“And indeed, if you were to judge by the stock of food here, as in the other shops we checked, the harvest of Ceres is mainly Cheetos. We did find two avocados in a basket on the counter at the Eagle Mini Mart, and a few lemons at a Central Avenue convenience store. You could make a pretty good meal from the eggs and bottled salsa, jalapenos and nopales at Al’s Oasis Food Mart, though the only fresh produce was a few lonely bananas near the cash register. This, in the center of one of the lushest agricultural regions on earth.” — Maria Bustillos went on a road trip “to converse with people whose California Dreams have been hollowed out by the growing imbalances in the economy.” Read the entire series here.

Some days it seems so dark that you don’t think you can remember a time when there was even a little light leaking in. The big issues are impossible to think about and the small stuff, the things that everyone else manages to get done without actually being aware that they are doing them, feels so overwhelming that the idea of facing it adds another twenty pounds to the heavy blanket of self-loathing you sling over your shoulders on the rare occasions where you manage to make yourself get out of bed and stay vertical for more than an hour. You’d try to leave the house but you know that as sad and lonely and hopeless as it is being locked in and alone, going outdoors would only make things worse since you can’t help but see the sorrow in every face you pass by, and the occasional bright eyes and giggling grins are even worse because you know how temporary those feelings are and how much more painful it’s going to be when those same smiling people realize just how awful things actually are, when the heartbreak hits home for them. And then, of course, you remember that maybe they are happy, that it probably is just you who feels this way, and why shouldn’t it be, because you’re worthless and you suck and all the friends and loved ones that you are turning away are better off without you and probably the kindest thing you can do for them is not make them have to put up with your miserable, tiresome personality and pathetic neediness. Not having to deal with you is probably the high point of their week, and that is one of the only things about which you’re sure anymore. Some days that’s how it feels, and lately those days are becoming more and more frequent, and as down as that pulls you you are still trying to cling to it because you know that what comes next will be even worse, and you’ve only got so long before that happens. Anyway, now there are some emojis for people like you.

Guess who’s back — or, really, I suppose, somehow, just never went away? We said it was over for New York’s love affair with Four Loko at the end of 2010 — and then we found out that nothing delicious ever dies. The brave brand soldiers on still in Real America, now apparently caffeine-less (finally!), although still being sued on behalf of dead college students from deaths five years ago. It’s got its marketing all worked out though. It is ON BRAND.

Ideas for Valentine’s Day: pic.twitter.com/qYnxdBW3JT

— Four Loko (@fourloko) February 8, 2015

How to be bae: pic.twitter.com/bXUNKHkRHz

— Four Loko (@fourloko) January 8, 2015

Me to Spring Break: Are we there yet? pic.twitter.com/3XXZNRonRR

— Four Loko (@fourloko) December 16, 2014

★★★ The snow as it aged had developed mysteries. Was the visible grain of the snowbanks on Broadway produced by the darkness of back-flung road dirt or the whiteness of the last windblown snow shower? How had the big chunks like snowman segments, whiter than their surroundings, come to populate the sidewalk outside the non-public park downtown? The yellow-rimmed ice stretching steadily on for yards and yards could not possibly all be dog-marked, could it? The sycamores dull as bleached bone were the only thing that could make the gray morning sky look bright. By afternoon, though, there were shadows and enough sun that it could be imagined to be warm. The treads of the fire escape were clear; the ice crust on the rooftop snow was intact. The light came in so low that the inner northeast rim of the new bootprints was the brightest part of the scene. Out on Prince Street a Bobcat was pounding at the frozen mass by the curbside, leaving its own distinctive product where it had passed: thick, flat ice chunks, dark on one side and white on the other.

A brisk wind is blowing through the Content Trenches today: Social media professionals at some publications are reporting, anonymously, that their Facebook numbers are plummeting. Specifically the complaints are about “Reach,” a somewhat mysterious number that is, after directly measured referral traffic, the best metric publishers have for how well stories posted to their official pages (as in facebook.com/publication) are performing. For some publishers, this number has been reduced to a tiny fraction of what they had previously come to expect, effectively muting official pages with many thousands of followers (the change started early this morning). Publishers have been told that the issue will be addressed, and that it is a temporary problem, so they are hesitant to make the matter public. Nonetheless it is causing quite a bit of anxiety in quite a few newsrooms right now — some small, some very large; some new, some very old — and has not yet been remedied or fully explained. This issue is not universal. For example: Some Gawker properties are affected while (at least) some Vox properties are not. Related: Email!

