The Morning: Mix tape nostalgia

August 29, 2026

Good morning. How do we balance our desire for modern conveniences with our nostalgia for the uncomplicated felicity of our pre-internet past?

A tangle of brightly colored electrical cords plugged into a power strip.

María Jesús Contreras

Fast forward

	By Melissa Kirsch

The cursed island town in the horror-comedy series “Widow’s Bay” is so remote that there’s no Wi-Fi and cell service is unreliable. This means residents are left to landlines and walkie-talkies to communicate. These limitations not only add to the feeling of creepy isolation, but they also dispense with the modern challenge of depicting smartphone usage onscreen. When Mayor Tom Loftis wants to talk to someone, he must call them using the multi-line phone in his office or the rotary model affixed to his kitchen wall.

Nostalgia for outmoded technology is bittersweet: We can’t imagine life without present-day conveniences, but things were so much simpler before! Our understanding of the world was slow to update. We said we’d meet at the restaurant at 6, and you couldn’t switch the location at the last minute or change the time if you were running late. We settled on the route we’d take to drive from A to B, no GPS to change it with a few seconds’ notice because of the traffic jam ahead. No moment-to-moment updates from friends, no impulse-Googling the name of that shampoo or tomorrow’s weather, no asking Claude. Our brains contained a certain amount of knowledge, and we didn’t add to it without time and effort.

In The Times today, Kera Bolonik writes about the mix tape, that relic of another era, which “took time, thought, careful listening and a level of physical coordination beyond what goes into the making of a Spotify playlist.” Good mix-tape-makers were experts in manipulating the pause and record buttons on the hi-fi, engaging with the equipment to create a tangible artifact. Unlike a playlist, tapes were material, present in the landscape. It made sense that something so meaningful took up room in the world.

“You have to imagine a space where music was a rumor,” the writer Jonathan Lethem told Kera. “You might hear something and not be able to know what it was, and no one can tell you, and it’s driving you crazy.” In the Shazam-less past, you’d hear a song and have no way to instantly entrap it. You’d live with the memory of the song you heard, hoping to catch it again on the radio. I remember becoming enamored of a song I heard on the radio in France in 1995 and telling my boyfriend back home that I’d heard the best new David Bowie track. There was no new Bowie album that we knew about, but we asked the clerks in every record store about it all the same. It would be six months before it came out in the States, and we discovered it wasn’t a Bowie song at all, but “A Girl Like You” by the Scottish musician Edwyn Collins. I put it on every mix tape I made that year.

There’s a whole universe of pared-back gadgets for those who miss the simplicity of old tech: dumbphones, internet-connected typewriters, screen-free digital cameras. There are apps that take a long time to send texts. But there’s something unsatisfying about using tech to address over-technification. Perhaps the answer lies in the technology that has persisted in its unimprovable simplicity: A pad and paper have never failed to save my journal entries or added formatting I didn’t ask for. I treasure my wristwatch that I never have to charge, the digital alarm clock that shows me the time from across the room.

I no longer have the dual-cassette boom box on which I made countless mixes, but Maxell released a Bluetooth cassette player this year. I don’t love the idea of buying something new in order to capture the magic of something old, but that something old might be worth pursuing. As Kera wrote: “More than just relics, mix tapes are portals to specific moments. Perhaps even more than old photos, they reanimate the past.”

THE LATEST NEWS

Trump Administration

A large ship with a red hull is docked at an industrial facility.

A refinery in Punto Fijo, Venezuela, in 2021. Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

The U.S. reached a deal to take majority control of a huge portion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, President Trump announced last night. The deal is for more than 65 billion barrels of oil — almost as much as all of the proven reserves in the United States.

The Trump administration has proposed giving a parcel of public land in Yosemite National Park to a private developer.
ICE has arrested Milo Yiannopoulos, the British right-wing agitator and early Trump supporter. He faces possible deportation after overstaying his visa.

More Politics

Wyoming’s governor, a Republican, said he was concerned by the “very odd” behavior of federal election monitors who tried to interview voters and examine voting machines during the state’s primaries last week.
It looks as though a New York Jet will finally win something: A former kicker, Jay Feely, is running against a former sideline doctor, Amish Shah, in a House race in Arizona.
The Times analyzed thousands of donations this midterms season and made a leaderboard of the top 20 biggest donors. It’s dominated by tech figures and Republicans.

Nepal Floods

A residential street stands heavily damaged and partially buried in thick mud and debris. In the foreground stands a man in a red button-down vest and a skullcap.

Atul Loke for The New York Times

At least 1,900 people are missing after the devastating flash flood in the Himalayas, officials now say, roughly twice as many as previously estimated.
New video shows how a giant glacier broke away from a mountain ridge, sending floodwaters crashing through valleys below. Watch The Times’s exclusive footage.

Around the World

The Taliban have banned education for millions of Afghan girls. Times journalists examined the secret classrooms where some are defying the rules.
Iranians are increasingly desperate six months into the war with the United States. Even some who initially cheered Trump’s intervention now fear a failing economy.

REMEMBERING THREE ICONS

Dolly Parton

At the Library of Congress in 2018. Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

Everyone knows Dolly as a consummate singer and songwriter. But she was also a prolific philanthropist whose gifts supported wildlife conservation and the development of the Covid-19 vaccine, among other things.
The crown jewel of her philanthropic efforts was the Imagination Library, which has given children hundreds of millions of free books.

Tim Curry

A full-length portrait of Curry in his Frank-N-Furter costume, complete with garters and high heels.

Evening Standard, via Getty Images

Curry’s performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the cross-dressing mad scientist of “The Rocky Horror Show,” helped bring androgynous fashion into the mainstream.
Along with being extraordinarily funny, Curry was a superlative storyteller. A writer who interviewed him three times last year reflects on what it was like to talk with him.

Yayoi Kusama

An older woman with bright red hair and a red jacket is seen repeatedly in an experimental art piece.

A video projection of “Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict,” by Yayoi Kusama, in 2024. Philip Fong/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In her long life, Kusama achieved something rare: two very different moments of stardom, almost as though she’d been two different artists, our critic writes.
Kusama created a hugely varied oeuvre — abstract paintings, fabric phalluses, naked performance pieces … you name it. See her life in pictures.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

In a video game screenshot, a woman holds a pistol near a man’s chest. In the background is a helicopter flying near skyscrapers.

Rockstar Games

Grand Theft Auto VI, the series’ first entry in over a decade, is due out in November. It’s a rare monocultural moment, akin to the release of a new Beyoncé album or Martin Scorsese film. Our reporter visited the studio in Edinburgh where it’s being made.

In “Coyote vs. Acme,” a new live action-animation hybrid in theaters this weekend, Wile E. Coyote sues the company behind those gadgets that always seem to backfire. It’s “a terrifically daffy film,” our critic writes.
Rupert Grint, who starred as Ron Weasley in all eight “Harry Potter” films, will reprise the role in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway.
“Paranormal Activity,” the horror film series, is now haunting Broadway. Our theater critic says it “feels like watching a magic show on a roller coaster.”

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