Even the polar bears don't like it!
Newsflash: It is COLD outside. So cold that Alabama's temperature is lower than Maine's. So cold that even polar bears and penguins had to be brought indoors. So cold that an escaped Kentucky prisoner turned himself in to authorities rather than be stuck outside. So cold, in fact, that all the pipes froze in my apartment, leaving me with nothing to do today but learn how to flush a toilet without water -- a pretty amazing trick, actually -- and mess around on the Internet. On that note, let's do this:
1. The man (boy?) who brought Wikileaks down was a double-chinned Icelandic hacker who became one of Julian Assange's best friends ... and then sold him out to the FBI. Sigurdur Thordarson was 17 when he started hacking for Wikileaks. He's now 21, totally infamous, and still living at home with his parents.
2. I have no idea how my computer works. Or my microwave, for that matter. But some technologies have become so complex that they are literally beyond any comprehension, by any human, ever. "We already see hints of the endpoint toward which we seem to be hurtling," Samuel Arbeson writes, terrifyingly, over at Aeon, "a world where nearly self-contained technological ecosystems operate outside of human knowledge and understanding."
3. Here are the cold, hard facts of freezing to death. Peter Stark's 1997 classic on the science and history of freezing is terribly relevant today and far more fascinating that I could possibly articulate.
This is a better trick than that whole boiling-water-to-snow thing.
Postscript: Here's every URL ever shown on Law & Order and every major iteration of the New York Times' homepage. A short list of things that got ugly today: the fascinating Instagram cult of Cheerlebrity, Kanye's fight to wrest his good name from the clowns at Coinye West, and Twitter trolling in the U.K. -- where two particularly infamous trolls are being brought to justice. In other U.K. news, someone is stealing all the ferrets. We have more ways to protest wrongs than ever, but our outrage is pointless. In closing: Much doge, so easy, such tools, wow.
Until tomorrow, @caitlindewey
Do you like this newsletter? Please send it to a friend! If you don't like this newsletter, please send it to an enemy.