as music design, music consultancy or something offered as part of a broader package of “experiential design” or “sensory marketing” – is constantly deciding what we hear as we go about our everyday business. The biggest player in the industry, Mood Media, supplies music to 560,000 locations across the world, from Sainsbury’s to KFC.

For a few years around the millennium, Delia’s and its direct-to-consumer catalogs were the hottest brand in the country. It was a glimpse of things to come. At its peak, 55 million copies were sent out to girls across the country every year.

1982’s Disco Jazz has been reissued. “Aaj Shanibar,” one of its four tracks, has also started to spread through the strange rabbithole that is YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. With the benefit of time and technology, “lost” songs reach a new generation of listeners halfway around the world.

The war propaganda function in the United States is finely tuned. It’s sophisticated and most of all it blends into the media terrain. While the names of the countries changed, and of course each circumstance was different, there were some parallels that cried out for examination.

Twenty years after it sputtered onto the web, it’s now a de facto pillar in our fact-checking infrastructure. Its pages often top Google search and feed the knowledge panels that appear at the top of those results. Big Tech’s own efforts to stop misinformation also rely upon Wikipedia.

An unusual billboard was recently set up at a crosswalk in France to promote pedestrian safety. Whenever a pedestrian was detected crossing while the “red man” light was on, the billboard would emit a loud tire screeching sound. A camera built into the billboard would then capture the terrified face of the jaywalker.

The Saturn V rocket carrying astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969 — and just four days later, man first set foot on the moon. The moon mission was a milestone in human history. But it was also a groundbreaking moment in broadcast television.

The band ditched a mega campaign in favor of fan letters and ads in the classified section of newspapers in Devon, North Wales, Sydney and more. Guitarist Jonny Buckland worked at the North Wales Daily Post – the newspaper of choice for this campaign.

The entertainment industry’s reigning super-agent planned to put his firm—and the very power structure of Hollywood—on the line with an audacious, now scuttled public offering. With that future on hold and the likes of Netflix and Disney commanding more ground by the day, what’s an ambitious modern macher to do?

Extremism flourishes on Amazon’s self-publishing arm. The company gives extremists and neo-Nazis banned from other platforms unprecedented access to a mainstream audience — and even promotes their books.

Despite their popularity, it’s still impossible to find paperback versions of many new books when they debut. It’s a common practice among publishers to release new titles as hardcovers and publish the paperback edition about a year after the initial print run.

Some people can dig up great music like magic, or have friends inside the industry who keep them updated. Others are perfectly content with their weekly Spotify Discover playlist. But if you need more ways to find music, here are some ideas.

In the past, the web was powerful and serious enough to land me in jail. Today it feels like little more than entertainment. The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?

Huge nationwide protests against corruption have been making headlines, but these young millennials are taking on power in a different way, by celebrating beauty, fashion and rap. They’ve got millions of followers, but, as Unreported World finds out, fame can have deadly consequences.

A mobile-storytelling platform called Quibi has loomed on the content horizon, promising that, when its app launches this spring, it will be a home to a huge library of short-form shows made specifically for your phone. But Snapchat has been operating in that space for years. It’s harder than you’d think.

Google Chrome extensions promised useful tasks like converting webpages into PDFs. But once installed, they injected ads and generated massive amounts of invalid traffic, the ad industry’s term for fake or manipulated views, users, or clicks. More than 60 of those extensions were owned by Daniel Yomtobian.

Gig economies are ersatz structures, designed to skirt labor laws and offload risk and expense onto workers themselves. They serve the whims of capital.

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society?

In 2012, a catchy New Wave anthem appeared on the internet with no information about who wrote or recorded it. Amateur detectives have spent thousands of hours since trying to figure out where it came from — with little luck. Inside the question that’s been driving the internet crazy for years.