Plz don't twerk before 10.
I realize the Internet basically shuts down after 3:00 on Friday and most of you are deep into happy hour now, but shelve these links for tomorrow, k? I got some good ones for your weekend reading lists:
1. A.O. Scott, the New York Times movie critic who found his tweet appropriated by the shady marketers of "Inside Llewyn Davis," has penned an essay on said shady marketers and the Internet controversy they kicked off. "It’s hard to say where it begins or ends and even more difficult to say what it all means," Scott writes, which sounds like one of the better characterizations of social media I've ever heard.
2. Unemployed people spend a hell of a lot of time on Facebook. That is one potential takeaway, at least, from a fascinating experiment by Businessweek, which found that Google searches for "Facebook" correlate with the unemployment rate more closely than do searches for any other term.
3. We all know the advent of web analytics has brought horrors like clickbait and Upworthy headlines. Here's an even scarier thought: Increasingly publishers can push that "big data" on book authors, too. Personally not looking forward to "12 chapters of YA dystopian vampire fiction you need to read now!" -- but what do I know?
It's the weeeeeeekend! Golden Globes weekend, that is.
Postscripts: Narcissists tweet, sharks tweet, medievalists tweet -- everyone tweets! Bill de Blasio ate pizza with a fork and Barack Obama ate chili with a bunch of "hip" "millennials." Every f-bomb in “Wolf of Wall Street,” every cocktail menu ever. Wordless News is a beautiful blog! In France you can’t twerk before 10. In Tanana, Alaska you can’t go online, because some (drunk?) idiot shot out the town's fiberoptic cable on New Year’s Eve. (H/T Max Ehrenfreud, that story is brilliant.)
Programming note: First person to send me a legitimately funny joke about T. Swift and Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel will get a special prize.*
Until Monday,@caitlindewey
* Probably a baked good of my making, unless you live outside the continental United States -- in which case, no dice.
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