Can seals even get hiccups? News to me.

Forget all the unpleasantness circulating your feeds today: Tomorrow marks the start of the third annual Internet Cat Video Festival, and that is something to celebrate! The festival, for the trendy Midwesterners among you, is held at Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, and will include food trucks (!), "feline-themed activities" (!!) and an appearance by Lil Bub (!!!). Roundtrip flights from D.C. to the Twin Cities are like $500 right now, but since Friday's my birthday, maybe y'all could pull together and make that happen for me. No? Just a suggestion? Whoakay, the links:

1. Kill the comments, for Pete's sake. Writers hate them. Readers mock them. Jezebel editors decry them to management further up the line. The comments section is no longer a place for constructive discussion or feedback: So why, exactly, are we still wasting our time?

2. The emotional weirdness of Twitter mourning. In times of grief, social media can feel like a real digital commons, a place for everyone to pool their collective feelings. But it can also feel ... weirdly competitive. As in, how many RTs can I get on this RIP tweet?

3. There is apparently such a thing as a "digital butler." And for $99/month, you can have one too!

Can seals even get hiccups? News to me.

Pocketable: James Bamford spent three days with Edward Snowden -- more than any other reporter has. This is the story that resulted. (7527 words/30 minutes)

Postscripts: Statue selfies. Youtube yogis. "Miraculous" memes. The science of drunk texts and song psychology. 10 rules for social media mourning and four reasons to (?!) binge drink. How online harassment hurts relationships and why we believe Facebook conspiracies. Finally, today, in things we could do without: Thought Catalog, Humans of New York, terrible trolling tweets.

Until tomorrow,
@caitlindewey

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