Noteworthy reads from the last week:
“Monkey Day Care,” Michelle Dean
“As a toddler in 1981 and 1982, I attended a day care with monkeys. Or, perhaps more precisely, I was part of a study in the form of a day care that involved monkeys. I was two, then three. I remember nothing.”
“The Joy of Slow Computing,” Nathan Schneider
“There is a habit in tech culture of saying that the latest app ‘democratizing’ whatever it happens to do. This is lovely, but best not to confuse it with actual democracy.”
“The Inexplicable,” Karl Ove Knausgaard
“In many ways, I find it repellent to write about Anders Behring Breivik. Every time his name appears in public, he gets what he wants, and becomes who he wants, while those whom he murdered, at whose expense he asserted himself, lost not only their lives but also their names—we remember his name, but they have become numbers.”
“A Brief History of Spacefarers,” Margaret Lazarus Dean
“Stories about astronauts are stories about risks. It is precisely the risks they take that make us admire them, that makes the wonders they encounter so wondrous.”
“Google, Why Won’t You Let Me Forget My Divorce?,” Christopher Null
“I asked a friend who was a former Googler for advice, and much to my surprise he said that he actually knew a guy who worked on that very product. An insider would surely be able to fix this with a few taps of the keyboard, right? Wrong.”
Hedgehogs abroad:
“Virtual Reality as Moral Ideal,” Matthew B. Crawford
“In the old Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, by far the most prominent source of hilarity is the capacity of material stuff to generate frustration, or rather demonic violence.”