The Verge - Long Reads

The best writing of the week, May 12

2013-05-12T14:30:04Z

We all know the feeling. You're sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn't cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it's one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it's better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again.

Grab all of these as a Readlist.

On e-cigs

Benjamin Wallace covers the three decade history of the e-cigarette and profiles NJOY's attempts to make e-smoking cool.

New York: Benjamin Wallace - Smoke Without Fire

The lesson is that as much as cigarette smokers crave nicotine, they yearn for other things, too: the hand-to-mouth motion, the primordial pleasure of sucking on something, the organoleptic experiences of flavor and mouthfeel and "throat hit," the visual cue of exhaled smoke, the ritual of ignition, the embattled/defiant camaraderie of the smoke break. These vital accoutrements of nicotine addiction were the promise of e-cigarettes, but early models had failed to deliver on it.

On simulations

Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh interviews Sim City's lead designer on the trouble with parking lots, the legacy of the SimCity series, and building a system that will adapt to the many ways that people play.

Venue: Nicola Twilley - Sim City: An interview with Stone Librande

When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

On Netflix

Ashlee Vance follows around Reed Hastings to get an inside look at the inner workings of Netflix, the company's deep relationship with Amazon, and its efforts at creating original content.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Ashlee Vance - Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley's Elite

Hastings tends to exist in one of two emotional states: relaxed and attentive, or relaxed and dismissive. The things he cares about he’ll discuss animatedly; with everything else, he disengages. Architecture? He claims he never looked at the designs for Netflix headquarters, preferring to just walk in and get to work when someone said the facility was ready.

On Daft Punk

Zach Baron meets up with Daft Punk, getting their take on the challenge of sequels, Skrillex, and the long-awaited new album.

GQ: Zach Baron - Daft Punk Is (Finally!) Playing at Our House

Bangalter talks a lot—about art, and technology, and blockbuster movies like Star Wars, which he loves. De Homem-Christo barely talks at all, which is disconcerting at first and then sort of fascinating. Later I'll give the two of them a ride home in my car, and from the backseat, de Homem-Christo will break character to beatbox the hard-hitting percussion break in Montell Jordan's "This Is How We Do It" when it comes on the radio, a sublime and unexpected moment, like watching a goat yell like a man.

On time travelers

Rick Paulas considers the enduring legacy of early 2000 time-traveling legend John Titor.

Pacific Standard: Rick Paulas - The Mystery of John Titor: Hoax or Time Traveler?

And the Titor legend persists, in part, because no one ever claimed to be behind it. Now that we won’t be fooled, we need an answer. It’s the Zeigarnik effect; when something’s not wrapped up, it preoccupies our memory. Our skepticism needs a party responsible, a grand designer that allows it to make sense. When we find out—think the wizard behind the curtain in Oz, or whoever Jacob was supposed to be in that final season of Lost—the mystery ends. No one has claimed Titor, so the story continues.

Have any favorites that you'd like to see included in next week's edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

The best writing of the week, May 5

2013-05-05T14:30:02Z

Grab this all as a Readlist.

On Y Combinator

Nathaniel Rich follows several teams through the preparation and pitching sessions for the stressful Demo Day of famed startup accelerator Y Combinator.

The New York Times: Nathaniel Rich - Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machine

"We’re in the early days of the Internet," Buchheit said. "Every other industry will be eaten by tech." This conviction, more than any other, explains the feeding frenzy that occurs on Y.C.’s Demo Day. If there’s going to be another Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and anyone can be Sergey and Larry, then it’s only logical for investors to bet on as many founders as possible. You can’t win the game unless you ante up.

On cinema

The Deadline team has director Steven Soderbergh's full keynote at the recent San Francisco International Film Festival.

Deadline Hollywood: Steven Soderbergh’s State Of Cinema Talk

Well, how does a studio decide what movies get made? One thing they take into consideration is the foreign market, obviously. It’s become very big. So that means, you know, things that travel best are going to be action-adventure, science fiction, fantasy, spectacle, some animation thrown in there. Obviously the bigger the budget, the more people this thing is going to have to appeal to, the more homogenized it’s got to be, the more simplified it’s got to be. So things like cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, god forbid, ambiguity, those become real obstacles to the success of the film here and abroad.

On tacos

Austin Carr has the story on the handshake agreement that let to the Doritos cheese-dusted Taco Bell taco synergy.

Fast Company: Austin Carr - Deep Inside Taco Bell's Doritos Locos taco

Like any serious renovation, Taco Bell’s started with a trip to Home Depot. It was April 2009. To show executives how the companies could fuse the flavor of Doritos with taco shells, the dev teams "basically went out to Home Depot to buy a paint-spray gun, and then sprayed [Doritos] flavoring onto our existing yellow corn tacos," recalls Creed, with a chuckle. "It was pretty funny watching people from behind glass spraying our tacos with a paint gun. But it was enough for us to know conceptually that we had a big idea."

