The Internet lives for this!

Get well soon, Internet: Per editorial blustering/general consensus/this screenshot of Buzzfeed's "trending" screen, the Internet suffered some kind of "break" today after the unheralded appearance of Kim Kardashian's bare ass in all its (oddly reflective?) glory. "BREAK THE INTERNET," screamed Paper Magazine's headline on the story, which my colleague Emily Yahr smartly debunked here. You can't break the Internet with Kim Kardashian's butt ... the Internet lives for this!

1. Alex from Target is scared to leave his house. Pooooor Alex. One minute the lil guy was just a normal 16-year-old who like soccer and had a messy room. Now he basically needs a security detail. Such are the unintended consequences of Internet fame, my friend.

2. What the law can and cannot do about online harassment. The legal issues around cyberstalking, bullying and harassment are very, very fraught: in some states, the law lags way behind the times; in others, protections tangle with free speech; in most, police and prosecutors have no idea what to do with this Internet thing. Eek.

3. Meet the "new identity media." Roosh V., a leader in one of the web's more skin-crawly PUA communities, has just launched a website for Gamergaters -- because, in his words (!), straight white men need a place to just be straight white men. I could only throw my hands up at this, but the (newly redesigned!) Awl has quite a brilliant take on it, as the Awl so often does.

Honey I shrunk the dog. (Like that reference, this video is old. But golden!)
Pocketable: Foreign-language dubbing is not an industry I've ever pondered, but WHOA surprise it is fascinating. (5768 words/23 minutes)

Postscripts: Cocktail calculus. Kitten therapy. Twitter attacks its worst trolling. Memes are a liberal conspiracy and women are less creepy than men. What happens when programs write folk songs. ("I am a weary immaterial laborer in a post-industrial wasteland.") Could the U.S. ever have a right to be forgotten? Are memes really a good means to and end? It's cool that we landed on a comet today ... but it's even cooler, imo, that these comet-landers are friends.

Until tomorrow!
@caitlindewey

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