BrooklynVegan, an interesting and important music news site, was a few days ago the victim of mass firings by its owner, Veeps 1 . Veeps was founded by Good Charlotte’s Benji and Joel Madden and has operated for many years as a ticketed livestream platform. Publicist Jacob Daneman mourned BrooklynVegan on X last night: “RIP Brooklyn Vegan. Absolutely bewildering. Thinking of all the great people…
By Rama, CC BY-SA 3.0 fr , Link Kismet , a robot head made in the 1990s, is a machine that can recognize and simulate emotions. I used Plex for years. Plex is a self-hosted media server. In short, you can install Plex on your own computer and use it to stream music, media, and images to your different devices. Trick is, Plex is not free and their 'lifetime pass', a way to skip subscriptions, has…
Ludvig Aspling, migration-policy spokesperson for Sverigedemokraterna. There's a reason for why I include a date in the title of this blog post: boundaries keep shifting. A word that was spoken in 2025 may not mean the same thing in 2026. This is noteworthy, simply because of how Sverigedemokraterna want to normalise the way they speak about 'others'. Sverigedemokraterna is a Swedish political…
<a href="https://xiuxiu.bandcamp.com/album/eraserhead-xiu-xiu">Eraserhead Xiu Xiu by Xiu Xiu</a> This is a log of my experience of listening to Xiu Xiu's new album, Eraserhead Xiu Xiu , for the first time, song by song in chronological order as they're played from the album. Viento Scrapy plastic/metallic objects, compressed sound, dragged over a surface near a mic. Distorted. Train whistle.…
I've started to read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita . The book is, to quote The Guardian , 'an endlessly controversial high-wire act' about how a twelve-year-old girl is lusted after by Humbert Humbert, an adult man. People agree that the book is controversial, to which I agree, but not on the point of why the book is controversial. Some believe it's a pedophile's excuse. Some think the book is…
John Gregory Dunne was married with Joan Didion. In 1973, he'd had enough of life, of his marriage, of more things; he left his wife and their child and moved to Las Vegas. As he left, he didn't know he was going to stay there for a year. This experience turned into a book: Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season . I am always being told things like that on first meeting, being told by strange women that…
Some time ago, I reviewed a couple of books about Anthony Bourdain: World Travel that is written with Laurie Woolever, his long-time collaborator, and The Last Interview and Other Conversations . The other day it was eight years since Bourdain died. Bourdain was a person just like anyone else. He had dreams, aspirations, and guess what? He had a lot of other sides to him, good and bad. Just like…
Lundsberg is a Swedish boarding school. To attend the school for a year will set you back 35,000 USD. In 1981, the book Evil 1 was published. The author, Jan Guillou, had attended another private school, but really, the book is about all boarding schools, especially those with cult-like qualities, which, to repeat, makes the book about all boarding schools. The book shows how older students abuse…
I've just read Sarah Kane's posthumous Completed Plays . This is a collection of plays, each of which are mind-expandingly great. I'm floored by Kane's simplicity, both in words and action, motion, inaction, and... Imagine Homer's The Odyssey written in simple... Nah, that comparison is wrong. Kane is much stronger than Homer, in human ways. Sure, The Odyssey is about gods and humans, and Kane…
Malcolm X , likely at a welcoming event for the African-American Students Foundation in 1959 or 1960 Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, singing 'We Shall Overcome'? You don't do that in a revolution. You don't do any singing; you're too busy swinging. Malcolm X, "Message to the Grassroots" Actually, singing that song is what a Swedish politician did to try and calm outraged people…
Look at the image of comedian Kathryn Leroux and the party leaders of the christian democrats and the moderates. By the way, there's nothing christian about the christian democrats, and because the moderates are now deeply liaised with the sweden democrats (xenophobes), their politlcal-party names are misnomers in the extreme. Also, there's no way that Ulf Kristersson can drive a bus, so this…
The Guardian recently released a list of ' the 100 best novels of all time '. The older I get, the less interesting these lists become, but it'd be a mistake to not read the list and pick the cherries off the list. Sarah Bakewell has added some books to the list. In case you don't know who Sarah is, I urge you to read her books. Start with the one about Montaigne or the one about existentialists.…
