The revelation of the new new Two World Trade Center, a stack of seven boxes that rise one thousand three hundred and forty feet into the sky, designed by the rather busy architect Bjarke Ingels, demands a fair amount of processing: It is replacing one of the better designs of the World Trade Center master plan, by Norman Foster, a tight bundle of four angular towers; in a shift of the New York media industry’s “center of gravity” to downtown, it will house the headquarters of both News Corp. and 21st Century Fox, whose Fox News will be broadcasting from the World Trade Center, its headlines streaking above the heads of passersby; and when (if) Two World Trade Center is completed by its target date of 2020, the re-constituted World Trade Center will be complete nearly twenty years after 9/11.

Though apparently designed at least in part to satisfy the whims of the Murdoch clan, whose money is required to complete the tower, resulting in a silhouette that is clumsy from some angles, Two World Trade Center is not entirely without charm or ingenuity — each box will have a garden which will “evoke varying climates, from tropical to arctic,” according to Wired — or recent precedent — stacks of boxes are real cool right now — even if Ingels’ rhetoric of reuniting the “streetscapes of Tribeca” with the “towers Downtown,” and of “horizontal meets vertical, diversity becomes unity” achieves the distinction of being among the more inane proclamations about yet another building with the unfortunate circumstance of being constructed in what has become New York City’s deepest, blackest hole of disingenuousness.

★★★★★ A dark blur of rain swept across the river to the north. It went on and away, and the sun sent the shadows of duct vents nearly straight down the face of the new building’s superstructure. The cross street was humid and still, but the air was blowing along Broadway. The light showed the dull coat of dust and pollen on the matching tasteful deep-navy paint jobs of a BMW and a Mercedes parked one after the other. A subtle sparkle rose from the pillar of a Muni Meter. Some ways ahead, inside the Park, a vivid yellow carriage wheel turned. A bench had enough shade to read a phone screen by. The high haze looked as if it were straining toward greater solidity. Another horse clopped by, and some ticking Citi Bikes. A sparrow wallowed in the deep dust; the breeze flipped notebook pages. Later, in the warmth of the gathering evening, the children done with their dance recital ricocheted among the big concrete blocks outside the high school entrance.

More people know how to use Facebook, which was started in 2004, than natively speak any single language; the particular syntax of Google’s email service, which soft-opened the same year, is familiar to about three times as many people as live in the United States; Pinterest won’t say how many people use its app, but those people have hit the “Pin” button at least fifty billion times. These platforms, which are conduits for human attention, have become staggeringly large.

A single person likely participates in sustaining many of these companies at once, which can make it difficult to understand how they relate to one another. You receive Gmail messages as you check Facebook; you get buzzes from Instagram as you scroll through Twitter. One moment you’re deep within an app platform reading news, two seconds later you’re sending private messages through another app that also hosts news. Media from one service appears in feeds elsewhere; the tranches of your identity represented by each swell and shrink constantly. This takes place, increasingly if not mostly, on your phone, where notifications pull you from place to place transparently and quickly enough that the process doesn’t feel like an intentional one. The phone, like the computer or the browser before it, seems neutral.

But of course it isn’t: Every path a user takes through the software on an iPhone, or an Android phone, is intentionally designed. iOS is an expression of Apple’s ambitions just as the News Feed is an expression of Facebook’s. Today’s iPhone is the product of years of refinement; its software, iOS, has been significantly altered over the last eight years, but has been refined largely in the service of one main function: running apps. Apps in a grid. Apps that open and close. Apps that were created first to access the large number of people using smartphones; apps that helped make smartphones more vital, turning that large number into an enormous one, and altering their platforms’ characters in the process. The iPhone, and Android phones, are, for different people, ways to check Facebook, or to use Snapchat, or to play games, or to take pictures, or to text on one of a dozen functionally similar services. But the hierarchy never changed. The platforms that host our conversations and our media and our social performances still answer to platforms of their own.

In recent years, Facebook’s News Feed created an enormous opportunity for the publishing business. Facebook, the place where people went to see what their friends were up to, became a central destination. News Feed collected and spread links and comments and videos, creating a virtuous cycle of attention — to organizations posting from the outside, its growth and ability to drive attention suggested endless demand. This culminated in something like industry dominance; news organizations and entertainment sites and video producers, some more intentionally than others, found that, even on the internet, the best way to reach the most people was still through a platform that isn’t their own. For Facebook, publishers filled a void in the service, supplying near-endless matter for conversation, reference and consumption within the feed; for publishers, Facebook provided growth.

