Illuminating Luminary’s Shady Operations

Podcast startup Luminary’s launch week keeps getting worse:

Major creators are continuing to remove their shows from Luminary, the $100 million subscription podcast startup, over its business model, and even more are leaving after the company was exposed for using a proxy server that hides listener data from creators.

Joe Rogan’s popular show was pulled from the platform yesterday, and Barstool Sports CEO Erika Nardini said her network’s shows would be pulled, too. The New York Times was already withholding its blockbuster hit The Daily, and Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parcast — which are all Spotify-owned companies — also didn’t make their shows available at launch.

Now, smaller creators, including Ben Thompson, Owen Williams, and Federico Viticci, are pulling their podcasts, too. Their withdrawal comes after podcasters noticed that Luminary was serving shows to listeners through a complicated linking system, depriving them of important listener data. The platform also stripped their shows notes, which can be used to share sponsored links or other relevant information.

This is a reminder content platforms like Luminary, Netflix, HBO and social media platforms are nothing without content creators. If those platforms aren’t respecting you, you should leave.

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Podcast

Bubbles & Math

Last month, mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck won the Abel Prize for her discovery of a phenomenon called “bubbling”.

The way she describes bubbles is quiet poetic:

“Bubbles are emptiness, non-liquid, a tiny cloud shielding a mathematical singularity,” he wrote. “Born from chance, a violent and brief life ending in the union with the nearly infinite.”

And this nugget caught my eye:

A soap bubble is the physical world’s solution for a mathematical challenge: to minimize a surface area — in this case, one that surrounds a prescribed volume of air. Nature is always seeking to optimize, to maximize gain at minimal cost in energy cost.

Bubbles sound like capitalists.

Helvetica Now has a font system like Apple’s San Francisco

Apple fixed Helvetica for screens with San Francisco (in Display, Text, Compact, and UI versions).

Monotype responds to San Francisco Pro with Helvetica Now (in Display, Text, and Micro versions).

Related: Public Sans is a free typeface developed by the United States Web Design System. Hey, who knew we had a web design system?