It’s that time again, where I pick out some of the articles I’ve read this week that you might find interesting. This week, Siracusa’s review of Mountain Lion took much of my reading time, and I know everyone probably read it last week, so I wont waste your time with an excerpt. Read it if you haven’t, it’s huge and thorough as always.
Double Jeopardy — Geoffrey Sant, Slate
The ability to hire so-called substitute criminals is just one way in which China’s extreme upper crust are able to live by their own set of rules. While Occupy Wall Street grabbed attention for its attacks on the “1 percent,” in China, a much smaller fraction of the country controls an even greater amount of wealth.
A Brief History of Money — James Surowiecki, Ieee Spectrum
Yet in tribal and other “primitive” economies, money served a very different purpose—less a store of value or medium of exchange, much more a social lubricant.
The IRL Fetish — Nathan Jurgenson, The New Inquiry
The current obsession with the analog, the vintage, and the retro has everything to do with this fetishization of the offline. The rise of the mp3 has been coupled with a resurgence in vinyl. Vintage cameras and typewriters dot the apartments of Millennials. Digital photos are cast with the soft glow, paper borders, and scratches of Instagram’s faux-vintage filters. The ease and speed of the digital photo resists itself, creating a new appreciation for slow film photography. “Decay porn” has become a thing.
Microsoft’s Lost Decade — Kurt Eichenwald, Vanity Fair
“They used to point their finger at IBM and laugh,” said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. “Now they’ve become the thing they despised.”