Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough. | | | | The Mick is a really, really funny show. It's also really, really f***ed up. That's a compliment.
(Fox) | | | | |  | “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”
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| | rantnrave:// I'm back, I needed a rest... ESPN is over. SNAP is in trouble. TWITTER is done. Yada, yada, yada. In general, the media loves a good death story. Even when death is far away. Last week's non-death? SOUNDCLOUD. It's one of the biggest platforms in the world. The audience absolutely loves it. Artists too. Layoffs and remaining cash are good reasons to panic if communication isn't great. And yes, they could have done a much better job at that. But, digging around I hear that they have a large customer base of creator subscribers who cover (or more) the costs of operating the core service. Top 25 free app in both app stores. Reported to have doubled revenues YOY and just cut staff by 40%. Sounds like they are getting costs in line with revenues. Rumors of a deal offer from DEEZER that they walked away from? If they were going to shut down, why would you walk away from a deal? You wouldn't. A product with massive user base doesn't usually just shut down. I mean MYSPACE is still there. Listen, the streaming business has issues. Largely about costs and revenue shares with labels. Insiders would love if labels understood what Soundcloud is and worked out new and different business deals rather than forcing them into similar deals and competition with the APPLEs and so on. This is only a guess, but I imagine they had their backs against the wall related to possible lawsuits, who knows. Lots of history to that theory in the sector. They have founders that care. And have blue chip investors like INDEX, USV, KPCB, and others. These people care about their audiences and reputations, they aren't letting their platform just die and the all the users/artists content with it. Just not going to happen. They would make migration simple if they could (deal-wise). So, let's all calm down, step away from the coffin and go back to listening. And oh, I love my podcasts and SADE remixes there too. But they do need to do some programming and curation to make the service better for discovery and browse. Sort of lame like YOUTUBE in this area. I could be wrong, but likely not. Here is what we're reading on Soundcloud... Amazing to me how many publishers continue to walk into the quicksand and let certain platforms f*** them. FOMO can kill. Really remarkable... MusicREDEF's MATTY KARAS was blown away by this and it's not easy to blow him away: A tidbit from SLATE's interview with reporter JIM DEROGATIS, who has been covering R. KELLY for two decades and wrote this week's BUZZFEED blockbuster: Asked about his nine-month reporting process, DeRogatis said, "Most of that time was spent, post–HULK HOGAN and GAWKER, finding a media outlet that was willing to run it." This is one of the most chilling sentences I've read about the media in a year of chilling stories about the media. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the chill is specifically about the pop-culture media, which I imagine libel lawyers and their clients see as a soft spot in the wall of First Amendment protection. The assault starts with a lawsuit and continues, even more menacingly, with fear. You can't beat fear in court, no matter how good your lawyers are... Where are all the outraged from the SOPA days on NET NEUTRALITY... Friends doing well: FRED GRAVER to DISCOVERY. OCEAN MACADAMS to THRILLIST... I like to give business to UBERX drivers but the blasting music and no sense of the passenger sometimes get to me. UberQuiet maybe?... If you dont' have turkey bacon and IPHONE chargers at your hotel. F your hotel... Happy Birthday to JULIE UHRMAN, MARK JUNG, and KISHORE VENKAT. | | | - Jason Hirschhorn, curator |
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| | | whenever I feel like givin' up |
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 | Variety |
| When Jeffrey Katzenberg touched down in Sun Valley, Idaho, last week, it extended a streak of appearances at the annual conference going back more than 30 years, nearly to the time Allen & Co. first launched its event in 1983. | | |
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 | The Howard Stern Show |
| Robert O’Neill takes Howard through the night he killed Osama Bin Laden. | | |
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 | Fortune Magazine |
| Uber's missteps and Lyft's new autonomous-driving tech could make it happen. | | |
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 | Meduza |
| Allegations that Russian hackers stole emails from top Democrats in the United States, in an effort to influence the results of America’s presidential election, are now more than a year old. Last November, Meduza published a detailed look at the operations of Russia’s cyber-soldiers. But a country’s cybersecurity is only as good as its cyber-defense, which is why Meduza’s special correspondent Daniil Turovsky returned to the subject, interviewing dozens of... | | |
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 | Real Life |
| Online advertising’s dependence on surprise accelerates its own instability. | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| People with anxiety can often find a supportive community through tweeting, but the nature of the social media site can exacerbate symptoms. | | |
