゜。°。°。° You are a special snowflake! ゜。°。°。°
Two years ago today, a baby monkey wearing a wool coat wandered out of an Ikea parking lot ... and into eternity/our hearts. These days, Darwin the Ikea monkey is no longer a baby, though he is, by all accounts, still a living meme. The Daily Dot reports he's enjoying adolescence at an Ontario animal sanctuary. With that uplifting news in mind, let's hit the links... !
1. Vine is the new YouTube is the new Hollywood. Teenz keep turning no-name YouTubers into household names. But despite their name recognition and online popularity, no one seems willing to grant these kids more lasting, mainstream fame.
2. Everybody hates voicemail and nobody checks it. But maybe that's because we fail to see it in an adequately intimate, nostalgic way. "My own inbox features six messages from my gruff former landlord in Brooklyn; thirteen from student loan debt collectors, usually from South Dakota, who all add an extra syllable to my last name and ominously want to discuss my "options"; one from my mother, with news of my grandmother's passing; and five long, empty accidental calls from an ex-girlfriend's broken flip phone that sound like unreleased John Cage compositions."
3. "Omg, black people on Twitter!" Pacific Standard has just started a very promising interview series on digital subcultures, and they're kicking off with Black Twitter. Spoiler: It's not as ~crazy and surprising~ as you've been led to believe.
゜。°。°。° You are a special snowflake! ゜。°。°。°
Pocketable: Human progress should be surging, what with the Internet and all. So why exactly has it ... stopped? (3200 words/13 minutes)
Postscripts: Women laughing alone with tablets. Writers pondering emoji keyboards. The syntax of the F-bomb, the secret economics of shipping, and Twitter as the new bookstore. How some rando from Jersey made the first viral vid. How YouTube squished a year of hits into this. A history of Internet-hating: It's always been doubted and dismissed.
Until tomorrow!
@caitlindewey
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