Welcome to Grace's Newsletter!

Enter all ye who seek musings

So welcome aboard the Gem of Amara newsletter express. This is more of a preview than the first entry, so let me tell you a bit about what you can expect.

Having made at least a small inroad to writing about football (Americans: read “soccer”) at statsbomb.com, this is going to be a space for my thoughts about pop culture, at least nominally. Culture is so often the lens through which we understand society, and maybe that matters right now. Or maybe it has always mattered. Or maybe I’m wrong about everything and it has never mattered at all, who’s to say.

I’ve already got some topics for potential articles in mind and hopefully this can be an interesting place of discussion. I’m going to try and do these about once a week to start, and we’ll see where we go from there. Thanks for subscribing!

Interesting things I’ve read recently

“Life Without the Tech Giants”, by Kashmir Hill - The final section of this has yet to be published as of my writing this, but the first four were fascinating insights into the ways the major tech companies have seeped into the foundations of the internet and even the “real world”. It’s an irony that what is now “Gizmodo Media Group” have produced some of the most vital writing on the internet since the end of Gawker, especially in terms of an anti-capitalist alternative to the kind of straightforward liberalism in much of what we read on the internet.

“Why are so many big-studio musical numbers so bad?”, by Jesse Hassenger - It has often been noted that the AV Club has moved away from the thoughtful close reading of pop culture it was once famous for in favour of quick hit news stories, but writers like Hassenger remain practitioners of the site’s classic style. Here, he examines why, for all that the musical genre is seeing a resurgence, it is currently struggling so much to create memorable song and dance numbers.