Hard City/Soft City, Music Writing x2, this New-sletter

Hello to everyone – long time, no…one-way correspondence!

Three topics for you today, let's get into it.

Hard City/Soft City

I’ve just returned from a few weeks in Europe and have a lot of thoughts I’ll be working through in the coming few weeks. For now, I want to kick off the return to this newsletter by throwing an idea to you based on these travels that might invite you to send me some correspondence back. 

Given some time in Buenos Aires in Spring and now Paris, Brussels, and Berlin – and plenty of time in New York – I’ve come up with a construct called “Hard City/Soft City.” In this theory, cities either are hard or soft to live in, but also may appear hard or soft to live in. Like any good typology, this one is of course squishy and imprecise – and certainly vary based on socioeconomic status! – but a hard city to live in might be one with lots of built, economic, infrastructural, and social friction and a soft city one where it is easier, more affordable, more comfortable, and with a more humane built environment within which to live. Appearing hard or appearing soft, I’ll leave up to your judgments. 

Here’s an example of how I would characterize some cities. 

What do you think about this construct and these characterizations? Where would you put other cities you know? Send me a short note with your thoughts.

Music Writing x2

Am I music journalist now? No, I’m still a proud dilletante, but I’ve published two pieces this year about music and I’m really eager to get them in front of the eyeballs & eardrums of you and yours. The first is an interactive graphics project about the DNA of music from April – how sound passes down across generations of songs through the practice of sampling. This was a long-time-coming collaborative project with the data visualizations website The Pudding and it was my (wonderful) first time working as part of a team on a creative project like this. I hope you’ll take some time to read and listen to this project, if you haven’t already. 

More recently, I wrote a rather unconventional essay at Heat Death reflecting on how the relationship between music and sports has drastically changed in the last 30 years, or since the first Jock Jams album. I’m really happy with this piece and, I think, in the media market I started out in, this would have taken a slightly different approach and been published in a magazine with a large readership. Alas, we don’t live in that media world anymore and it’s been a bit of a bummer to put something out there that then gets very little traction in our very fractured and depleted information ecosystem. Which is all to say, I hope you, dear reader, will read it and share it with others if it did something for you.

New-sletter

If you’re an acute observer of the technological, you might notice that this email looks a little different from others you’ve received from me. But the point – hopefully – is that the belated shift of newsletter hosting services requires no notice or action from you at all. You’ll now be receiving emails through Ghost – a non-profit platform! – rather than Substack, whose documented affinity for right-wing extremism finally pushed me over. Thanks for being here.

That’s all for now, hope to reach you soon with some more elaborate thoughts (including your input!) on city life abroad and here in New York.

Stephen