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The ‘SNL’ Sketch That Predicted Our Nerd Overlords

On December 20, 1986 , one month after the release of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home , William Shatner hosted Saturday Night Live . By that point, the actor had been playing Captain Kirk for 20 years. More than anyone else (except maybe Leonard Nimoy), he understood what it was like to live under a…

Dec 28, 2018

Outstanding rant about the surreal design ethos of The Cheesecake Factory

boingboing.net

Cleveland games developer Max Sledroom went on a Twitter tear about the amazing, surreal, awful design experience that is The Cheesecake Factory, a place whose calorie bombs rank among America's deadliest , and whose strange religious projects have made headlines. Sledroom dates the Cheesecake…

Dec 28, 2018

Is This the Most Crowded Island in the World? (And Why That Question Matters)

longreads.com

Longreads | February 2017| 19 minutes (5,053 words) Geographers have an affinity for superlatives. Among the millions of named features on Earth, if something can claim to be the biggest, tallest, deepest, longest, or otherwise most extreme, it gets a lot of attention. Asserting any superlative…

Dec 28, 2018

‘The New World’: Terrence Malick’s Magic Portrayal of America’s Original Sin • Cinephilia & Beyond

cinephiliabeyond.org

After a much-discussed hiatus that lasted for two decades, Terrence Malick returned to filmmaking with the highly praised anti-war epic called The Thin Red Line , and as the critics and film lovers around the globe competed to express their acclaim for the powerful cinematic poem that proved Malick…

Dec 28, 2018

I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon.

theatlantic.com

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters Holiday parties were right around the corner, and I needed a cover story. I didn’t feel like admitting to casual acquaintances, or even to some good friends, that I drive a van for Amazon. I decided to tell them, if asked, that I consult for Amazon, which is loosely true: I…

Dec 28, 2018

Fortnite isn't a game, it's a place | Charged Tech

char.gd

I've played a lot of Fortnite this year, and I was struggling to understand why I liked the game so much. It's fun to play, but usually I get bored of multiplayer because I'm being constantly killed, can't keep up with the hardcore players or it just gets stale. Fortnite is different, because it's…

Dec 28, 2018

How Vaping Giant Juul Explains Everything That’s Wrong With Our World

theintercept.com

Twelve years ago , e-cigarettes couldn’t be found in America . Three years ago, Juul didn’t exist . But last Friday, Marlboro manufacturer Altria bought a 35 percent stake in the vaping juggernaut for $12.8 billion. The deal values Juul at $38 billion, a similar market capitalization to that of…

Dec 28, 2018

The Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Very Litigious Kiini Bikini

nytimes.com

Maria Solange Ferrarini. Credit Dado Galdieri for The New York Times On a sunny summer day in Montauk, Ipek Irgit was in the familiar situation of not knowing what she was doing with her life. It was 2012, and she was 34 years old. Earlier in the year, after having her heart broken, she had taken a…

Dec 28, 2018

Athletes Don’t Own Their Tattoos. That’s a Problem for Video Game Developers.

nytimes.com

LeBron James has distinctive tattoos, which also appear on digital versions of himself in sports video games. Several of them are the subject of copyright lawsuits. When LeBron James bounds down a basketball court, he is both a transcendent athlete and a prominent palette for dozens of tattoos. His…

Dec 28, 2018

Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES – Video Game History Foundation

gamehistory.org

The unreleased packaging illustration from SimCity, as seen on a rare retail display sign from VidPro. A lot of you are probably aware of Nintendo’s remarkable rendition of SimCity for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The cartridge launched alongside the system here in the United States, and…

Dec 28, 2018

As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants

nytimes.com

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, at a Senate hearing in April. Internal Facebook records describe data-sharing deals that benefited more than 150 companies. Credit Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters Internal documents show that the social network gave Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify and others far…

Dec 26, 2018

The Fall of the Meth King: An Oral History of the Best ‘Breaking Bad’ Episode Ever

theringer.com

The Breaking Bad finale aired on September 29, 2013, but the series peaked two weeks earlier. That Sunday evening, AMC broadcast “Ozymandias.” The antepenultimate chapter of chemistry-teacher-turned-drug-kingpin Walter White’s saga is as irresistibly brutal as a hit of Heisenberg’s blue crystal…

