5 Days of Soylent
From last June: When Food 2.0 is All You've Got
The hilarious, fascinating, and disturbingly informative tale of survival.
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I have no food, nor do I have any money for food. I don’t have any money for anything, really. I’m in the negative. I eye everything in my kitchen, judging its nutritional value.
Will this small container of sage keep me alive? Can a 230 pound, 6-foot-3 man survive off of a single can of tuna for an extended period of time?
The situation looked grim. It was at this point that I realized there was a white cardboard box full of untapped foodstuffs in the corner of the kitchen. I had to. There were no other options.
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DIVISION
⊚ Antonio García Martínez on the real significance of Russian Facebook activity vs. Trump's.
"None of this is even novel: It’s merely best practice for any smart Facebook advertiser. Custom Audiences was launched almost six (!) years ago, marketed publicly at the time, and only now is becoming a mainstream talking point. The ads auction has been studied by marketers and academics for even longer. The only surprise is how surprising it can still seem to many."
⊚ Uber and Lyft are definitely congesting cities.
"One study included surveys of 944 ride-hailing users over four weeks in late 2017 in the Boston area. Nearly six in 10 said they would have used public transportation, walked, biked or skipped the trip if the ride-hailing apps weren’t available."
⊚ Reply All does drop shipping.
"So you only paid two dollars for this watch, but someone's just bought it for 40 dollars."
⊚ White people still haven't let go of attempts to self-actualize via falsified "science."
"The supposed science of race is at least as old as slavery and colonialism, and it was considered conventional wisdom in many western countries until 1945. Though it was rejected by a new generation of scholars and humanists after the Holocaust, it began to bubble up again in the 1970s, and has returned to mainstream discourse every so often since then."
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ART
⊚ Frank Bruni of The New York Times on the possibility of going suddenly blind.
WARNING: If you are especially sensitive about eye stuff - like me - you may want to skip this one. "You cannot spend your life preparing for future losses" is a beautifully wise sentiment, but I am going to be drinking several gallons of water before bed every night from now on!
⊚ The New Yorker profiles Donald Glover.
"Slim but thick-chested and broad-shouldered, Glover has the rolling, slew-footed walk of a riverboat captain. In a group, he laughs as often as he makes others laugh, a trait rare among the occupationally funny."
⊚ The 2017 Vidya Gaem Awards are now available everywhere you want them.
In case you missed this year's as-usually extraordinary exhibition of video editing, motion graphics, and generally supreme creativity which is made by a ton of our friends.
⊚ A depressing photo essay on America's round-the-clock daycare centers.
"Nearly 40% of Americans now work non-traditional employment hours. Almost two-thirds (64.2%) of women with children under age six are working, and one in five working moms of small children work at low-wage jobs that typically pay $10.50 an hour. They all need to earn more if they are to truly be able to afford daycare, and in a cruel twist, many must work more and stranger hours to do so."
⊚ The Verge interviews Mary H.K. Choi on her new SMS-laden Young Adult novel.
Ouch... Probably genius, but I can't imagine that's going to age very well.
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MEDIA
⊚ Casey Newton's daily newsletter is a must-have for those who're interested in keeping social media companies in check.
An extraordinarily in-depth take on the industry, and it's especially important at this very moment. Impressive! Imagine if I did one of these every evening...
⊚ Kara Swisher and Katie Couric interview one another.
Katie's daughter listens to NPR podcasts while she brushes her teeth while her mom thinks and reads about class disparity. "A small girl in Afghanistan with the cure to cancer in her brain, but she'll never get there." Amazing.
⊚ The Facebook Journalism Project's new "Local News Subscription Accelerator."
Participation is free! Apart from your soul...
⊚ Ev Williams on Twitter's origin.
If you can stand the... LinkedInness of Reid Hoffman as interviewer, you'll find some interesting insights on Twitter's beginnings. "Twitter is not a social network. I argued, I argued Twitter is an information network or real-time information network. Social information was a subset of what Twitter provided, and actually it wasn’t the point, some of the people you want to hear from are social connections, but there’s a whole world of other people."
⊚ JUST CLICK THE FUCKING...
The temptation to create an evil, marketing-oriented Extratone twin weighs heavily upon this editor in this ungodly hour.
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