We all know the feeling. You’re sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn’t cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it’s one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it’s better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again.

Grab the entire list as a Readlist.

On Anonymous

David Kushner investigates the roots of Anonymous.

The New Yorker: David Kushner – The Masked Avengers

He recalls thinking, "I could wield Anonymous against this tiny little city government and they would just be fucking wrecked. Plan was we were finally going to solve this homelessness problem, once and for all."On 'Ghostbusters'

Stephen Vider writes an ode to Ghostbusters as one of the greatest New York films as it returns to theaters on its 30th birthday.

Avidly: Stephen Vider – Nobody Steps on a Church in My Town!

One of the great twists of the film is to portray its heroes as working class, like firemen or exterminators, right down to their drab gray jumpsuits. When a hotel guest asks them, "What are you supposed to be, some kind of a cosmonaut?", Peter replies, "No, we’re exterminators. Someone saw a cockroach on the twelfth floor."On curating

Zuynep Tufekci makes a strong case that Twitter shouldn’t introduce a new algorithmically curated timeline.

Medium: Zeynep Tufekci – Why Twitter Should Not Algorithmically Curate the Timeline

What else will a curated feed optimize for? It will almost certainly look more like television since there is a reason television looks like television: that’s what advertisers like. There will be more celebrities. There will be more pithy quotes. There will be even more outrage, and even more lovable, fluffy things (both are engaging, and remember, algorithms will optimize for engagement). There will be more sports and television events. There will be less random, weird and otherwise obscure content being surfaced by the collective, networked judgement of the users I choose to follow.On disconnecting

Grist’s David Roberts writes about what he learned on his one-year sabbatical from social media and email.

Outside: David Roberts – Reboot or die trying

There’s only so much any individual can do in the face of these forces. Mindfulness may be a necessary form of self-care, even self-defense, but it is not a solution to digital unease any more than driving a Prius is a solution to climate change. Instead of just treating our anxieties exclusively as a symptom of poorly engineered minds in need of hacking, perhaps we also ought to see them as a collective challenge, to be addressed through social and political action. Hey, we could start a hashtag.On Shenzhen

MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito visited the Shenzhen’s Blade Runner-esque mix of factories and markets.

Joi Ito: Joi Ito – Shenzhen trip report – visiting the world’s manufacturing ecosystem

These chips were sold, not individually, but by the pound. Who buys chips by the pound? Small factories that make all of the cellphones that we all buy “new” will often be short on parts and they will run to the market to buy bags of that part so that they can keep the line running. It’s very likely that the “new” phone that you just bought from ATT has “recycled” Shenzhen parts somewhere inside.For more great longreads, visit our friends at Longreads.

Have any favorites that you’d like to see included in next week’s edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

Welcome to the first annual Verge Hack Week. We’re totally blowing up our site: we’ve given our reporters and editors the entire week to play with new tools and experiment with new storytelling ideas, while members of our amazing product team have gathered in New York to help build all sorts of interesting new things. Learn more.

Perhaps it’s having grown up in the ’80s and a hearty dose of nostalgia in the face of overwrought visual effects in modern movies, but there’s something indescribably powerful about the special effects in films like Blade Runner, Alien, and Dark City. It was an era before CG took over, a time when nearly a century of practical special effects culminated in whole armies of craft workers and artists that knew how to bring the audience to another world or dimension.

Visual effects masters like Douglas Trumbull, the mind behind the visual effects in Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and 2001: A Space Odyssey pushed the limits of filmmaking in the blockbuster era and beyond.

In a welcome change from the prequels — and trends in big-budget Hollywood effects — Looper director Rian Johnson recently told The Hollywood Reporter that the new Star Wars films would return to some of the practical effects that the originals used so effectively to help you suspend disbelief. Few spaceflight sequences feel as real or urgent as the Millenium Falcon flying through the Rebel Fleet on the way to the Death Star in Return of the Jedi.

With these sequences in mind, we take a look at some of our favorite modern practical effects to grace the silver screen, from the moodiness of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles to the intricacies of Tim Burton’s vision of Gotham City.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Following legendary films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, visual effects legend Douglas Trumbull moved on to work on the return of Captain Kirk and crew in the first big screen adaptation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Spock’s interaction with the sentient V’Ger cloud, which masterfully mixed both in-camera and post-production techniques, recalls much of 2001’s far out finale.

