A great podcast on cultivating your own taste

This episode of the Ezra Klein show (Apple Podcasts link, NYTimes link) was something I enjoyed listening to a lot.

Here is the description:

Being on the internet just doesn’t feel as fun anymore. As more of our digital life is driven by algorithms, it’s become a lot easier to find movies or TV shows or music that fits our preferences pretty well. But it feels harder to find things that are strange and surprising — the kinds of culture that help you, as an individual, develop your own sense of taste.

This can be a fuzzy thing to talk about. But Kyle Chayka, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has written a whole book on it, the forthcoming “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.” We talk about how today’s internet encourages everything to look more the same and is even dulling our ability to know what we like. And we discuss what we can do to strengthen our sense of personal taste in order to live a richer, more beautiful life.

The conversation between Ezra Klein and But Kyle Chayka was full of wonderful recommendations. One of them was was to the book Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin, which I referenced in my last post.

Another one was the musician Fred again (Apple music, Spotify), who I had not heard of but have been binge listening to for the past two days.

His Tiny Desk Concert was amazing!