This is felt as a great inconvenience to said publishers, for whom a longer-term loss of Facebook traffic would range from temporarily disastrous to existentially threatening; this is felt on Facebook as a whole, one must assume, barely at all.

No, you need to shut the fuck up and do something worthwhile.

Everyone who does not NEED to be a writer ought to do something else.” -George Simenon http://t.co/UsSkyn5A2A

 — @parisreview

Yeah, about that: Nobody needs to be a writer. Nobody. I can certainly understand the appeal of not doing physical labor or toiling in a field in which your brain is not fully engaged but there is no human need to be a writer. I get it, you have thoughts, you feel the world should share them, you like attention, you don’t want to do something else that is probably harder and less affirming of how special your sensitivities are, but you know what? The world will somehow get along without your deep and knowing interpretations of what we mean when we say something or what is conveyed when we stare into the middle distance or how our titanic struggles with existence are often played out in the smallest and most quotidian of ways. Someone else will eventually say it, and probably better. What the world needs, frankly, is for everyone who needs to be a writer to shut the fuck up for a while (I ask for a year but I would settle for six months) and do some real fucking work and maybe look around and realize just how worthless their insights into our sad doomed lives really are. If you have somehow managed to pull off being a writer I congratulate you on a successful scam, but you more than anyone should know how little need comes into play. Need to not do real work is more like it, am I right? Anyway, Georges Simenon turned out 200 books and was born at the beginning of the last century, so he had more of an excuse for trying to peddle this line of crap than most. The rest of you, born more recently, whose writing is mostly anger-blogging episodes of “America’s Next Top Model” or sweary steak recipes, should know better, so let’s all try to keep this bundle of self-romanticizing bullshit to a minimum, okay? Thanks.

Remember San Cisco’s “Awkward”? Of course you don’t, it was over three years ago, which, in our era of chronologic celerity, might as well be so far in the historical past that when you try to remember it your brain conjures up sepia-shaded images of women in crinoline curtsying to poorly-dentrificed men in powdered wigs at some lute-intensive dance in a giant ballroom as extravagantly-groomed horses shit out in the street and gap-toothed orphans huddle around fires in their lice-infested rags to keep from catching their death of cold in the brutal and pitiless winter. But that image is incorrect; that is actually what 2008 looked like. Still, early 2012 was a long time ago. To put it in a perspective that might make it easier for you to understand, when “Awkward” came out, Taylor Swift was only 23, and her fans were considerably younger, and anyone older than she was knew better than to hope that by pretending to find her “amazing” or “empowering” or “fierce” some of her youth or dazzle would magically transfer and allow the pretender to also pretend that they weren’t edging ever closer to a time in which culture was no longer aimed at them or even adjacent to them and the next stop on their journey was the grave. It was a while ago, is what I’m saying. Anyway, San Cisco has a new album coming out soon and here’s a song from it. It’s kind of catchy, right?

by Hallie Bateman

12.Yahoo! News

11. ESPN

10. CNN

9. Comedy Central

8. People

7. Warner Music Group

6. Vice

5. Snapchat In-house

4. National Geographic

3. The Food Network

2. Cosmopolitan

1. The Daily Mail

Fearing they’ll crush employees’ confidence and erode performance, employers are asking managers to ease up on harsh feedback. “Accentuate the positive” has become a new mantra at workplaces like VMware Inc., Wayfair Inc., and the Boston Consulting Group Inc., where bosses now dole out frequent praise, urge employees to celebrate small victories and focus performance reviews around a particular worker’s strengths — instead of dwelling on why he flubbed a client presentation.

The shift may annoy leaders who rose in a tough-love era in business, but executives say hard-edge tactics simply do more harm than good these days.

When employees’ flaws are laid bare, “there’s that mental ‘ugh’ and shrug of, ‘This is who I am,’ ” says Michelle Russell, a partner at BCG.

How easy it is to read this story as more evidence about soft millennials in the workplace, or to accept its deliberate framing as a helpful update on the latest and greatest management strategies.

Or could it be: Resorting to positive reenforcement is the only possible response to a realization that diminished expectations for reliable long-term employment, even for relatively well-paid professionals, has resulted in a commensurate lack of employee tolerance for institutional behavioral correction, and that, besides, what kind of employees that are subject to regular “performance reviews” aren’t also replaceable, so why not just pat them on the head right up until you show them out the door?