Spotify’s free tier finally lets you pick a song and press play. I like the idea in theory. In practice it lands as a late concession in a market that has been slowly hollowing itself out. Lossless arrived the same week, which is nice for sampling new music, but I do not treat streaming as ownership anymore. I use Spotify to scout. I find tracks through other people’s playlists, make a note, and then I go collect the song for my own library if it matters to me. That is the only way this keeps feeling like music rather than content.

The same logic applies to movies and TV, except the gap is even more obvious. Services love to stamp high def or 4K on a page, but the quality is not the same as a disc or a well made file. A UHD Blu-ray can push far higher bitrates than a typical 4K stream, which means more real detail and fewer compression smears in dark or fast scenes. Discs also carry lossless audio formats like Dolby TrueHD, while the stream you get from an app is usually the lossy, bandwidth friendly version. If I care about how a film looks and sounds, I keep my own copy. The difference is not placebo.

Meanwhile the platform layer has been busy rearranging the walls. Google just announced it will require developers to verify their identities before their apps can be sideloaded outside the Play Store, starting in a few countries in 2026 and expanding globally in 2027. They frame it as safety. Maybe it is. It also narrows the open space that made Android feel like a real computer in your pocket. You can call that nuance. It feels like a slow squeeze.

On the desktop, Chrome has marched ahead with Manifest V3 and the deprecation of older extensions. The end result for normal people is simple. Many of the ad blockers they relied on either broke or had to accept limits, and the experience of the modern web slid further into sludge. If you have felt like Chrome got worse at protecting your attention, you are not imagining it.

YouTube doubled down too. The service has been in a public fight with ad blockers since 2023 and ramped enforcement again this year. More ads, longer ads, pause screen ads on TVs, and videos that refuse to play if a blocker is detected. I understand their business case. I also understand why people feel pushed toward alternatives when a three minute clip turns into a five ad obstacle course.

So yes, Spotify giving free users on demand playback is cool. Lossless is cool. In the bigger picture it has been a land run of corporate greed the last couple of years. Prices go up. Quality goes down. Control tightens. The exit door gets smaller and is labeled as safety. People notice. I am seeing more curiosity about how to take care of your own media, especially among younger listeners who grew up inside apps and are now learning there is a world outside the feed. That is healthy.

For me the solution is simple and boring. I do not pay for music or TV streaming. I use Spotify for discovery, then I collect what I love. I maintain a private digital library of films, shows, audiobooks, and music. It is organized. It is backed up. It is mine. When a service drops a title or wrecks the compression, my copy does not care. When a platform changes the rules, my library keeps playing.

If that sounds old fashioned, good. The future I want is hybrid. Stream to explore. Collect to keep. Build a home archive that reflects your taste and survives the next round of product decisions. The platforms can be windows. The vault should be yours.

The Song of Wandering Aengus 

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and tides are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

                — William Butler Yeats

The article points to a cluster of causes rather than one culprit: shrinking economic opportunity, accumulated trauma, lack of affordable care across the life course (which leaves acute and chronic problems under-treated), and “deaths of despair” (suicide, alcohol, and drug overdoses). Car crashes and gun violence add to the toll, but this mix is what distinguishes younger U.S. cohorts from peers in other rich countries. The result is higher mortality for Millennials and now Gen Z, with little sign of improvement unless those conditions change.

July has long inspired me because of its revolutionary spirit, pushing me annually to reinvent myself creatively. Jamie xx’s Dream Night perfectly captures the quiet intensity of this July. It feels like those nights when I’m driving down an empty city highway, streetlights flickering past the windows, and reality condenses into a calm, reflective focus. The vocals glide over the music with a soothing steadiness, creating an atmosphere that feels both peaceful and charged with possibility, a soundscape that mirrors my own personal revolutions.

For a while I have worried about how deeply market logic has seeped into every corner of modern life. We measure success in quarterly earnings and page views, not in wisdom gained or problems solved. The same pressure that turns art into disposable content has begun to turn science into a private club where access and recognition are rationed out by cost, prestige, and branding.

Capitalism’s influence is not new, but its present scale is unprecedented. Corporate funding steers research agendas toward fast-moving technologies that promise immediate returns. Universities fight for patents and spin-offs. Journals hide publicly funded findings behind paywalls that keep out anyone without an institutional badge. Even the informal conversations that once drove inquiry now live on platforms that monetize every click. Curiosity still exists, yet it is forced to pay rent in a marketplace of hype.

The article below captures this tension with unusual clarity. It challenges the idea that science is an open, self-correcting commons and argues that a small priesthood now controls who speaks, who is heard, and who gets the tools to test new ideas. I found it an important reminder that knowledge can be enclosed just as land can be fenced off.

If we care about the long-term health of science, we need to imagine structures that reward truth over profit and collaboration over gatekeeping.

For many, aliens only exist in the realm of science fiction. But regardless of whether aliens exist or not, the potential existence of extraterrestrial species throws into question our entire metaphysical framework, which has long gone unchallenged. In particular, we would need to rethink our understanding of language, which currently determines how we experience our world.

But what if there were other languages out there that better captured reality? For theoretical philosopher Matti Eklund, these are the questions philosophy needs to be asking.

“Investigating what alien languages there can be is a natural and fruitful way to investigate different ways for the world to be,” Eklund argues.