Facebook’s influence on what publishers produce is obvious because publishers produce media: They wear their sensibilities on their sleeves, and express them in familiar language, so it’s easy to watch them change. Just as Twitter’s brand of competitive conversation breeds and favors certain behaviors, Facebook’s metrics-sorted News Feed breeds and favors its own. Media must account for its container, and a platform is an opportunity for publishers only insofar as they are willing to produce media in the platform’s native languages and forms. These languages and forms change as the platform does; the platform changes as its owner sees fit. Facebook as a video host, or as a host for articles, strains the definition of partnership. How can you partner with the company that provides the entire context for your existence? This arrangement likewise strains the definition of a publication, which — having lost some degree of self-determination — is reduced to the sum of its content.

What’s easy to miss from within Facebook’s platform, where its relative size implies total self-determination — is that it is similarly dependent on two others: Android and iOS. Facebook reported 3.54 billion dollars in revenue last quarter, seventy-three percent of which came from smartphones. At the same time last year, twenty-four percent of its monthly visited on mobile; now, that number exceeds eighty-five percent. This is staggering but contingent growth: It is billions of dollars gathered from advertising placed in apps used on platforms designed and ultimately controlled by Apple and Google. Social platforms’ businesses are contingent on the mobile platforms alongside which they have taken over the world.

This situation is not lost on Facebook, which is large enough to characterize as a competitor to Apple and Google. The company attempted to make its own phone, which failed. It has been more successful in breaking its app apart into pieces, isolating messaging from the News Feed while seeing growth in both. It has acquired other, simpler services — like Instagram and WhatsApp — and it has taken steps to survive in a world in which the app grid is no longer the first thing people see when they check their devices, which, it turns out, may not even be phones. (Facebook is attempting to buy its way out in front of that, too.)

Recent announcements regarding the parent platforms have given this task a sense of urgency. Google described a feature in the next version of Android that reaches within apps to provide contextual information to others:

If you and a friend are discussing a movie, just long-press the home button to pull up a card with information about the movie, like showtimes and ratings. If you’re watching a YouTube video of a famous actor, just call up Google Now to get more information about that person.

Foursquare, another service the company included in its presentation, would seem to function not as an app with its own interface and friend connections and advertisements, but as a piece of infrastructure in a Google service. This feature, an extension of Google Now, a fuller attempt to reconstruct Google’s smartphone software around “cards,” which glean recommendations, predictions and updates from, among other sources, your email, searches, and maps. It recommends articles not in a feed housed within an app but on the home screen, based on sites you’ve read and what else their readers read. I’m not sure I’d call the recommendations Now has given me good, exactly, but they are extraordinarily specific and often unexpected — they project, above all, the presence of lots and lots of data.

Apple, yesterday, showed off something similar — a change to iOS that treats apps less as silos than as transparent, accessible entities:

Proactive assistance presents the most relevant information without compromising users’ privacy and suggests actions at a particular moment — even before you start typing — automatically suggesting apps to launch or people to contact based on usage patterns, and notifying you when you need to leave for appointments, taking into account traffic conditions. iOS 9 can even learn what you typically listen to in a certain location or at a particular time of day, so when you plug in headphones at the gym or hop in the car before work, it can automatically display playback controls for your preferred app. Typed search queries deliver more relevant results from more categories, including sports scores and schedules, videos and simple math calculations.

Both moves make sense: They give these companies, who are not shy about reminding the public that they have presided over the creation of vast new industries, more control over what has grown, they feel, on their turf. Such changes might also fundamentally change what an app is, and how it should function: An operating system in which an app’s utility is extracted from its interface and integrated into the main software is an operating system that regards apps in a meaningfully different way than the iOS or Android of yesterday. Just as a publisher’s proposition to an advertiser is undermined by Facebook’s ability to advertise further up the referral chain, an app — even an app like Facebook! — might find business models reliant on platforms within platforms less appealing. (You could argue that in-app interfaces have already been demoted by notifications, which provide direct access not just to apps but to specific parts and actions of apps. A simple messaging app exists substantially within notifications; many in the first wave of Apple Watch apps are, essentially, notification filters.)

This is the proper context to understand Apple’s music services and News app, which, not unlike Facebook’s Instant articles, will host publications’ content natively. (It will also allow publications to sell their own advertising, or supply ads for a cut of revenue.) Whether or not Apple’s News app will succeed is as much a question about how Apple’s platform will change as it is about the specifics of the first version of the app: Do people want a Flipboard-style panel of nicely formatted news stories with no social context? And if they do, won’t publishers face the same identity obliteration they found on News Feed, where publications’ names and reputations have been relegated to captions between panels of official platform content? Or is finding a foothold on Apple’s platform about making sure you’re at least present when media is proactively sent to users according to the judgment of software? Apple’s past attempts at bigfooting their developers haven’t always worked, but they have also been relatively constrained — a News app that’s just one more app in the grid doesn’t seem to change much on its own. But, again, Apple provides and exerts influence over that entire context.