On the Y-12 intrusion

Dan Zak writes the story of how three peace activists (a nun, a drifter, and a house painter) penetrated the defenses of US nuclear-weapons facility Y-12, the "Fort Knox of Uranium."

The Washington Post: Dan Zak - The Prophets of Oak Ridge

And now there she was, an old lady in sturdy shoes, reaching the limits of her mortal energy at the top of Pine Ridge with Greg, about 90 minutes into the mission. There was the vista over which the Prophet of Oak Ridge had prayed more than a century before, where a national security complex now winked in the darkness.

On spaceship Baltimore

Ron Miller describes the history behind Baltimore's Robert Condit and the rocket he built in 1928.

io9: Ron Miller - The Great Baltimore Space Program of 1928

The Baltimore rocket was fueled with 50 gallons of gasoline with eight steel pipes for engines. The several layers of sailcloth that covered the rocket were impregnated with varnish making an airtight shell "as brittle as glass." The nose section unscrewed to allow the rocket’s single passenger ingress.

Have any favorites that you'd like to see included in next week's edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

The best writing of the week, April 28

2013-04-28T14:30:05Z

Grab all of these as a Readlist.

On Yuri Gadyukin

Kevin Morris digs into the Borgesian hoax of director Yuri Gadyukin that fooled Wikipedia and IMDB for years.

The Daily Dot: Kevin Morris - The greatest movie that never was

Perhaps you’ve heard of Gadyukin? He was a star of early Soviet cinema before fleeing to England. You can read about his life on a fansite and a Facebook group. You can watch him melt down in a British television interview, storming off stage in spittle-spewing rage. For nearly four years, there were Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database articles about him, brimming with citations from authoritative Russian sources.

Those entries are now gone. Yuri Gadyukin did not owe money to a gangster. His final film was not swirling out of control. Weathers did not kill him. His body was not found beneath the Hammersmith Bridge.

On big data

Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger look at how scientists, companies, and even cities are dealing with massive new flows of data.

Foreign Affairs: Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger - The Rise of Big Data

When a person is seated, the contours of the body, its posture, and its weight distribution can all be quantified and tabulated. Koshimizu and his team of engineers convert backsides into data by measuring the pressure they exert at 360 different points with sensors placed in a car seat and by indexing each point on a scale of zero to 256. The result is a digital code that is unique to each individual. In a trial, the system was able to distinguish among a handful of people with 98 percent accuracy.

On relationships

A couple months after the launch of Wolfram Alpha's Facebook personal analytics tools, scientist Steven Wolfram digs into some of the early findings and insights drawn from the huge data set.

Steven Wolfram Blog: Steven Wolfram - Data Science of the Facebook World

For everyone there’ll be a different detailed story behind the structure of their cluster diagram. And one might think this would mean that there could never be a general theory of such things. At some level it’s a bit like trying to find a general theory of human history, or a general theory of the progression of biological evolution. But what’s interesting now about the Facebook world is that it gives us so much more data from which to form theories.

On SXSW

Noreen Malone reflects on a few days in Austin for SXSW and the evolution of the conference.

New Republic: Noreen Malone - Spring Break for Nerds

I saw a man in a bike helmet—on the fourth floor of a building, so he’d done some walking—FaceTiming without headphones in a crowded area. During one panel, a woman stood up in the seated audience and unabashedly took a photograph with her iPad of a founder who’d just walked up to the microphone. Another woman lay down in the middle of a busy street, in two different places, so she could get the optimal angle for Instagramming. "You forget," said Crowley, "how quickly you just become numb to these things."

On band names

Michael Erard writes about the difficulty of coming up with band names in the digital age.

The Morning News: Michael Erard - Like a Lead Balloon

One can imagine that 20 years ago, any garage band could have any name it wanted—or no name at all. The only reason a band really needed a name was if they were going to gig or record or tour. Let’s say 10 percent of those bands ever left the garage. Today all those bands are on Bandcamp, and they can’t be on Bandcamp without a name. These sites, including Myspace, which has 14 million acts, have inflated the demand for band names.

On Star Trek

David Hochman interviews "king of the reboot" J.J. Abrams on the upcoming Star Trek film, spoilers, Star Wars, and working with Tom Cruise.

Playboy: David Hochman - Playboy Interview: J.J. Abrams

Audiences pick up on that stuff. Not only are we post–Star Trek the series and movies, but we’re post–Galaxy Quest, post–Saturday Night Live spoofs. We were coming at this post–Trek satire, so we needed to be earnest in the right places and funny in the right places or people would have made fun of us.

