Children, Wake Up: a (ch)oral history of Arcade Fire’s ‘Funeral’ →

Anthony Mansuy:

Three months later, when back to Massachussets for a concert series organized in a period of full "hype", the Montreal-based make their entrance in Boston's Roxy, a larger, more welcoming hall. Nine hundred souls have their eyes directed towards the stage. Richard Reed Parry is still wearing his bike helmet, but it has now become a purely decorative object. As for the other members of the band, they seem much more conscious of what's at stake here : no stumbling, still a bit of struggling but much less. A few weeks before, David Byrne and David Bowie were flattering them. Then it was Bono. Then the rest of the world. That was the start of the Arcade Fire we would know ten years later : the world's most professional band, miles away from the daydreams, innocence and orchestrated chaos of Funeral, which will remain their best album forever. But there was a time when daydreams, innocence and chaos were the band's daily bread, an everyday life which gave Funeral its inner body. On the occasion of the album's tenth anniversary, we chatted with some members of the band, current or ancient, old friends, one-time and full-time associates, and others who, from a distance or close-up, contributed to the success of Funeral. They tell us about the genesis of Arcade Fire in Montreal, the recording of the album and the reaction of a band caught straight into the eye of the storm.

If you care at all about Arcade Fire, this sprawling piece is worth it for the pictures alone.

A Panel of Middle-Aged Dads Review Jeff Tweedy’s New Album →

Zach Schonfeld:

Several years ago—somewhere between 2007’s Sky Blue Sky and 2009’s Wilco (The Album), let’s say—Jeff Tweedy and his band Wilco faced a new charge. The music, breezy and comfortable and so far removed from the electronic squiggles of 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, still amply satisfied legions of the band’s followers. But among critics and some fans as well, it was attracting a new descriptor. It was being pegged as “dad rock.”

No one quite grasps what the term means, least of all the many dads I interviewed about it last Father’s Day. (Succinctly, one Urban Dictionary entry describes it as “music that Boomers would listen to and/or write themselves,” adding: “Inherently uncool.”) But no matter. Tweedy, ever unflappable, kept calm and publicly defended the label. And now he has embraced it anew, embodying dad rock as fully as any rock star has by literally recording an album with his son, 18-year-old drummer Spencer, as “Tweedy.”

Titled Sukierae, the result is out this week. Already, it has drawn the usual stock of jokes.

But the music—is it really so dad-friendly? I performed an experiment: I asked my dad to invite several of his fellow music-liking dad-friends over to the house, where I would hold a dad-themed listening party and see how the dad-rock focus group responded.

So, but, you know—what if you liked Wilco before you were a father? What then? God, I wish I hadn’t read this four days after turning 30.

iFixit’s iPhone 6 Plus Teardown →

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iFixit:

Over the years, we've seen the iPhone evolve—and grow. It began as just the iPhone. Soon it learned how to 3G, it gained an S (it would lose and gain this every other year), and it even learned to read fingerprints. Years of hard work and dedication have made the iPhone into what it is today, the iPhone 6 Plus. Join us live as we explore this gargantuan iPhone 6 Plus.

Every year, new iPhones are released, and every year, usually before said iPhones have even gone on sale in the United States, iFixit has begun their teardown of the phone. I always make it a point to scroll through this teardown as a way of forcing my caveman mind to try and grasp the sheer brilliance that is modern technology. Any time you feel inclined to wonder when we’ll see the future that the Jetsons promised, just open this link and remember that it’s already in your pocket.

Temple Grandin—An Anthropologist On Mars →

Oliver Sacks:

I phoned Temple from the Denver airport to reconfirm our meeting—it was conceivable, I thought, that she might be somewhat inflexible about arrangements, so time and place should be set as definitely as possible. It was an hour and a quarter’s drive to Fort Collins, Temple said, and she provided minute directions for finding her office at Colorado State University, where she is an assistant professor in the Animal Sciences Department. At one point, I missed a detail, and asked Temple to repeat it, and was startled when she repeated the entire directional litany—several minutes’ worth—in virtually the same words. It seemed as if the directions had to be given as they were held in Temple’s mind, entire—that they had fused into a fixed association or program, and could no longer be separated into their components. One instruction, however, had to be modified. She had told me at first that I should turn right onto College Street at a particular intersection marked by a Taco Bell restaurant. In her second set of directions, Temple added an aside here, said the Taco Bell had recently had a facelift and been housed in a fake cottage, and no longer looked in the least “bellish.” I was struck by the charming, whimsical adjective “bellish”—autistic people are often called humorless, unimaginative, and “bellish” was surely an original concoction, a spontaneous and delightful image.

