We Love the Internet 2016/39: The Rapping, deconstructed edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Spotify Is Perfecting the Art of the Playlist
• Where Does The Apple TV Go From Here?
• “Think Different” is Bad Advice
• The digital age has destroyed the concept of ownership, and companies are taking advantage of it
• How Nielsen Is Shedding Old Perceptions, and Building New Businesses
• Snapchat spectacles and the future of wearables
• Slate, now 20 years old, reflects on the value of taking the long view and not chasing digital media trends
• Robot Creator Sam Esmail on How He Handles Criticism of the Show

Reference points:

• Here are all the things young people have been accused of killing
• 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time
• Making video ads that work on Facebook
• The greatest record sleeves – as chosen by the designers
• The Simpsons by the Data
• The truth about Pepe the Frog and the cult of Kek

Longer reads:

• The fall of Salon.com
• I Let Facebook’s Algorithms Run My Life For Weeks
• Inside the final days of Roger Ailes’s reign at Fox News and Why She’s Suing Fox News

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time
• Canada’s Justin Trudeau Rates His Internet Critics
• Real life transformer
• What exactly is a microaggression? Let these examples from Hollywood movies explain
• Makeup Transformations – Celebrity Makeovers
• How the Mona Lisa became so overrated
• ping pong carnival
• Most Amazing Whistler in the World

Things to look at/read:

• An Easy Guide to Writing the Great American Novel
• Hand-crafted, loving sketches for my friends over at Reddit/r/RoastMe
• The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel
• Brangelina Is Dead; Long Live Angelina
• What Is Shakespeare’s Most Popular Play?
• Practice doesn’t make perfect

Animal corner:

• 15 Pictures Of Wiener Dogs In Costumes Having The Time Of Their Lives
• Smart Cat Knock On The Door
• 19 Dogs Who Are Honestly Going Straight To Jail

Tweets of the week:

• this is the best screensaver cos whenever i get a notification, Kanye holds it up for me
• So this is how they sell music on the streets of Mexico…
• The funniest encounter I had this summer…
• 2016, ya’ll.
• Huge if true:

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer pop culture articles:

• In the bizarro world of Miss America, losers smile and winners sob
• What happened to Robert Swift?
• Why America Will Never Stop Trying To Solve JonBenét Ramsey’s Murder
• Brent Brown Wants To Build America’s Next Great Family Entertainment Franchise, His Investors Want To Know Where Their $100 Million Went
• Barack Obama: The ultimate exit interview
• The People’s Cheeseburger

 

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We Love the Internet 2016/38: The How to think like Shakespeare edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Who’s Too Young for an App? Musical.ly Tests the Limits
• Secret life of a seven year old Instagram star
• We’ve Reached Peak Curation In Music. Can Collisions Save Us From Ourselves?
• Vanity Killed the Social Media Star
• How Breitbart Conquered the Media
• It does not pay for advertisers to narrow their targets too much
• Silicon Valley’s Quest to Make Periods Cool
• YouTube Is Building Community—And It’s Not Just About Video

Reference points:

• The A to Z Guide to Culture Decks
• Discover how Noirbnb was created.
• Wish you were here — Qantas revamps the Out of Office reply
• How Amazon’s Pricing Algorithm Is Designed To Hurt Consumers
• The Bored Internet User’s Guide
• 28 TV Network Chiefs on Dream Casting, the Reboot Craze and What Happens Under President Trump
• Kevin Hart Emoji App Leaps to No. 1 on Apple App Store Paid Chart

Longer reads:

• I Used to Be a Human Being
• Corey Feldman and the battle for the internet’s soul
• The great question of the 21st century: Whose black box do you trust?
• The Eye Knows What People Want to Watch

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Laguna Pool Drop 2
• Kid Obliterating His Rugby Opponents Is An Absolute Monster
• Homer Simpson: An economic analysis

Things to look at/read:

• How to Think Like Shakespeare
• Solving Chicago’s murders could prevent more
• Fear of a College-Educated Barista
• How to Pick the Fastest Line at the Supermarket

Animal corner:

• Baby monkey befriends a kitty
• I just died in your arms tonight, Cat.
• 11 Pet Products That Go Too Far

Tweets of the week:

• LOOOOOOOOOOOL these South London Dominos drivers are a mess
• I didn’t know you could get a full page ad on the front of the Evening News these days
• Uncanny
• The Dalai Lama, seen here illustrating the basic Buddhist belief that life is suffering, pain, and misery.

