Weekend Reading

Short this week due to spending a couple of days sleeping, vomiting, sleeping, vomiting…

  • Winamp’s woes: How the greatest MP3 player undid itself
    As many of us are busy crafting the perfect playlist for grilling outdoors, most likely such labor is happening on a modern streaming service or within iTunes. But during the last 15 years or so, that wasn’t always the case. Today, we resurface our look at the greatest MP3 player that was—Winamp.
    Ahhhh them were the days. The joy of sorting ID3 tags…

  • For decades, Western culture touted self-esteem. It got the most important thing wrong
    What would you guess people are most stressed out about in their careers? One might assume that hating your job, or dealing with the frustration of finding a new one, would top the list.
    Standard, file under ‘duh’ article that still needs a quick read.

  • The sound illusion that makes Dunkirk so intense
    Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a nerve-wracking film. Three separate storylines tell the famed World War II tale — where 330,000 Allied forces, surrounded by the enemy, were evacuated from the Northern beaches of France — in a way that feels tense and visually stunning.
    Explains so much. Never felt quite so on edge throughout an entire movie, regardless of what was happening on screen.

  • Palantir: the ‘special ops’ tech giant that wields as much real-world power as Google
    Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed, data-mining firm honed its ‘crime predicting’ techniques against insurgents in Iraq. The same methods are now being sold to police departments.
    [insert Minority Report references] – that’s some clever, scary, tech.

  • How Scared Should I Be of Macaroni and Cheese?
    Being a first-time father to a 1.5-year-old child means addressing unexpected questions from the first-time grandparents of a 1.5-year-old child.
    Answer: about as scared as you think!

  • Phoebe Waller-Bridge: ‘I felt strongly there was no such thing as a slut’
    Her comedy Fleabag was a bleak and honest depiction of female sexuality that made her an international star. She talks about being a ‘terrible actor’ in her 20s, why women should all go on strike and how success has proved that she’s not crazy.
    IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED FLEABAG YET THEN FECK OFF AND DO IT NOW!!

  • The Golden Age of Bailing
    It’s clear we’re living in a golden age of bailing. All across America people are deciding on Monday that it would be really fantastic to go grab a drink with X on Thursday.
    Ugh. Guilty of this at times, despite knowing that I always feel better after socialising.

  • LEGO Ideas Third 2016 Review Results
    Over the past several months, the LEGO Review Board has carefully reviewed 12 projects that reached 10,000 supporters between September 2016 and January 2017, our third review qualification period of 2016. Sanne, our Project Manager, shares the results from LEGOLAND in Billund:
    HUZZAH!

  • Why We Can’t Have the Male Pill
    The trouble began, as it so often does, with a bottle of Chivas Regal. Back in the 1950s, scientists at Sterling Drug, a now-defunct pharmaceutical company, synthesized a class of chemicals that made male rats temporarily infertile.
    tldr; it’s cos we produce so much sperm every damn day (also the source of many other problems)

  • We Analyzed 1,000 Fortune Cookies To Unlock Their Secrets
    I’m a bit obsessed with fortune cookies. I, an otherwise non-superstitious person, have no fewer than five incidentally meaningful ones stashed away in special places.
    If the internet didn’t exist, would this have happened?