Saved (Public Feed)

Why we need fiction, and why we pretend.

Getting politics wrong and getting pop wrong.

Written with the opinion that this is necessarily a Bad Thing. Revisit; this is interesting.

Saved for later…

What 'the web' actually is, and why building desktop-class applications on it is not what it was built for.

I want to revisit this later; it is an interesting retort to Michael Pollan and others' condemnations of current farming techniques.

Wild and sad.

The infamous 'hot coffee' lawsuit.

AKA 'Stairway to Heaven'. It's officially closed but you can supposedly get around the guard/fence.

This is silly. Taking this pop star's very carefully constructed image and hype seriously isn't very useful, no matter how many times you use the word 'deconstruction' and 'phallus'.

The always-great Matt Thompson on why episodic news content isn't as helpful as laying a contextual groundwork for a story and then letting readers know about events that happen in that framework.

What's really happening here? BP bit off more than they could chew, and there was a catastrophe that they weren't fully prepared for. That's stupid and irresponsible. But it doesn't seem equally foolhardy or naive, as this article seems to suggest, to assume that technology will solve our problems like cancer and hunger — of course it absolutely *will* solve them eventually. (Or it won't because we won't invent that technology, and we'll destroy ourselves.) There's a difference between hoping your existing technology will be adequate and hoping that people will continue to develop ingenious applications of science to solve problems. Because that's what technology is. The screwdriver is technology, "top-kill" mud seals are technology. Whether the first incarnation of something works isn't a sure thing, but blaming the non-entity "technology" as something we shouldn't trust because it isn't ready sometimes doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Think more on this.

They're are distraught and stuck in a pre-maturity funk.

So if people are naturally creative or not, to what degree does 'encouraging' creativity even work? And do we understand this enough to know what aspects of creativity we are encouraging, or rather I should say: do we know how to encourage the 'good' parts of being creative and not make people into schizophrenics/sociopaths?

"Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects."

Humanizing and well-written. Spoiler: she doesn't have a penis.

Touring by playing performances in people's homes. Free room and board, and it's actually profitable. Everybody wins. Problems with this are: can be noisy, and you'll need a PA if you're not an acoustic band.

A very good, very important list.

The story of Chat Roulette's teenage creator. Where will it lead?

On whether Best Coast's guys-treat-me-like-shit-but-I-just-keep-crawling-back lyrical content is hindering the female experience. Read all of the follow-up Tumbls and comments to get the full perspective. It would be interesting to hear Bethany herself comment on this.

Because there's no alternative, and it is valuable. But its privacy practices are awful.

A simple theory on how we interpret music.

An insight on the limited morality of babies and the implications of that for the rest of us societal adults.

Why the reaction to the iPhone leak reflects a much-weakened press and an Apple in bed with the authorities.

Total linkbait I know but there's some useful stuff here.

Using CSS to detect device size (for things like iPads and iPhones).

This is exactly why Instapaper is so incredible: "Instapaper makes me more productive, everywhere. On my desktop it dismisses distractions. On the go it transmutes idle time to knowledge. It remembers things I forget, but it has never become a new todo entry on my list. If all my apps had this power, I would be utterly unstoppable."

There's two big lessons here: 1. Fame makes people do and say crazy things, and other famous people tend to give an equally outrageous reaction to it. 2. Christianity is a joke.

Nitsuh Abebe on why being wrong doesn't make you a bad person, and why 'support' is weak sauce.

Attempting to answer the question, "what is white culture?" and reporting on those who have tackled it before.