Remembering Nina Simone today on the 23rd anniversary of her passing (April 21, 2003) | Explore her musical legacy (including audio & video highlights) here: album.ink/NinaSimoneRIP

From the vault: In the studio with Prince: Susan Rogers on recording: "He was not a lordly type. He was a working man. He had a strong work ethic" In 1983 a phone call about a job opening in Minneapolis changed Susan Rogers' life forever. Working as Prince’s staff engineer for five years, she’d spend day and night behind the desk and tape machin...

Remembering Prince on the 10th anniversary of his death with this interview by his staff's engineer Susan Rogers who worked on Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign o' the Times, and The Black Album.
audiomediainternational.com/in-the-studi... #prince #susanrogers #musicstudio

BLACK STUDIES ON 135TH STREET is out today! My contribution, “Following Schomburg’s Example,” is about amplifying decency.

U.S. culture doesn’t require white people to be decent, so if you want more decency in the world, you must amplify & support it when you see it! True 100 years ago. True now.

Discovering Prince, Ten Years Later - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Tomorrow marks 10 years since Prince passed. For the first time, I gathered nearly two decadesq of my writing, podcasts, talks & more into one curated resource, including playlists, rarities, a review of every video he ever made, and collaborations I did with his estate. anildash.com/2026/04/20/p...

Coachella is trying to wipe all of the footage of The Strokes protest set so I’m gonna post it here. The last images on the screen made me cry.

A question for American historians: were the Robber Barons of the 19th century as corrupt as the technofascist billionaires of the 21st century?

I think my comments on LLM drafts by some students are getting much better.

Like an elegant version of saying, "C'MON SON."

The Industry of the Future Is Run by People Who Hate Each Other AI leaders agree on two things: Change is coming, and the other guys can’t be trusted

1. They hate us more.
2. Amongst themselves, their class solidarity is always going to prevail.

It’s giving “oh you know the ones…” as a 22 point statement

It’s funny that as I read that palantir word salad the image that popped in my mind was a book I checked out from the library in the early 1990s on apartheid history

“We’ll win the culture wars by erasure and annihilation of some cultures”- Palantir, actually

What’s interesting here is they say “culture” when they mean “people” but they think that this maintains a veneer of deniability about what they’re really saying. In any case it’s true that the “culture” of the tech billionaires is morally and intellectually depraved rot bsky.app/profile/elio...

You can plate it and serve it you like but it’s impossible to disguise that this is just shit scraped from the toilets of 20th century totalitarians

It's also worth being clear about who's doing the arguing. Palantir sells operational software to defence, intelligence, immigration & police agencies. These 22 points aren't philosophy floating in space, they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating.

Extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement

This is how you end up married for 20 years...

Massive Attack and Tom Waits? That's a very specific Gen X art pop culture response to a host a f*cksh*t

Seems like the Strait of Hormuz is only open when the stock market is.

A Newly Discovered Recording Lets You Hear Delta Blues Legend Robert Johnson in Stunning Clarity Great swathes of rock music since the nineteen-sixties would never have existed, we're sometimes told, were it not for the recordings of Robert Johnson. Certainly the likes of Keith Richards, Eric Cla...

Holy SHIT someone found the test pressing of Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues and it is clear as a PIN www.openculture.com/2026/04/reco...

Happy ‘Sinners’ Day!

One year ago, Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners,’ released in theaters.

It’s so funny that they pubbed this the day before “john roberts invented the trump era shadow docket to make sure fossil fuel companies could keep killing you and make money doing it” bsky.app/profile/cris...

Why are Harvard’s slavery researchers quitting or being fired? The school’s $100m project to examine its slave ownership in Antigua is mired with controversy as academics allege obstruction

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

Pope Leo XIV's visit to an African church linked to slavery reflects on his own complex heritage The pope’s planned visit to a Catholic chapel in Angola that was connected to the slave trade is seen as a symbolic moment by some Africans.

I'll be watching this part of Pope Leo trip to Africa carefully...
apnews.com/article/pope...

Some recommended reading by James Baldwin to add contrast to this uh… take.

www.nytimes.com/1979/07/29/a...

💪🏿

She'll end up with their house and their savings. Twenty trees?!

We need much more OFFLINE intra-community political education about domestic violence. Much more. People are still at 101 when they should absolutely be at the 401 level by now.

Seems like a poison narrative to apply to anyone with ambitions for president who would model or adopt Mamdani like politics that 3rd way types can parrot later election cycles

Another thing that is confusing the political commentariat about Mamdani is that he isn't going to run for President because he can't. So they can't write their usual 'he's a political climber' story lines and I think that has also broken something in them.

Whew, you could write a whole grad student dissertation on this excerpt. One issue is the use of "elite." I'm sure Mamdani's parents are doing fine, but "Manhattan elite" is a realm of billionaires, not a filmmaker and a college professor. Their wealth and power is a rounding error to Jamie Dimon.