This is not a subtweet ... unless it is!

Obama said some things about the NSA this morning, but since we’d all rather gab about Lena Dunham (it’s okay, you can admit it, you are among friends), here’s the ONE sentence you need to read from Obama’s speech … and here’s some more, ahem, levity:
1. This is a lens on pop culture we don’t often see: shifting attitudes on politics, economics, science and the arts, as quantified by Big Data. These concepts are often squishy and unscientific -- the stuff of much-reviled trend pieces! -- but thanks to tools like Google’s Ngram viewer, we can actually measure and understand social meta-trends like we never could before.
2. There are many ways to deploy the Twitter favorite, few of them sincere. The farewell fave is one, though the passive-aggressive fave -- in which you star a rude tweet so the sender knows you saw it -- is my personal preference.
3. Speaking of rude, Jezebel’s anti-Lena-Dunham-Photoshop vendetta does nothing to advance the causes of ladies, art or Jezebel itself. Vogue, you did good on this one. Haters gonna hate.

Oh-so-relevant Girls’ premiere GIFs, courtesy Videogum.
Postscripts: The science of selfies. Phones that send scents. American Apparel’s new mannequins were too profane for us to print. These are towns that share names with Internet slang words, and this is a long history of Velveeta “cheese.” How to stop online daters from lying. How to hitchhike across the U.S. This is not a subtweet ... unless it is!
Weekend reads -- an Instapaper-able list of things you may have missed this week: "The online avengers" (NYT magazine) / "A dangerous mind" (New York) / "Navigating stuckness" (Transom) / "A toast story" (Pacific Standard) / "Is this thing on?" (Digg)
Until Tuesday, @caitlindewey
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