Adjacent Weekend

This week: the decades-long manipulation of your music taste (from payola to algorithmic psyops), a design philosophy that ditches the humanoid robot obsession, what Japan's immigration debate reveals about national identity, a case for great books belonging to everyone, and a horror box office that two twenty-somethings just remade.

Your Music Taste Is Being Manipulated: A History

The Geese psyop allegations — a beloved indie band accused of being an industry plant — turned out to be a useful mirror. This piece traces the arc from 1950s payola scandals through algorithmic playlist placement to today's suspiciously viral TikTok "discoveries," asking the harder question underneath: if taste has always been shaped by money, what does authentic preference even mean? You'll come away with cleaner vocabulary for something you've probably sensed but couldn't name.

The Culture Journalist · 18 min

Forget Humanoids: Eno Might Be the Robot We Actually Need

While Boston Dynamics and Figure chase the bipedal dream, Eno takes a different bet: that the most useful robot isn't the one that looks most like us. This design piece is a sharp essay disguised as a product review — it interrogates why we defaulted to the humanoid form factor and whether that instinct is about utility or vanity. Worth reading alongside any of the humanoid coverage from the past two years.

Yanko Design · 10 min

What Defines Japan's National Identity?

Japan's birth rate crisis is forcing a question the country has avoided for a long time: can you be Japanese if you weren't born that way? Noah Smith takes the question seriously rather than treating it as either a nativist talking point or a simple diversity argument, tracing how Japanese identity got constructed and why it's proved so resistant to revision. The piece is really about every aging country facing the same pressure — Japan just makes the tension most visible.

Noahpinion · 15 min

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.” — Mind Candy

'Backrooms' and 'Obsession' Disrupt the 2026 Summer Box Office (paywall)

Two horror films from first-time directors in their twenties have done what studios spent hundreds of millions trying and failing to do this summer. The piece is less a box office report than a structural story about how horror economics keep creating openings that franchise IP can't fill — and what that says about where film culture moves when no one is watching the discourse.

The New York Times · 12 min

The Great Books Are For Everyone

Ted Gioia profiles Zena Hitz, a tutor at St. John's College, whose argument for the great books canon is neither conservative nostalgia nor progressive rehabilitation — it's something stranger: that these texts matter most to people who have the least to gain from credential culture. A genuine case for slow, difficult reading in an era that keeps telling you to optimize your information diet.

Ted Gioia / The Honest Broker · 14 min

Marcin Wichary on Designing Finger-Friendly Interactions

An interactive essay that demonstrates — kinesthetically, not just argumentatively — how digital interfaces interfere with motor skills. Wichary makes you feel the design failure before explaining it, which is a more honest form of criticism than most design writing manages. Set aside the time to actually interact with it rather than skim.

Waxy.org · 20 min

Does Anything I Write Matter Anymore?

A physicist-turned-economist-turned-blogger asking the obvious question in an era when anyone can generate a thousand words on any topic instantly. This is less a crisis-of-confidence piece and more a careful attempt to figure out what "mattering" even means for writing now — what a human voice can do that fluent text generation cannot, and whether that distinction holds. Honest in a way that most media-industry hand-wringing isn't.

Noahpinion · 13 min