You might have noticed that actor Paul Marcarelli, who played a memorable role as Verizon’s “Test Man” for many years, has begun to star in commercials for Sprint, a rival telecommunications company. Why the switch? Some insight can be found in a 2011 profile of Marcarelli by Spencer Morgan in The Atlantic.
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The Salmon’s Identity Crisis
Matthew Berger explores the evolution and the history of salmon aquaculture for Nautilus.
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Shopping for Forbidden Fruit
Rafil Kroll-Zaidi writes about proxy services which help Western shoppers navigate the Japanese online marketplace and buy the goods retailers refuse to sell outside Japan.
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What Sexual SEO Looks Like
In The Walrus, Natalie Zina Waschots describes her time doing search-engine optimization for a Toronto pornography curator.
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Volkswagen and ‘the Normalization of Deviance’
In The Atlantic, Jerry Useem looks at historic precedents in other large organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, Ford and NASA to explore Volkswagen’s expensive mistake and the corporate climate that led to it.
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The People You Meet on Tinder
Fresh from a go-nowhere relationship, Gemma Sieff writes an engrossing personal essay in Harper’s about her passing encounters with a series of men she met on Tinder.
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The Selling of ‘Valley of the Dolls’
“A new book is like a new brand of detergent,” Jacqueline Susann famously said. “You have to let the public know about it. What’s wrong with that?”
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Who Owns Tattoos?
Over at Vice Sports, Aaron Gordon has a fascinating piece up about intellectual property rights and tattoos. He opens with the case of the NBA2K video game series, which is currently being sued by a tattoo artist agency over the games’ digitally recreated tattoos, which appear on the virtual bodies of players such as Kobe Bryant and LeBron James. But copyright issues […]
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Technology for Problem Sleepers
Having trouble sleeping? In The New Yorker, Patricia Marx writes about the economy of slumber, offering a lively survey of current gadgets and expensive equipment designed to get you a night of rest, and she nestles it snug as a bug with a primer on the growing science of sleep. From deprivation to natural cycles to oversleep, […]
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The Misguided Meal-in-a-Box Phenomenon
Andy Samberg and Colonel Sanders aren’t the only people to put memorable things in boxes. Corby Kummer wrote about his trials and issues with the booming meal kit delivery industry in The New Republic last October, weighing the benefits of convenience and culinary experimentation with the reality of waste: I won’t be marketing my services as an investment adviser, at least […]