Surrounded by digital ghosts

Do you guys remember that song "Whip My Hair"? (It made you irrationally angry, 'cause it was sung by a nine-year-old.) WELL. Said nine-year-old is all grown up, relatively speaking, and talking quantum physics with T magazine. No word on whether she and brother Jaden are actual human children or lost robots from the their father's 2004 film. In either case, they're entertaining!

1. Consider the emoji. They're on every smartphone and social feed; they've been analyzed and decoded and recoded again; they are arguably the foremost linguistic development of our age. And yet, for some reason -- maybe the piles of poo and crying faces, although what do I know -- people seem unwilling to take these lil icons seriously. Which, given how quickly they conquered the culture, is probably a mistake.

2. Every email is a ghost story. There are few things more uncanny, or unsettling, than reading through old correspondences with friends. Some of whom, inevitably, aren't friends anymore. "One thing that never occurred to us—or at least to me—was whether those messages were being stored. But of course they were. The truth is that we are surrounded by digital ghosts, easily conjured."

3. The psychology of food porn. It's not quite the same as the psychology of, you know, porn porn, but the underlying mental processes are actually pretty similar.

This couple has kind of melted my cynical viral-video-hating heart.

Pocketable: The New Yorker is TECH-THEMED this week, so prepare to stock up yer Instapaper queue. Here's everyone's favorite #longreads purveyor on esports (10,667 words/43 minutes) and the economics of Spotify (7,174 words/29 minutes).

Postscripts: Serial > Shakespeare. 8chan < 4chan. Sweden > everywhere else. This is death by a thousand cuts and this is clickbait worth the clicks. Apps are killing the Internet. The Internet's killing religion. Religion is killing ... eh idk. 19 products that prove we're living in the future and 7 (literally) fatal Pinterest mistakes. How the GOP used Twitter to bend the law. How we talked about the Internet in 1984. Speaking of throwback videos, you probs haven't seen this gem before.

Until tomorrow!
@caitlindewey

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