All Airlines Are Now the Same

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Everyone knows that air travel isn’t what it used to be. Domestic flights are crowded and unglamorous. One receives little more than peanuts, and full meals may not be offered even in first class. You have to fight with your fellow passengers for… read more

Driving Without a Smartphone

A new law in Georgia discourages drivers from even touching a screen. Whether or not it improves safety, it could help break people’s phone habits.

Last week, for the first time in years, I stopped my car at a red light and didn’t bide the time by fondling my smartphone. This isn’t a proud admission, but it is an honest one: Pretty much every time I stop my car at a traffic signal, I pick up my phone and do something with it. I’m not… read more

Ulysses and the Lie of Technological Progress

How a broken Twitter adaption of James Joyce’s novel reveals the secret of Bloomsday

Today is Bloomsday, a folk holiday adopted to celebrate the life and work of the Irish writer James Joyce, in particular his 1922 novel Ulysses. The name derives from the book’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, one of the Dubliners the book follows through the day of June 16, 1904. First celebrated mere years after the novel’s publication, Bloomsday festivities have been… read more

The Internet of Things You Don’t Really Need

Smart devices turn every industry into the computer industry, and dupe consumers into thinking their lives are better for it in the process.

Atlanta turns yellow for two weeks in April. Streets, driveways, terraces, cars—everything cakes with pollen. It’s the trees that cause the worst of it. Pine, oak, sweet gum, sycamore, mulberry, hackberry, birch, willow. Prolific itching, sneezing, and car-washing ensue. Grilling season officially begins when the pollen subsides. This year’s was particularly grievous, and perhaps that’s why I was so eager… read more

The Cathedral of Computation

We’re not living in an algorithmic culture so much as a computational theocracy.

Algorithms are everywhere, supposedly. We are living in an “algorithmic culture,” to use the author and communication scholar Ted Striphas’s name for it. Google’s search algorithms determine how we access information. Facebook’s News Feed algorithms determine how we socialize. Netflix’s and Amazon’s collaborative filtering algorithms choose products and media for us. You hear it everywhere. “Google announced a change to… read more

Swing Copters: The Randomness of the Universe, Captured in Pixels

The creator of Flappy Bird is back with a game offering the sublime agony that comes with mastering a craft—and still failing.

Many of the highest-performing professional athletes are also the most superstitious. Serena Williams bounces the tennis ball five time before her first serve, twice before the second. Michael Jordan wore his University of North Carolina basketball shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform. Baseball hall of famer Wade Boggs bore a bounty of superstitions. Among them: He ate chicken before each… read more

The McRib: Enjoy Your Symptom

How McDonald's strange, seasonal sandwich explains the rest of its menu

Each year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ribs, its slathering of barbecue sauce acting as camouflage as much as coating. “Pork” is a generous term,… read more

The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder

From the New Aesthetic to Alien Aesthetics, at the Atlantic

You know that art has changed when a new aesthetic movement announces itself not with a manifesto, but with a tumblr. Manifestos offer their grievances and demands plainly, all at once, on a single page—not in many hundred entries. “Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber,” wrote Filippo Marinetti in his 1909 Futurist Manifesto. “We want… read more

The Mereology of Cola

On generic names for carbonated soft drinks

Harman links to this lovely map infographic of generic names for soft drinks in the United States (click below for a bigger version). It’s been around for a while but is worth revisiting in light of a few points Graham makes in his post. First, Graham wonders what comprises the green “other” category in these maps, which is far more… read more

The Legume, the Piston, and the Bearded Man

My Contribution to the Speculative Heresy/The Inhumanities Cross-Blog Event

This week and next, Speculative Heresy and The Inhumanities are running a series on speculative realism and ethics, responses addressing the following question: â??While speculative realism has critiqued anthropocentrism in ontology, and critical animal studies has critiqued anthropocentrism in ethics, there has yet to be many productive connections made between the two. With each offering the other important insights, the… read more