Alien (1979)

Packed with an all-star team of talent including H.R. Giger, Dan O’Bannon, and director Ridley Scott, Alien’s haunting design still holds up decades later.

Blade Runner (1982)

Douglas Trumbull and the visual effects team initially had trouble building the now iconic Blade Runner police spinner miniatures. Trumbull said “it looked like a flying brick. It took an enormous amount of energy to make it appear aerodynamic and interesting–continually adding flashing lights and other effects.” The spinner scene still makes for a fantastically believable liftoff.

Dune (1984)

In David Lynch’s Dune, Emililo Ruiz used scale models and exact perspective to emphasize the visual impact of the spaceships from the Houses Harkonnen and Atreides.

Batman (1989)

Influenced by Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Tim Burton worked with Anton Furst to create a new bleak and incredibly dark Gotham City overrun by crime.

Independence Day (1996)

Volker Engel, Douglas Smith, Clay Pinney and Joseph Viskocil took home the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for their work on Independence Day, Roland Emmerech’s film that leaned towards practical effects for more realistic explosions and visuals.

The Fifth Element (1997)

For 1997’s operatic, over-the-top Fifth Element, Director Luc Besson built a scale model of 23rd century New York City.

The Dark Knight (2008)

Director Christopher Nolan worked with New Deal Studios to build the 1:3 scale models for the Batmobile tumbler and garbage truck for The Dark Knight’s riveting crash sequence.

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After a neon green blimp was spotted over London emblazoned with the Aphex Twin logo, Deep Web hints at a new album, stencils popping up in New York, record label Warp has confirmed a new Aphex Twin album called SYRO slated for release on September 23rd. The artwork (below) is from legendary design firm The Designers Republic, best known for its mid-90s work on games like Wipeout and artwork for bands like The Orb, Pulp, and Autechre.

Aside from the release of the long-lost Caustic Window album earlier this year, it’s been over a decade since the last official release of new material from electronic artist Richard D. James.

Earlier this week, a new tweet from the official Aphex Twin account revealed information on “SYRO,” complete with what appeared to be a full tracklist, complete with BPM; Pitchfork later confirmed that the album title and tracklist are official.

http://syro2eznzea2xbpi.onion

— Aphex Twin (@AphexTwin) August 18, 2014

Just had confirmed @WarpRecords have something going on at @OvalSpace @LCBFestival, Aphex Twin blimp outside pic.twitter.com/m4t1Yjstdw

— Jack Cooper (@heyjackcooper) August 16, 2014

We all know the feeling. You’re sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn’t cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it’s one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it’s better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again.

Grab the entire list as a Readlist.

On Zohydro

Stephen S. Hall examines the controversy over Zohydro, a new FDA-approved painkiller, and America’s prescription-painkiller epidemic.

New York: Stephen S. Hall – How Much Does It Hurt?

In the annals of new-drug rollouts, Zohydro seems to be in a class by itself. It has become a political nightmare for the drug’s manufacturer, Zogenix, Inc., and for the FDA—Massachusetts tried to ban it; the attorneys general of 28 states excoriated the FDA for approving the drug without "tamper-­resistant" features, a decision Senator Charles Schumer of New York has called "baffling"; and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has introduced legislation to roll back the approval. It has inspired apocalyptic warnings, mostly because Zohydro belongs to a class of drugs that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2011 has created a nationwide, doctor-­driven epidemic of addiction, death (roughly 16,000 a year), and unquantifiable familial devastation.On brands

Kate Losse writes about the insidious appeal of corporations acting like self-aware, meme-slinging persons on Twitter.

The New Inquiry: Kate Losse – Weird Corporate Twitter

But if the conceit of #weirdtwitter is that any average person in America can remake themselves as a pseudonymous #weirdtwitter comedian, corporations joining the fray have an outsize advantage, because they are neither anonymous nor average nor even a person. When corporations tweet something "weird" and "funny" to us, we pay more attention: The thought of a traditional corporate entity, which has historically had no direct "voice," suddenly distilling itself into an eccentric, devil-may-care character is instantly affecting, precisely because of how uncanny, even creepy, it is.On Common Core

Lyndsey Layton reports on the Common Core State Standards, the contentious nationwide education standard bankrolled and supported by the Bill Gates and Melinda Bill Foundation.

The Washington Post: Lyndsey Layton – How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled innovation because textbook publishers and software developers were catering to a large number of small markets instead of exploring breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating system.On cleaning memories

Michael Specter’s latest piece about the potential to manipulate memory and purge our most traumatic memories is now available online.