On numbers stations

And finally, with hints of a new Boards of Canada album floating around the web, here's a great piece by David Segal from 2004 that profiles Akin Fernandez and his life-consuming efforts to create the Conet Project.

The Washington Post: David Segal - The Shortwave And the Calling

"Conet," in other words, delivers a couple of the slightly subversive thrills that rock could once deliver without breaking a sweat. It feels new, a little dangerous, a ticket into a subculture of sorts. That's an experience you don't find in record stores much anymore, in part because rock has been around for 50 years -- and can anything that old really feel dangerous? -- and in part because corporate America long ago figured out there's gold in the underground, and now mines and mass-produces it faster every year. In a way, "Conet" is a measure of just how fringeward you need to head these days to find something that delivers the frisson of the margins.

Have any favorites that you'd like to see included in next week's edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

The best writing of the week, April 21

2013-04-21T14:30:04Z

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On misinformation

Alexis Madrigal digs into murky chain of events that led to the misidentification of Sunil Tripathi as one of the Boston Marathon bombers.

The Atlantic: Alexis Madrigal - It Wasn't Sunil Tripathi: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster

This is the story, as best as I can puzzle it out, about how such bad information about this case became widely shared and accepted within the space of a couple of hours before NBC's Pete Williams' sources began telling the real story about the alleged bombers' identities.

On the Tsarnaevs

David Remnick writes about the brothers Tsarnaev and their family.

The New Yorker: David Remnick - The Culprits

Dzhokhar’s Twitter feed—@J_tsar—is a bewildering combination of banality and disaffection. (He seems to have been tweeting even after the explosions at the finish line last Monday.) As you scan it, you encounter a young man’s thoughts: his jokes, his resentments, his prejudices, his faith, his desires.

On HTTP

In this month's Wired 20th anniversary issue, Paul Ford meditates on the humble beginnings of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and how it has "led to the weirdest flowering of creativity in history."

Wired: Paul Ford - Meet the Web’s Operating System: HTTP

In its wonderful vagueness, HTTP encoded a profoundly upbeat idea about our ability to come together, to fill in the blanks. And that crazy optimism has proven to be correct. Over the past two decades HTTP has forced us, almost accidentally, to clarify what sorts of information are worth defending.

On Lego

Sam Thielman looks at Lego's lucrative success in navigating the minefield of brand licensing with companies like Lucasfilm, Marvel, and DC Comics. For more on the Denmark-based block company's history and market research, check out Brad Wieners' piece in Businessweek from a couple years ago.

Adweek: Sam Thielman - How Lego became the most valuable toy company in the world

Essentially, brands have to prove to Lego that they’re worth the time and effort the toy maker must commit, laying out not just a product’s appeal to kids but also its appeal across borders. "It has to have global clout, which is very different from other partners in the industry," explains Manuel Torres, svp of global toys for Nickelodeon. "[Others] will have a strategy for what they do domestically and another for what they do overseas. For Lego, you have to show that you have interest in Europe, that you have interest in the Americas—and then they’ll pursue a partnership."

On Curiosity

Burkhard Bilger documents the entirety of the Curiosity mission, from inception to a successful Mars landing, and beyond.

The New Yorker: Burkhard Bilger - The Martian Chroniclers

Space exploration is science; landings are theatre. Steltzner’s team would monitor every second of the descent, but this was far from a live event. Curiosity’s signals would need fourteen minutes to travel the hundred and fifty-five million miles to Earth. By the time they reached the control room, the rover would already be on the ground—intact or in pieces.

On Shane Carruth

Grantland's Zach Baron grabs a couple drinks on a random Thursday night in New York with filmmmaker Shane Carruth.

Grantland: Zach Baron - Shane Carruth Will Have Another

These days Carruth has a kind of secretive, Salinger-of-cinema reputation — the nine silent years between Primer and Upstream Color have become part of his legend. But after Primer, Carruth wasn't exactly wandering the vast white space of his own mind or riding a motorcycle across the desert in Utah. He was in Hollywood. He went to Los Angeles, Carruth says, took every meeting he could get, made a kind of halfhearted effort to find his Batman.

On Glass

frog's Jan Chipchase essay on Google Glass considers how it could upset social dynamics in both private and public spaces.

Future Perfect: Jan Chipchase - You Lookin’ At Me? Reflections on Google Glass

Not having a persistent record allows us to present a nuanced identity to different people, or groups of people, provides with the space to experiment with what we could be. The risk that what we say will be broadcast, narrowcasted to people we don’t know, or may underpin someone’s future business fundamentally changes what we want to talk about. The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership falls on people in proximity of the wearer, and that its benefits have yet to be proven out.