Recently, the father of a former work colleague died. The former colleague posted a lot about this on a social-media channel. There's nothing notable about this; to communicate a tragedy is to, hopefully, get over the worst of feelings, to help one to transition into feeling better, to sort-of convert sorrow into lovely memories. Reading two lines of text made me realise the person had used AI to…
Yesterday I read a Bandcamp article about ' the best field recordings on Bandcamp, April 2026 '. I didn't know what would hit me. <a href="https://subjamlabel.bandcamp.com/album/unknown-artist">unknown artist 未知艺术家 by no artist</a> This album is attributed to No Artist because Laurent Güdel didn’t record it, he only discovered it. The Swiss sound artist ordered four digital recorders from…
The cover image for the album 'LIVE ROPE' by Swans. I'm listening to Swans' LIVE ROPE , a live album that I thought is released today. It is, on Mute in North America, but it was first released in 2024. I felt a tinge of shame because I didn't know that. On the other hand, release dates are trivial. Swans can be truly great. Some part of me, perhaps a younger part of me, still feels shame in…
Yesterday, Sveriges Radio (the state-run Swedish Radio) released an exposé 1 of the biggest digital-healthcare providers in Sweden. They focused on Kry, but they also investigated Doktor.se and MinDoktor.se 2 . I listened to their two-part podcast series yesterday. Part one 3 revealed a lot of information, for example: Kry earn 500 Swedish crowns (50 USD) per digital doctor visit; this money is…
This is the start of a talk that Michael Parenti held in the University of Colorado in 1984 . The introduction by David Barsamian was created in 2026. David Barsamian Michael Parenti was a leading independent political analyst, scholar and author. Cornell West called him a towering prophetic voice. He taught at major colleges and universities in the United States and abroad. He's the author of…
I'm a Twin Peaks fan, although I'd be rejected by true Twin Peaks fans. I've visited exactly one convention, never visited a single filming location, etc. However, I've read a few Twin Peaks books, including those by Mark Frost, one of the two creators of Twin Peaks , and a third in, I must say this book is by far the best one that I've read 1 . Scott Meslow's new book A Place Both Wonderful and…
Dum curamus eum consequi, et operam damus, ut intellectum in rectam viam redigamus, necesse est vivere. While we pursue this end, and devote ourselves to bringing the intellect back to the right path, it is necessary to live. —Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect Clare Carlisle is a professor of philosophy. Her most recent book, Transcendence for Beginners , was published in 2025.…
A few days ago, Jimmie Åkesson, the political party leader of Sverigedemokraterna 8 , purportedly threw himself from his bed onto floor and then into a mirror. This caused a minor facial wound. Expressen, one of the two biggest daily tabloids in Sweden, published an article 1 about this. All translations and possible errors in translations are by myself. The cause was a nightmare that became “very…
Joe Sacco - The Once and Future Riot Joe Sacco's latest book, The Once and Future Riot , is journalism and anti-fascism in a bundle. Sacco goes to India to look into how Muslims and Hindus could once live together and are today separated by Hindutva , a fascist ideology that leads RSS , a paramilitary organisation, to ultimately serve BJP , the currently political party at the helm of India. The…
Today Xiu Xiu release their new album of covers. Yep, they've again interpreted the songs of others. With other artists, this is usually a trite thing. With Xiu Xiu, this is something else. Buy or stream the album via this link . Note: somehow, the band's own Bandcamp page offers the album in 16-bit/44.1kHz sound quality while some music-streaming services offer the album in 24-bit/96 KHz. Because…
The Vanilla OS logo I've recently started to like using Linux again. Let me rephrase that: I've always liked Linux; I've recently found a couple of Linux distributions that feel like home. Linux is the operating system. 'Distribution' is the same as 'flavour' as related to ice-cream flavours. I've used Microsoft Windows as operating system for the past 2.5 years; to return to Linux feels sane.…
Cameron Crowe wrote and directed a film named Almost Famous . The film is legendary. It's about a young lad who's a teenager when he finds—or rather, everything finds him —music, action, love, sex, and writing. If you've ever grown up, chances are you'll like this film. If you've not yet grown up: see the film. A short while ago, Crowe had an autobiography published: The Uncool . The title is…
The list is in chronological order: top to bottom, earliest to latest listen. Noam Chomsky - The Clinton Vision: Old Wine, New Bottles The Clinton Vision: Old Wine, New Bottles Noam Chomsky Even though this album is old, it still applies. Chomsky is sharp as hell here. Scott Gordon - Metals Metals Scott Gordon Talk about metal music: Gordon applied contact microphones to actual metals, then hit,…
