Selfies, an official public health threat
Let’s get this out up front: Despite what you may have heard from certain flamboyant French paparazzos, the Washington Post is not about to expose Obama’s sexy fling with Beyoncé. I know anywhere I go from there is downhill. But let’s continue anyway!
1. Amazon makes books cheap, monetarily speaking. But the monolithic online superstore may also be cheapening the written word as intellectual and cultural currency, George Packer reports. The resulting article is very, very long and also very worth reading -- Instapaper it!
2. “I cannot take this anymore.” So ends Flappy Bird, the world’s most-downloaded game, which incidentally doubles as a meditation on “the fundamental pointlessness of human existence.” Now we have Flappy Doge, which surely serves as an even more brutal example of that exact same point.
3. Soul Mate in a Box: noun; a person with whom one has a safe, sanitized, online-only relationship meant to protect both parties from heartache. It’s a term Modern Love editor Daniel Jones in an essay I appreciate and ahem guest-star in (see penultimate graph), but do not entirely agree with.
Postscripts: Pizza Hut is on OkCupid. Wikipedia is on your phone. Millennials are on a screen, more or less all the time, including when they're in the bathroom. Facebook has a pronoun problem and “Dumb Starbucks” has a copyright one. Sochi problems paired with quotes from Russian literature. House of Cards Against Humanity. Feminist stock photos. Today in portraiture: selfies with homeless people, selfies in Sochi, selfies as official public health threat.
Until tomorrow,
Do you like this newsletter? Please send it to a friend! If you don't like this newsletter, please send it to an enemy.