In 2011, Apple put news apps behind a single icon; this week, it brought them out. For years, its App Store recommended games to users based on a simple algorithmic determination of “What’s Hot.” Now, in a change that might be small and obvious for Apple, but which will significantly alter the way in which developers make and market games, its recommendations are made by people. Who knows where News ends up in a couple software updates! Or where, in some new and obvious software scheme, a standalone Facebook app exists. Or how deeply Apple’s music service becomes embedded into its phones, tablets and watches, and what remains available to Spotify. What is an App Store, exactly, when your phone suggests new apps based on things you do or say, or, as they already do, based on locations you visit?

It could be the case that Apple and Google’s attempts to re-centralize the various functions of their platforms under tighter control will fail. Maybe, in making their own platforms more assertive, they create a new class of arbitrary interfaces that competitors — on their platform or on new ones — can improve upon. Maybe the basic functions of a smartphone operating system become easy enough to replicate that an increasingly territorial Apple or Google could lose its claim on the category, just as a social platform that annexes and anoints too many of its partners might risk drowning out the simple but compelling human network that drew its audience in the first place.

The melding experiences of living and working on a queasily centralizing internet will be defined by these relationships. Platform conflict, private or public, sensible or capricious, explicit or implied, will determine the manners in which we read and watch and communicate and produce online. A type of co-dependency that would be familiar in any advanced industry becomes incomprehensible at such scale and seemingly boundless acceleration — a billion users as unsure about what they’re seeing as where they’re seeing it from.

Anyway! This is the internet we have, at least for the time being: the internet of platforms, all the way down.

by Johannah King-Slutzky

I love the Apple Watch commercial. Its syncopated ticks and whirs, the cog-like rotation of the band with snare-drum clicks transforming the entire spinning timepiece into a synecdochic gear, or maybe a film reel. But the commercial exacts its deepest tug in its final moment: Here’s Mickey! The classic Mickey Mouse watch by Ingersoll, itself the reification of an animated, virtual icon, has come to life in the form of a digital gadget.

In the Apple Watch, the mouse best known from commercials, TV programs, and movie shorts has a new screen: the digital watch. Digital devices are a new class of screen for cartoons and other virtual images, and we should contextualize the Apple Watch as a cladistic branch in animation’s history. In digital devices, “animation” combines the old sense of animation dating from the sixteenth century — meaning “to instill with life” — with the new sense, dating from the twentieth century, meaning the manipulation of images to create the illusion of motion. Mickey Mouse roguishly tapping his foot on your wrist isn’t just a transposition of an old cartoon into a new medium; it’s a millennial fulfillment of the fairy tale in which children’s toys spark to life at midnight.

There are strong parallels between Disney marketing and the marketing of Apple gadgets; viewed together, they reveal a highly salable impulse to interact with non-living beings in a way that neatens and intensifies lived experience. This is reflected in the content of Disney’s cartoons, in the marketing of licensed merchandise, and in its theme parks. Apple (whose former CEO Steve Jobs was Disney’s largest private shareholder until his death, after the acquisition of Pixar) has borrowed lately from Disney-pioneered marketing. For example, the introductory sketch to the 2015 Worldwide Developer’s Conference Keynote includes such leggy personifications of Apple-gadget animated characters as Angry Bird, crow people and App icons in the style of Disney theme parks’ Donalds, Hooks, and Winnie-the-Poohs — not to mention the cinematic conceit that facilitates Bill Hader’s directorial thaumaturgy.

Here’s the #WWCD15 intro starring Bill Hader!

Here’s the opening video to Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference! #wwdc15

Posted by BuzzFeed Tech on Monday, June 8, 2015

The drive to interact more fully with non-living objects significantly predates the invention of animated cartoons in the early twentieth century. Automata famously appear in The Iliad as “twenty tripods…[that] wheel down on their own to the gods’ assembly”; the Chinese mythologized automata as early as the third century B.C.E., describing a horny, winking wooden robot in the Zhou royal court; and humanoid, often musical automata have existed in the Muslim world since the eighth century. Interest in automata continued to pique and flag over the centuries, with modern flare-ups around the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution.