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer pop culture articles:

• Milo Yiannopoulos Represents a New Force in Electoral Politics
• Dance Music 101: An Online Reading Course
• The great fall of Chyna
• Dispatches from the rap wars
• Man v rat: could the long war soon be over?
• Patagonia’s philosopher king
• Game On
• Holy Shit, ‘South Park’ Is 20!

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We Love the Internet 2016/37: The Drug of choice edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Game Time For Twitter: Jack Dorsey’s Big Bet On Live Events
• The Netflix Backlash: Why Hollywood Fears a Content Monopoly
• McDonald’s shuts YouTube channel amid low interest
• Facebook vs the media
• Beyond the iPhone
• Why are there so many women in audience engagement?

Reference points:

• Booknotes Volume One: Clever books we’ve read so you don’t have to

Longer reads:

• What’s So Special About FX President John Landgraf? and How FX became TV’s best, most reliable network
• ‘Created’ in China: Shenzhen is making hardware like Silicon Valley makes apps
• When your boss is an algorithm
• Facebook’s News Feed Turns 10
• The Fight for the Future of NPR              
• The seventh-grader’s sext was meant to impress him.
• The Sandy Hook hoax
• I tried to make a meme and lost my mind

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Bronx To Billions: The Forbes Guide To Hip-Hop History
• A GIF Illustrating The Rise Of The Internet
• Alien VS Predator Stop Motion

Things to look at/read:

• If The Events Of Disney Movies Were Reported By Today’s Media
• Shitty food porn
• A timeline of Earth’s average temperature
• This 3-Year-Old Tried Cotton Candy For The First Time And Went Absolutely Nuts
• Have We Witnessed the Death of Boybands?
• How to Correctly Sing the Word “Love”
• One of the Most Important Crosswords in New York Times History
• These Are the Most Oddly-Named Towns in Each U.S. State

Animal corner:

• -Swing and Maru.-
• This Tiny Bird Got Tiny Custom Snowshoes For His Deformed Feet

Tweets of the week:

• Unsure Trump
• Someone on Facebook did a 9/11 Crossfit workout. I…
• Jesus Christ.
• This Peep Show reboot looks fucking horrible
• Oh for fu…

Part 3: For the weekend

Reference points

• 19 Wikipedia Pages That’ll Send You Into A Week-Long Wikihole
• Every Netflix Original Series, Ranked (Again)
• All 314 Bruce Springsteen Songs, Ranked From Worst to Best

Longer pop culture articles:

• The drug of choice for the age of kale
• ‘We’re the Only Plane in the Sky’
• Is Ivanka for real?
• Laura Jane Grace: A Trans Punk Rocker’s Fight to Rebuild Her Life
• Inside the fight to reveal the CIA’s torture secrets
• The Book of Bruce Springsteen
• How Snowden escaped
• Little People, Big Woes in Hollywood: Low Pay, Degrading Jobs and a Tragic Death

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We Love the Internet 2016/36: The This is what’s missing from journalism edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• BuzzFeed Regroups as Media Turns Video-Centric
• Flirt. Ghost. A journey into the social media lives of teens
• The worldwide cage
• Facebook Must Either Innovate Or Admit Defeat At The Hands Of Fake News Hoaxsters
• Is Elon Musk trying to do too much too fast?
• Amazon Taps $1 Billion Focus Group by Streaming Shows on Twitch
• Comics and cartoons are coming to life well beyond the page

Reference points:

• This is what’s missing from journalism right now
• The Rules of Pitching
• The Elements of Value

Longer reads:

• Why The Simpsons Is the Best TV Show Ever and Why ‘Deadwood’ Is a Top-10 TV Show of All Time
• How algorithms rule our working lives
• The once and future king of esports
• Could this be the year movies stopped mattering?

