~All the rage~

"Which one of my toxic sons are you?" Mmmmmmmmmmmmm reading this oddly viral and very odd quiz kind of wiped my brain of further thoughts, tbh, so I'm just going to encourage you to click it after you read the other links:

1. Every election is now a Facebook election. Everybody in media knows that Facebook is basically the platform where stories live or die online. And the storie sthat live, it turns out, are often the ones that promote a particular identity. That means that fast, loud, hyper-partisan content-mills, and the Facebook ecosystem that feeds them, could have a bigger impact on future elections than TV ads or the lamestream media. Which, whatever your political persuasions, doesn't exactly sound like a good thing.

2. "Grief porn" in the Internet age. Did you see that video of a guy singing the Beatles to his newborn son, right before the baby dies? If you didn't, you're kind of an anomaly: It's been viewed 15.4 million times. The question, Kelly Conaboy acts -- provocatively! -- is why.

3. Why the French hate Internet cats. We tend to lump all the dumb, viral and silly things on the Internet into this ambiguous category called "Internet culture." But it isn't the Internet that likes this stuff -- it's Americans.

Bonus, of sorts: Yesterday's newsletter was missing the link to this article about Europe's foremost "digital counterrevolutionary." Sorry!

I'm not a horrible person for laughing at this because the guy was okay!

Pocketable: "My niece is a teenage Instagram celebrity." This is an amazing thing. (3614 words/15 minutes/many Instagrams)

Postscripts: Zero-g coffee. The future of tweets. Grown-ass adults pretending to be teens. How to react when your mean tweet is on Kimmel and how to write an email the right way. "Get me off your fucking mailing list." (... Something I hope you never say.) The history of string cheese. The inventor of Tetris. The battles of the early Internet age. Does the world need phone-charging jackets? 'Cause they are apparently ~all the rage.~

Until Monday!
@caitlindewey

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