Automata like the cuckoo clock — a stock image in the Disney unconscious — often stir whimsy into the quotidian. The cuckoo clock delights by animating a house, a bird, the time, all nothing special. Its wondrousness comes from its unremarkableness; automata and animated machines are made of unremarkable materials and clumsily replicate living creatures or attend to our most boring needs. Relatedly, they are also playful to the point of condescension. One of Europe’s most beloved automatons, an eighteenth-century shitting duck that can eat and digest grain from a spectator’s hand, has been glossed by a book extract for the Guardian as “a highly skilled joke. Had the duck been an artificial defecating man, there would no doubt have been a more complicated, less rapturous response.”

When we rapturously respond to Disneyland, a mechanical flute player, or the ensouled furniture of Beauty and the Beast,we delight in the utter simplicity of these fantasies. Animated machines facilitate wonder by taming the more overwhelming sublime. An 1877 volume of the Fortnightly Reviewunintentionally alluded to the simplicity of wonderful objects when it questioned, “Before comparing the activity of an automaton with that of a dog or man, would it not be wiser to compare it with that of a plant of a jelly-fish?” The suggestion is patently ridiculous because automata and animated creatures have systems that appear complex and super-interactive only because their scope is limited.

Like automata, cartoon animation creates life out of inanimate materials such as ink, plastic, and metal. Cartoons have always been a between-world where real people can interact with non-sentient and unintelligent beings. The conceit of jumping “into” a cartoon, familiar from movies like Mary Poppins and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, is as old as the medium itself. One of the earliest examples of this trope is “Gertie the Dinosaur,” a novelty cartoon by Windsor McCay that toured the country in 1914 as a vaudeville act. In it, the IRL — not filmed — McCay performs tricks “with” the amiable brontosaurus before disappearing behind the screen and re-emerging as an illustration from the proscenium of Gertie’s fountain-like mouth.

Disney was the first corporation to capitalize on our desire to interact with fantastical creatures. They achieved this through licensing and theme parks. Disney licensing was original and rapacious. For decades, almost a hundred percent of Disney’s profits came from merchandising and theme parks that allowed consumers to interact in real life with the animated images they saw on screen. Disney cartoons lost money. Fantasia, now a classic, was called “Disney’s Folly,” and Cinderella was reviewed as a dud. Snow White, Dumbo, and Bambi are the only Disney movies that made respectable profits in Walt Disney’s lifetime.

Harry Woodin, a movie theater manager from Ocean Park, Los Angeles, invented the interactive element that has become Disney’s trademark. Woodin organized the first Mickey Mouse Club in 1929 as a promotion to fill his theater on Saturday afternoons. Supplicants took a Mickey Mouse pledge, played in a Mickey Mouse band, and watched Mickey Mouse cartoons on the big screen. Woodin’s marketing was a success, and he mailed Walt Disney a letter advising Disney to take Mickey Mouse Clubs national. Walt agreed, tacking on his own merchandise clause: “I feel positive that a stunt like this, combined with a Comic Strip and various toys and novelties…might be made around MICKEY,” he wrote to business partner Charles Giegerich. Theaters could buy a Mickey Mouse Club license from Disney Studios for twenty-five dollars, for which they were encouraged to host Mickey matinees, live contests (pie eating, marble shooting), and Mickey-themed bands. Children recited, “Mickey Mice do not swear, smoke, cheat or lie” before every Club meeting, and sang a song written by Carl Stalling, called “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo”: “Neither fat nor skinny/ She’s the horse’s whinny/ She’s my little Minnie Mouse.” Disney Studios funneled the revenue into manufacturing licensed merchandise like Mickey pins and toys, which salesmen bought from Disney. Woodin and Disney had devised a world that appeared complete and comprehensively systematized (arts, ethics, commerce) but remained simple.

Among the earliest Mickey products were dolls, animal storybooks, and a candy bar made by Mars. Demand was so huge that Disney had to open an office in New York just to handle the business that spilled over from George Borgfelt, with whom the Disneys had struck their first licensing deal. Some of this decision may have been a canny financial move, as the Disneys thought Borgfelt handled business like “some bunch of farmers.” In response, they gave more and more of their business first to Harry Woodin, the Mickey Mouse Club originator, and then, in 1932, to their to-be closest licensing partner, Herman Kamen, a department store window designer from Kansas City. Kamen immediately canceled the contracts Borgfelt had made with smaller partners — Disney was known for shoddy merchandise — and sidled up to national companies like Cartier Jewelers, General Foods (who put Mickey on Post Toasties), and Ingersoll, the maker of the iconic Mickey Mouse watch. By 1933, Mickey was licensed for use on forty different products. A year after that, Disney merchandise was racking up seventy million dollars in sales a year. The New York Times even wrote a trend piece on Mickey goods, writing that the country was “bursting with Mickey Mouse soap, candy, playing cards, bridge favors, hairbrushes, chinaware, alarm clocks and hot water bottles wrapped in Mickey Mouse paper tied with Mickey Mouse ribbon and paid for out of Mickey Mouse purses with savings hoarded in Mickey Mouse banks.” The drive to touch and play with things you saw on screen was a profitable business. By the mid-thirties, six years after Mickey’s first sound short, merchandise sales exceeded ticket sales.

