Welcome to the latest installment of “Five Words From …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist explains Spotify’s influence on the modern music business, and how it’s reshaped the experience of both listening to and creating music.

datafication

“The writer Rob Horning once argued in his newsletter that datafication, or the process of rendering our lives as data, is ‘first and foremost a kind of surveillance designed to impose classification and norms on the surveilled while devaluing whatever ways they understand themselves.’”

Places such as the Data Justice Lab investigate the social justice implications of how personal data is used by corporations for profit.

enshittification

“In the hands of major labels and streambait consultants, AI was looking likely to become just another tool of what Cory Doctorow called platform decay, or “enshittification,” and it was all going to be monetized by streaming.”

Doctorow explains enshittification as “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

freemium

“By the end of 2007, the freemium business model—which included ad-supported and subscription-based tiers, with the goal of funneling users from free to paid—was created as a deep collaboration between Spotify and the [record] labels.”

Freemium as a business model has been extensively analyzed and studied to make it more effective.

hope labor

“Spotify’s emphasis on selling the feeling of potential also reflects a broader tendency of 2010s platform capitalism: the prevalence of hope labor, a term that academics have used to frame the aspirational work that users do for free in hopes that it will lead to future work.”

Similar to artists being asked to do things for “exposure,” hope labor offers merely the chance to be recognized rather than fair pay.

lean-back

“In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing.”

The opposite of “lean-back” listeners are the “lean-forward” listeners, who know what kind of music they want to listen to and actively seek it out.

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Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, we follow nature writer Miriam Darlington from her home in Devon, England, through the wilds of Scotland, Wales, the Lake District, and the countryside of Cornwall as she pursues a deeper understanding of the enchanting, elusive, and fascinating otter.

holt

The wild otter I saw would no doubt be out of the water and making tracks to its own musky holt, to curl belly-upward in a home of roots, peat and rocks.

Otters’ resting-places are also sometimes called lodges or couches.

leat

Lower down, the path joins an old leat, a stone waterway engineered a hundred years ago to carry water to feed the reservoirs and tin mines.

The word ‘leat’ is more commonly found in the south and west of England, and in Wales; the word goit is more common in northern England.

spraint

There may be spraint, the otter’s droppings, nearby, and these signs can sometimes form great mounds.

Otter excrement is also sometimes called coke, because it has a black, ashy appearance. For other terms for animal droppings, check out the Wordnik list “Specific Excrement“.

stickle

In the twentieth century, sometimes a hunted otter would be trapped in the water by a line of people forming a barrier with poles. This was called a “stickle” and if caught like this the otter was less likely to escape.

In the dramatic conclusion of Tarka the Otter (an inspiration for Darlington’s own otter search), Tarka escapes from between two stickles, killing a hunting hound before swimming free.

vibrissae

From this sniff-level position I get a flash of the bristling vibrissae, the otter’s extravagant whiskers, and in a split second he catches my scent.

The word vibrissa (vibrissae is the plural) comes from a Latin word meaning ‘vibrate’.

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Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this installment, Sy Montgomery recounts her poultry husbandry journey, showing us that the “chickenverse” is a deeper and more interesting place than we imagined.

augury

“The word ‘augury’ comes from the Greek word meaning ‘bird talk’, for to understand the language of birds was to understand the gods.”

Montgomery’s chickens communicated with her and each other through elaborate noises that conveyed specific meanings. For more on how birds communicate, check out Barbara Ballentine and Jeremy Hyman’s Bird Talk: An Exploration of Avian Communication.

crop

“When Peanut was a year and a half old she developed a blockage in her crop–the muscular compartment where birds store and soften their food.”

The average chicken’s crop can hold about an ounce and a half of food.

ermine

“There was the skunk, and another time a mink, another time a neighbor’s dog and once an ermine. The tiny ferocious weasel in its snowy winter coat had slipped through our barn’s foundation and decapitated one of our hens.”

Keeping live chickens is an invitation to meet the local predators and Montgomery encountered plenty of wild animals eager for chicken dinners. The ermine (also called a stoat) is a common visitor to chicken coops across Europe and North America.

overpet

“Then it starts all over again, until the hen has had enough and has reached what we call “overpet.” She fluffs her feathers, shakes, and, fortified by affection, strolls off to continue her chicken day.”

