mbethw

[dailydot]

Rejected 'Black Mirror' episode or terrifying reality?

Imagine you’re married. Maybe you’ve been going through a stressful couple of months. Perhaps you’ve lost your job, or your current job is a nightmare, and maybe you’ve suffered from poor health and fallen out with long-term friends, so that you hardly ever see anyone but your husband and kids. Now imagine that, understandably, your libido has fallen through the floor during this difficult period, so you don’t even think about sex anymore. And finally, imagine that your husband has begun targeting you with online ads intended to “brainwash” you into having sex with him, since he can’t think of any other way of restoring your interest in lovemaking.

This scenario might sound like some kind of weird dystopian joke or the rejected plot of a Black Mirror episode. However, it’s now actually a reality, thanks to a new startup called the Spinner and to Facebook, where the startup has found a place to host its manipulative ads.

Most critics assume that Facebook’s misadventures relate only to its posting of ads paid for by corporations and agencies, organizations that aim to puppeteer the “average” individual. It turns out, however, that the social network also now lets this same average individual place ads that aim to manipulate other such individuals, all thanks to the mediation of a relatively new and little-known company called the Spinner.

READ MORE

[mbethw]

fucking creepy.  omg.

[oregonexplored]

Photo from @matthewnkphotography - King’s Mountain Trail - Image selected by @ericmuhr - Join us in exploring #Oregon, wherever you are, and tag your finds to #Oregonexplored - part of the @exploredco family, online at exploredco.com via Instagram https://ift.tt/2P33Iv4

[newyorker]

A cartoon by Barry Blitt. 

[newyorker]

Fifty years ago this month, hundreds of feminist activists, most of them from the political-resistance group New York Radical Women, arrived in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to protest the Miss America pageant. Marching along the boardwalk, the activists expressed their dissatisfaction with the pageant’s objectification and sexualization of its contestants—and, by extension, of women more generally.

Read the full story, “A Photographer’s Life-Changing Encounter with Political Struggle,” here. 

[mbethw]

Opinion | James Comey: The F.B.I. Can Do This

Despite limitations and partisan attacks, the bureau can find out a lot about the Kavanaugh accusations in a week.

[irakalan]

INCEPTION Painting Oil on Canvas Size: 50cm H x 50cm W x 2cm - my art project “Space”

[patterbay]

I’ve never seen more effective use of fantasy animation to promote tourism [x]

[jitterbugjive]

When they say ‘slight exaggerated’ they aren’t kidding. Here, just look to see that these are real honest to god places:

Yeah. That shit’s all REAL. You guys think the video’s amazing, check out the real deal.

[aprillikesthings]

I’M SO GLAD SOMEONE DID THIS POST 

[the-mamishka]

This is so beautiful, it brought tears to me eyes! I heard about this advertisement while I was at NWC, but I forgot to look it up. So lovely!

[thegraftedbranch]

I belong to Oregon’s rainier northern neighbor and can verify, 0 exaggeration here

[newyorker]

On Sunday, in the fifty-second minute of the final game of the World Cup, four women dressed in Russian-police uniforms charged the field, briefly disrupting the match. They were members of the Russian protest-art group Pussy Riot. The group, by taking the field at the World Cup final, demonstrated exactly how intervention, rule-breaking, and destruction happen. 

 Read more.

[newyorker]

The Strange Poignancy of Courtney Barnett’s Minutiae

The Australian musician Courtney Barnett often sings about anxiety and depression. One track on “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” her new album, is titled “Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence.” But those conditions rarely manifest themselves in predictable ways. Dread can yield frantic, needling work: deranged guitar, a yelping vocal. Yet Barnett’s most defining characteristic is her nonchalance. She sounds gloriously, enviably unbothered, even as the circumstances around her openly deteriorate.

Read more.

[newyorker]

The Writer

The Writer avoids distraction by disabling his Internet connection. As a reward for this sacrifice, he allocates special Internet time for himself every three to five minutes.

The Writer exists in two worlds: the world he’s creating and the world in which he wears the same shirt a lot. The Writer successfully holds each world responsible for his failings in the other, a Ping-Ponging of accountability that frees him to wake up around elevenish.

The Writer feels uneasy referring to himself as a writer in the presence of others. He struggles to shake the sense that he’s an imposter and that at any moment someone’s going to ask him what an adverb is.

The Writer has a small group of confidantes with whom he feels comfortable sharing his drafts. He relies on their honest feedback, and in exchange he gives their e-mails the finger.

The Writer refuses to allow criticism of his writing to sow doubt in other aspects of his life. He has other critics who specifically handle that stuff.

[smithsonianmag]

Did you take a spectacular shot this year? Enter Smithsonian.com’s 14th Annual Photo Contest for a chance to win up to $2,500!

The deadline is FAST approaching! Submit by November 30, 2016, at 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST).

Photo: “They’re Here”

Photographer caption: An alien-looking, powerful supercell grows as it forms over the mountains of Montana.

Photo by Ryan Wunsch (Leader, Canada); Stanford, Montana

[betomad]

Reine, Lofoten. Norway. photo by Maya Beano

[subpop]

Time to kick yr Monday into high gear: Watch @metz_theband’s blistering @gethardshow performance (and find updated international tour dates) now on the blog at subpop.com. [📷 by Andrew Bisdale/ @trutv] . . . #METZ #ChrisGethardShow #MessOfWires #Cellophane #MrPlague #StrangePeace #subpop

[newyorker]

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Through the Years

A groundbreaking litigator for women’s rights before being appointed to the bench, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has worn many aspects in her eighty-five years. On the Justice’s birthday, flip through some photographs of her as a girl in Brooklyn, as a law graduate who left Columbia as co-valedictorian (but with no job offers), as a young mother, and as an advocate whose greatest legacy may be in the cases that she argued before what was then an all-male Supreme Court—and won.  (Photographs from the collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.)

See more photos here. 

[newyorker]

A cartoon by Will McPhail.

[oregonexplored]

Photo from @daniel_fleischhacker - Crater Lake National Park - Image selected by @ericmuhr - Join us in exploring #Oregon, wherever you are, and tag your finds to #Oregonexplored - part of the @exploredco family, online at exploredco.com via Instagram http://ift.tt/2oYPNHv

[newyorker]

Long before artificial intelligence came into its own, a programmer named Christopher Strachey taught a computer to write love letters.

For Strachey, the interesting thing was how a simple setup, using only about seventy base words, could produce a combinatorial explosion of results—on the order of three hundred billion different letters. The lovelorn user could run the program over and over until his fingers seized up, and never see the same letter twice.

Struggling for words this Valentine’s Day ? Try out Christopher Strachey’s love-letter generator for yourself: http://nyer.cm/IN73U1D