Hello there, friend. Not much to say from my end this week, so enjoy the list below.

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1. DrDrunkenstein’s Reign of Terror - Slate

This is hilarious.. and bizarre? DrDrunkenstein is only one of many online names Magnus Carlsen goes by when he’s having fun messing around with online chess tournaments. He plays audacious chess, cracks jokes, gets drunk, and also wins a number of tournaments that he enters.

DrDrunkenstein returned in March and April 2018 for two more runaway victories in the Lichess Titled Arena. But in the fifth Titled Arena, Drunkenstein came in an uncharacteristic fifth place. Viewers of his Twitch broadcast report he had lag issues, but one comment near the top of the stream suggested that Carlsen’s handle might have been a little too accurate this time: “I thought Carlsen was sandbagging these tournaments to make it interesting,“ user Cinnamon Cookies said, “but after watching his stream he’s just really drunk.”

2. One of the last abortions in Louisiana? Diary of a woman from a clinic under threat of closure - The Guardian

This is a Guardian piece from the beginning of March this year about an impending Supreme Court vote on a new abortion legislation in Louisiana, the state in which I currently live. The law, if passed, would require the physician performing the abortion to have the ability to admit their patients into a hospital if needed. Basically, it will cause two of the three abortion clinics in the state to close, and put the remaining one in jeopardy as well. Welp.

3. Emotionally stunted stunting - The Outline

“There’s a very simple reason why millennials are so lonely: Social media mimics community even though it pushes us further away from each other.”

But there is something to be gleaned from his idea that “the basis of the capacity to be alone is the experience of being alone in the presence of someone.” Social media yammers on about connection and community when it really leads to isolation and, worse, a narcissistic immaturity desperate for the kind of human connection that cannot be borne from replying to each other on Twitter. If Winnicott’s paradox is a baby playing near its mother, social media is going to a career fair in hell: so much noise, everyone showing off, no one paying attention. The social web is engineered — gamified, in fact — to make us feel that we’re a part of a community, a conversation, a culture, but without the context that typically allows these things to flourish, such as eye contact or silence.

4. Interestingness Is Always There: Talking with Jenny Odell - The Rumpus

This piece couples nicely with the previous one.

I feel like that’s a metaphor for how I think about a lot of other things, like social media. It’s this engine that runs on anxiety and envy and insecurity, and it posits that the answer to that is “over here.” It’s always over here. I see social media as this sort of dam that acts on that impulse and, at the end of the day, doesn’t fulfill that need. It just creates more of it.

For example, when I was doing my artist residency at the San Francisco dump, I found that I could pick up almost anything from the public disposal area and within fifteen minutes of trying to figure out where it was made, or researching the story behind it, something very surprising would always come up. I realized that interestingness wasn’t a function of the object, it was a function of my patience and attention. Interestingness is always there.
Interestingness is not a function of the object, but a function of your patience and attention. What a lovely statement.

5. How a Hacker’s Mom Broke Into a Prison—and the Warden’s Computer - WIRED (paywalled)

John Strand runs Black Hills Information Security, which means his job is basically to break into, or attack the defenses of, his clients, and then tell them how they can improve their security (both physical and cyber). One of his jobs involved testing the defenses of a correctional facility, and his mom (aged 58, the company’s new Chief Financial Officer) wanted to break in. And whoa, she did a wonderful job.

6. Self Portrait as a Human Interest Story - Longreads

(trigger warning: rape) This was so sad. It’s an autobiographical piece about how the author, Emi Netfield, attained “success” and lived the American Dream but was scarred multiple times in the process.

7. Legendary Technologist And Essayist Paul Graham On Walking Into Ideas, The Test Of Good Writing, And Becoming A Connoisseur Of Bad Writing - Writing Routines

I think I shared a Paul Graham interview a few weeks ago as well. I really enjoy his writing as well as his insights and answers in this particular interview.

That’s pretty standard advice. But this bit might not be: become a connoisseur of bad writing. When you read something that seems bad, try to figure out why. Is it because the author is being dishonest? Is the rhythm off? Is the diction too formal? How would you say it? Once you’re good at noticing mistakes, it becomes harder to produce them.
This quote reminds me of Robert Cottrell, the man who reads 1000 articles per day.

8. What combing through ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s catalog reveals about 40 years of pop music - Fast Company

Weird Al Yankovic is one of my heroes (one of my highlights from last year was getting to watch him live) and I am so excited that there’s a new book coming out called The Weird Accordion to Al! This article is about the book and about Al himself. As a parody artist, his timing is impeccable and he has a knack of parodying other artists at the peak of their powers. Also, he (and his parodies) has remained ingrained in public consciousness even as we start to forget the actual songs he parodied. If you want Weird Al suggestions, ask me!

9. The boss who put everyone on 70K - BBC

You might have seen this already, but this is about the CEO/founder of a Seattle-based company, Dan Price, who abruptly changed the base salary of all employees at his company to $70,000/year (almost doubling the salary of some employees). Contrary to expectations of employees becoming lazy or incompetent, it has catapulted both productivity and overall happiness. I’m no economics expert, but I would love to live in a world where executives don’t earn as much as they currently do.

10. The Many Lives of Roberto, a Soup - New Yorker (paywalled)

Ha! I loved this. It’s about a soup recipe that became so popular with its creator and her husband that they had to name it, and is now popular on the internet.

Hey, right now, we’re all going to be really into this three-year-old soup recipe with a silly name, buried in a newsletter archive. The end result, however we got here, is that, every day, people are telling me that they’ve made my soup, and that they really like it. They’re mostly telling me on Instagram Stories, which makes it easy for me to take their Roberto pictures and share them with my own audience: a daily, collated folio of worldwide Roberto incarnations, points of light from a far-flung and wide-ranging soup-making collective whose individual expressions of happiness fill me, strangely and wondrously, with a pure and unfamiliar happiness of my own.