Rob Arcand News Today

Perfunctory brands What work is the “Happy Harvest” brand doing on this can of tomato paste from Aldi? It’s not competing with other brands of canned tomatoes, because Aldi pretty much sells only its own house brands. Despite this, Aldi doesn’t simply take a no-frills approach and uniformly brand all its products with “Aldi”; it invents sub-brands like Happy Harvest to internally differentiate them. It’s as if Aldi wants to protect the food it sells from certain aspects of its own ...

Yaeji, Aphex Twin, Skrillex, Tirzah, Avalon Emerson, and more: these are the songs and albums that defined the year in electronic music.

“WHAT CAN A BODY DO?” Gilles Deleuze names this as the central question of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, which places the body at the center of a philosophy of expression. The inquiry was motivated in part by Spinoza’s commitment to radical contingency—Deleuze goes on to suggest that “We do not even know of what a body is capable”—but it’s a question that feels broadly in tune with the artistic form known as sound poetry, which harnesses human vocality to newly expressive ends. Take...

The music publications cross-genre tradition includes releases by Beyonce, Harry Styles, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Megan Thee Stallion, Taylor Swift, and others.