On Suck

Finally, Longform.org this week reprinted Josh Quittner's classic Wired piece on early internet publisher Suck.com.

Longform.org / Wired: Josh Quittner - Web Dreams

You've probably heard of Suck (www.suck.com). It's one of the more successful sites on the World Wide Web. Suck's minimalist design and amusing, smarty-pants tone has generated plenty of buzz on and off the Net. And Carl, 26, gets at least half the credit. He codesigned the Web site with his partner, the 25-year-old venal and flagrant know-it-all Joey Anuff. At first Suck was little more than a clean white page streaked down the middle by a narrow column of text. The two of them wrote Suck's daily barb every night - typically, a pomo, decon essay criticizing some loser's ghastly foray onto the Web. They filled each piece with hypertext refs from their own private collection and illustrated it with art ripped off from whatever site they happened to be vilifying. And each morning, they'd publish their neojournalism on their Web site.

Have any favorites that you'd like to see included in next week's edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

The best writing of the week, April 14

2013-04-14T14:30:07Z

Grab all of these as a Readlist.

On monsters

Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley met up with Mike Elizalde, CEO of Spectral Motion, the animatronics house behind films like Attack the Block, Hellboy, and the upcoming Pacific Rim. Also check out more at Venue.

The Atlantic: Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley - Enter a Monster: How a Hollywood Effects Studio Builds Movie Creatures

And sometimes the monstrous defies definition. I guess it's more of a primal reaction--something you can't quite put your finger on or describe, but something that makes you feel uneasy. It makes you feel uncomfortable or frightened. A distortion of what is natural, or what you perceive as natural, something outside what you think is the order of things--or outside what you think is acceptable within what we've come to recognize as natural things--then that's a monster. That's a monstrous thing.

On computational creativity

Gary Marcus dropped by Manhattan's Institute of Culinary Education to check out I.B.M.'s efforts to build a model of how the human palate responds to flavor combinations.

The New Yorker: Gary Marcus - Cooking with I.B.M.: the Synthetic Gastronomist

Most work in computational creativity aims to replicate the styles of earlier masters; only rarely do machines reach for genuinely new territory. (David Cope’s famous computer program Emily, for example, tried to make ersatz Bach and faux Chopin, internalizing the greats but not daring to stray far from their well-trodden paths.) The goal here was different. “We’re not trying to solve the Turing test for cooking,” said Lav Varshney, one of the system’s designers. “We’re trying to invent new kinds of recipes.”

On synthetic drugs

Vanessa Grigoriadis explores the strange world of synthetic drugs and the new generation of "proto-Walter Whites" remixing the purest pleasures and highs.

New York: Vanessa Grigoriadis - Travels in the New Psychedelic Bazaar

Patents for these drugs are easy to find on Google Patents. That’s where many underground chemists and research-chemical vendors look for new drugs to synthesize, in hopes that their quasi-legal nature will help them get rich while staying out of jail. Once the drugs are on the market, gray-market tinkerers take them into their own labs or study them and make modifications — some members of the advanced-chemistry forums made variations on Huffman’s synthetic-pot group, for example, each with its own trip.

On the electrosensitive

Joseph Stromberg visits Green Bank, West Virginia, a town inside the US National Radio Quiet Zone, where a small group that claims to suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivy is starting to grow.

Slate: future tense: Joseph Stromberg - Refugees of the Modern World

When you walk in the Schous’ two-story brick house, 4 miles up a forested road from the Green Bank post office, the first item you see might be a radiation meter they keep in their living room. She and her husband, Bert, moved here from Cedar Falls, Iowa, because they believe Diane is sensitive to very specific radio frequencies. She first began noticing her sensitivity in 2002, she says, when U.S. Cellular, a wireless provider based in the Midwest, built a tower near their farm. "I was extremely tired, but I couldn't sleep at night," she said. "I got a rash, I had hair loss, my skin was wrinkled, and I just thought it was something I ate, or getting older."

On Felix Baumgartner

William Langewiesche profiles Felix Baumgartner and the story behind his record-breaking jump.

Vanity Fair: William Langewiesche - The Man Who Pierced the Sky

Red Bull is an Austrian company, and a big deal in that town. It sells a form of intoxication like ultra-sobriety. In doing so it seems to have answered the old question about trees falling in forests when no one is around. The conclusion during energy-drink events, at least, is that nothing happens unless it happens on video—and that YouTube especially is the key. As a result Baumgartner’s capsule was hung with 15 cameras, and he himself was hung with 5.

On banner ads

Brian Morrissey tells the story of the birth of the baner ad, way back in the fall of 1994.

