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New Rules Of Media

I started playing with sine waves as a composition tool around 2012. I got frustrated around then by how genre specific so many different sounds were, that they instantly evoked an instrument or a style. I wanted a totally neutral writing tool. I wanted to hear pure notes.

I found a very simple sine wave plug-in and started using that as a writing tool for the Ramona Lisa album. When I started playing with phasing, with phasing one note against each other, it was like, “Oh my god, I just want to mute everything else and just listen to this.”

Once in awhile, when I needed an ear break from working on whatever I was working on, I’d start a new session to play around with just the sine waves, and would save it. At first, I did it just for myself. I didn’t even take it very seriously. I thought, “This is cool. I want to listen to this.” Once I started accumulating enough of them to listen to a series of them, I realized, “Wait a minute, this is essentially what I want to listen to a lot of the time.”

I started using the recordings just for getting things done. Like getting up in the morning, doing email, going to bed at night, for when I was feeling really stressed out on the train… I’d put them on. I was compelled by how functional it was and it felt strange to me that I’d never really looked at music that way before. I’d always approached music as being a narrative or being aesthetic or having meaning by way of reference or being political, and I’d never looked at it just so cleanly as, “This is useful.” That was very exciting to me.

There is a distinction worth drawing between luxury and beauty, or more precisely between opulence and grace. Marcel is a useful case study. Everything about the place signals a level of unrestricted aesthetic devotion at which money seems almost an abstract annoyance. There’s a Helen Frankenthaler on the wall, and a Robert Indiana tucked coyly under the stairs. And yet money, in its most indiscreet sense, is everywhere: each piece of flatware and plateware is available for purchase, as your server may mention, and bronze-framed vitrines that serve as subtle room dividers display treasures from Sotheby’s—a claw-like Chaumet necklace, a pocket-size John Chamberlain “tidbit” sculpture—with placards noting, pointedly, “price available on request.” In the dining room’s previous lives—say, as Flora Bar, in the Met days—lunch might be followed by a wander upstairs to see a collection of Munch or Celmins paintings, and diners at Marcel can similarly tour certain Sotheby’s floors that are open to the public. Still, there is a fundamental difference between a show and a showroom: one is culture, the other is retail. Restaurants, at their best, are adept at fusing the two, which I suspect is why Marcel feels compelling and coherent even when its corporate landlord fails to muffle the ka-ching of the cash registers.

What about Meta’s A.I.-enabled smart glasses, which have raised questions about privacy and surveillance? In a recent thread on Bluesky, the writer Sarah Rose, who is legally blind, described them as “absolute game changers for the blind community.” It is “incredible,” she wrote, “to talk to your glasses and ask them what they see.”

“I Am Not a Robot” looks, superficially, like an attempt to assess the value of A.I.—a doomed endeavor, since the technology is always improving. (“One of the biggest obstacles I faced was that the tech kept getting better faster than I could test or write,” she notes.) On a deeper level, though, the book is a performance in which Stern models the process of deciding whether different kinds of A.I. are good for her, as an individual. She notes that she wrote all of “I Am Not a Robot” herself (the words “started in my brain and traveled, via my MacBook keyboard, onto the page”), yet she also employed “BookBots”: custom A.I. agents she built using ChatGPT and Claude. These bots, she explains, had access to her outlines and transcripts, and throughout the writing process they “researched, summarized papers, crunched data, copyedited sections, suggested better words, brainstormed, and even mocked-up illustration ideas.” (When the book was finished, they wrote the blurbs: “ ‘I Am Not a Robot’ is unusually self-aware,” ChatGPT observed.) Stern questions whether using the BookBots was a good idea. Did having them “constantly edit and tighten my writing cost me the version of this book that might have resulted from the slower, more reflective process of figuring out what I actually wanted to say?” She doesn’t really arrive at an answer, perhaps because whatever insight she found wouldn’t necessarily apply to anyone else.

Returning to San Francisco's Coast Recorders, the band recruited their soundman, Dan Healy, to help produce. In between studio sessions, the band also began recording their live dates. Lesh commented that this was in part because the songs were not "road tested."[9] Healy, Garcia, and Lesh then took these concert tapes (encompassing two Los Angeles shows from November 1967, a tour of the Pacific Northwest in January and early February 1968, and a California tour from mid-February to mid-March 1968) and began interlacing them with existing studio tracks.[7] Garcia called this "mix[ing] it for the hallucinations".

...Jerry [Garcia] and Phil [Lesh] went into the studio with [Dan] Healy and, like mad scientists, they started splicing all the versions together, creating hybrids that contained the studio tracks and various live parts, stitched together from different shows, all in the same song — one rendition would dissolve into another and sometimes they were even stacked on top of each other... It was easily our most experimental record, it was groundbreaking in its time, and it remains a psychedelic listening experience to this day."

If someone is early in their career and feels like they ‘don’t have taste yet,’ what would you have them do for 30 minutes a day for a year?

How do you know if you have good taste?

What’s the best way you’ve helped someone find their taste?

How do you know when to trust your own taste versus listening to feedback from clients, coworkers, or the internet?

As founders and creatives, how do you tell the difference between building for genuine long-term taste versus just responding to what feels culturally loud in the moment?

As your businesses have grown, how have you balanced building systems and processes that scale without losing the originality and personal taste that made the work compelling in the first place?

How do you keep building ambitious things without losing your sense of taste and self?

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