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Popularity of baby names over time
• Total Eclipse of the Heart Literal Video Version
• A two-year-old’s solution to the trolley problem
• I’m raising my girl to be an evil genius.
• Kurt Talks Backwards #1
• Insane Urban Downhill Mountain Bike
• Southwest Looney Tunes

Things to look at/read:

• A. Vice: Inside Media Mogul Shane Smith’s Santa Monica Estate
• Calculating the Exact Amount of Banter in That Photo of Those Eton Schoolboys Who Met Putin
• Premier League’s Wealth Often Subsidizes Clubs Across the Channel
• A Celebrity Z-List? Yes, It Exists

Animal corner:

• A failed experiment in cat shaving

Tweets of the week:

• Cannot unsee.
• If olive oil is made from olives and peanut oil is made from peanuts, what do you suppose baby oil is made from?
• find a man who looks at you the way russell crowe looks at maps
• Tweet every day with the confidence of a man with 34 followers shouting at a celebrity.
• Your masculinity might be fragile, but is it “reclaim four letters so’s the queers don’t queer ’em up” fragile?

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer pop culture articles:

• How Elizabeth Holmes’ House of Cards shame came tumbling down
• From E.T. to Stranger Things, an Oral History of Kids Cursing On Screen
• Twilight of the Four Seasons
• An Oral History of “We Built This City,” the Worst Song of All Time
• The Oral History of the Comedy Central Roast
• Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns
• Edward Snowden’s Long, Strange Journey to Hollywood

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We Love the Internet 2016/35: The Millennial whoop edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Blogging gave us everything we love — and hate — about the Web
• The Concept of ‘Cat Face’
• Who Killed YTMND?
• Facebook Live: Too Much, Too Soon
• Go ahead: Waste time on the Internet.
• Katy Perry knows exactly how much Spotify is punishing Apple exclusive artists
• Yuval Noah Harari on big data, Google and the end of free will
• Length Matters

Reference points:

• A Stat to Explain Barb, the Internet, and Television
• What it takes to manage a daily popup Snapchat channel from the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio
• Animated diagrams

Longer reads:

• Are Viral Recipes Ruining Cooking?
• Google, Uber and the evolution of transport as a service
• Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine
• The ibrain is here
• Cindy Gallop doesn’t care what you think

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Best Comeback Ever
• Ruben’s Elevator
• 10 Best Structured Movies of All Time
• Ice Cream Melting In Macro

Things to look at/read:

• The millennial whoop
• Why trigger warnings are really so controversial, explained
• How Do Mathematicians Cut Cake?
• All The Things You’ll Learn At University That a Lecturer Will Never Teach You
• 26 Pictures That’ll Make You Say “WTF Were You Thinking?”
• The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total Collapse of Humanity in Order to Save It
• #pricedoutlondoner
• Skyscanner’s Response To Giving Someone A 47 Year Layover Was PR Gold

Animal corner:

• Luckiest dog in the world

Tweets of the week:

• me: black lives matter. my mentions:

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer pop culture articles:

• The Real-Life Superhero Who Beats the Cops to Bike Thieves
• The Electric, Infuriating Nick Kyrgios
• The Uber Killer: The Real Story of One Night of Terror
• Amy Schumer: ‘I’m not trying to be likable’
• The troubled teen industry has been a disaster for decades
• I spent five years with some of Trump’s biggest fans
• Let’s “Fix” Racism in Movies and TV
• David Chang’s Unified Theory of Deliciousness

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We Love the Internet 2016/34: The Why am I so fat? edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet
• The unbreakable genius of Mark Zuckerberg
• Where is God on the small screen?
• If a bot hasn’t chatted you up yet, one will soon
• The invisible women of videogames
• Postmates has failed to make Uber-for-anything cheap, and is quietly misleading customers about it
• Access, Accountability Reporting and Silicon Valley
• NPR Website To Get Rid Of Comments

Reference points:

• The stuff we really need is getting more expensive. Other stuff is getting cheaper.
• How an Algorithm Learned to Identify Depressed Individuals by Studying Their Instagram Photos
• Five Years of Tim Cook’s Apple in Charts
• Comparing load times

Longer reads:

• Social media use in the UK
• The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction
• Tim Cook, the interview: Running Apple ‘is sort of a lonely job’
• The yellow king

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• The Fight for Falluja | 360 VR Video
• Hot Wheels Road Trip
• Every Jason Statham Kick. Ever.
• 25 MILLION Orbeez in a pool- Do you sink or float?

