The NEW YORKER's profile of XL RECORDINGS head RICHARD RUSSELL is a great primer on how to run an artistic enterprise—especially the kind of enterprise that has no shareholders and where the top exec can therefore say, "Why should it grow? It shouldn't grow. It should be this size." In XL's case, "this size" is nowhere near as big as UNIVERSAL or SONY but big enough to contain one of the world's best-selling artists, which wasn't necessarily the plan at the beginning but which is, perhaps ironically, a direct result of building a business around music, not money. It also helps, of course, to know good music when you hear it and how to nurture the people who make it. MATTHEW TRAMMELL's longread isn't as fluffy as I'm probably making it sound, just a solid profile of what sounds like your platonic ideal of a music exec. One who is self-aware enough to point out a little later, "One of the reasons XL doesn't have to grow is that it's already quite big"... Speaking of fluff, SPOTIFY's DISCOVER WEEKLY playlists aren't quite as platonically ideal as this semi-deep dive into its algorithm/recipe would have you believe. But as hyper-personalized, machine-made playlists go, I'm not sure I've seen anything better. MATTHEW OGLE, who oversees the algorithm for Spotify, makes clear how much processing power and machine learning goes into those playlists, and swears the service has resisted calls from labels and artists to seed the playlists with promoted music. Dear Spotify: Please keep resisting. At the end of the piece, Ogle and his lead engineer offer tips on how to tweak your Spotify habits to get the best possible Discover Weekly playlist each week. Ideally, of course, you shouldn't have to tweak anything. My ideal algorithm will one day deliver me perfect playlists tailored for my tastes, my sense of adventure, my mood, my surroundings and my deepest hidden desires based on nothing more than noticing what I'm already doing. For $9.99 a month, obvi... Yes this sounds like a TUPAC documentary I'll want to watch... EMMANUEL MACRON, pianist... BILLY JOEL parking lot... AMERICAN IDOL is coming back even faster than LCD SOUNDSYSTEM. Not all judges give the idea a thumbs-up... The (apparently successful) search for the highway interchange on the cover of OK COMPUTER.