Media recommendations
Videos, podcasts and article picks: Context Collapse #163
Greetings from Goblin Island, where we’ve been BUSY.
Because we’ve been so busy (and learn more about what we’re up to at Ungerleider Works!) today’s newsletter is going to go straight to the media recommendations.
Let’s do this thing.
40,000 Words on Crypto
This thing. Matt Levine (the dude who writes Money Stuff, the only newsletter that actually translates global finance for normies) just wrote 40,000 words on crypto for Bloomberg.1
If you don’t have patience for reading what’s basically a non-fiction-book-in-the-form-of-a-magazine-article about the biggest shift in the world economy since credit cards, check out 10 Takeaways From Matt Levine’s “The Crypto Story.”
“If you’re a certain sort of financial person,” Levine writes, the crypto world “is incredibly, incredibly beautiful. You wake up one day, and there’s just a whole other financial system. It’s full of smart people building interesting things, and it’s full of idiots making terrible mistakes. People have built brilliant new ways to make financial bets that you can use, and they’ve built insane new ways to make financial bets that you can exploit.”
Curious Coincidence: A journey to the origins of COVID-19.
Where did COVID come from? Why is the virus so damned weird? Was it from the wild, a lab leak or something else entirely? And what the heck is gain of function research anyway?
MIT Technology Review biomedicine senior editor Antonio Regalado’s masterful six-part podcast Curious Coincidence is a must-listen investigation into COVID’s origins. It’s also refreshingly unorthodox for an institutional podcast and gleefully pisses all over the conventional wisdom for this sort of thing.
Recommended.
Adam Curtis’ TraumaZone
British documentary maker Adam Curtis has a distinct style. You know how you can tell a Werner Herzog movie right off the bat? Curtis is like that.
His new BBC documentary, TraumaZone, is helpfully up on YouTube for non-UK viewers. It tells the story of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the rapid destruction of an entire society when a system enters decline and how Putin’s Russia became Putin’s Russia, which is, uhh… relevant in 2022!
I like Curtis’ explanation in The Guardian:
I’ve just made TraumaZone, a series of films about another time when that was happening. It was in Russia in the 1990s after communism collapsed. Those in charge began an experiment to create an extreme form of capitalism. I made it because I don’t think we in the west understand what the Russians went through: a cataclysm that tore apart the foundations of society.
Enjoy. (Or cry, or mope! Open form, y’all.)
Lex Fridman x Kanye ‘Ye’ West
Yup… that dude. Podcaster Lex Fridman (Who is Jewish, which is very relevant to the interview) sits down with Kanye West for a two-and-a-half hour, very awkward interview.
Have you had mentally ill people in your life who have self-destructed in visible ways and caused collateral damage to their loved ones in the process? I sure have! I’m betting many of you have too.2
I’m a fan of Fridman’s podcasts. An AI researcher who moved into podcasting through some very complicated life paths that I’m not too sure of myself, he’s normally relatively non-emotional on his podcasts. That changes in this one.
Fridman calls West out on his anti-semitism and erratic behavior on air as West meanders from answer to answer3. West escalates and finally, later in the interview, figures out ways to deescalate him.
Why am I recommending this? As a person of Jewish-American ethnicity who has no real interest in promoting the opinions of a pretty damn vocal anti-semite?
Here’s the thing… We live in 2022. If a celebrity wants to self-destruct because of their visible mental illness in 2022, there is an entire media ecosystem at their availability to help them self-destruct. Everyone loves watching a celebrity collapse and flail as long as they don’t have a personal stake in the game.
In an ideal world West would have loved ones taking the computer and phone away from him and having some real talk.
But we’re not in an ideal world, dude’s dominating the news cycle and here we are.
Jess Zafarris’ Haunted Twitter
Finally, seeing as we’re in the Halloween season—check out Jess Zafarris’ tale of encountering something fucking weird in the Connecticut woods.
Is it a genuine paranormal encounter? A very, very well-crafted spooky fiction story in Twitter form? I don’t know… but I do know you should read it.
Thanks Zack for the tipoff - much appreciated.
Hey readers who grew up with mentally ill family and friends. You know how this mess goes.
As quite a few YouTube commenters noted, putting timestamps on topics in a video/podcast interview with the 2022 incarnation of Kanye West is hard.