DIGITAL LIBRARY // TRUE

Welcome to this quarter’s digital library, where you’ll find all the extra truthy content that we couldn’t put into your box. Enjoy!

 

LISTEN

PLAYLISTS

TRUE

True love, infidelity and lies are the bedrock of so many pop songs, there’s no shortage of material when you’re compiling a playlist that touches on the theme TRUE. We steered (mostly) clear of the obvious choices to create an hour of music to play while you dig into your box and enjoy this quarter’s magazine.

 

This quarter’s playlist was compiled by Emma, who has no musical qualifications whatsoever and whose greatest regret is that she’ll probably never perform on stage in a band or DJ to a packed dancefloor. She had fun putting together the playlist for you anyway. 

 

FOCUS + READ

Instead of a 30-minute playlist to help you focus, we thought we’d link you to some useful noise colours our teenager discovered while planning (avoiding?) her GCSE mock revision.

You’ll be familiar with white noise as the static crackle that used to come from an untuned radio or television. It contains all frequencies across the spectrum of audible sound at equal intensity. Pink noise is a variation of white noise with the higher frequencies turned down, which results in a softer and more pleasing tone. In brown noise, the higher frequencies are turned down even further, resulting in a deeper tone and, for some, an even more restful sound.

Here are a couple of our favourites. Which colour noise do you prefer?

Super Deep Smoothed Brown Noise

 

Deep Smoothed Brown Noise + High Focus Isochronic Tones for Studying

Warm Pink Noise

 

 

PODCASTS

The Spy Cops Scandal

Guardian investigative editor Paul Lewis and investigator reporter Rob Evans detail their decade-long investigation into undercover policing.

Part 1 |  Part 2

 

The Detection of Deception

When James Frye, a young black man was charged with murder under unusual circumstances in 1922, he trusted his fate to a new machine: the lie detector.

This episode of Jill Lepore’s The Last Archive podcast asks why William Moulton Marston (who you met on page 9 of the magazine) thought a machine could tell if a human is lying better than a jury.

 

Serial

The original true crime podcast. Season one examines the disappearance of a high-school senior and was broadcast over twelve episodes in 2014, with updates on the case broadcast sporadically from 2015 through to 2019, with a final update made in 2022.

 

The Truth Police

For years, scientific research has been dogged by suspicious-looking data sets and breakthrough results that can’t be replicated. In this episode of the Radio 4 documentary series, Seriously, presenter Michael Blastland meets the ‘Truth Police’, a group of outsiders who are committed to keeping science honest.

 

 

WATCH

VIDEOS + FILMS

How Social Media Rewired Our Minds & Our World with Max Fisher

 

New York Times investigative reporter, Max Fisher, is the author of book one in your box. Here he talks to the editor-at-large of the technology website, The Verge, at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

'I was duped by an undercover policeman'

Watch the original Newsnight report about Donna's case, when she was still anonymous, that followed the investigation with The Guardian.

The Incredible Creativity of Deepfakes – and the worrying future of AI

AI developer, Tom Graham, talks to head of TED Chris Anderson about the creative potential of hyperreal content known as ‘deepfakes’ and its risks.

 

How Generative AI Could Replace Artists in Creative Industries

A Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing that examines whether artists, writers and filmmakers are right to be raising the alarm about AI and how it might impact the future workforce.

 

 

READ

Full Fact

Full Fact is a registered charity that fact checks claims made by politicians, public institutions and journalists, as well as online content. A reliable resource for getting impartial and accurate information on all the big stories that dominate the news. We included the book Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t by Full Fact’s editor, Tom Phillips, in this quarter’s Reading List.

Bellingcat

We included the book We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins, in the Reading List of the magazine. This is the website that Higgins founded and where you can find details of all their investigations.

How a student tricked the Irish Times into running a fake AI-written opinion piece

More on the story we mentioned on page 10 of your magazine.

 

Serial Is My Favourite Murder: Examining Motivations in the True Crime Podcast Audience

True crime has been popular for decades but it converged with podcast media in 2014 with the launch of Serial (linked above), which tells the story of a single true crime across the course of a whole series. Serial became the fastest ever podcast to reach 5 million downloads and, in 2016, a year after the final episode of season one aired, there had been more than 80 million downloads and over 150 other true crime podcasts had emerged.

This is a detailed study that was the source of the stat on page 9 of the magazine, that the true crime podcast audience is predominantly female (73%). It examines why the true crime genre is so popular with podcast listeners, what motivates people to listen to true crime, and the impact it has on the criminal justice system. It’s free to download but you’ll need to register.

(And if you want more on the connection between the rise of the podcast and the rise of true crime, you can download this thesis which was the source of the other stats on page 9 of your magazine.) 

 

That’s it for this quarter’s digital extras. The next box will arrive with subscribers and gift recipients in September and there’ll be a whole load more thought-provoking extras to access then. Until then, see you over on Instagram.

 

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