You’ve made it to the end of February! Congratulations! Here’s a special extra edition of my newsletter to help you march happily into next month.
Social Media Tips & Links
In the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with Dispo, the photo-sharing app from YouTuber David Dobrik. The idea is to mimic those old disposable cameras we used to have - the app has a distinct late ‘90s feel to it. You take photos that then “develop” and are then available to you the next day with a bit of a vignetting effect. You can almost detect the acrid smell of darkroom chemicals.
Taylor Lorenz’s article has a good breakdown of why this app might bear watching. Want to try it yourself? The first 10 to tweet this newsletter and tag me @jongabriel can get a free invite!
Speaking of photography - what if you could take an old photo of your long-passed grandmother, and bring it to life? That’s what this new artificial-intelligence service, Deep Nostalgia, can do, and it’s pretty mind-blowing (and a bit unsettling).
Extra: If you had a PC any time in the last 20 years, you know the gorgeous grassy hill that Windows used as its default wallpaper. Did you know it’s a real hill?
Interesting Reads
I recently finished Trevor Noah’s wonderful autobiography, “Born a Crime”, which covers his growing up in the immediate aftermath of the end of apartheid in South Africa. I admit, when Noah first started at The Daily Show, I had a hard time believing he could fill the shoes of the previous host, Jon Stewart. But Noah has made the show his own through his affable personality and trenchant wit. He’s often uniquely insightful as he brings his outsider’s perspective to American culture and politics.
The book’s title comes from the fact that Noah’s birth was literally a crime in apartheid South Africa - he’s biracial, the product of a white father and a Black mother (who, incidentally, comes across vividly in these pages as Noah’s primary role model). As Noah explains:
In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race-mixing proves that races can mix—and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.
The other book I’m reading right now covers a bit of history I had no clue whatsoever about. Did you know that, shortly after the Soviet Union’s formation at the end of World War I, the United States helped them overcome a deadly famine that threatened to upend the still-fragile communist nation? It’s true, and it involves Herbert Hoover, who, before being unfortunately immortalized as the president who failed to halt the Great Depression, was famous for his great humanitarian efforts around the world. The book is called “The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin.”
That’s all for this month! See you next time! If you liked what you read, would you please be so kind and share with a friend?