Things to look at/read:

• Why am I so fat?
• The sandwich that ate the world
• Every Type Of Female Action Movie Character
• The lure of Japan’s mysterious ruins
• Transfer window: exposing the widely held myths about how clubs sign players
• Timescape: Hall’s Harbour, Nova Scotia

Animal corner:

• Look At This Frickin’ Chicken Walking Around With Pants On
• Sir Nils Olav promoted to Brigadier by Norwegian King’s Guard
• Dog Becomes Local Legend For Walking 4 Miles Into Town Every Day Just To Say ‘Sup’ To All His Human Friends

Tweets of the week:

• This picture is in today’s @suttonguardian
• Here it is!! The video of me getting my hair shaved for #StrangerThings. Enjoy!
• IM NOT EVEN SUPPOSED TO LAUGH BUT OMG someone take it off
• .
• An artist’s impression of tonight’s inaugural #NightTube service. Seems legit.

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer pop culture articles:

• The Uber Killer: The Real Story of One Night of Terror
• The Death of Flair: As Friday’s Goes Minimalist, What Happens to the Antiques?
• The most exclusive restaurant in America
• The implosion of the daily fantasy industry is a bro-classic tale
• Inside The Race To Become The Chipotle Of Pizza
• Ripped: My Life as a Competitive Bodybuilder
• Walmart’s Out-of-Control Crime Problem Is Driving Police Crazy
• Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom To Be Murdered

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We Love the Internet 2016/33: The Secret life of cadavers edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Robot and Why TV Twists Don’t Work Anymore (spoilers for this week’s episode)
• How do you tell a better story in sports?
• Imaging, Snapchat and mobile
• What I learned after taking over my 13-year-old sister’s Snapchat for two weeks

Reference points:

• I keep a list in my head of the awful reality of today’s IT
• Wikiverse turns Wikipedia into a visual universe of articles
• Text analysis of Trump’s tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half
• The lost infrastructure of social media.
• Hey Siri
• An Encyclopedia of Every Literary Plot, Ever
• Seven ways that AI could be A-OK

Longer reads:

• “A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment
• How to innovate the Silicon Valley way
• This is Your Life in Silicon Valley
• SightSound Versus Apple, and the Death Squad for Patents
• Sex, lies and YouTube: The predatory side of internet fame
• To survive, the game of business needs to update its rules
• Playing The Long Game Inside Tim Cook’s Apple
• A compulsive audience and a complicit news media

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Olympics special

• These are some of the coolest experiments in digital news coverage of the 2016 Rio Olympics
• The Rise of Britain’s Cycling Empire
• 14 video game sports that would make great Olympic events
• Simone Biles is the best gymnast in the world
• Is Simone Biles really unbeatable? Breaking down the physics behind her gymnastics
• We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance
• The alternates

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Super MARIO Bros – Excel Stop-Motion
• Hikea
• Werner Herzog’s meditations on a connected world
• Most robots dancing simultaneously – Guinness World Records

Things to look at/read:

• All Mapped Out
• 4 Men with 4 Very Different Incomes Open Up About the Lives They Can Afford
• Why Self-Help Guru James Altucher Only Owns 15 Things
• Why we’re post fact
• The Hunt For GTA V’s Cut Content
• A day in the life of 16-year-old rare-sneaker dealer Benjamin Kickz.
• The week democracy died

Animal corner:

• The 31 Best Animal Photobombs Of All Time
• Dolphin jumps out of water and steals iPad

Tweets of the week:

• I hate uni already
• My god. This is the funniest video I’ve seen in a long time.
• Jason Kenny packing his kit into a Bag for Life just after winning his sixth gold medal is the most British thing I’ve ever seen
• I’m crying there was a bee in her flowers

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer pop culture articles:

• The Secret Lives of Cadavers
• Fractured lives: How the Arab world came apart
• Who Is the Best Movie Cop of the Past 30 Years?
• The Many Man-children of Todd Phillips
• Meet the California couple who use more water than every home in Los Angeles combined
• Shame less
• Is America any safer?

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