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Last night, the Berkeley-bred, Internet-beloved rapper Lil B gave a sold-out lecture at NYU’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. It’s possible that this was a beautiful, inspiring event, at which people rallied joyously around a quirky young entertainer’s timely message of empathy and kindness. It’s also totally possible that the whole thing was an epic tragedy, in which a young man’s urgent plea for basic human dignity was repeatedly laughed at by stoned college kids who preferred to shout catchphrases at him while finding his existence hilarious. I think it mostly depended on where you sat, and who was sitting near you.

His homemade philosophy is such that he can just wander around trying to be honest and respectful of others, and how they react to that effort is entirely their problem, not his. This is why no pockets of ickiness in the audience reaction feel particularly sad.

Good questions.

Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.

Instagram succeeded for many good reasons, including its design, its viral qualities, its simplicity, and the fact that its engineers focused so obsessively on making sure that it works all the time. Part of its success, no doubt, is the fact that it was just in the right place, at the right time, with the right, crowd-pleasing mix of features.

Asimov’s favorite of his short stories, and widely regarded to have an astonishing ending.

On why the ‘Zombies, Run!’ is $8 instead of $1, and why it works.

If we are going to interfere in the lives of others, a little due diligence is a minimum requirement.

I wish for my own voice what Aretha’s has had from the beginning: a sense of self so strong that she had to open her mouth and sing to keep from exploding, to keep herself whole.

Two schools in New York using character-building programs.

…it’s a pity that Apple has chosen to re-enter the education market with a pitch about Reinventing the Textbook that, frankly, sounds pretty old hat. The reason, I suppose, is that there’s potentially a lot of money to be made selling the things to schools as replacements for the books.

I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about SOPA and PIPA, and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups.

Connecting the dots between Fatboy Slim and Skrillex.

On ‘mediated experiences’ and the ways that different types and generations of people experience them.

Justin Hopkins AKA Rarebit is also a visual artist.

Two years and several reports later, we thought we’d try to look at how Expert Labs fared. The premise behind the project was that the federal government could and should engage in conversations with people on their existing social networks. The idea was to use existing commercial social networks to crowdsource policy decisions and to synthesize the responses in an intelligent manner.

Readability has no right collecting money in my name without my consent. Now, realistically, I have given Readability consent by signing up — but what about other publishers that have not only not signed up, but have actively chosen to not sign up? Is it still OK for Readability to be collecting money in their name? I think not. But how do you solve this problem? I don’t know, but it is a very real problem.

Email is Schrödinger’s cat’s litter box. Every sent or received message necessarily exists in multiple places at once.

How to use the Smart Objects Link Panel I just linked.

An awesome and essential script for creating objects that can be placed and linked in PSDs across multiple files. (Essentially Smart Objects that can be updated across multiple PSDs.)

I’m almost never alone with my thoughts anymore.

The simple narrative equating American demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many Americans feel guilty about their impact on the world. It’s also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in terrible ways. China produces goods for markets all over the world, including for its own consumers, thanks to low costs, a large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds rapidly to market demands. To imagine that we have willed this universe into being is simply solipsistic. It is also demeaning to the workers. We are not at the center of this story—we are minor players in theirs. By focussing on ourselves and our gadgets, we have reduced the human beings at the other end to invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone.

Nicki employs street hardness as a signifier of how great she is at rapping, not as an attempt to actually convince anybody that she's "hood" or any of that authenticity nonsense. She's successfully occupying the trap, ground zero for hardness, and calling its inhabitants "bitches," all to prove that she is the consummate rhyming bad-ass.

Having heard ‘Erica Western Teleport’, Justin looks into his other favorite songs that have that song’s ‘simple IV-V-I progression’. A good bit of pop notes and theory that I need to look into further.

dys4ia is an autobiographical game about the period in my life when i started hormone replacement therapy.

I think it’s important to publish what you learn. There’s really no school for front-end development. You can’t go to a university for a JavaScript degree or a class about how browsers work. Most of us learn from blogs and Twitter. Early in my career, I learned a bunch of things whenever I worked on a project, but I never told other people about them. So my general advice is to publish what you learn, share with the community, and collaborate on projects that help move the community forward.

It's almost impossible to approach MDNA without some degree of cynicism, but it's equally difficult to imagine anyone being more cynical about this music than Madonna herself. Unlike previous late-period records in which she had the luxury to indulge in creative tangents and not get too hung up on scoring several hits, MDNA is a record that comes with major commercial expectations. The "this has to work" factor is high, and it's hard to shake the impression that she has some measure of contempt for the contemporary pop audience.

It didn’t have to be this bad. She didn’t even need to dig that deep on the iTunes “Electronic” page to find a producer to craft intriguing electro. Instead of Solveig, she could have emailed SBTRKT. Or Anthonly Gonzalez. Or Scuba. Anyone else. She’s clearly learning about dance music from television ads, not nights out.

Nick Zammuto lives on a mountain, in Vermont, with his adorable young family, in a house he built with his own two hands. Rock 'n' roll.