The New Yorker: Michael Specter – Partial recall

"I want to disentangle painful emotion from the memory it is associated with," she said. "Then somebody could recall a terrible trauma, like those my father obviously endured, without the terror that makes it so disabling. You would still have the memory, but not the overwhelming fear attached to it. That would be far more exciting than anything that happens in a movie." Before coming to New York, Schiller had heard—incorrectly, as it turned out—that the idea for "Eternal Sunshine" originated in LeDoux’s lab. It seemed like science fiction and, for the most part, it was. As many neuroscientists were aware, though, the plot also contained more than a hint of truth.On Twitter

In light of Twitter’s recent executive shakeups, Mike Isaac analyzes the company’s independent Media Division.

Medium: Mike Isaac – Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: Twitter Plans a Shakeup for its Media Division

This is a major departure for Twitter Media, an independent division long trumpeted as the shining bastion of what Twitter was getting right. These days, you won’t see a major network television ad campaign or TV show without some sort of Twitter branding or hashtag associated with it which, according to numerous sources, helped to introduce new users to the service.
But therein lies the problem. Twitter’s Media team is great at getting new people to use Twitter, but doesn’t worry about whether those people will keep using Twitter. And as I’ve written before, most of those new users indeed have not been sticking around.For more great longreads, visit our friends at Longreads.

Have any favorites that you’d like to see included in next week’s edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

We all know the feeling. You’re sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn’t cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it’s one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it’s better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again.

Grab the entire list as a Readlist.

On type wars

Jason Fagone reports on the fallout of famed type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones.

New York: Jason Fagone – A Type House Divided

According to a designer who used to work with Frere-Jones, his eye is so sharp that he can look at a printout of a letterform and tell if it’s one pixel off, the same way Ted Williams was said to be able to hold a baseball bat and tell if it was a half-ounce too heavy.On Damon Lindelof

On the eve of The Leftovers debut on HBO, Taffy Brodesser-Akner profiles Damon Lindelof and his struggle to move beyond the Lost backlash.

The New York Times Magazine: Taffy Brodesser-Akner – Damon Lindelof Promises You His New Show Won’t End Like ‘Lost’

George R. R. Martin, author of the "Game of Thrones" novels and a co-executive producer on their HBO adaptation, summed up the magnitude of the disappointment when he told The New Yorker his biggest fear in ending his own series: "What if I do a ‘Lost’?"
Lindelof was devastated.On @everyword

Ruth Spencer interviews Adam Parrish about his automated @everyword Twitter account, which wrapped up on Friday.

The Guardian: Ruth Spencer – Creator of @everyword explains the life and death of a Twitter experiment

Words aren't just things that we write and use in our speech. They are also things we think about individually. Like sex, weed, swag – when they're not in a sentence, we can also think about them individually. Everyword raises that question of thinking about a word just from that perspective, as a social object.
On the other hand, because @everyword is inside an individual person's Twitter stream, the words take on the context of whatever else is in the stream at the time. There's the possibility of weird serendipitous interactions between a word in your stream and some other tweets. The word "super" might be tweeted, and then you read a tweet about a school superintendent or Superman movie.On Chris Kooluris

Emily Dreyfuss profiles Chris Kooluris, an obsessive collector that converted his apartment into an arcade.

Wired: Emily Dreyfuss – Arcadia, A Love Story

A LITTLE OVER a year ago, Kooluris fell in love with a woman he met at work. Within six months, they got engaged, and he moved out of his Murray Hill apartment and into his fiancée’s bigger Brooklyn pad. ¶They began to adjust to living together: He tried her raw food diet, she started listening to GNR. In August 2013, they went on a vacation to the Grand Canyon. While on the trip, Kooluris read Ready Player One, a 2011 novel about a future world obsessed with the arcade game culture of the 1980s. "It awoke a monster in me," he says. "I just had this revelation that, you know, why shouldn’t I—in this short time that we’re here—surround myself with the things I really enjoy?"On 'World of Darkness'

Ian G Williams writes about the collapse of the long-awaited ‘World of Darkness’ game from CCP, the developer behind ‘Eve Online.’

The Guardian: Ian G Williams – World of Darkness – the inside story on the death of a game

“When experienced people leave the industry entirely, we lose institutional memory. Our games stagnate. I think AAA is in extended death throes. I think it’s going to look like the comics industry in a few years: a couple of huge corporations that dominate the mainstream attention, and then an enormous number of very small indies. Actually, it looks like that today.”For more great longreads, visit our friends at Longreads.

