Source: ChatGPT
Dear Friends,
By far my favorite podcast this year is the magnificent Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, put together by Higher Ground and hosted by Jad Abumrad. It’s the story of the Nigerian superstar who created some of the most beautiful music of the 1970s while engaged in a constant war with the authorities—that led them to arrest him 200 times; throw his mother from the roof of a building; rape some of his 27 wives; and burn his compound, known as the Kalakuta Republic, to the ground. And every time some horror was brought upon him by the police, Fela would turn it into more music. I have heard “Expensive Shit” for years, without knowing that its lyrics describe a time that he was arrested by the police, swallowed a joint, and then hid his defecation while in prison so they would not find the evidence. I knew that “Zombie” was a critique of authority—Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn / Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think—I did not know that he had played it at the police as they surrounded his compound one night in 1977, helping set off their most violent rampage.
But the 13-part podcast isn’t just a political history. It’s a story of how Fela developed his style of long trance-like grooves, with solos and sweat on top of them. And how his politics were radicalized, in part by the story of his mother and in part, too, from the Americans he met while traveling to this country in the 1960s. And of his ultimate madness and death from AIDS, even while denying that the disease existed. You can read about his life here. But I highly recommend listening to all of Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. Music histories are definitely an art form where it’s better to listen than to read.
That said, in a strange parallel, but also inversion, I recommend reading “Broken Time,” a Steve Silberman profile of the piano player Bill Evans, who I first learned about while trying to understand the mystical piano tracks on Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” Evans was a man whose music was in some ways quite unlike Fela’s. I’ve listened to Evans’s “Peace Piece” about the same number of times as Fela’s “Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake AM” over the years, but in very different moods. Both men were known for their pauses and ability to play inside of the beat. And both men had to deal with intense racial dynamics. Fela was trying to figure out a Black African identity after colonialism; Evans was the one white man playing inside of perhaps the greatest jazz group ever put together.
From Silberman’s piece:
When he heard Evans’s name, Miles Davis asked, “Is he white?”
“Yeah”
“Does he wear glasses?”
“Yeah.”
“I know that motherfucker,” Miles said. “I heard him at Birdland—he can play his ass off.”
Evans’s decline is brutal, which connects with another of my favorite stories this week: Ashley Parker’s recounting of her father’s descent into dementia. "I watched helplessly as the man whom I resembled more than anyone in the world, and who—again, more than anyone in the world—could infuriate and comfort me in equal measure, lost the ability to do either,” she writes. She adds, beautifully, “If childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies, as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in her poem of the same name, then dementia is the kingdom where you are always fading but never fully gone.”
I was captivated, too, by this story in Harper’s of a disappearance in Arkansas. A child is lost in the woods, and then found. Then the story gets even weirder. Laura Secor’s recounting of the lost opportunities for freedom in Iran pulled me in. As did this strange old Atavist piece about how a drifter from Milwaukee became an executioner for Fidel Castro. “It was an open secret in Havana that he invited select visitors to the executions, which were conducted in the empty stone moat around La Cabaña, beneath a giant floodlit statue of Christ with outstretched arms. American politicians, journalists, starlets, and socialites had all made discreet inquiries about watching a firing squad do its work. Williams, whose grandfather had been a minister, forlornly felt that he might comfort a condemned man by offering ‘a small encouraging smile’ before he was shot.”
Last, a shout-out to the best movie I’ve seen in a while: Train Dreams, a gorgeous adaptation of the Denis Johnson novel about a man trying to find his way as a logger in the early 20th-century American West.
The Most Interesting Things in Tech
This Financial Times piece made an interesting case that AI chatbots might undo some of the political polarization social media has wrought by providing people with balanced, consensus-driven answers. And Google moved up its deadline for Q Day—when quantum computers can crack most of the encryption we currently use. It’s a few years away still, but if you’re a bank, or really anyone running data that needs to be genuinely protected, it’s time to get ready.
Perhaps the biggest story in tech this week was Anthropic accidentally leaking some of the source code behind Claude Code. The gaffe revealed a bunch of interesting details, including a clever feature that’s akin to an anti-training mode. If Claude recognizes another AI company is trying to train their model on its outputs, it will inject fake information into them, ruining the data. It reminds me of the way one of my Wired colleagues used to try to protect her privacy on Google by running a script that would fill the search engine with bogus queries tied to her name, creating a flood of slop over her actual searches.
It’s a way to use tech to cover tech. Or, you can just opt out. Fela Kuti was asked in the 1980s if he wanted to use synthesizers in his music. “I don’t want to use electronics,” he said. “I want to really control what the sound is like—I don’t want the machine to control what I say.”
Podcasts
Here are some recent podcasts I’ve been a guest on.
Cheers * N
I hope you enjoy this newsletter. Please continue to forward it to anyone else who might enjoy it. They can sign up here.