#23: Kyle — The New Yorker, Culture, Technology
The author of "Filterworld" shares a few of his favorite things.
Welcome to Mia’s Queue, a newsletter spotlighting the secret agents of taste among us. In each edition, I chat with an undercover tastemaker infusing creativity and wonder into their (and our!) everyday life. Learn what lights them up, where they find inspiration, and what they think we should all be enjoying right now. Meet Agent 023: , the New Yorker’s media and technology reporter and the author of “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.”
As a long-time subscriber of The New Yorker, I’ve developed journalistic crushes on many of their writers and will read anything they publish, among them Ariel Levy, Kyle Chayka, Jia Tolentino, Hua Hsu, and Amana Petrusich. Well — life dream unlocked! — I got to interview Kyle last year for my podcast for Flipboard. We talked about culture, curation, and taste, previewing many of the ideas in his new book, “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.”
That book finally came out this week, and I already think it’s essential reading because it touches on themes so dear to me in such a clear way. Things like developing your own aesthetic and POV; taking care to find and connect with real people with actual taste; and not falling into a passive mode of consuming culture through algorithmic deliverance.
Kyle was on The Ezra Klein Show last week articulating all of this:
Since I like to know what interesting people like Kyle are reading, watching, and listening to, I always ask for their selections at the end of my show. Kyle’s picks, told to me in 2023, feel timeless so I’m excited to re-surface them today in this newsletter.
📗 “In Praise of Shadows” by Junichiro Tanizaki
I always, always go back to this essay by the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki. It’s a short, 40-page essay written in 1933 in which Tanizaki reflects on how the rise of electric lights has changed Tokyo and changed culture and society for him as he was living through this period of industrialization in Japan. This essay captures so much and is so elegant and cool that I think everyone should read it.
I've been obsessed with a Swiss furniture designer called the USM Modular, which are these kinds of modular shelving systems and credenza chairs and desks and tables that look like giant K’nex or something. They're grids of metal tubes connected by little ball sockets. You fill in the shelves with powder-coated steel and bright colors. They're so cool. You don't see them in the United States as much.
The Bill Evans Trio
When I got my Spotify Wrapped [for 2022], I was in the .01% of top listeners of the Bill Evans Trio, a jazz trio from the 1960s. It's like, wow, that's almost an insult [that more people haven’t listened to them]. I just find the trio records from the ‘60s, particularly the live ones, to be amazing, amazing jazz, and the best writing/working/thinking music you could ask for. Plus, it's good for a dinner party background.
🔥 An Induction Burner
In terms of cooking, my apartment has a bad electric coil stove. I've always been frustrated because you can't cook with a wok on it very easily; you can't do good stirfry. My cooking curation would include an induction burner that you put on top of your stove — it gets way hotter, way faster, and is more controllable than your bad rental stuff.
📚 Orlando Figes
It can be hard to find inspiring books; you never really know what you're going to get into. But I've been reading the work of Orlando Figes for the past year or more. I stumbled upon his work because I read the book “The Europeans,” which is a kind of triple biography of Ivan Turgenev the novelist; a Spanish singer and composer, Pauline Vlardot, and her husband, in 19th century Europe. That book was great.
Then I went through Orlando Figes’ entire body of work, which is a lot of Russian history. I love his writing so much that I love reading about Russia in a way that I never thought I would. His writing is so eloquent, interesting, and wide in scope that I’ve read every book he's written.
That's a rare experience, when you find an artist or writer who compels you so much that you're driven to go through all their work. It’s a process worth doing: when you find someone or something that's compelling, like go find everything else they did, because you'll probably like that too.
If you’d like to hear my whole conversation with Kyle, it’s right here:
And don’t forget, you can order “Filterworld” wherever you buy your books.
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More Mia’s Queue: Keith • Cecily • Raymond • Marisa • Andy • Sebene • Gil • Alison • Alexis • Storey • Meg • Sadia • Kel • Tracy • Theresa • Vasha • Eva • Sarah • James • Adi • Letitia
Love this Mia! Also, hubby Bob's got you beat on Bill Evans. It's like a running joke in the house that it's always seemingly on in the background.