The Disney theme parks are even more immersive and interactive than Disney’s licensed merchandise. As the historian Jackson Lears has noted, “The quintessential product of the [Disney] empire…[is] not the cartoon character, but the ‘audio-animatronic’ robot.” Disneyland was immediately popular and, unlike Disney films, made buckets of money when WED, an independent company owned by Walt Disney, opened it in 1955.

Walt had begun work on the theme park in spring of 1948. It was too expensive and complicated, so he first launched “Disneylandia” instead — a touring display of miniature figurines, furniture, boats, farm equipment, and little homegoods like tiny liquor bottles in tiny crates. The manipulation of scale was an important element that later made Disneyland feel more like a wonderful, controllable toy. Walt hired an artist to draw Norman Rockwell-style scenes of Americana and enlisted the help of machinists and sculptors to help him design figures based on the windup toys he’d seen on an expedition to Europe in 1947. Then, in 1951, Walt began implementing designs for early animatronics based on the movements of a filmed dancer named Buddy Ebsen. Disneylandia finally premiered in 1952 in the Pan-Pacific Auditorium at the Festival of California Living.

A mix of Disney cartoons and Disneylandia, Disneyland is one part movie, one part plaything. Walt spoke of everything in the theme park as a film. Staff must be “cast,” rides are described as movie experiences (the darkness outside your car is intended to replicate the experience of a theater), and environments down to the level of pavement fade and blend together like a panning camera. I was delighted to discover from Kate Losse’s memoir Boy Kings that staff positions at Facebook are also called “roles,” which Losse says are meant to imitate cinema — so although I am focusing on the parallels between the marketing of Apple gadgets and Disney corporate strategy, Disneyland’s cinema heuristic may have predicted the strategies of many screen-worshipping corporations in Silicon Valley.

Equally important, Disneyland had the feel of a large toy. The bottom floors of its shops are nine-tenths scale, the second floors eight-tenths, and the rest of the park is, in Walt’s words, a “matter of choosing the scale that could be practical and still look right.” Scale was important to Walt because it “made the street feel like a toy,” and it made people feel paradoxically more childish and in control. Disneyland visitors subliminally exert control over their environment by towering over the mildly miniature buildings, but the change in scale also makes visitors feel like a gleeful child playing with miniature trucks or dolls.

Theorists of Disney theme parks like Alan Bryman generally focus on wonder and control as the twin pillars of Disney’s success. Apple owes its success to the same. However, it’s a mistake to suggest that wonder and control are distinct experiences. For example, although I might fantasize about the ability to talk to animals, if all animals could speak it wouldn’t feel “interactive” any more than talking to other humans feels “interactive.” But by keeping the digital or animated environment controlled, predictable, and efficient, wonder can safely kick into gear. Thus the constant schadenfreude delight in iPhone obsolescence — like Cinderella’s pumpkin, the iPhone’s capacity to induce wonder is on a highly controlled, predictable time limit. And culture critic Elayne Rapping’s account of visiting Disney World for the first time feels like the experience of using a great, crash-proof OS, comparing the park to “a series of prescribed routes to preplanned itineraries….Indeed, the sameness, the static predictability of this wholly managed, wholly simulated world of ‘Taylorized fun,’ as it’s been described, seems to be a large part of its appeal.”

The Apple Watch breeds control and calm with particular acuity. It will monitor your health, manage your schedule, and extend tactile intimacy with your partner when you’re apart. The Apple Watch is methadone to the iPhone’s meth. It is marketed to loosen you up. Yet it’s also fun, like a toy. It’s slightly larger than a normal watch, yet more miniature than an iPhone (it has been compared to the iPod mini) — there’s that manipulation of scale again — and it’s a little clunky, like a parachute pack for your wrist. Its intuitive design is not only efficient and simple, it’s soothing. The circles in the watch’s Workout app are calming, lacking any corners. (Incidentally, this is an attribute to which many pin Mickey Mouse’s success. Mickey’s head and torso are all circles.)

