Aug 14, 2015
2 min read
filtered
for just one sentence (week of aug 10 2015)
- Bret Easton Ellis, Thoughts on David Foster Wallace and ‘The End of the Tour. “This is the movie that prefers the Wallace who was knighted into sainthood with his Kenyon commencement speech.”
- Maya Prohovnik, Surprising users with something delightful. “We were all pretty upset about having to jam onboarding in front of our beautiful, ethereal app.”
- John Hermann, Time is a Privacy Setting. “Twitter is a massive rolling context experiment, its conversations and subjects and audiences materializing and disintegrating constantly; a single user’s Twitter archive is a series of permanent and public contributions to discussions that have long since ended.”
- David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy, Are You Smarter Than Other New York Times Readers? “An answer of zero would be what’s known as the Nash equilibrium of this game: the answer people would give after knowing the other players’ answers and being given infinite opportunities to change their own.”
- Benedict Evans, How is the Apple Watch Doing? “Pleasing, like luxury, matters a lot.”
- The New York Times built a Slack bot to help decide which stories to post to social media. “With Blossom, a social editor thinking about promoting a specific Times story can ask what’s been happening with that story in terms of social engagement, or else ask for some predictions.”
- Ian Bogost, Don’t Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone. “Today, we have an alternative for long-distance intimacy: the capacitive touch screen.”
- Charles Fishman, How California is Winning the Drought. “The farmers are saving themselves now, but they are inflicting long-term damage to the vast underground water supply that is really California’s only remaining water cushion.”
- Jessica Winter, Why Sesame Street’s Move to HBO Is Both Great and Extremely Depressing. “Ganz Cooney’s big bet was that the television set, present in 97 percent of American households by the mid 1960s, could become a delivery device of early education even to some of the poorest and most culturally deprived households.”
- Mallory Ortberg, Torch Songs Where The Word ‘Me’ Has Been Replaced By ‘Bees’. “All of bees / why not take all of bees / can’t you see / I’m no good without you.”
