Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #314

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another: 

• Using Metadata To Find Paul Revere – Kieran Healey. “I came across this post while looking into other data science stuff. It’s interesting, because it shows how simple facts (like membership in known groups) can tell us a lot about people — in this case, that Paul Revere was plotting against the British. But it’s brilliant, because the writer stays in character. He doesn’t say, ‘here’s the source code,’ for example, but rather, ‘there is a secret repository containing the data and the appropriate commands for your portable analytical engine.'” (Alistair for Hugh). 
• Super-chill rapper wins South Korean space-out competition – Mental Floss. “I’d suggest this one for the title alone. But they say that when something becomes abundant, that which it consumes becomes scarce. So in a phone-charged, always-connected world, the ability to do absolutely nothing is rare. So rare, in fact, that there’s a contest. Yes, there are commentators. And while it’s performance art, apparently it’s also hard. ’Artist Whoops Yang invented the contest in a period of intense stress in her own life two years ago.'” (Alistair for Mitch).
• Three shirts, four pairs of trousers: meet Japan’s ‘hardcore’ minimalists – The Guardian. “God, I wish I was a Japanese minimalist.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• The Neu Jorker. “This is the most comprehensive bit of parody I think I’ve ever seen. I’m a fan of the New Yorker magazine, but it’s always just veering on the side of insufferable. Well, here is a full 82-page(!!) parody issue, complete with ads (‘Acela: The train for nieces’, ’Father hats’), articles, with opening sentences like this: ’I attended my first Kentucky Derby the year after college, taken by my then-boyfriend who was something of Tennessee royalty,’ and even, God bless them, cartoons: ‘Crab? Like the animal?’. This is a serious bit of commitment to the craft of satire.” (Hugh for Mitch). 
• Can Becoming A High-Tech Hub Lift A City Out Of Poverty? – City Lab. “I love everything that Richard Florida writes about. In this piece, the always-urban writer about how humans and cities intersect looks at the merits of building tech hubs in our cities. It has long been thought that if you invest in the people who are building the next generation of businesses, then you can create a wealthy and sustainable city. These businesses inspire creativity, create jobs and more. So, is it working?” (Mitch for Hugh). 
• The Dark Side of Longform Journalism – Literary Hub. “I’m pretty transparent about content. I love spending a lot of time deep diving into text (business books, magazine cover stories, longform journalism and more). I like sharing links and tweets, but they really don’t satiate my infovore diet at all. It’s not just reading longform content, it’s the thinking about it, taking notes about it, and applying it to the work that I’m doing. I rarely get that same output from a listicle (big surprise). What you may not know is the true motive behind the journalist. Why do they write these stories? Their answers might surprise you…” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.