Have any favorites that you’d like to see included in next week’s edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

We all know the feeling. You’re sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn’t cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it’s one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it’s better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again.

Grab the entire list as a Readlist.

On Patricia Lockwood

Jesse Lichtenstein profiles poet Patricia Lockwood, best known for her brilliantly weird tweets.

The New York Times: Jesse Lichtenstein – The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas

Lockwood, who goes by "Tricia," may be best known for her persona on Twitter, where her steady stream of surreal, sexually explicit and often sexually impossible humor has won her 30,000 followers and a string of admirers in the world of comedy. Andy Richter, the longtime sidekick to Conan O’Brien, considers her a friend, though he has never met her offline: "She’s funny, she’s interesting and she’s a weirdo — which is all I ask for in a person."On Go

Alan Levinovitz writes about the difficulty of training computers to beat humans at the 2,500 year old game of Go.

Wired: Alan Levinovitz – The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can’t Win

"There is chess in the western world, but Go is incomparably more subtle and intellectual," says South Korean Lee Sedol, perhaps the greatest living Go player and one of a handful who make over seven figures a year in prize money. Subtlety, of course, is subjective. But the fact is that of all the world’s deterministic perfect information games — tic-tac-toe, chess, checkers, Othello, xiangqi, shogi — Go is the only one in which computers don’t stand a chance against humans.On Sabu

Adrian Chen met Lulzsec hacker Hector “Sabu” Monsegur following his sentencing in downtown New York. For more background, check out Steve Fishman’s 2012 profile from New York.

The New Yorker Elements: Adrian Chen – Anonymous no more: Sabu walks

Monsegur arrived with his public defenders and sat down without a word. He is a big man, with closely cropped hair, a thin chinstrap beard, and glasses. He wore a black button-down and baggy khaki pants. The hearing took less than an hour and had the valedictory feel of a graduation party, with the judge, prosecution, and defense all extolling how many cyber attacks Monsegur had thwarted, how many vulnerabilities he had helped fix, how many other hackers he helped imprison, all while enduring death threats and physical danger to the point that he and his family needed to be relocated from their apartment, in the East Village’s Jacob Riis projects.On the waffle taco

Venessa Wong explores Taco Bell’s breakfast menu and the pressure to invent products like the Waffle Taco.

Businessweek: Venessa Wong – Taco Bell’s Secret Recipe for New Products

"I brought the waffles in Monday morning at 7 a.m. and just started playing with them in the kitchen," she recalls. By taking the frozen waffle, leaving it to thaw at room temperature, folding it, and flash frying it in Taco Bell’s chalupa baskets, she ended up with a crispy waffle in the shape of a taco shell. By 9 a.m. it was stuffed with eggs, sausage, and cheese and being evaluated by executives at Taco Bell’s Irvine (Calif.) headquarters. "As soon as the team started to see it," she says, "there was this instant excitement, this buzz that this is a cool idea, this is a big idea."On the web

Adapted from a talk given at Beyond Tellerrand, Maciej Ceglowski considers advertising, big data, and the problems of the modern web.

Idlewords: Maciej Ceglowski – The internet with a human face

There’s another reason, besides fear, that’s driving us to save everything. That reason is hubris.
You’ve all seen those TV shows where the cops are viewing a scene from space, and someone keeps hitting “ENHANCE”, until pretty soon you can count the bacteria on the criminal’s license plate.
We all dream of building that ‘enhance’ button. In the past, we were going to build it with artificial intelligence. Now we believe in “Big Data”. Collect enough information, think of a clever enough algorithm, and you can find anything.
This is the classic programmer’s delusion, the belief that if you look deep enough, there’s a hidden deterministic pattern. Tap the chisel on the right spot and the rock will crack open.For more great longreads, visit our friends at Longreads.

Have any favorites that you’d like to see included in next week’s edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

We all know the feeling. You’re sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn’t cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it’s one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it’s better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again.

Grab the entire list as a Readlist.

On laundry

Jessica Pressler reports on Washio and the travails of companies trying to disrupt the world of laundry.