The watch feels particularly like interacting with an inanimate object because it looks like a watch, not a screen, monolith, or abstract slab. Maurice Sendak, in accounting for the popularity of Mickey, has suggested that the famous mouse is “immanently touchable” — and the Apple Watch is, too. Apple markets the timepiece as super haptic. It can simulate heartbeats, “tap” you on the wrist instead of vibrating, and responds to “force touches,” meaning it’s sensitive to fleshy pressure. When you talk to Siri, you’re talking to a watch — the bewitched “Cogsworth” in Beauty and the Beast remade in the twenty-first century’s image.

In general, wonder-inducing objects are reiterations of familiar objects. Mickey merchandise excites because Mickey is a familiar character from the movie or television screen, made touchable; the Mickey plushie or Cinderella doll is, strangely, more exciting because it is not inventive. The drive to blend cartoon with reality either by reifying cartoons as merchandise or through the fantasy of jumping into animated worlds is a repetition compulsion: every time Disney prints a new Mickey T-shirt, a new Mickey doll, or a new Mickey costume with an oversized head, it’s pushing to produce an impossible object — a real, interactive, non-simulated Mickey. Yet these reproductions seem to make us neurotics even hungrier for the impossible. You can build a Mickey Mouse plushie to fondle or a timepiece that dances, but no matter how many cross-platform iterations of a character you manufacture, you’ll never reallybe able to interact with it person-to-person.

Of all the profitable tech companies, Apple emphasizes its repetitive lineage the most. One of Tim Cook’s first observations in the 2015 WWDC Keynote was that this WWDC was Apple’s twenty-sixth. Like the reiterative principle that translates animated characters into Disney merchandise and theme parks, Apple’s message is “We’re the same as before, only slightly more intelligent, more seamlessly animated, and more touchable.” Not only does the iPhone repeat from generation to generation, it also repeats across platforms, like iPhone to iPad. The Apple Watch is the timepiece iteration of an iPhone, which is a digital iteration of a phone. It’s not insignificant that the closing image of the Apple Watch’s first commercial was a shot of the Mickey Mouse watch face. The insinuation is that this is the animated version (Apple Watch) of a reified version (Ingersoll watch) of an animated character (Mickey).

Apple executives often promote the watch in the press as, essentially, an animated or filmed product. “Apple photographed many different species of jellyfish to make up a single, moving Watch face,” reads the caption to a Wired story’s lede photo. The resultant moving images are intricately constructed, similar to animators’ slow-mo studies of tap dancers or leaping cats

They built a tank in their studio, and shot a variety of species at 300 frames-per-second on incredibly high-end slow-motion Phantom cameras. Then they shrunk the resulting 4096 x 2304 images to fit the Watch’s screen, which is less than a tenth the size. Now, “when you look at the Motion face of the jellyfish, no reasonable person can see that level of detail,” Dye says. “And yet to us it’s really important to get those details right.”

Dye was the graphic designer-trained head of Apple’s “human interface” team (now a vice president) on the Apple Watch. He made technology — or in this instance, a mini-movie of a flower — feel personable enough to touch and talk to.

Digital technology is appealing in part because it’s a way for animated characters ranging from the iconic, like Mickey, to the anonymous, like blooming flowers, to ghost our machines. This is only the latest in humanity’s recently accelerated project to interact with inanimate creatures. Early cartoons featured inanimate objects suddenly jumping around and talking, handshaking, back patting, or whistling at people. We should recognize interactive technology as belonging to that legacy. The parallels between cartoons and digital technology shed light on the cultish wonder attached to many products like the Apple Watch, since they are being marketed like toys that give you an opportunity to interact with virtual characters much in the manner that Disney theme parks and merchandise give consumers the chance to interact with characters they’d seen on-screen. All tech companies consistently market their products this way, but Disney did it first; now Apple’s perfecting it again. This wonder-control hybrid drive, whatever it is, has been successful across industries, and it sells billions.

I have written in the past about lab-created varieties of fruits and vegetables that I think are garbage (the Red Delicious apple), lackluster (the Tommy Atkins mango), or good but perhaps overrated (the Honeycrisp). Lest you think I am opposed to recent American advances in the competitive world of produce breeding, now is the time of year to gorge on one of my all-time favorite vegetables, created for a Gallatin, Montana-based company and first released in 1979: the sugar snap pea, which is showing up in farmers markets, meaning that winter is finally over.

Sugar snap peas were first bred by Dr. Calvin Lamborn and Dr. M.C. Parker in a quest to solve a problem associated with the ancient Chinese snow pea, the flat variety you often find in takeout American Chinese food (and also from-China Chinese food, and also other food; it’s a good pea). The snow pea is unusual for having an edible pod that’s basically bereft of insoluble fiber, making it very easy and delicious to digest. But the snow pea can be tricky to grow, twisting and buckling and popping when it gets to even a moderate size.

