To Monopolise Our Ears

Daniel Cohen: What Spotify Wants, 4 May 2023

The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance 
by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud.
Diversion, 295 pp., £15.99, January 2021, 978 1 63576 744 5
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Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation 
by Nick Seaver.
Chicago, 203 pp., £16, November 2022, 978 0 226 82297 6
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... to sleep’.As part of this project to monopolise our ears, Spotify has moved beyond music. Since 2019 it has made a series of expensive investments in podcasting, buying production companies such as Gimlet and the Ringer, striking deals to produce shows with the Obamas and Prince Harry and Meghan, and paying more than $200 million for the exclusive rights to ...

Delete the workforce

Deborah Friedell: Musk’s Twitter Takeover, 3 April 2025

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter 
by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac.
Cornerstone, 468 pp., £25, September 2024, 978 1 5299 1469 6
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Elon Musk 
by Walter Isaacson.
Simon and Schuster, 688 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 3985 2753 9
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... no ford-fire.com. Tesla had nearly gone bankrupt in 2008, and again between 2017 and 2019: even as he was on track to be the richest man in the world, he couldn’t stop worrying that his company might fall apart. If consumers weren’t confident that Teslas were roadworthy, it wasn’t just that he would lose nearly all his money, Musk ...

Fraudpocalypse

John Lanchester, 4 August 2022

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion-Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth 
by Dan McCrum.
Bantam, 326 pp., £20, June 2022, 978 1 78763 504 3
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... to run until Christmas this year, but he was transferred to prison in Germany and released in January 2021.) Germany does not extradite to the US, so the five other senior executives charged by the US authorities were safe from the Feds. A number of them were tried in Germany, where they were all acquitted. It turned out that the demanding, notoriously ...

In the Multiverse

Jessica Olin: What Knox did next, 9 October 2025

Free: My Search for Meaning 
by Amanda Knox.
Headline, 283 pp., £22, March, 978 1 0354 2815 1
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The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox 
produced by K.J. Steinberg.
Disney+, August
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... when he suggested she use a pseudonym. She got a second job behind the till at Arundel. But in January 2014 the Court of Cassation found Knox and Sollecito guilty for a second time. Faced with the threat of extradition and a 28-year prison sentence, Knox once again considered suicide. Meanwhile, her family plotted to smuggle her to safety. ‘At ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... the US, where ‘free speech’ has, on the right, been increasingly evacuated of principle. In January, the presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis inaugurated his second term as governor of ‘the free state of Florida’ by declaring, ‘We will never surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.’ His project to restore freedom to his state ...

Akihito and the Sorrows of Japan

Richard Lloyd Parry: The Anxious Emperor, 19 March 2020

... the palace grounds. ‘The emperor collected their droppings every Sunday afternoon between January 2009 and December 2013,’ the Kyodo news agency reported, ‘and examined plant seeds contained in them through a microscope.’The imperial family enjoy almost none of the perks of royalty: this is the greatest contrast with the British royal ...

After the Fall

John Lanchester: Ten Years after the Crash, 5 July 2018

... Then the book came out, and I was giving talks about it all over the place from its publication in January 2010 through the spring and summer, and there was this mysterious lack of rage. People seemed numb and incredulous but not yet angry. In July 2010 I was in Galway for the arts festival, giving a talk in a room where, I later learned, a former taoiseach ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... they were unable to take breaks. Memos between managers at Southmead Hospital in Bristol in early January, leaked to the local press, warned that beds were ‘104 per cent full’: ‘Patients are admitted to any available bed,’ the hospital’s clinical director wrote. ‘Speciality patients are scattered.’ At that point, with all overflow beds ...

We must think!

Jenny Turner: Hannah Arendt’s Islands, 4 November 2021

Hannah Arendt 
by Samantha Rose Hill.
Reaktion, 232 pp., £11.99, August 2021, 978 1 78914 379 9
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... the way she met Blücher, a non-Jewish former Spartacist and sex-club bouncer, whom she married in January 1940. In September 1939, Blücher and Benjamin were interned together at Nevers, though Blücher was released early, only to be interned again a few months later. This time the order included women. On 15 May 1940 Arendt showed up at the Vélodrome ...

Purges and Paranoia

Ella George, 24 May 2018

... The elections​ due to be held on 24 June, brought forward abruptly from the end of 2019 by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, come after a period of repression and fear that represents the most serious rupture in the history of the Turkish republic. In the last two years more than 100,000 people have been detained, and tens of thousands are waiting for their lives to be upended by a knock on the door, or the publication of a new emergency decree ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... him to respond to this allegation, but he preferred not to. The Grenfell Action Group blog from January 2016. In a blog posting in November 2016, the action group’s long history of accusations against the council and the TMO came to a head. ‘It is a truly terrifying thought,’ the blog said, ‘but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a ...