Cards Against Humanity has launched their “America Votes” expansion packs for sale:
Today, we’re letting America choose between two new expansion packs about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
At the end of this promotion, Cards Against Humanity will tally up the sales of both packs, and depending on which pack gets more support, we will donate all the money in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Fast Company has a fantastic, and in-depth, profile on Apple:
With Macs, iPads, and software applications and services, Apple isn’t a one-trick pony like BlackBerry, to use an example cited by those most freaked out about the recent iPhone slowdown. It recorded $50.6 billion in sales during that “disappointing” quarter, more than the combined revenue of Google parent Alphabet ($20.3 billion) and Amazon ($29.1 billion) over the same period. Its $10.5 billion in profits outpaced not just the combination of Alphabet ($4.2 billion) and Amazon ($513 million) but also Facebook ($1.5 billion) and Microsoft ($3.8 billion).
“I don’t read all the coverage on Apple that there is,” Cook tells me a few days after my lunch with Cue and Federighi. “The way that I look at that is, I really know the truth.” And he’s ready to talk about it.
The piece is written by one of the the authors of Becoming Steve Jobs, which is the book I most recommend (even over his own biography) people read to understand Apple and Steve.
Sydney Shaw, writing on her blog, highlights some of the misogyny she witnessed in our music scene while doing her job as a journalist. This description from Warped Tour made my stomach turn:
I listened to a man yell slurs at one of the female photographers shooting Yellowcard’s set. “Who’d you blow to get in front of the barrier?” he asked. “And aren’t you hot in those jeans, baby? It’s 90 degrees.”
I saw a man try to slip his hand up the shorts of a young woman crowdsurfing over him. She kicked at him when she realized what was happening and grazed the side of his face with her Converse sneaker. He clutched at the spot on his cheek and called her a “fucking bitch.” He said he hopes she gets dropped on her head.
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Rihanna has joined the Ocean’s Eleven spin-off Ocean’s Ocho.
Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett — both of whom have been long rumored to star in the movie — will head up the cast of the Gary Ross-helmed heist film that is scheduled to begin production in October in New York.
Like the Oceans Eleven films, the rest of the ensemble is stacked with major stars including Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter. Mindy Kaling also is joining the cast, with music stars Rihanna (Battleship) and Awkwafina (Neighbors 2) rounding out the group.
Mark Sullivan interviewed Apple Music’s Bozoma Saint John for Fast Company:
We should be paying attention to all of the ways that people want to listen to music, I mean, truly. Each point of interest is equally important as the other. I really like R&B from 1993, but I really like R&B that I just heard last week, too. How do I get served both of those things, because I am a complex music listener? By the way, you don’t have to be a music-phile in order to have that experience. Even a casual listener at the end of the day does not want to listen to the same thing again and again and again. You do want fresh; you want to be served something. I have learned that the balance of all of those things between the security of listening, to everything I want to listen to, and being served something new, the experience of U.S. consumers or me as a consumer, all those things should be rated equally.
This interactive piece from The New York Times on Simone Biles, the US gymnast, is awesome:
Her signature move is a double layout with a half-twist and a blind landing. When she first performed it in 2013, no one else had ever tried it in competition.
It’s now officially known as “The Biles.”
BitTorrent has announced the “Discovery Fund:”
Over the next year, BitTorrent aims to partner with 25 creators by providing cash grants and promotional support to build impactful releases and discover new fans. We are looking for artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers and other creators working on uncompromised projects representing a diverse, original perspective seeking global distribution. This open, international initiative has a rolling call (so you can apply when your project is ready) and provides $2,500- $100,000 in marketing and distribution funding to use at your discretion.
Artists an apply here.
The movie War Dogs is coming out next week and I finally sat down to read the Rolling Stone piece by Guy Lawson from 2011 about the story the movie is based on. A gripping read.
Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. “It was surreal,” he recalls. “Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn’t know anything about the situation in that part of the world. But I was a central player in the Afghan war — and if our delivery didn’t make it to Kabul, the entire strategy of building up the Afghanistan army was going to fail. It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn’t know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.”