Lamborn was hired by the Gallatin Valley Seed Company as a breeder, and Parker introduced him to a bizarre fluke mutation he’d found a decade and a half earlier. Shelling peas, meaning a pea with an inedible, fibrous pod, are by far the most common variety of pea in the world — all our frozen peas come from this sort of pea. Parker’s weirdo mutant shell pea had a particularly tight pod, which basically never burst or twisted, and the two cross-bred the Chinese snow pea with the mutant pea, thinking they might come up with a snow pea that doesn’t have the physical problems. Instead what they got was the sugar snap pea: a pea with a thick-walled, edible pod; a fresh, herbal flavor; and an incredibly high sugar content.

The first year the sugar snap pea was available, it was an immediate smash hit. None other than James Beard, the grandfather of modern American cuisine, raved about it in the New York Post, calling it “nothing short of sensational.” He was correct; the sugar snap makes a good argument for every single possible thing involved in its creation. Are seed conglomerates good? Yes, look at the sugar snap pea. Is American produce good? Yes, look at the sugar snap pea. Is Montana a cool state? Hell yes, look at the sugar snap pea.

These days, there are dozens of varieties of sugar snaps, all variations of the original. The name “sugar snap” is mostly used to denote a firm, round, edible-pod pea with an elevated level of sweetness. It’s pretty rare that you can ever figure out the exact provenance of any particular sugar snap, so before you buy, eat one and make sure that they taste right. The sugar snap pea is, ideally, a bit paler than you would expect from a pea, totally firm and crisp and taut in texture, and the stem is still attached. They should be no more than three or four inches long, with absolutely no wrinkling at all. And they should be eaten with reckless abandon whenever they are found; Lamborn even told the Los Angeles Times that he saw the sugar snap as an ideal gardener’s vegetable, meaning the gardener will have no option but to munch on them while gardening because they are so irresistible.

Even more than the other delicate fruits of springtime, like the asparagus and the fiddlehead, the sugar snap pea is so fresh, so light, and so vibrant when raw that it should very literally be a crime to expose them to heat for any significant length of time. Do NOT roast, boil, steam, or blanch the sugar snap. Drs. Lamborn and Parker are American heroes and I am totally guessing, but basically completely positive, that they would be deeply offended by such a thing. If you must cook them, expose them to a lot of dry heat for a very very short time. Your key tools for extreme heat are the wok and the grill, both avenues for getting char and caramelization within a minute or two.

But I would encourage you also to eat them raw whenever possible. They pair especially well with herbs and light white cheeses (ricotta, mozzarella, and chevre are classics for a reason), but I find they don’t need to go with Italian flavors. They taste great with ginger, for example, and their sweetness balances well with spice. Their mother, after all, is the Chinese snow pea, so don’t be afraid to look for flavors outside Western Europe.

I have not included a recipe for this, because I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that a pretty spectacular ice cream could be made out of sugar snap peas. There’s a recipe over here — please, if you try it, let me know.

Sugar Snap Pea and Beet Panzanella Salad With Ginger Vinaigrette

Shopping list: Sugar snap peas, Swiss chard, red beets, baguette, ginger (whole but frozen), rice wine vinegar, olive oil, brown sugar, scallions, pumpkin seeds

Trim beets of stem and leaves, if they’re there, and wrap individually in aluminum foil. Roast in the oven at 350 degrees F until a thin knife pierces all the way through with no resistance. Allow to cool and peel — while wearing gloves, if you want, since they will stain your hands for a day or so — then cut into cubes about an inch by an inch by an inch. Heat a dry cast iron pan on the stove over medium heat and when hot, toss in a handful of pumpkin seeds and allow to toast until fragrant. Remove and let cool.

Trim sugar snap peas of their stems and slice width-wise into two or three pieces per pea. Toss into a big bowl along with the beets. Cut out the stem of Swiss chard and reserve (it’s very good to pickle!) and chop up the leaves into small pieces. Toss those into the bowl too. Add in the pumpkin seeds and a few chopped scallions.

Make your vinaigrette: take a knob of frozen ginger and grate with a microplane into a glass container with a lid (like a tupperware or jar). Add in some rice wine vinegar, some olive oil, some salt and pepper, and some brown sugar, close the lid of the container and shake thoroughly to combine.

Cut the baguette into cubes about the same size as the beets. Toss into the bowl, pour on the vinaigrette, and serve immediately. The bread does not keep, but you can make the salad ahead of time and add the bread at the last second if you want.

