Basically
This week, bump stocks in Vegas. The paper towel toss in Puerto Rico. Harvey "you're fired" in Hollywood. In good news: ICAN took the Nobel Prize (and called Trump a moron). The moon got big enough to Harvest—which does not explain why you was acting like that. Plus, for Canada, it’s Thanks Giving at the moment. And for the rest of you, it’s just regular old Sunday—which is a fine day. Or maybe it’s Columbus Day eve. That is up to you.
Verbatim
So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint
Let's head on down the road
There's somewhere I gotta go
And you don't know how it feels
No, you don't know how it feels to be me
Let’s remember that. And him.
ThingsWe’re suckers for fake food trends spun by a few savvy folks who know how to wield a tongue-half-in-cheek tweet. Or ten. Now that nobody tumbls anymore, sometimes we get a little sad that we might not ever get another snackwave. But, worry not. All it takes is one staff writer on deadline to pull out a half-assed trend piece in a prominent title mashing food fads with cryptocurrency, and then, hey ho, all-steak diets for the bitcoin carnivores! (We’re not denying that this is perfect.)
Look, we found the incantation that will bring about the end of email: “It’s basically Stratechery for your quads.”
Joseph Bernstein’s excellent excavation of documents on Breitbart and Milo for Buzzfeed this week has rightly gathered all the attention—as unsurprisingly fetid as the world behind that tasteful curtain turns out to be, the best bit is definitely the unfiltered sampler of Steve Bannon’s email style. Read it if you haven’t. If that report documents the machinations of idiot puppetmasters who happen to be brilliant at fomenting chaos, perhaps read David Lewis reporting for The Stranger from a Seattle white nationalist convention as a companion document of their horrible puppets.
We’ve tried swishing it around in our mouths, rotating it in our hands, and approaching it from different angles. Max Read does all that at once, writing of Facebook as a hypercube, taking glimpses as they come and avoiding fixation with any one story or metaphor (except the one with the hypercube; that’s sticky). Facebook’s immensity demands an approach different from those honed for grappling with media monopolies, global NGOs, political parties, or religious institutions. “Facebook’s actual value system seems less positive than recursive… The values of Facebook are Facebook.”
Toymaker Mattel scrapped their plans for Aristotle—a smart-hub / AI-parent—after their new CTO listened to concerned parents. Or he listened to his sources inside Google, which announced its own video-enabled, AI-enhanced, wearable, family-friendly, home hub in the same week. It’s like Google Glass, but you put it on everything but your face.
“The ideal of journalistic objectivity is an outright threat to democracy.” Post-truuuu...
Toronto proud: An Oral History of the IKEA Monkey.
As long as we’re sort of on the subject of Toronto, local comedian Tim Gilbert’s album “Please Help Me I Am Very Sick” is a little-known masterpiece. But for the weak second track, its dark-yet-playful tone is representative of the quality comedy in this here city.
Toodles poodles! Oh and for Anna’s mom who has asked 44 times that we include a Facebook share button (that's every week since we started): We can't. We won't.
Dear @mom(s), Click this link, then copy and paste it to your Facebook page. And @everyoneelse, that there link works for you too, in whatever way YOU WILL TELL YOUR FRIENDS.