I don’t know if it’s because I read this long piece from 1993 at 2am, but I found it incredibly insightful and a bit sad, as well as charming and, of course, fascinating. Basically, as I’m sure Sacks intended, the same as Grandin herself. The final 2/3rds of the piece is mostly about Grandin, but there’s also a fair amount of exposition on autism itself. Get this read (or added to Instapaper, at least) before The New Yorker’s paywall (potentially) goes back up.

Unlocking Every iPhone At Once →

/via @MntyDsi

Artificial Sweeteners Linked to Obesity Epidemic →

CBC News:

In Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature, researchers report that artificial sweeteners increase the blood sugar levels in both mice and humans by interfering with microbes in the gut. Increased blood sugar levels are an early indicator of Type 2 diabetes and metabolic disease.

The increase in consumption of artificial sweeteners coincides with the obesity and diabetes epidemics, Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his co-authors said.

"Our findings suggest that non-caloric artificial sweeteners may have directly contributed to enhancing the exact epidemic that they themselves were intended to fight."

No such thing as a free meal.

9to5Mac’s Top 20 iOS 8 Features →

Happy New iPhone(s) Day.

A Generic College Paper →

Jon Wu:

“Massive block text to lend legitimacy to this sorry endeavor.”
— Legitimate-sounding Anglo Saxon name (year between 1859 and 1967)

You hear that? That’s the sound of every Freshman Comp/Academic Writing teacher in America nodding violently while reading this pitch-perfect piece.

Fighting Cancer by Controlling It, Rather Than Killing It →

Jerome Groopman:

The breakthrough is notable in part for the unconventional manner in which the drug attacks its target. There are many kinds of cancer, but treatments have typically combatted them in one way only: by attempting to destroy the cancerous cells. Surgery aims to remove the entire growth from the body; chemotherapy drugs are toxic to the cancer cells; radiation generates toxic molecules that break up the cancer cells’ DNA and proteins, causing their demise. A more recent approach, immunotherapy, coöpts the body’s immune system into attacking and eradicating the tumor.

The Agios drug, instead of killing the leukemic cells—immature blood cells gone haywire—coaxes them into maturing into functioning blood cells. Cancerous cells traditionally have been viewed as a lost cause, fit only for destruction. The emerging research on A.M.L. suggests that at least some cancer cells might be redeemable: they still carry their original programming and can be pressed back onto a pathway to health.

This is a fascinating article. This approach seems so obvious that it feels simultaneously maddening and completely understandable that it took so long to develop. On the other hand, by the end of this piece, I wondered what people would make of it in—100 years. Or even worse, in 200 years. What about 500 years? So much talk and work about and on cancer works from an assumption that it is something that eventually will be overcome. But what if (and pardon me for getting super nihilistic for a moment) cancer is something that we aren’t meant to beat/eradicate/cure? What if we’re beating our heads (and wallets) against the wall, fighting an enemy on the molecular level, for nothing?

The Legacy of Arcade Fire’s ‘Funeral’ →

Stuart Berman:

Ten years ago this week, Arcade Fire released Funeral, an album that not only transformed this once-ramshackle Montreal orchestro-rock collective into instant indie-rock icons, but forever transformed the very concept of indie rock from a fringe movement born of economic circumstance into an aspirational career model. Arriving just as the Internet’s corrosive effect on major-label hegemony was becoming apparent, Funeral showed how a fearless, fiercely committed band could take advantage of the power vacuum—in the album’s wake, "indie" became not so much an ideological rebuke to the concept of playing arenas as an alternate, service-road path to realizing it.

I’ll be 30 tomorrow. I take music very seriously. Arcade Fire is, without a doubt, on my list of the most important musical discoveries of my life.

Oh, and a side note—please make sure to check out the video Berman embedded in the piece. I’ve linked to it before and watched it many times and it’s yet to not give me goosebumps.

Oh, and another side note—for those who heard the “Reflektor is going to be Arcade Fire’s last album” rumors, here’s some good news.