Grilled Sugar Snap Peas With Thai Dressing

Shopping list: Sugar snap peas, wooden skewers, rice wine vinegar, sambal oelek, baby dried shrimp (optional), brown sugar, fish sauce, olive oil, cilantro, peanuts

Grilling sugar snaps is easier than you’d think: First, soak the skewers in water for a few minutes so they don’t catch on fire. Then lay out two skewers per kabob: you want one skewer to go through the top, near where the stem attached, and one near the bottom, the opposite end of the pea, making it kind of a flat paddle shape. Brush with olive oil and place on the grill for or a minute or two on each side until charred but still crisp.

For the sauce, mix vinegar, sambal, brown sugar, and fish sauce in a container. If you can find baby dried shrimp, do this all in a mortar and pestle and smash it instead of mixing it. If you can’t find any, no big deal, just mix up the dressing the way you would any other. Serve in a dish, pour the dressing on top, and top with chopped peanuts and fresh cilantro.

Sugar Snap Salad With Pickled Radish, Mint, And Feta

Shopping list: Sugar snap peas, radishes, fresh mint, feta, white vinegar, white sugar, Israeli couscous, lemon, olive oil

This is kind of a classic recipe but it’s a classic for a reason; it is a very good use of spring produce. First quick-pickle your radishes. Get a pot of vinegar and sugar on the stove in a ratio of about 2:1, and bring it to a boil. Slice radishes thinly (a mandoline is useful for this) and put in a glass container with a lid. Pour the hot liquid over the radishes, cover, and allow to cool. The longer in advance you can do this, the better.

Cook Israeli couscous according to package directions. (It’s just pasta.) Allow to cool.

Slice sugar snaps into rounds about five millimeters thick. Toss in a bowl with chopped mint, couscous, radishes, feta, a squeeze of lemon and a lot of olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste.

Sugar snap peas taste like spring and early summer; it seems impossible that any vegetable can be that sweet, that crisp, that delicious without any cooking at all. I’m eating some right now. Just a bag of them next to me, emptying slowly.

Photo by Alice Henneman

by Awl Sponsors

Brought to you by Chocolate Milk.

When professional basketball player Kevin Love steps on the court, he knows he has one job to do. Watch as one of the biggest pros in the sport shows how rebounding and shattering records are BUILT WITH CHOCOLATE MILK.

Kevin knows that rebounding on the court is just as important as helping his body rebound and recover after a tough game. That’s why he reaches for chocolate milk for recovery. Backed by more than 20 studies, low fat chocolate milk has high-quality protein to build lean muscle and nutrients to help refuel muscles. Check out the video above to get inside the mind of Kevin Love, the newest member to join a long line-up of elite athletes who make chocolate milk their post-workout drink of choice. Find out more about how he grew up playing basketball and why he knows that 80% of rebounds are below the rim.

For more information, please visit: BuiltWithChocolateMilk.com.

“An earlier version of this article misstated the number of waterfalls in the 15th Street condominium of Colin Rath and the year that the adjacent property was surrendered to the lender. The condo has two waterfalls, not three, and the property was surrendered in 2009, not 2010.”

What we have here is the soundtrack to “an imaginary award that seeks to uncover the nature of music and the intangibility of success.” I don’t know either, but if you go in with low expectations and you have a fondness for pretty, acoustic/ambient-y music you stand a good chance of enjoying this, so, keeping that in mind, enjoy. [Via]

★★★★★ With the sunlight around the edges of the blinds, it was impossible and unnecessary to tell 6 a.m. from 9 a.m. Fresh air blew in. The revolving doorway out to get lunch revealed a baby, in crisp but rumpled white sun hat, coming in the door beside, its share of morning well invested. How many months would it be before another day like this could come by? The planting beds down on the forecourt were swelling with annuals. A small cabbage white, with its globe-spanning eye for a good thing, had found them. It fluttered up and down and alighted. A brilliant shine touched everything. There wasn’t really time to walk up Amsterdam all the way to the lobster-roll place and back, with the schedule so tight, but how could one not venture it? The sidewalk brunchers were so thick it felt like Columbus. The S on a child’s full-length Superman cape glittered. Cops ambled by in their short-sleeved blues, caps in hands. On the way uptown again, to the pool, the boys and the upstairs neighbor boy went sprinting ahead. The seven-year-old and the neighbor debated how cloudless a sky could be. The pool was uncrowded; other people had evidently had other, more outdoor ideas. By the tail end of the afternoon, cool shadows had chased the warmth from the streets. Late light through a glass of seltzer cast a blue stripe on the broccolini and a strip of full rainbow on the wall. The night breeze shook the blinds so loudly it had to be shut out, with regret.