Dec 26, 2018

How Credit Cards Are Used to Finance Mass Shootings

nytimes.com

DEC. 23, 2018 Massacres are frequently carried out by killers using military-grade equipment that’s easier to obtain when buying on credit. Massacres are frequently carried out by killers using military-grade equipment that’s easier to obtain when buying on credit. DEC. 23, 2018 A Dealbook…

Dec 26, 2018

The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected

email.getpocket.com

The Future Book was meant to be interactive, moving, alive. Its pages were supposed to be lush with whirling doodads, responsive, hands-on. The old paperback Zork choose-your-own-adventures were just the start. The Future Book would change depending on where you were, how you were feeling. It would…

Dec 24, 2018

The 50 Best Podcasts of 2018

theatlantic.com

Katie Martin / The Atlantic Editor’s Note : Find all of The Atlantic ’s “Best of 2018” coverage here . The word podcast has by now become completely untethered from its namesake—the iPod. Analytics that were once uncapturable have become fairly comprehensive ( downloads from Apple Podcasts surpassed…

Dec 24, 2018

The case for taking AI seriously as a threat to humanity

vox.com

Finding the best ways to do good. Made possible by The Rockefeller Foundation. Stephen Hawking has said , “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Elon Musk claims that AI is humanity’s “ biggest existential threat .” That might have people asking:…

Dec 23, 2018

The Fall and Rise of M. Night Shyamalan

rollingstone.com

Call it a surprise twist, if you must: Early in this Monday morning in November, M. Night Shyamalan turned on his shower, and no water came out. The writer-director has come to believe that the universe is fundamentally benevolent, and as it happens, the universe — not to mention the vast success of…

Dec 22, 2018

For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain

smithsonianmag.com

“Whose woods these are, I think I”—whoa! We can’t quote any more of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” because it is still under copyright as this magazine goes to press. But come January 1, 2019, we, you, and everyone in America will be able to quote it at length on any…

Dec 22, 2018

Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace

email.getpocket.com

Last August, Zac Plansky woke to find that the rifle scopes he was selling on Amazon had received 16 five-star reviews overnight. Usually, that would be a good thing, but the reviews were strange. The scope would normally get a single review a day, and many of these referred to a different scope, as…

Dec 22, 2018

Why you should surround yourself with more books than you’ll ever have time to read

email.getpocket.com

Lifelong learning will help you be happier, earn more, and even stay healthier, experts say. Plus, plenty of the smartest names in business, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk , insist that the best way to get smarter is to read. So what do you do? You go out and buy books, lots of them. But life is busy,…

Dec 22, 2018

I took a ride through Elon Musk’s new tunnel in California

theverge.com

I am in a Tesla Model X, behind a storefront Elon Musk plans to use to sell bricks. The bricks will come from dirt excavated from tunnels like the one I am about to enter. This is O’Leary Station. The Model X, which is playing Faith No More’s “Epic,” pulls up to a place about the size of two…

Dec 22, 2018

The Best Facts I Learned from Books in 2018

newyorker.com

Illustration by Daniel Savage Like most writers, I can be a stickler about language, but anyone who hangs out with me for long enough will learn that I favor a certain ungrammatical turn of phrase: “true fact.” Technically speaking, that expression is a pleonasm—a redundant description—since all…

Dec 22, 2018

wired.com

Apple prides itself on prioritizing user security and privacy. It counts the iOS and Mac App Stores, where customers can download an array of trusted, vetted software, as cornerstones of that initiative. But while the approach does minimize situations where users get tricked into downloading…

Dec 22, 2018

Rising Instagram Stars Are Posting Fake Sponsored Content

theatlantic.com

Shutterstock Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: A shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number "6," shot from above on a concrete…

Dec 22, 2018

No, You Don’t Really Look Like That

theatlantic.com

A screenshot from an Unbox Therapy video showing selfies taken under identical lighting conditions with different generations of Apple phones Lewis Hilsenteger When a prominent YouTuber named Lewis Hilsenteger (aka “ Unbox Therapy ”) was testing out this fall’s new iPhone model, the XS, he noticed…

Dec 22, 2018

Jim Mattis, Defense Secretary, Resigns in Rebuke of Trump’s Worldview

nytimes.com

Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, found himself at odds with President Trump on several issues, including NATO policy and a military parade. Credit Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times WASHINGTON — Jim Mattis, the four-star Marine general turned defense secretary, will retire at the end of…

Dec 21, 2018