Sitdown Sunday: Their chart-topping album got millions of streams - but was anyone really listening?

The Journal

2 days ago

IT'S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We've hand-picked some of the week's best reads for you to savour.
1. Streaming fraud
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Alamy Stock Photo
Two musicians released a jazz album on streaming services that shot straight to No 1 on the Billboard chart. A week later, it disappeared. The album got millions of streams. Except, as it turned out, no one was actually listening.
Kate Knibbs does a deep dive on the first AI music fraud case in the United States, and what the industry is facing.
(
WIRED
, approx 13 mins reading time)
Pulling up Spotify's dashboard for artists, Hay scrutinized the analytics for the pair's work. Listeners appeared concentrated in far-flung places like Vietnam. Things only got stranger from there. Here's how Hay remembers it: He started receiving notices from distributors, the companies that handle the licensing of indie artists' music. The distributors were flagging Smith and Hay's music, from Jazz and from other projects, for streaming fraud and pulling it down. Smith told Hay it was a mistake and that Hay had messed up securing the proper rights for samples. Hay frantically tried to correct the issue, but the flagging persisted. Hay, panicking, badgered Smith to help him figure out what was happening. Finally, Hay says, Smith offered some answers: Smith had instructed his staff at the medical clinics to stream their songs. It didn't sound like the full story.
2. 'Are the bricks evil?'
Sally McGrane speaks to residents who live in a German village that was built in the lead-up to World War Two as an 'elite community' for the Nazi S.S. They feel they have a responsibility to both remember and conquer its past.
(
The New York Times
, approx 11 mins reading time)
'Hannah Arendt called it the 'banality of evil,'' said Matthias Donath, a historian specializing in Berlin's Nazi architecture, in an email. Recently, Mr. Donath's research made headlines when he was able to draw a direct line from Waldsiedlung Krumme Lanke to Auschwitz, where former village resident Joachim Caesar was the head of agricultural operations. 'The residents found ideal living conditions — an idyll,' he said. 'And at the same time, they planned monstrous crimes.' How the residents here have reckoned with the past — or not — has followed larger cultural trajectories. For decades, it was swept under the rug.
'One method of survival in a destroyed and morally devastated Germany was repression,' Mr. Donath said. As a result, some of the village's residents are unaware of its history, until neighbors tell them about it. 'Some people say, 'It's 80 years ago, it has nothing to do with me,'' said Susanne Güthler, 67, a teacher of disabled children who moved here with her family in 2000. 'For me, it's the opposite. I want to know what happened, here in my house. It's intimidating, to hear about families drowning themselves in the Krumme Lanke, or hanging in the attic. But you can't move forward with silence.'
3. The battle over Toumaï
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
A fascinating article on the discovery of an ancient skull and the 20-year fight over what it tells us about the history of humanity.
(
The Guardian
, approx 35 mins reading time)
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When he returned from Chad, Brunet was furious. According to Macchiarelli, he immediately spent several days studying the femur in the laboratory, behind closed doors. He soon asked to meet with Bergeret in his office. 'Mademoiselle Bergeret, you were entrusted with study materials that were unidentified,' he told her, Bergeret recalled. 'It was not your role to make an identification.' A laboratory meeting was convened in the presence of a university dean to discuss a 'leak of scientific information', as the minutes put it. One researcher alleged that there were 'people who take advantage of our being away in the field to rifle through our collections'. Brunet spoke of 'a Judas'. 'A grave professional offence has been committed,' wrote the dean. In the meantime, Bergeret left for several days of fieldwork. When she returned, she found that her research materials had been confiscated; the fossils were being 'renumbered', she was told. At one point, however, Bergeret said, one of her advisers appeared with the femur in his hand. 'This piece,' he warned, holding it before her: 'You forget you ever saw it.'
4. Microplastics
They're everywhere – including, scarily, our blood. Elyse Hauser tried to measure the kinds of microplastics in her bloodstream using a $150 home test kit that she bought online. The results weren't great.
(
Slate
, approx 8 mins reading time)