New York Magazine: Jessica Pressler – “Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry”

In early October, Washio opened up shop in San Francisco. Not surprisingly, the area around Silicon Valley was already awash in laundry disrupters. In addition to Prim, there was Laundry Locker, along with three other locker-technology-enabled businesses: Sudzee, Drop Locker, and ­Bizzie Box. There was Sfwash, which offered ecofriendly cleaning on top of pickup and delivery. There was even, briefly, a service called Your Hero Delivery, whose driver-founders dressed like superheroes.On Tom Cruise

Amy Nicholson considers Tom Cruise’s career up to and after the infamous Oprah couch moment.

LA Weekly: Amy Nicholson – How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star

You can probably picture it in your head: Tom Cruise, dressed in head-to-toe black, looming over a cowering Oprah as he jumps up and down on the buttermilk-colored couch like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Cruise bouncing on that couch is one of the touchstones of the last decade, the punchline every time someone writes about his career.
There's just one catch: It never happenedOn the internet

John Herrman writes about how sites are so tied to the whims of Facebook and Google and how quickly fortunes can change. Don’t miss Matt Haughey’s’ recap of MetaFilter’s troubles.

The Awl: John Herrman – The New Internet Gods Have No Mercy

People still visit sites directly, but less. Sites still link to one another, but with diminishing results. A site that doesn't care about Facebook will nonetheless come to depend on Facebook, and if Facebook changes how Newsfeed works, or how its app works, a large fraction of total traffic could appear or disappear very quickly.On Oculus Rift

Peter Rubin profiles Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey.

Wired: Peter Rubin – The Inside Story of Oculus Rift and How Virtual Reality Became Reality

Carmack got to work on the machine, hot-gluing a motion sensor to it and duct-taping on a ski-goggle strap. But his greatest contribution came in the code he wrote for it. The Rift’s biggest selling point was its 90-degree field of view, which Luckey accomplished by slapping a cheap magnifying lens on the display. The problem was, that lens distorted the image underneath, making it warped and uneven. So Carmack coded a version of Doom 3 that pre-­distorted the image, counteracting the effects of the magnifying lens and making the picture appear correct to the viewer. The result was a completely immersive gaming experience, the kind that would other­wise require $10,000 in high-end optics.On software

Quinn Norton writes about the terrifying mess of online security and surveillance.

Medium: Quinn Norton – Everything is broken

Look at it this way — every time you get a security update (seems almost daily on my Linux box), whatever is getting updated has been broken, lying there vulnerable, for who-knows-how-long. Sometimes days, sometimes years. Nobody really advertises that part of updates. People say “You should apply this, it’s a critical patch!” and leave off the “…because the developers fucked up so badly your children’s identities are probably being sold to the Estonian Mafia by smack addicted script kiddies right now.”For more great longreads, visit our friends at Longreads.

Have any favorites that you’d like to see included in next week’s edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

We all know the feeling. You’re sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn’t cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it’s one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it’s better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again.

Grab the entire list as a Readlist.

On Newark

Dale Russakoff follows up on Mark Zuckerberg’s headline-grabbing $100 million donation to Newark, New Jersey schools, and assesses the volatile mix of philanthropy, power, politics, and education reform four years later.

The New Yorker: Dale Russakoff – Schooled

When Winfrey asked Zuckerberg why he’d chosen Newark, he gestured toward Booker and Christie and said, "Newark is really just because I believe in these guys. . . . We’re setting up a one-hundred-million-dollar challenge grant so that Mayor Booker and Governor Christie can have the flexibility they need to . . . turn Newark into a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation." This was the first that Newark parents and teachers had heard about the revolution coming to their schools.On Nintendo

In an excerpt from his upcoming Console Wars book, Blake J. Harris digs into the early days of Nintendo.

Grantland: Blake J. Harris – The Rise of Nintendo: A Story in 8 Bits

Due to last-minute negotiation issues with King Features, Nintendo had lost the rights to Popeye, which forced Miyamoto to come up with something else. As a result, Arakawa, Stone, Judy, and a handful of warehouse employees didn’t know what to expect. They inserted the new processor into one of the thousands of unsold Radarscope machines and then watched the lights flicker as the words "Donkey Kong" came to life on the arcade screen. The initial impression was that this was a silly game with an even sillier name.On 'EVE Online'

Rich Stanton details the fascinating virtual manhunt in EVE Online that spanned nearly two years.

