In the End, People May Really Just Want to Date Themselves – Five Thirty Eight
“Opposites attract. That’s how the cliché goes, and people really believe they are attracted to those different from them: 86 percent say they want a partner who “complements them” rather than one who “resembles them.” There’s only one problem with this idea: It’s false. I studied 1 million matches made by the online dating website eHarmony’s algorithm, which aims to pair people who will be attracted to one another and compatible over the long term; if the people agree, they can message each other to set up a meeting in real life. eHarmony’s data on its users contains 102 traits for each person — everything from how passionate and ambitious they claim to be to how much they say they drink, smoke and earn.”
My Father, the Drug Lord – Esquire
“He was angry at himself for letting cocaine use throw off his judgment; embarrassed about a botched stash house and a car crash; worried about those security cameras that must have caught him running through the lobby of a hotel with a box of money. All eighteen thousand pounds of weed had been sold, nothing lost, no one arrested. But by getting high on the job, he had broken the pirate code, nowhere written down but known by all. And now he had three months to sit and stew about it.”
A Complete Ranking of Almost Every Single Mitch Hedberg Joke – BuzzFeed
“I find that a duck’s opinion of me is very much influenced over whether or not I have bread.”
Wave of Decomposition: The Pixies, Thurston Moore, and alternative icons in decline – Grantland
“A few weeks ago, a jazz critic named Ted Gioia wrote an article for the Daily Beast about how contemporary music criticism is terrible. This was the crux of his argument: “Technical knowledge of the art form has disappeared from its discourse. In short, music criticism has turned into lifestyle reporting.” It was hardly an outrageous (or uncommon) observation. As a professional dispenser of opinions about popular musical artists, I hear some variant of this complaint at least once a month. I sort of see where these people are coming from, but I never understand what exactly they’re asking for. Do they really want record reviews to be more pedantic and inscrutable? Is their ideal for pop criticism “less jokes, more guitar tablatures”? Do they also hassle film critics about talking too much about the actors and not enough about the gaffers?”
The Secret Shame of an Unacquired Tech Worker – New York Magazine
“Last week, amid the overwrought start-up angst and sexual escapades that clutter the anonymous messaging app Secret, a hint of genuine drama emerged: a post that said, “Google was interested in buying my 5 person company for our team. They hired everyone but me.””
The Slumps that Shaped Modern Finance – The Economist
“At its core, finance does just two simple things. It can act as an economic time machine, helping savers transport today’s surplus income into the future, or giving borrowers access to future earnings now. It can also act as a safety net, insuring against floods, fires or illness. By providing these two kinds of service, a well-tuned financial system smooths away life’s sharpest ups and downs, making an uncertain world more predictable. In addition, as investors seek out people and companies with the best ideas, finance acts as an engine of growth. Yet finance can also terrorise. When bubbles burst and markets crash, plans paved years into the future can be destroyed. As the impact of the crisis of 2008 subsides, leaving its legacy of unemployment and debt, it is worth asking if the right things are being done to support what is good about finance, and to remove what is poisonous.”
5 Terrible Things I Learned as a Corporate Whistle-Blower – Cracked
“JP Morgan wanted to sell a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of debt to a debt buyer. I looked into it just a little and realized that most of these people had settled their debts, or their cases were dismissed by courts, or balances were outdated or inflated, and so on. This doesn’t mean we’d have been screwing over the collections agencies, though. They didn’t care if the debt info we gave them was out of date or incorrect, because the bank is in the clear either way: When they sell your personal information, they put “as is” at the top of the contract like it’s the windshield of a crappy used car.”
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Photo courtesy of Greg Roberts.