Digiday: Brian Morrissey - How the Banner Ad Was Born

Joe McCambley, a creative director at the shop, was enamored of the potential of the Web. What’s more, he had the perfect client, AT&T, which was in the midst of a campaign positioning itself as the facilitator of breakthrough tech under the tagline "You Will." Teaming with a techie named Craig Kanarick, who would go on to found seminal Internet agency Razorfish, McCambley set out to build the first banner. They holed up for four days to craft the execution.

On fictional interfaces

Finally, if you haven't been reading Make It So, a site building on the recent book, add it to your RSS reader now. The authors analyze on-screen interfaces in films ranging from The Fifth Element to Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis.

Make It So: Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Nossel - Make It So

Have any favorites that you'd like to see included in next week's edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

The best writing of the week, April 7

2013-04-07T14:30:04Z

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On modafinil

Robert Kolker writes about modafinil, the wonder drug rumored to have inspired 2011's Limitless, and its rising use as a "smart drug."

New York: Robert Kolker - The Real Limitless Drug Isn’t Just for Lifehackers Anymore

It is rumored to be the model for the fictional pills in the movie Limitless that allowed Bradley Cooper’s character to use 100 percent of his brain. Timothy Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Work Week, recently dished about its effects with modafinil fan Joe Rogan, the former host of Fear Factor, on Rogan’s popular podcast. Probably its biggest booster is Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Executive web forum, where he blogged about the drug’s powers (headline: "Why You Are Suffering From a Modafinil Deficiency"). Last summer, ABC News did a segment on Asprey in which he compared taking it to the scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything blossoms from black-and-white to color.

On gaming

Tevis Thompson considers the devious microtransaction models prompting gamers to give up their hard earned money for upgrades in mobile games.

Grantland: Tevis Thompson - The Endless Shopper: Burning Money in Temple Run 2, Candy Crush Saga, and Little Inferno

As video games move to incorporate micro-transactions more extensively and behave like services instead of stand-alone products, they become more like little economies rather than worlds or stories or simulations or experiences.

On Ain't It Cool News

Hal Espen and Brys Kit profile Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles and his efforts to turn the movie site back around.

The Hollywood Reporter: Has Espen, Borys Kit - Ain't It Cool's Harry Knowles: The Cash-Strapped King of the Nerds Plots a Comeback

Their child-rearing philosophy was full media immersion. "I was their experiment," says Knowles. "They unleashed everything on me. I saw porn, all the Universal monster movies, all the Charlie Chan films, all the Sherlock Holmes things, all the Fred and Ginger movies. Film for me became how I related to everything else."

On Mario

Karina Longworth digs into the fascinating history and production of the Super Mario Bros. movie — Tom Hanks, Danny DeVito both considered the role of Mario. It was the first feature based on a video game, and remains one of Hollywood's most notable attempts (and failures) to cash in on games.

Grantland: Karina Longworth - Hollywood Archaeology: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

The movie's plot — to the extent that any lucid story line is discernible in a film cobbled together from drafts worked on by at least nine writers — conjures an alternate universe in which humans descended not from primates, but from dinosaurs. Reading the breathless coverage given to the film in the Hollywood papers, starting in the rumor stages and continuing through its spectacular belly flop, you can almost see an alternate universe in which this could've been the big hit of summer 1993 instead of that other dino-studded effects spectacular, a world in which the summer blockbuster as we currently know it might have taken a similarly warped path of evolution.

On Apple HQ

Peter Burrows looks at Apple's HQ, its huge cost, and all the details you'd ever want on the building's custom curved glass.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Peter Burrows - Inside Apple's Plans for Its Futuristic, $5 Billion Headquarters

Since 2011, the budget for Apple’s Campus 2 has ballooned from less than $3 billion to nearly $5 billion, according to five people close to the project who were not authorized to speak on the record. If their consensus estimate is accurate, Apple’s expansion would eclipse the $3.9 billion being spent on the new World Trade Center complex in New York, and the new office space would run more than $1,500 per square foot—three times the cost of many top-of-the-line downtown corporate towers.

On brain games

Over at the newly launched Elements site, Gareth Cook reports on new research showing that using brain games to train yourself is ineffective.

The New Yorker: Elements: Gareth Cook - Brain Games are Bogus

Over the last year, however, the idea that working-memory training has broad benefits has crumbled. One group of psychologists, lead by a team at Georgia Tech, set out to replicate the Jaeggi findings, but with more careful controls and seventeen different cognitive-skills tests. Their subjects showed no evidence whatsoever for improvement in intelligence.

On Facebook

Wired's Steven Levy interviewed Mark Zuckerberg following last week's launch of Facebook Home.

