Charu Sinha, writing for Vulture, has the story on the newest Foo Fighter, Josh Freese.

The band announced the news during the Foo Fighters: Preparing Music For Concerts livestream. A prolific session drummer, Freese has worked with artists and bands including Lana Del Rey, Rob Zombie, Bruce Springsteen, Nine Inch Nails, the Vandals, and Weezer. He also performed, along with over 50 other musicians, at Hawkins’s Los Angeles tribute concert last year. 

I watched the Preparing Music for Concerts video and I thought Freese brought a tremendous amount of energy. It will be a different vibe, but I think it’s more of a “turn the page” feel. This is the new Foo Fighters, pretty much the same as the old Foo Fighters.

I can’t wait for the new album.

Seth Godin:

More hope.

More health.

More security.

More innovation.

More breakthroughs.

More connection.

More creation.

More joy.

Read the rest.

Jamelle Bouie, writing for The New York Times, takes a look at the legislation that Republicans around the country are pushing and, in the style of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, outlines what goals they are attempting to achieve.

There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

That’s biting and, perhaps, entirely truthful?

Neil Gaiman, Author and Professor of the Arts at Bard, addresses New College of Florida Students, who organized their own Alt-Graduation Ceremony in defiance of the hostile takeover of their college and attack on their Academic Freedoms.

It’s a powerful speech.

AppleTV dropped a teaser trailer for the next great Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon.

Martin Scorsese has a long history with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Now, the iconic director is uniting his two muses for an AppleTV feature. Based on the best-selling book, Killers of the Flower Moon goes back to 1920s Oklahoma to retell the serial murder of the Osage Nation.

In preparation for his demise, the great composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto—who died of cancer in March at age 71—prepared a playlist for his own funeral. 

The funeral playlist features beautiful pieces by Ennio Morricone, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, David Sylvian, Laurel Halo, Bach, and the Bill Evans Trio, among many others.

Nicholas Bate –

1. Know when enough is enough. Of anything: salted caramel and chocolate tart, push-ups and ‘success’.

2. Sometimes you can ignore the views of other people.

3. Nobody can take your learning away from you. Read, read, read.

4. Walking does actually solve pretty well anything from the immediate worry to a long-term health issue. Constant movement is more important than occasional exercise.

5. Nothing lives for long (healthily) in a cubicle.  There is an escape plan. 

6. Reptile brain is awesome in emergencies. Human brain understands long-term consequences and interdependencies, displays emotional intelligence and when finally tuned can access secrets of the universe. Use it at all times except emergencies. Tip: most of life is not an emergency.

7. Bizarrely, doing something well can stop us hating it. Useful for the day job. 

David Roth, writing at Defector, has been thinking about Twitter.

Because Twitter is so big and open-ended, and because it is a product of the grandiose and impatient and deliriously shallow world of Silicon Valley, the ways in which it has been talked about by the people who talk about it most have mostly been ridiculous. For all the site has been—sometimes a place where important things happen, more often a place to watch less-important things happen alongside if not truly with other people, always a wall on which to write graffiti and a periscope that would show you a stranger being weird—it has never been what they said it was. The overheated register in which Silicon Valley types have tended to talk about Twitter as The Global Town Square, a horizonless agora in which all of humanity can meet to uh engage in free speech together or whatever, is how they always talk about whatever they are selling, right before they move on to selling something else. For better and worse, these people like Twitter—many people do—but they can’t say why, or call it what it is. And so it has to bring people together, for the future’s sake.

You can see the problem. It is a miraculous thing, or anyway an impressive one, to invent a platform on which anyone can speak to anyone/everyone else, about anything. But because these people don’t really value people or togetherness very highly, or have much to say, or consider the future as anything but a place where they will become richer, they don’t really know what to do with that. “Bringing people together” is a value-neutral thing, and a mass of humanity does not become a community—and is not prevented from becoming a mob—simply because they’re all in the same place. Silicon Valley types want whatever’s next because there might be money in it, but also they are fundamentally not very interested in inhabiting or maintaining the new realities they shape; it’s too much like work. Maintaining things is hard, and requires much more care than making things does.

Nicholas Bate –

Coffee brewed.

Pencil paused.

Sun rose.

Thoughts tumbled.

Doctor Who returns later this year for its 60th anniversary with three special episodes.

Special One: THE STAR BEAST

Special Two: WILD BLUE YONDER

Special Three: THE GIGGLE

I’m looking forward to watching Tennant and the returning Catherine Tate as they likely get into some more time travel shenanigans one last time before Ncuti Gatwa takes over as the new Fifteenth Doctor.