Queens + Greenpoint

T. C. Boyle’s Chicxulub

I’m just getting back into listening to podcasts again, and noticed that the New Yorker Fiction podcast hit episode number 100. Congratulations to Deborah Treisman! If you’re not a subscriber already, definitely listen to some of the old episodes, there’s a lot of great stuff in there. This T.C. Boyle story is up there with the best of them.

Link

Could a Bank Deny Your Loan Based on Your Facebook Friends?

Facebook recently filed a rather unsettling patent application describing (among other things) a hypothetical social-graph-based credit scoring system. What level of freaked out would be an appropriate response?

Facebook makes its money by encouraging people to have large friend networks and create lots of content for it to show ads against. And given that that’s the primary profit driver for Facebook, as a practical manner, it would really surprise me if they decided to get into the credit-scoring business, just because I think that’s going to make people feel panicked and uncomfortable. If I were them, I would not be in a giant rush to do that.

This makes me wonder if a lot of people suddenly started blocking ads, would companies like Facebook move quickly to adopt more dystopian business models? Or would they be more likely to start embracing those business models much earlier—quietly, secretly, mischievously—in anticipation?

Link via Ingrid

One Rothko per hour

Basically exactly what it sounds like, created as a response to the seizure-inducing Rothko animated GIF.

Link

What Happens Next Will Amaze You

Maciej Cegłowski on the perilous surveillance of online advertising:

Ad fraud works because the market for ads is so highly automated. Like algorithmic trading, decisions happen in fractions of a second, and matchmaking between publishers and advertisers is outside human control. It’s a confusing world of demand side platforms, supply-side platforms, retargeting, pre-targeting, behavioral modeling, real-time bidding, ad exchanges, ad agency trading desks and a thousand other bits of jargon.

The winners in this game are the ones running the casino: big advertising networks, surveillance companies, and the whole brand-new industry known as “adtech”.

The losers are small publishers and small advertisers. Universal click fraud drives down the value of all advertising, making it harder for niche publishers to make ends meet.

Link via Ethan Marcotte

High Line + SFPC

What shape is the Internet?

Basically any answer to this question is correct.

According to patent drawings, it’s a cloud, or a bean, or a web, or an explosion, or a highway, or maybe a weird lump.

internet-shape

Link via Andy

Five goals in nine minutes

Robert Lewandowski, a striker for Bayern Munich, scored a bunch of goals and sportsed quite successfully.

Number five took out the goalcam.
Number five took out the goalcam.

Robert Lewandowski came on for Bayern Munich at halftime in a match they were losing 1-0 to Wolfsburg. Five minutes and 40 seconds into his appearance, his first goal hit the back of the net. Almost exactly nine minutes later, his fifth goal did the same. This man is on fire.

Link, with all the videos, via Ed

Fall updates

It is starting to feel like Fall here in New York, and I am up to some new things since the last time I wrote here in January (!). By the way, those New Years resolutions? They are going terribly! So it goes.

The big news, if you hadn’t heard, is that I’ve left my job at the New Yorker magazine. I am still very proud of how the redesign turned out, and I learned a ton from my many amazing colleagues there, but after two years it just felt like time for me to move on. So I am back to freelancing, and feeling excited to work on some new things. And yes, I am looking for new clients, you should hire me!

In addition to freelancing, I’ve also started a fellowship at Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. I’m working with an awesome group of collaborators using telephony and wifi darknets as tools for gathering stories. I’ll be posting more about that here in the coming weeks.

Also, if you look around, you may notice I’ve updated my WordPress theme a bit. The underlying structure is very similar to what I had before, but I focused on a few key improvements:

  1. The page layout is now responsive, so it works better on very small and very large screens.
  2. Whenever possible, I’ve minimized my reliance on third-party tools (for example, I no longer use TypeKit for my header fonts).
  3. So long green and red, hello pink! I’ve also made it easy to change the color scheme in the future through the magic of Sass variables.
  4. Comments are gone! At least for now, maybe I’ll change my mind about that. I do love getting feedback about stuff I post on here, so drop me a line if you might have otherwise left a comment.

Of all the changes in this website update, the one I feel best about is cutting out the third-party tracking. I’ve noticed that YouTube embeds serve up a DoubleClick advertising tracker, just by loading a page with a video, which isn’t cool. Now video embeds only load on demand, after you’ve hit the play button (mobile visitors may need to tap two times). Naturally, you’ll still be tracked by Google if you play an embedded YouTube video, but otherwise the page shouldn’t leak data to any off-site parties.

Third-party trackers, before and after.
Third-party trackers, before and after. Mint is the one thing I kept around, but it’s hosted on my own server.

The bottom line is I am in control of what goes up on phiffer.org, which includes things like hidden advertising trackers. Now there is slightly less ambient surveillance around here. Plus the pages should load marginally faster!

Hunters Point explorations