#SundayReads 14.04.24
Back from a hiatus… and welcome to all the new subscribers!
Read #1. Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ a quiet manifesto of Black music reappropriation birthed from marginalization.
Jackson felt that his work, despite the tremendous melodic, rhythmic, and production leaps it took, was being marginalized as just a Black album. Despite its success, “Off The Wall” was released on the other side of the growing shroud of the “disco sucks” rhetoric that was seeping with racist and homophobic overtones.
He spoke about his disappointment in his 1988 autobiography, “Moonwalk.”
“I felt ignored by my peers and it hurt,” Jackson wrote. “I said to myself, ‘wait until next time’ — they won’t be able to ignore the next album.”
Read #2. Dispatches from the Adderall epidemic.
Read #3. Aflac’s CEO gave us that obnoxious, genius duck and changed the insurance industry. Now, he’s facing his aging customers’ mortality—and eventually his own.
Read #4. Bitter sweet symphony: how bitters became a bartender's secret weapon.
The word ‘cocktail’ was first coined in print in 1806 in The Balance and Columbian Repository when, in response to a reader enquiring about the word, the editor defined a cocktail as “a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters.”
Read #5. The Violent Birth of Kampala
When the chance came to immerse myself in it, I spent many months starting from 2014 “searching” for Kampala. I came to think of the Kampala created by urban planner A.E. Mirams in 1931 as “the egg”, given its shape.