A few months ago, when Sweden was covered in sun rather than in...half-gloomy darkness most of the time, I visited Way Out West, a music festival in Gothenburg. As I entered, I was struck by the name of a stage: the Spotify stage. Apparently exclusive for new musicians. Catch 'em while they're young. During Refused's gig, the front man, Dennis Lyxzén, paused to tell the audience his feelings about…
Detail of Nikola Tesla from a Serbian Dinar banknote. Andreas Cervenka is my favourite economy journalist. A few years ago I wrote about his book Greedy Sweden: how the people's home turned into a paradise for the ultra-wealthy . Andreas just published an article 1 about how Elon Musk had the Tesla board of directors promise him a payment of one trillion USD if Tesla makes certain goals 2 . Here…
An AI-generated picture of Ebba Busch wearing a t-shirt that says 'CHATGPT EXCUSE FORCE' on the back. This is an image based on a real vacation photograph by Busch, where she hung out with the Israeli army 7 . Almedalen is a small section of Gotland, an island that is part of the nation of Sweden. Once per year, politicians flock to this little space to spread propaganda. This is the story of what…
I've recently started reading Murderland 1 , a terrific and spellbinding book by Caroline Fraser. Here's a quote from the book: In the early 1920s the fuel additive tetraethyl lead (TEL) is developed and marketed by General Motors and Standard Oil. It is designed to make automobile and airplane engines run without knocking. GM knows that an ideal antiknock solution already exists in ethyl alcohol,…
Marshall McLuhan from La Ventana Ciudadana, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons In 1964, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase 'the medium is the message' 1 . The phrase asks us to look at the medium, not just at content (the message). In other words, what is used to convey a message can be more interesting and relevant than the message itself, not…
Richard J. Evans wrote Hitler's People: the Faces of the Third Reich , a book that focuses not only on 'personal characteristics and professional ambitions of' top nazis but also shows how those personality traits and goals shaped Germany and the world. Here's an excerpt that shows Hitler's thin skin and deep–seated irrational rage. So-called modern art, Hitler declared, was sick, incompetent, so…
Laurence Rees is a great historian, scholar, author, and video producer. He has written a number of extremely valuable books about World War II. His The Holocaust: A New History is one of the most important books that I have read about World War II. His latest book, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History , is about the mentalities of the Nazis: 'why did they commit the crimes they did? How…
The following is an excerpt from Matt Kennard and Claire Provost's brilliant book Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy . This section is my brutal edit of the original text. The book paints a more broadly and easily understood picture; I firmly recommend reading the book. The bit below is all about how the German banker Hermann Abs suggested a sort of capitalist Magna Carta, a…
I recently finished reading Blake Butler's memoir Molly . I've not been so taken aback by a memoir in a long time. Butler tells the story of his life with Molly Brodak. I highly recommend the book as a deeply emotive and insightful look into a person whom Butler obviously loved and as a mirror into oneself. The abyss certainly stares back. Blake Butler's latest book is Void Corporation , published…
Jimmy Carter. Department of Defense. Department of the Navy. Naval Photographic Center, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Jimmy Carter is dead. He became 100 years old. He may be known as the 'least-bad American president', which is no small feat. Let's look at what he did, based on some notes I've made through the years; in other words, this is merely a collection of quotes from books,…
The recently published book The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World is published in 2024. It is written by Nathan J. Robinson, mainly based on what Noam Chomsky has written and spoken about in the past. The book clearly shows how the unfathomable devastation that is created by the U. S. government and its overarching military body is explained away as 'needed' or…
I recently started reading Richard Flanagan's so-far radiant book Question 7 . I read the following passage at lunch today and it should be shared, so here it is: Chekhov believed that the role of literature was not to provide answers but only to ask the necessary questions. One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s…
The Tidö party leaders. Photograph by Tom Samuelsson - Eget arbete, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128410949 Table of contents Jimmie Åkesson invited the leader of an organised crime network and at least one antisemite and racist to his wedding Ebba Busch poses with an antisemitic racist at Åkesson's wedding Swedish right-wing politics today The Sweden Democrats kept…