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 | Longreads |
| Mario Livio on his new book about human curiosity, his work as an astrophysicist, and why we shouldn’t fear our expanding universe. | | |
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 | Die, Workwear! |
| "The changes are scary, and they remind me of an interview I once did with Allan Gilchrist, a manager at William Lockie. As many people know, the Scottish knitwear business has been dying for decades. Where you used to have hundreds of companies involved in the trade – from the spinning of yarn to the knitting of sweaters – there are all but a handful of surviving firms now (William Lockie being the best of them)." | | |
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 | Vanity Fair |
| After relentless attacks from Trump and his allies, a series of journalistic problems, and in the shadow of a possible merger, the network’s C.E.O., Jeff Zucker, is feeling the heat. “I think there’s a real chance that Zucker is being forced out,” said one employee. “That’s going to blow up this organization like nothing in the history of CNN.” | | |
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 | Forbes |
| After the Summit Meeting with Putin, Trump fired a public shot across the bows of his enemies in the US intelligence community. That has consequences. | | |
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| | | whenever my sunshine turns to rain |
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 | EW |
| Twenty years ago, Besson blew the doors off cinema with his 23rd-century thriller about a flying-cab driver, an alien beauty, and a quest to save the world. Stars Bruce Willis, Chris Tucker, Milla Jovovich, and more look back for the film’s anniversary. | | |
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 | The Chronicle of Higher Education |
| On the controversy surrounding the Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains. | | |
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 | Victory Journal |
| Vladimir Putin is preparing to use the 2018 World Cup in Russia as his greatest work of political propaganda ever. | | |
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 | TED Talks |
| Why do so many companies make bad decisions, even with access to unprecedented amounts of data? With stories from Nokia to Netflix to the oracles of ancient Greece, Tricia Wang demystifies big data and identifies its pitfalls, suggesting that we focus instead on "thick data" -- precious, unquantifiable insights from actual people -- to make the right business decisions and thrive in the unknown. | | |
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 | NPR |
| On the first episode of the NPR podcast "What's Good With Stretch & Bobbito," Dave Chappelle talks about growing up in D.C. and his decision to host the first SNL after the presidential election. | | |
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 | LA Weekly |
| Only hardcore fans know their names, but Chris Weber and West Arkeen's contributions to Guns N' Roses' early records was invaluable. Here's what happened to them post-"Appetite." | | |
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 | Bloomberg |
| Amid an historic glut, a secretive, government-sponsored entity is putting cheese anywhere it can stuff it. | | |
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 | Midem |
| Artists had their say in Cannes, while diversity, sync, legal issues and music discovery also figured prominently | | |
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 | Hollywood Reporter |
| On the anniversary of the ouster of the most influential man in conservative politics, who died in May, a legacy is revealed in Trump's anti-media venom, Rupert Murdoch's unrest and a vision that has jumped cable news to become the dominant historical current. | | |
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 | Vice |
| Read an excerpt from Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich's breathtaking new book, 'The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II.' | | |
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 | UPROXX |
| Uproxx TV critic Alan Sepinwall reflects on 10 years of 'Mad Men' and the TV world environment it reshaped. | | |
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 | NY Daily News |
| Hypocrisy and politics have enjoyed a long and beautiful marriage, going together like peanut butter and jelly, chocolate and vanilla, bacon and, well, anything else, for as long as laws have existed. Washington, in particular, has made an impressive fetish of "do as I say, not as I do." | | |
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 | VentureBeat |
| American physician and surgeon William J. Mayo, one of the founders of the famed Mayo Clinic, stated, "The aim of medicine is to prevent disease and prolong life, the ideal of medicine is to eliminate the need of a physician." | | |
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 | The Conversation |
| Autism manifests in different ways. The signs are often less visible in women than in men, leading many to be underdiagnosed. | | |
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| © Copyright 2017, The REDEF Group |
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