Many animals have less-patient responses than chickens to overstimulation (sometimes called sensory overload).

sex crouch

“And just as the hens always do with me, she assumed her distinctive squatting posture. This is a well-known chicken behavior usually directed at a member of her own species. It is actually known as a “sex crouch.” It’s a position that a chicken normally uses to make it easy for a rooster to mount her.”

Hens will begin showing this behavior (called lordosis in mammals) when they are mature enough to start laying. When chickens see a human they know, they might squat in this position, hoping to be picked up or petted.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023, explain how AI works (and why it often doesn’t), explore AI’s limits and risks, and outline where AI is a useful tool and where it’s not just empty hype but actually harmful.

algospeak

“To appreciate how common it is for regular users to try to evade content moderation, consider algospeak: words or phrases that are widely understood and adopted by social media users as a way to avoid being mistakenly penalized by fickle content moderation algorithms.”

Neologism researcher Brianne Hughes has created a Wordnik list of “Algorithm Avoidant Inventions” to collect algospeak examples.

cliodynamics

“One ambitious effort is the theory of cliodynamics by Peter Turchin, which applies mathematical models to populations.”

The ‘clio-‘ of ‘cliodynamics’ comes the name of the muse of history in Greek mythology.

criti-hype

“Researcher Lee Vinsel called this phenomenon criti-hype—criticism that tends up portraying technology as all powerful instead of calling out its limitations.”

Vinsel created the word ‘criti-hype’ in a 2021 Medium post titled “You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype“.

deep learning

“In 2011, Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton decided to take a crack at the ImageNet competition using neural networks, which by then had been branded “deep learning” because of the key insight that having more layers (depth) improves accuracy.”

Neural networks, despite the name, are not intended to realistically model the behavior of actual neurons.

shadowbanning

“Instead of removal, the post can be slapped with a warning, or, if it is a “borderline” policy violation, it might be silently shown to fewer users than it otherwise would. This is a notable development in the last few years known as downranking or demotion, or, colloquially, shadowbanning.”

Rich Kyanka, the creator of Something Awful, claims that the term ‘shadow ban’ was created on that forum. A 2018 explainer from Vice, “Where Did the Concept of ‘Shadow Banning’ Come From?” highlights similar practices, including ‘twit bit’, ‘bozo filter’, and ‘toading’.

Welcome to the latest installment of “Five words from …” our series which highlights interesting words from interesting books! In this book, Vogue culture writer Emma Specter writes about her struggles around diet culture, eating disorders, and learning self-acceptance doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Night Eating Syndrome

“Night Eating Syndrome (NES) is classified as its own eating disorder, one that affects about one in ten people who have obesity.”

NES as an eating disorder that can be comorbid with anxiety, depression, and insomnia in adult men and women. More information and help can be found on the Sleep Foundation’s website: Night Eating Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatments.

SMILF

“Frankie Shaw’s SMILF ran for two seasons on Showtime, and while the series wasn’t perfect on screen or off … the story that endeavored to tell about women parenting, class, addiction, and food was profoundly ambitious.”

Slang for “single mom I’d like to fuck,” though in some cases the “S” stands for “step” or “soccer”. In the context of the television show, the “S” represents South Boston.

fat icon

“Yes, today’s teenagers have fat icons like Paloma Elsesser, Barbie Ferreira, and Aidy Bryant to look up to, but representation can go only so far and do only so much.”

Specter posits that a handful of representatives have little influence against the global institutions selling the idea that weight loss and thinness are the only routes to happiness.

meta-shame

“I now know that what I was experiencing was what Sonia Renee Taylor refers to in her 2018 book The Body Is Not An Apology as meta-shame, or the state of feeling shame for feeling shame about our bodies.”

Specter shares that the roots of body-shaming have been difficult to eradicate, especially when she hasn’t felt she has been able to find self-acceptance in the “correct” way.

terror management

“In times of stress or fear, people focus more than usual on the things they believe they can control, this is called terror management.”

Specter discusses that during the COVID pandemic, quarantine allowed people to scrutinize their eating and food consumption (often in disordered ways) as a means to feel agency in their own lives.