Is this even legal?
Quick, guys! If you x-out of this newsletter right meow, you may still have time to catch the tail end of the White House's Tumblr meet-and-greet, unironically hashtagged #ObamaIRL. (No one has told the White House, apparently, that all the cool kids are on Snapchat now.) Anyway, I can't decide if I love or hate that "influential Tumblr bloggers" currently have more access to the president than members of the media often do. But I suspect that ambivalence makes me an old, so let's maybe just move on:
1. Sex, drugs and toasters ... or all the things you can buy when you're living on Bitcoin. GQ gave a reporter some Bitcoin and told him to make a go of it -- with amusing, if not entirely productive and/or elucidating, results.
2. Please stop sharing fake s%#t on Facebook. You know exactly what I'm talking about here: the conspiracy videos, the faux-statistical memes, the absurd listicles from websites with names like Viral Bonanza. "This is the front line against viciousness and madness and anti-science and anti-reason. When people post slanderous, malevolent lies, if you forward them without censure, then you are abetting slanderous, malevolent lies."
3. Inside the online cult of Martha Stewart. This exists. I know. I'm part of it. (Welp.)
Goooooooooooooooooooooal!
Pocketables: New Murakami #longread is new, long, wonderful. (8588 words/34 minutes)
Postscripts: Surgery sexting. Project Eavesdrop. The sleeping habits of geniuses and the web's hardest-working dogs. No, a supercomputer did not pass the Turing Test, and no, it's not a "privilege" to be raped. Stop blaming the Internet. Start reading Cord Jefferson. Is this even legal? Not sure it should be...!
Until tomorrow,
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