Wired: Steven Levy - Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Home, Money, and the Future of Communication

But sharing can be exhausting. You hear about people taking "Facebook vacations." It’s an interesting phenomenon. We have two ways to turn off Facebook: deactivate and delete. The group who chooses to turn Facebook off permanently is relatively small, but there’s a larger set of people who will deactivate their account for a day or two because they want to focus and study for a test—it’s the equivalent of locking yourself in the library. It’s actually a very popular feature.

On movies

And finally, Longform recently reprinted a 1991 Playboy interview with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. It's also worth revisiting Chris Jones' 2010 Esquire piece on Ebert's battle with cancer.

Playboy: Lawrence Grobel - Playboy Interview: Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert

When I went to movies as a teenager, we went to see what adults did. Now adults go to the movies to see what teenagers do. People over the age of twenty-one hardly ever make love in the movies anymore. They sit around and tell the kids they shouldn’t be doing it. It’s amazing. And today, the best American directors are not trying to make great movies, they’re trying to make successful movies.

Have any favorites that you'd like to see included in next week's edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

The best writing of the week, March 31

2013-03-31T14:30:04Z

On the new rich

Expanding on Rebecca Solnit's excellent piece on Silicon Valley and boomtowns earlier this year, Ellen Cushing takes a look at the explosive growth of the obscenely rich in the tech world.

East Bay Express: Ellen Cushing - The Bacon-Wrapped Economy

More young people have more money in a more concentrated place than perhaps ever before. Old money is being replaced by new, but it’s a new kind of new, one that has different values, different habits, and different interests than the previous generation. The very rich have always, to a greater or lesser degree, been guilty of excess, but what’s changed is that the Bay Area’s new wealth doesn’t necessarily have the perspective, the experience, or the commitments of the group it’s replacing.

On 'SimCity'

Simple and effective: pair an architecture critic and a copy of Sim City for a week and see what happens. Justin Davidson and his 15-year-old son uncover the games guiding principles and deeper assumptions towards urban development.

New York: Justin Davidson - My Week As Robert Moses, With Oil Wells

From Lagos to Los Angeles to Mumbai, the physical world is experiencing a great rushing tide of urbanization, which creates huge environmental problems and at the same time concentrates the creativity needed to solve them. In the Sims’ world, though, the masses migrate and settle, then file passively through their lives. SimCity’s engineers have repeated the same mistake made by countless potentates, forgetting that cities are forged both by master builders and the people who hack their grand plans.

On Bitcoin

Column favorite Paul Ford defends the open source Bitcoin currency.

Businessweek: Paul Ford - Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy's Last Safe Haven

Maybe Bitcoin’s devotees are right, and it’s the currency of the future. Or perhaps it’s a ridiculous joke—a speculative, hilarious enterprise taken to its most insane conclusion. Given that the founder is nowhere to be found, it feels like a hoax, a parody of the global economy. That the technology used to implement it has, so far, shown itself to be impeccable and completely functional, and that it’s actually being exchanged, just makes it a better joke. The truth is, it doesn’t much matter if it’s a joke or not. It works.

On gaming

On the launch of BioShock Infinite, Tom Bissell interviews series creator Ken Levine on writing great villains, the importance of atmosphere, and... sneakers.

Grantland: Tom Bissell - Does the Sneaker Have to Matter?

I spend a lot of time — a lot of time — watching and rewatching scenes from movies that are particularly meaningful to me. And the best villains, the best scenes of any movie ever, are usually the ones where the villain and hero are in close proximity. The best scenes with the Joker in The Dark Knight are the scenes where the Joker and Batman are locked in a room together. It’s a romance, almost. If you look at Batman and the Joker, if you’re not seeing the Joker’s sort of in love with Batman, you’re missing the point of the scene. There’s danger that underlies everything, but there’s this great dialogue going on at the same time. I’ve always loved villains, but I’ve never liked the mustache twirlers.

On the center

Jeremy Miller hunts down the US's centroid, the country's forever shifting center point as defined by population distribution.

Orion Magazine: Jeremy Miller - The Centroid

Our progress blocked by a high fence, we hop out of the truck and assemble. Before setting out into the woods, I punch the following coordinates into my hand-held GPS unit: 37°31´03˝ N, 92°10´23˝ W. From a manila folder, Doyle produces a satellite image of the area. A small digital thumbtack denoting the center pokes into a stand of trees on the opposite side of a small stream—the only barrier between us and the balance point of the American population.

And finally, McSweeney's has a retrospective of Becky Jones' selfies.

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The best writing of the week, March 24

2013-03-24T14:30:02Z

On video game writing

Verge-contributor Maria Bustillos interviews author Tom Bissell about his work on the new Gears of War: Judgement, and the promise, difficulty, and difference in writing for video games.

