Holy cannoli

Don't despair, ye Internet skeptics: According to a new poll out from Pew, the whippersnapper digital natives among us are actually MORE likely to (a) read books and (b) appreciate offline learning than their older, wiser, fussier parents. This is proof positive not only that the kids are all right, but that the Internet isn't totally melting our brains after all. (Partial meltage still probable.) On that happy news, the links!

1. The very dark side of the sharing economy. Trendy start-ups like Homejoy, the "Uber for home-cleaning," may seem convenient and efficient to you. But the system is girdered by overworked, underpaid employees with no insurance, time off, or job security -- and, it would often seem, no respect for their humanity.

2. Facebook's facial recognition is creepy-good. DeepFace, the algorithm Facebook uses to identify people in photos, measures more than 120 million parameters -- enough to guess your identity 97 percent of the time. But even when DeepFace gets it wrong, the implications are ominous. The service misidentified one user as his mother, for instance -- and experts say it's evidence that DeepFace could one day be used to identify someone's "ethnicity, region of origin, and family affiliation," or to identify users who don't even have pictures online

3. ALL OF THE PUMPKINS. Americans love pumpkin-flavored things, especially beer. (I am American and can testify that this is true. No, I don't care what's *actually* in pumpkin flavoring.)

Bb elephant learns to blow bubbles. Guh.

Pocketables: The problem with the culture of instant gratification. (6079 words/24 minutes)

Postscripts: Holy cannoli! Wikemoji. McBrunch. Alongways. "Dystopian junk mail." Smart watches are the new mood rings and pictures are the new words. 100 books that resonated. 100 ideas that changed the web. Quiet news outta yesterday's Apple event: the iPod classic is dead. :(

Until tomorrow!
@caitlindewey

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