You know who else was a curator? [Via]

The Internet That Cried Apocalypse

The Internet, according to much of the Internet, is about to be ruined: FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is reportedly going to propose that companies like Netflix or YouTube be legally allowed to pay Internet providers like Comcast and — will there be any other providers besides Comcast in five years? — to ensure that their stuff reaches people faster and more reliably than companies who don’t pay. Death and destruction await.

This would violate a principle blandly known as “net neutrality,” which is that all kinds of bits, from all kinds of places, should be treated the same way as it moves across the Internet; if you’re a Time Warner Cable customer, in other words, everything should arrive at your computer equally slowly, no matter who sent it. But for most, this notion is so numbingly abstract — does it mean that I can’t FaceTime as well as Skype? Well, maybe — and the response from the tech press and nerd forums so maddeningly grave — “the Internet will literally die!” — each of the many times that it has been threatened over the last several years, that it’s been hard to tell when, precisely, the Internet as we know it is going to devolve into a series of tiny weird Internet fiefdoms, sort of like that Justin Timberlake movie In Time, where the world had become a series of bad puns about time and was divided into discrete zones which only the truly rich (or at least truly handsome) could travel between speedily and freely. This “messaging issue,” I guess you might call it, is sort of a problem if you believe that the Internet is on the verge of being ruined by cable and phone companies, for really real this time, now that a former cable lobbyist is in charge of the FCC.

Tim Wu, who coined the phrase “net neutrality” eons ago, back before it became a wan rallying cry plastered on display banners, has perhaps come up with a better way to talk about it: Allowing giant tech companies with vast resources to pay for better access to people “threatens to make the Internet just like everything else in American society: unequal in a way that deeply threatens our long-term prosperity.” A neutral Internet is hard to get behind; an unequal Internet is easy to be against. I mean, it’s working for Thomas Piketty’s book sales.

Photo by Michael Chen

“You won’t be able to mix nicotine in your bathtub and sell it anymore.”

Huh, first Courtney and now this. We are probably weeks away from the Moonpools & Caterpillars reunion.

“By using a common four-letter term for sexual intercourse, he went on, Lawrence was trying to remove the stain of profanity from plain English words. ‘We have no word in English for this act which is not either a long abstraction or an evasive euphemism, and we are constantly running away from it, or dissolving into dots,’ Professor Hoggart said.”
 — Richard Hoggart is pretty much the father of cultural studies, so I don’t know if my primary emphasis in his obituary would have been his testimony in the Lady Chatterly case, but having missed the opportunity to collect the first round of obituaries a couple of weeks ago when he actually died, I guess I don’t get to make that decision and this is as good a place as any to make my tardy note of his passing. And also to note the Times’ continued contortions in avoidance of the word “fuck.” Hoggart was 95.

Yeah, listen up, hectoring Englishman: Everyone is sleep deprived. We live in a world of shiny devices flashing bright lights at us twenty-four hours a day. We are constantly being buzzed at on the phones we carry around with us like security blankets by inconsiderate friends or employers. Our background noise is rich women calling each other effing b’s on the giant television screens we always have running to drown out the oppressive sounds of silence. Even our chewing gum has caffeine in it. So yes, we’re all tired. Don’t try to make us feel like shit because maybe we miss a couple of things on your stupid observation tests. I don’t care what color the bus is anyway. You know what? Go fuck yourself. I’m going back to bed. [Via]

by Natalie McMullen

As far as fake holidays generated by committees of well-meaning bureaucrats go, World Book and Copyright Day is nice enough.

Natalie McMullen is a street photographer, culture critic and food writer. She is an archivist of the resonant, a nerdy polisher of words, and a lifelong scholar on love and relationships. She is currently resident photographer at The Awl.

★★★ The eastern sky above the buildings was blinding with cloud-scattered light. The barbershop door stood open; a man walked by outside trundling a cartload of catering food. Pink and white petals had fallen to the ground and were being trampled into brown smears. People stepped back in the reclaimed pedestrian zone to shoot photos of the Flatiron Building. The breeze was cool on the newly exposed ears. The clouds began to dim the sun appreciably. By afternoon’s end, a shower had dampened everything. The air by the churchyard on Prince Street smelled like wet stones. Further on, the smell was wet metal, then wet grime. Even as the pavement was drying out, the discolored clouds promised it wouldn’t be dry for long.

“What Will Happen When the Earth’s Magnetic Field Begins to Reverse?”

I will refer you to my earlier remarks, the substance of which was essentially that this bear was rather adorable. I see no need to revise that estimation.