Rock, paper, shotgun: Rich Stanton – EVE Online And The Big Game Hunters

"Maximum camp mode, twenty-four seven or twenty three seven as we say in EVE parlance [the server has a short downtime every day] and so we waited and we waited, knowing he could move at any moment. Our crew covers all time zones, some are Australian, some are European, some in the US, so we could basically follow the sun. But we had deduced the guy was Russian so we figured it was most likely to happen in early evening European timezone hours."On H.R. Giger

Matt Zoller Seitz remembers H.R. Giger, who passed away this week.

RogerEbert.com: Matt Zoller Seitz – H.R. Giger, 1940-2014: The Xenomorph’s Father

Giger knew what scared us. He always did.
And he was ahead of the cultural curve in ways that only true artists can be. His work anticipated the real-world blurring of the organic and the mechanical, the real and the virtual, that powered so much science fiction and so much horror over the last thirty years. The fact that horror and science fiction have become increasingly indistinguishable is partly due to Giger's imagery, and designs that borrowed or outright stole from him.On jellyfish

Tim Flannery writes about the accelerating growth of jellyfish due to human activity.

The New York Review of Books: Tim Flannery – They’re Taking Over!

It’s now known that the brush of a single tentacle is enough to induce “Irukandji syndrome.” It sets in twenty to thirty minutes after a sting so minor it leaves no mark, and is often not even felt. Pain is initially focused in the lower back. Soon the entire lumbar region is gripped by debilitating cramps and pounding pain—as if someone is taking a baseball bat to your kidneys.For more great longreads, visit our friends at Longreads.

Have any favorites that you’d like to see included in next week’s edition? Send them along to @thomashouston or share in the comments below.

We all know the feeling. You’re sleepless in the sad hours of the night or stumbling around early on a hazy weekend morning in need of something to read, and that pile of unread books just isn’t cutting it. Why not take a break from the fire hose of Twitter and RSS and check out our weekly roundup of essential writing from around the web about technology, culture, media, and the future? Sure, it’s one more thing you can feel guilty about sitting in your Instapaper queue, but it’s better than pulling in vain on your Twitter list again.

Grab the entire list as a Readlist.

On bodies

Logan Hill writes about the pro athlete-caliber fitness programs modern leading actors undertake to get pumped up.

Men’s Journal: Logan Hill – Building a Bigger Action Hero

Sometimes that impulse to get fit can disrupt a film. Six-packs and bulky chests can look freakishly anachronistic in a prestige period picture: It's not just that Tudor princes and Victorian lotharios didn't have waxed chests and 12-packs – it's that almost nobody had bodies like these until the last decades of supplements and fitness science.On Soylent

Lizzie Widdicombe profiles Rob Rhinehart and his high tech food replacement, Soylent.

The New Yorker: Lizzie Widdicombe – The end of food

Eventually, Rhinehart compiled a list of thirty-five nutrients required for survival. Then, instead of heading to the grocery store, he ordered them off the Internet—mostly in powder or pill form—and poured everything into a blender, with some water. The result, a slurry of chemicals, looked like gooey lemonade. Then, he told me, "I started living on it."On Apple and Samsung

Kurt Eichenwald investigates the rivalry between Apple and Samsung.

Vanity Fair: Kurt Eichenwald – The Great Smartphone War

A year later, Korean newspapers reported that the government had fined Samsung for obstructing the investigation at the facility. At the time, a legal team representing Apple was in Seoul to take depositions in the Samsung case, and they read about the standoff. From what they heard, one of the Samsung employees there had even swallowed documents before the investigators were allowed in. That certainly didn’t bode well for Apple’s case; how, the Apple lawyers said half-jokingly among themselves, could they possibly compete in a legal forum with employees who were so loyal to the company that they were willing to eat incriminating evidence?On video ads

David Segal digs into the fascinating, byzantine world of online video advertising.

The New York Times: David Segal – The Great Unwatched

Many of the ads were running in tiny players, 3 inches by 2 inches, on the sites. Some were auto-playing. But disappointment turned to rage when she read the list of domain names where the ads were running; it included pornographic websites. The team opened one site with an especially lewd name and gaped in horror. "Oh my God," some shouted. Others cursed.On evidence

Writer Clive Thompson reflects on the power of evidence and direct observation.

Medium: Clive Thompson – The Moons of Jupiter

I’m a science journalist and a space buff, and I grew up oohing and aahing over the pictures of Jupiter sent back by various NASA space probes. But I’d never owned a telescope, and never done much stargazing other than looking up in the night unaided. In my 45 years I’d never directly observed Jupiter and its moons myself.For more great longreads, visit our friends at Longreads.

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