This week…
Did you know that Twitter was born in 2005 as Odeo, a podcast company, before becoming a ‘microblogging’ site in 2006? And now, it is officially pivoting back to audio, a good 16 years later. Typing is not enough, everyone wants to talk.
Well, here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Twitter is becoming a podcast app
Ariel Shapiro for The Verge:
Twitter is officially getting into podcasts. The app will launch a test version of Twitter Spaces today that includes podcasts, letting you listen to full shows through curated playlists based on your interests.
The redesigned Spaces tab opens with Stations, topic-based playlists combining podcast episodes pulled from RSS with Twitter’s social audio events and recordings. It functions like a Pandora station but for spoken word and is pretty different from the a la carte listening podcast consumers are used to on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Live and upcoming spaces are still in the tab, further down the page. The test will roll out to a random group of users across the world, initially only in English.
I wish more people hate the sound of their own voices in recordings.
The rise of the ‘Morally Dubious Podcaster’ in pop culture
Neda Ulaby for NPR:
One of this summer’s most popular shows centers on a slimy true crime podcaster. Only Murders In the Building, on Hulu, follows three fans of a Serial-like show called All Is Not OK in Oklahoma. By the end of season two, it becomes clear the show’s host, played by Tina Fey, may be a cold-blooded murderer herself.
“I need something with famous people, and blood!” she wails to an assistant. “God, I need a murder. A good one!”
Fey’s character is just one example of what seems to be a new pop culture archetype.
Call them the morally dubious podcasters.
I can’t bear them.
Sanas, the buzzy Bay Area startup that wants to make the world sound whiter
Joshua Bote for SFGATE:
The tacit promise of Sanas seems to be that callers will be more polite — and more amenable to being helped — if they think the person on the other end is more like them. (This isn’t a new concept; call center workers in India, the Philippines and elsewhere already adopt American names, and are pressured to develop accents that will sound more “neutral” to Americans.)
But there’s a fundamental flaw with the tacit promises of Sanas, and the logic presented by [Marty Massih] Sarim — an angel investor with “more than 25 years of call center experience,” according to his LinkedIn. Accents don’t cause bias, they trigger pre-existing biases. That bigotry is supercharged by the power dynamics at play in the hellscape of modern customer service, where frustrated callers are trapped on the phone with agents who have little authority to solve their problems, and everyone is forced to interact exclusively through dehumanizing, uncanny valley scripts.
Make it stop.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading a fascinating piece, “Socialite, Widow, Jeweller, Spy: How a GRU Agent Charmed Her Way Into NATO Circles in Italy” by Christo Grozev for Bellingcat.
I’m listening to episode 71 of Lingthusiasm. Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch talk about the vocal folds.
I’m watching a video essay on the use of multilingualism to highlight tensions and develop characters in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Reviews, opinion pieces and other stray links:
There will always be guys like Andrew Tate by Ryan Broderick for Garbage Day.
New breed of video sites thrives on misinformation and hate by Andrew R. C. Marshall and Joseph Tanfani for Reuters.
Deepfakes for all: Uncensored AI art model prompts ethics questions by Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch.
She-Hulk’s review bombing proves IMDb’s biggest ratings problem by De’Vion Hinton for Screen Rant.
The bionic arms race by Britt H. Young for IEEE Spectrum.
Chart of the week
An idea for your next (true crime) podcast. Katharina Buchholz shows what droughts have revealed for Statista. Well, this took me down a bit of a rabbit hole, specifically the one about the hunger stone. Had no idea what it was, but harrowing to learn about.