Cornelis Cort, The Last Judgment Triptych, engraving on laid paper, plate: 33.5 × 49.2 cm (13 3/16 × 19 3/8 in.) sheet: 37.5 × 52.1 cm (14 3/4 × 20 1/2 in.), 1570 1560, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.52407.html. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington OpenAI have just released two new models, 'o1-preview' and 'o1-mini'—both of which are in preview, in spite of the name of the…
Frederick Douglass in 1879. Photograph taken by George Kendall Warren. On this fourth of July, I quote Howard Zinn and Frederick Douglass, as printed in Zinn's extremely important and readable book A People's History of the United States: 1492–present 1 : Frederick Douglass knew that the shame of slavery was not just the South’s, that the whole nation was complicit in it. On the Fourth of July,…
The Tidö party leaders. Photograph by Tom Samuelsson - Eget arbete, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128410949 Marcus Larsson, with the think tank Balans, has recently published an audit that shows how elected politicians in Stockholm are simultaneously (!) employed by lobbyist firms - the core business idea of which is to influence politicians. Society's capital mania…
Henry Kissinger - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2008. Used with permission from World Economic Forum under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Deed license. Table of contents Jacobin on Kissinger English media coverage of Kissinger's death Swedish media coverage of Kissinger's death A tiny list of media coverage on Kissinger pre-death Conclusion Finally. He's finally dead. I'm happy he's dead. Even…
AI interpretation of 'A technical writer who's leaving their fintech job for the last time.' Where is the madness that you promised me? Where is the dream for which I paid dearly? The Magnetic Fields , 'No One Will Ever Love You' I've worked for a fintech 2 company for one and a half year. I've just come home, having finished my last day at the company. I'm drinking a huge glass of water, looking…
David Berman, photographed and tweaked by himself. A stranger tweeted this letter after David Berman died. I was given permission to reprint the entire thing on my old blog before the twitter account was suspended. The tweet: Seven years ago I was about to go into the hospital for detox after a really rough few years. I was scared and isolated. I sent an email to David in the dark. His response…
Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung from Berlin, Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons From the Start the Week episode Democratic capitalism - marriage on the rocks : Tom Sutcliffe : Capitalism. It's a word that always needs some form of qualification, does it, to refine it and sharpen the definition? Kate Raworth : Yeah, well, it's a big word. So I…
The OpenAI product DALL-E 2 generated this image from the text 'artificial intelligence that kills all human life'. Hm, it looks a bit like us, doesn't it? Things are very quickly happening with artificial intelligence (AI). We get chatbots to write poetry for us, images created by typing some words, and software code delivered ready to use in our own code. Is there some hidden cost buried here?…
This is a list of my favourite Obsidian plugins. The list was started in 2023 and was last updated on 2024-11-20. With every section there's a GitHub link and an Obsidian link. If you have Obsidian installed, select the Obsidian link to open the plugin page inside of Obsidian, from where you can install and enable the plugin. The plugins Advanced Tables Awesome Image Calendar Clear Unused Images…
A DALL-E 2 interpretation of 'A Turkish militia taking over Sweden.' Less than a year ago, the Social Democrats, the biggest political party in Sweden, completely reversed their NATO stance: one week, they said joining NATO would be an aggrieved provocation against Russia; the next week, they approved of a Swedish NATO membership application. Turkey has vetoed Sweden's joining NATO. Turkey's…
The following short quote is written by Chris Hedges, taken from his podcast episode named The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Dr. Gabor Maté on his new book “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture." I quote Hedges's short paragraph because of how succinctly he nails how capitalism works, how it thrives, and whom it rewards. I've separated the quote into paragraphs to…
Swedish rents on average were raised by 531% in 10 years. I've previously written about the extreme differences between rich and poor in Sweden, and how the gap between them are widening 1 . The table, from the latest Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse 2 , shows how the number of Swedish USD millionnaires will grow by 31% in five years. This doesn't indicate that Swedes, altogether, are…