Richard Bowie, writing for VegNews, on how Blink-182 have hired the vegan chef, and Instagram personality, Mary Mattern as their chef on their current tour:
The 30-year-old chef and cookbook author is currently travelling with the group cross-country, creating plant-based recipes—such as cauliflower chowder with biscuit flats, fishless filet sliders, and apple crumb pie—to help fuel members Mark Hoppus, Matt Skiba, and especially the band’s long-time vegan Travis Barker.
Devin Faraci, writing about the difference between “best” versus “favorite”:
So the next time you see a list of someone’s favorite movies, instead of jumping right to why they’re wrong or asking the perennial irritating asshole question “What, no love for ______?”, try instead to have a conversation about why those films got picked. That’s a great discussion to be had, whether it’s directly with the person making the list or whether it’s you trying to understand an artist’s tastes and how they influence his or her work. And it’s always great for you, as a grown up thinking person, to be able to explain why you like stuff – why things are your favorites – beyond “My dad showed it to me when I was 7.”
Amen.
Ben Casselman, writing at Five Thirty Eight:
But Friday’s report suggests the recovery is beginning to reach some of the groups that have struggled most in recent years. The unemployment rate for workers without a high school diploma fell sharply to 6.3 percent in July, lower than it was when the recession began. (Their unemployment rate topped 15 percent in the recession.) For workers with only a high school diploma, the unemployment rate is down to 5 percent from more than 10 percent during the recession.
None of that is likely to stop Trump from talking about the weak economy — or from outright claiming the numbers are manipulated. And there is plenty of reason to worry about the path of the economy, starting with this week’s weak estimate of second-quarter economic growth. But the job market, at least, appears to be on firm footing.
Christine Birkner, writing for AdWeek, about how if you’re a business and you tweet about the Olympics you may get in trouble (emphasis mine):
While individuals, news media and official sponsors are generally free to post about the games and athletes during the Olympics, other businesses and brands are essentially locked out from anything close to a direct discussion.
Summarizing its many brand restrictions, which you can see detailed below, the USOC warns businesses: “Do not create social media posts that are Olympic themed, that feature Olympic trademarks, that contain Games imagery or congratulate Olympic performance unless you are an official sponsor as specified in the Social Media Section.”
Oh come on.
Spotify has announced the new “release radar” that will give you a personalized weekly playlist of songs from new, and recently released, albums. The Verge goes into more detail:
Discover Weekly focuses on a window of the last six months or so to decipher your taste and make suggestions. Release Radar can’t replicate that approach, because your favorite band may not release an album more than once every two years. Instead it takes stock of your entire listening history, then narrows the range of possible suggestions down to tracks that have been released in the last two to three weeks.
I’m still, mostly, an album-only listener, but I really like this approach to trying to get people to check out new music and tackling the problem of so many people not being aware that new music is out from artists they love. Hell, I follow this stuff for a living and even I would like a personalized page each Friday that shows me all the albums out today from artists already in my collection, and then below that gives me four recommended albums I should check out and what song to start with.
Joshua Benton, writing for NiemanLab:
It isn’t quite our-long-national-nightmare-is-over level, but one of the significant daily reminders of the early web just disappeared. ESPN’s website, which had been hosted at espn.go.com since 1998, is finally now just at espn.com.
Damn, there goes one of my favorite jokes.
My first introduction to “final clubs” was in The Social Network; however, Sarah Maslin Nir has a great article in The New York Times about their place at Harvard in 2016:
Today, that description is perpetuated by unwritten codes on who may pass through their doors and who may join. The elaborate courtship of the desirable can begin with an engraved invitation slipped under a dorm room door to “punch” — a selection process that continues with a series of outings and culminates in a black-tie dinner feting the few who make it through.
To many students, the clubs remain potent symbols of privilege, anachronistic and out of place on an increasingly diverse campus.
