Today in WTF: Secretary of Goof John Kerry shows off a pair of big spuds. Polar bear strips, dies in climate-change burlesque show. Vladimir Zhirinovsky recommends quarterly sex, no meat, no alcohol, and no tobacco forRussians who feel Russian life isn't already miserable enough. Don't look now but Iran has figured out our secret. X-Rated mud run? Golden Globes had too much estrogen? Hell is Brit Hume saying "masculine muscular man's man" forever. "Growth hacker" is the new SEO weasel. The NYMag "Cannibal Cop" story is nuts in every possible way. Finally, Rachel Sklar Instagramming Bryan Goldberg reading Chimamanda Adichie from Beyonce's"Flawless" is a perfect tab-storm.
Google announced yesterday that it is buying Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash. Coverage was widespread and fairly predictable. The overwhelming sentiment on social media was that this is yet another creepy acquisition by Google. Or as Marco put it, "Great."
Further coverage of Facebook buying the Branch team focused heavily on Josh Miller's mutable view of Facebook. The startup-world singularity became complete when Techcrunchreported that the first leaks may have happened on Biz Stone's new app Jelly. And Re/code provided the word-salad headline: "Facebook's New Branch Hire Tweets About His Medium Posts." Good word-using, everyone.
Thought Catalog is Impo—ha ha ha ha. Ahem. Thought Catalog is I—hahahaha. Thought Cata—lololahahahahaha. I just can't. Sorry.
Dissident ex-Facebooker Kate Losse wrote about social media's gendered surveillance culture in the new quarterly Model, View, Culture. If you want to understand the social-media determinist world we live in now, Kate's book The Boy Kings and her other writing on the subject is essential, in the sense that if you don't read it you will not understand anything at all. But hey it's your call.
Fish bites bird. "Thagomizer" a real thing now. Club Dead. Back up your life. Why is Salman Rushdie so irritating? Lerers run everything. Weed Popular.
This New Yorker post considering a person with a smartphone as a kind of cyborg is very good.
~DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country ; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy Tab of Usher.~
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