Having microplastics in the human body does not sound good. To better understand why this isn't good, I called up Heather Leslie. She's a scientist who does consulting on environmental and health issues, and she's an expert on blood-borne plastic specifically. In 2022 she led the research team that found microplastics in human blood for the first time. Microplastics were first observed in humans in 2018, when researchers at the Medical University of Vienna detected them in the digestive system. After that study came out, Leslie felt it was important to check the bloodstream. Finding plastic circulating there proved that it was actually absorbed by our bodies, rather than something that simply passed through us. Since then, microplastics have shot into our collective health consciousness—and knowing that we can absorb them has motivated some, myself included, to cut down on plastic use. I've filled my kitchen with Pyrex instead of Tupperware. I quit reusing Ziploc bags. I check clothing labels, looking for natural fibers.
5. Tom Hardy
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
The English actor has played quite a few gangster roles on screen, from the Krays in Legend to Alfie Solomons in Peaky Blinders. Here, he chats about his hit new drama series MobLand, which tells the story of two warring London crime families.
(
Esquire
, approx 24 mins reading time)
When MobLand came along, he says, it offered a 'similar solar system' to the one he'd just left: 'You know, still a studio production, still a big vessel, but it's different muscles. Some are older muscles that I'm warming up again, like villains and criminals…' Plus it was the right time for it, spiritually. 'I needed to go somewhere. To move forward. I needed to draw a line, because otherwise I'd be looking back, going 'Sony, will you have me back? Reignite the flames!' That's a desperate place to be as a human being.'
There were some obvious attractions to MobLand in its own right, too: not only actors such as Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren and Paddy Considine, who play members of the nefarious dynasties for whom Hardy's character, Harry, acts as a very capable go-between, but also another go at working with Guy Ritchie. The British director has had something of a revival recently with the success of his TV series The Gentlemen — a huge hit for Netflix — although Hardy hasn't worked with him since 2008, when he appeared in a high-octane caper called RocknRolla as a closeted getaway driver called Handsome Bob. He's got some thoughts.
6. Guitar heroes
A profile of an obsessive duo who have collected some 600 of the instruments, which will soon go on display in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
(
The New Yorker
, approx 26 mins reading time)
The lion's share of the collection—almost six hundred instruments—was destined for the Met. A hundred and seventy-three had already travelled there last spring. (An earthquake hit when they finished loading the U-Haul.) Two more shipments were scheduled. 'The collection presents a representation of the American guitar that is pretty much complete,' Margouleff said. 'There's nowhere else on planet Earth where this exists.' Margouleff, who built out the warehouse himself, keeps some of his own collectibles here, too. He produced a battered guitar in a display case, with 'Do Not Touch' scrawled on the body and the headstock snapped off. This was Old Yellow, the longtime test guitar at Manny's, which customers used to compare amplifiers. Another Rosebud. 'Everyone handled that guitar,' Margouleff said. 'Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton. It's the first guitar I ever saw in a music store. When Manny's got sold to Sam Ash, they hung it on the wall. And then Sam Ash went bankrupt. I finally got to buy it.'
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
99 years ago today, Marilyn Monroe was born. In this longread, Daphne Merkin examines the enduring contradictions of her life, image, and death.
(
The New Yorker
, approx 21 mins reading time)
Sometimes I think we respond to Marilyn Monroe as strongly as we do not because of her beauty or her body but because of her desperation, which was implacable in the face of fame, fortune, and the love of celebrated men. Every few years, she comes around again, the subject of yet another revelatory book (there are more than a hundred to date) or of a newly discovered series of photographs. Her films continue to be watched and reassessed, her image pilfered by everyone from Madonna to Monica Lewinsky. We will never have enough of Monroe, in part because there is never sufficient explanation for the commotions of her soul, and in part because we will never tire of hearing about the native sadness behind the construction of glamour. The damaged creature behind the pinup, the neglected foster child who became a blond vision in sequins: her story has entered the realm of myth. Its unhappy ending makes her less the exemplary heroine of a fairy tale than its cautionary victim—a glittery example of female entrapment in the male star-making machinery.
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