The New Yorker: Maria Bustillos - Gears of War writer Tom Bissell on video games and storytelling

I’ve grappled with the degree to which games are not really a writer’s medium. Film’s not really a writer’s medium, either. Good writing certainly doesn’t hurt, but it’s not the thing that saves the day. I’ve been quietly lobbying for games that are smart and intelligent, even if they’re about blowing lots of shit up. At the same time, though, pure storytelling is never going to be the thing that games do better than anything. Games are primarily about a connection between the player, the game world, and the central mechanic of the game.

On betrayal

Maureen O'Connor writes about Netflix cheating, sneakily covering it up, and lying to deny the ultimate betrayal.

The Cut: Maureen O'Connor - Netflix Adultery: The Smallest, Most Insidious Betrayal

Three weeks ago I cheated on my boyfriend. He was perhaps twenty feet away from me, sleeping in my bed with the door open while I betrayed his trust on the living room sofa. At one point, he woke up and walked right by. "You're not watching House of Cards without me, are you?" he asked. "No," I lied without hitting pause. With my ear buds in, you could say Netflix was actually inside of me as my boyfriend returned to bed. I stayed in the living room and kept watching.

On the cutting edge

Veronique Greenwood talks about growing up on the bleeding of technology, and coping with its runoff of video phones, early webcams, and QR codes.

aeon: Veronique Greenwood - I grew up in the future

It’s not always a particularly comfortable place to be, that knife’s edge between the next big thing and a truly embarrassing evolutionary dead-end. We were constantly wading through early models of doomed technology, and we dressed in, wrote with, and drank out of the detritus of wrecked start-ups.

On BlackBerry

Pitchfork Reviews Reviews' David Shapiro offers his trademark take on review of BlackBerry's latest Z10.

BetaBeat: David Shapiro - People Will Think Less of You When You Show Them Your BlackBerry Z10

Like baby boomers who will never hear an album as good as Sgt. Pepper, for me, the BlackBerry 8700 is not only a good phone, but actually the best phone of all time. Obviously its features are trumped by every current phone, but if Babe Ruth stepped on the field during spring training this year, he would be an overweight alcoholic smoker, and we still generally agree that he is the greatest baseball player of all time.

On Twitter

Elon Green interviews The New Yorker's David Grann about how he uses Twitter.

The Awl: Elon Green - David Grann, What Is Up With Your Twitter?

It’s fine if I’m watching the Oscars or the Super Bowl, to be part of this wonderful community also watching this event. I can feel like I’m at a cocktail party. I’m pretty shy, too, so that’s kind of nice. But if I’m working on a story, I would never want those voices. I want the voices I’m reporting on, and all the participants, and I want to make sure I see the event as coldly, and clearly, and lucidly, and unemotionally, and uncollectively as possible. That’s the biggest difference. Oh, and one’s a lot of work and one is the illusion of work.

Have any favorites that you'd like to see included in next week's edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

The best writing of the week, March 17

2013-03-17T14:30:04Z

Grab all of these as a Readlist.

On urban hacking

Matthew Power profiles Bradley L. Garrett and tags along with him and his urban explorer friends as they explore London's off-limits, underground infrastructure.

GQ: Matthew Power - Excuse Us While We Kiss The Sky

Garrett was handcuffed and led through passport control, where his ID was seized. Fingerprints, mug shots, and DNA swabs followed. He was eventually led to a holding cell and then an interrogation room. There he was not formally charged but was informed that he was being investigated for burglary, property destruction, and criminal trespass, among numerous other possible charges. He was told he had been the subject of a manhunt by the British Transport Police. His alleged crimes were a blatant affront to the image of a high-tech security state London had constructed for itself. And yet, during his interrogation, an investigator leaned across the table and whispered: "Off the record, Bradley, I love the work that you do."

On Facebook

Following Facebook's recent redesign event, John Herrman takes a look at the midlife woes the social network has largely brought on itself.

Buzzfeed: John Herrman - Welcome To Facebook's Midlife Crisis

Facebook needs to make maintaining a Facebook account as compelling as creating one. And it’s not clear how Facebook can incentivize people to update their accounts — to trim old friends, to add new ones, to adjust all the various sliders and dials that power Facebook today. This is labor; it feels like doing repairs, not creating something exciting and new.

On 'Omni'

Brent Cox writes about the history of the groundbreaking sci-fi magazine Omni by taking a look back at the 1981 issue featuring William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" short story. Peruse the entire run for free at Internet Archive.

