Pink Floyd, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and Me by Charlie Savage

Charlie Savage, who’s now a well-regarded political journalist with a Pulitzer Prize on his shelf, recounts his experience a cub reporter when a human interest piece about stoners syncing up Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz became an early example of a story going viral on the internet. This is amusing in its details and slides in some reasonably profound ruminating on the shifting media landscape over the course of the few decades Savage has been immersed in it. I’m mostly sharing it at the top of this weekly feature to note that his aside about other albums aligning with other movies is an entryway to telling the sordid tale of my own household’s experience with the phenomenon. Not too long after Savage’s original article made the rounds, we boozily tried the experiment and found it entertaining enough that we convinced ourselves absolutely anything would match up with The Dark Side of the Moon. The very first test of our hypothesis was playing the Pink Floyd classic alongside the Aardman Animation masterpiece The Wrong Trousers. It was stunning, reaching its mind-blowing pinnacle when the very first cash register ching of “Money” occurred at the targeted diamond first comes into focus during the heist scene. No other pairings that night worked nearly as well, though the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique with Apollo 13 had its moments. This article is published by The New York Times Magazine.

Congress Is Woefully Unprepared to Regulate Tech by Maya Kornberg

Writing for Slate, Maya Kornberg rightly excoriates legislative leadership in the United States for continuing to treat the tech sector as a mere afterthought, haphazardly muddled with by a slew of tangentially associated committees. What little regulation does dribble out demonstrates an astounding dearth of knowledge about the very tools and businesses it supposes to direct. It’s been true since the at least the The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a drastically wrongheaded law that still causes damage today, which makes it all the more damning the twenty-five years has passed with no real improvement in oversight for the modern technologies that are embedded in nearly every facet of the nation’s business.