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A few days ago, I was browsing my Twitter feed when a suggestion from my friend @flaper87 caught my attention: On my “comfortably old” MacBook Pro1, Spotify has been an absolute hog. The simple act of opening it will require three hundred MBs. That’s a remarkable amount of memory for staying idle and doing nothing useful. Let it play for a few hours, and have fun glancing at CPU and RAM usage ramping up like there’s no tomorrow. Just for the record, here’s Spotify memory usage at launch: ...

This week the “Sunday Morning Reading Award” goes to Lisa Whittington-Hill, for her The Women Who Built Grunge on Longreads: Bands like L7 and Heavens to Betsy were instrumental to the birth of the grunge scene, but for decades were treated like novelties and sex objects. Thirty years later, it’s time to reassess their legacy. More here.

Robin Rendle quoting Neil Gaiman, who is quoting G.K. Chesterton: Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated. I read somewhere that he based the Gilbert character from The Sandman on Chesterton, so it’s no surprise to find Gaiman quoting Chesterton in Smoke and Mirrors. Wanting to find the work in which the quote first appeared, I did a little research only to discover that G.K. Chesterton never actually wrote it. According to E.M. Goldsmith1, Gaiman’s is a rework of the following original quote: ...

As part of his captivating Hidden Heroes series, Steven Johnson publishes an account of the mother of all demos. More than 50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart gave the “mother of all demos” that transformed software forever. The computer world has been catching up with his vision ever since. More here

Open Culture shared a “jaw-dropping visualization of John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ solo.” Indeed, it is stunning, beautiful and valuable. A visualization like this makes music much more accessible. Quoting Open Culture: Coltrane’s complexity is daunting for the most accomplished musicians. How much more so for non-musicians? It can seem like “you need a doctorate of music to go anywhere near his recordings,” Nicholson writes. But “nothing could be further from the truth.” With its dancing lines and circles, Brother’s visualization gives us another way to appreciate the “sheer joy of music making and the power and energy of his playing” that inspires students, serious fans, and newcomers alike through “universal values that still speak to us now.” ...

Bret Devereaux has long been my go-to source for all things ancient and military history. One thing I somehow missed reading from his incredibly resourceful website is the This Isn’t Sparta series. He recently published a three-year-anniversary series retrospective which promptly surfaced on my RSS feed, giving me a chance to catch up over the holidays. The whole thing is a very long read, with some installments more engaging than others but overall very enjoyable, eye-opening, and information dense. In the just-published retrospective, Bret writes: ...

Adelphi1 prints in book form two unpublished speeches by Milan Kundera, one from 1967 and the other from 1983, in which the great Czech writer reflects on the fate of the small nations in central Europe and the cultural drift of (western) Europe as a whole. As we read along, thanks to Kundera’s acumen and depth of analysis, we find many surprising ante-litteram references to today’s critical situation (Russian-Ukrainian war). ...

As a Shirley Jackson fan, I couldn’t pass on this new collection of unpublished short stories. A good chunk of these was unheard of for thirty years until someone unearthed some cardboard boxes in a Vermont barn and then sent them to her heirs. Unlike The Lottery, where all tales followed a distinct theme, Just an Ordinary Day has little to unite the stories. Several genres are represented: classic family stories, supernatural, horror, and unsettling accounts of day-to-day life in the fifties all make up the list. Not all stories are of the same level. While most are mature for prime time, a few could have used some more tinkering, yet they were worth publishing as a precious testimony of an (infinitely talented) writer’s creative process. At one point, two versions of the same tale are put side by side, thus allowing a look into how Shirley Jackson revised her stories and perfected them over time. I think my Italian (Adelphi) edition includes a selection of the original collection of more than fifty, which is probably a good thing (I read somewhere that a second book with the missing pieces is planned). ...

Suppose you are looking for a juicy and thought-provoking read on Italy’s twentieth-century crucial moments. In that case, I heartily recommend Italica by Giacomo Papi, a significant collection of short stories by prominent Italian writers of the period including the likes of Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Beppe Fenoglio, Natalia Ginzburg, and Giorgio Scerbanenco. A short essay introduces each tale. I thoughtfully appreciated these introductions, sometimes even more so than the story itself, as they are quintessential to comprehending the tale’s historical background. Papi’s remarks are insightful, brilliant, well-written, well-documented, and often heavily data-driven. ...

I am happy and humbled to have been awarded the Microsoft MVP Award for the seventh consecutive year. July 1, the award assignation day, always comes with curiosity and a bit of trepidation. Being a member of the MVP community has been a very positive experience for me, especially in the years before COVID, when the MVP Summit, the main MVP event, was held in person in Seattle at the Microsoft HQ. That assembly of experienced developers from all over the world is an exhilarating experience. Smart guys and gals from different cultures gather to meet the people responsible for their daily drivers’ tools and technologies. There are countless networking possibilities, both with fellow MVPs and Microsoft personnel. ...