The Awl: Brent Cox - The Future According To 1981: An 'Omni' Appreciation

At some point, and I reckon this was more towards the middle of high school, I realized that the layout of Omni resembled that of another magazine—Penthouse. There was a reason for that. Omni, launched in 1978, was the brainchild of Kathy Keeton. Keeton, was a South African, trained in ballet, who, in her 20s, became an exotic dancer in Europe (an AP story would later say she'd been one of the highest-paid strippers on the Continent). She met a young Bob Guccione when he noticed her reading the Financial Times between sets. Together they launched their intended competitor to Playboy, Penthouse. Keeton also wanted to start a magazine that was not just a science-fiction magazine, but also a science magazine.

On useless machines

Abigail Pesta looks at the history of the useless machine.

The Wall Street Journal: Author - Looking for Something Useful to Do With Your Time? Don't Try This

He also dreamed up the useless machine, although the name he gave it was the "ultimate machine." His mentor at Bell Labs, Claude Shannon, built one and kept it on his desk, where the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke spotted it one day. "There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing—absolutely nothing—except switch itself off," Mr. Clarke later wrote, saying he had been haunted by the device.

On divers

And in case you missed it a few weeks ago, check out Nathaniel Rich's fantastic piece on the new generation of divers working for oil companies in need of humans following the destruction wrought by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The New York Review of Books: Nathaniel Rich - Diving Deep into Danger

Not everybody is cut out for the job. A diver cannot be claustrophobic or antisocial, because he must spend much of his time in a tiny sealed capsule with several other divers. He must be well-disciplined and perceptive, for he is likely to encounter a variety of unexpected hazards on the job. Many divers are military veterans, or have worked as roofers or mechanics. "The best are those who have a great deal of confidence in themselves and their abilities," one former diver, Phil Newsum, told me. "You have to be willing to adapt to any situation. Philosophically, when you go out on a dive job, you’re expecting something is going to go wrong."

Have any favorites that you'd like to see included in next week's edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

The best writing of the week, March 10

2013-03-10T13:30:04Z

Grab these all as a Readlist.

On sleep

Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the science and mystery behind sleep and sleeplessness.

The New Yorker: Elizabeth Kolbert - Up All Night

In one of Kleitman’s first experiments, he kept half a dozen young men awake for days at a stretch, then ran them through a battery of physical and psychological tests. Frequently, he used himself as a subject. As a participant in the sleep-deprivation experiment, Kleitman stayed awake longer than anyone else—a hundred and fifteen hours straight. At one point, exhausted and apparently hallucinating, he declared, apropos of nothing in particular, "It is because they are against the system." (Asked what he meant, he said he’d been under the impression that he was "having a heated argument with the observer on the subject of labor unions.")

On algorithmic spam

Tim Maly's latest essay explores Solid Gold Bomb's "KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT" t-shirt PR disaster, and the growth of algorithmic spam.

Quiet Babylon: Tim Maly - Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel

Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.

On fusion centers

Mario Quadracci spends some time with the Milwaukee Police Department's high-tech fusion center.

Milwaukee Mag: Mario Quadracci - The Watchmen

After 22 years as a cop, with many of those spent as a homicide detective, it takes more than everyday street crime to break the reflective cool that dominates Smith’s disposition. But this, the message revealed, would be anything but a run-of-the-mill Sunday. "Oak Creek has a mass shooting," said the email from Fusion’s watch desk, "multiple victims, possibly two shooters, area of Howell and Rawson, more as it becomes available." Like a pinch at the onset of a pleasant dream, Smith was reminded of the world of threats in which he operates. And soon, his head was shifting into a keener, more efficient frame of mind – crisis mode.

On the acquistion

Devin Leonard has the inside story on Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm.

Businessweek: Devin Leonard - How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for 'Star Wars'

Even so, he’s attended story meetings for the new film, adjudicating the physical laws and attributes of the Star Wars universe. "I mostly say, ‘You can’t do this. You can do that,’ " Lucas says. "You know, ‘The cars don’t have wheels. They fly with antigravity.’ There’s a million little pieces. Or I can say, ‘He doesn’t have the power to do that, or he has to do this.’ I know all that stuff."

On the second screen

Noel Murray reports on the state of second screen apps after spending a month with offerings from CBS, Fox, USA, and more.

Grantland: Noel Murray - The 'Second Screen': Is This App Really Necessary

The second-screen phenomenon, though — and specifically the networks’ recent aggressive involvement with it — is more a case of established organizations trying to co-opt or cash-in on something that originally happened outside their purview. It could be more useful someday. Right now, however, the majority of the second-screen apps aren’t solving a problem, or even providing a new kind of entertainment that didn’t exist before. Instead, they’re mainly just taking what Twitter and Wikipedia already do just fine and slapping their own logo on it.

Have any favorites that you'd like to see included in next week's edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.