Adrian Hon on what ARGs can teach us about QAnon — expanding on his popular Twitter thread; related: Charlie Warzel interviewed him about it for the NYT #

TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Eugene Wei on how algorithms can form interest graphs at unprecedented scale without following anyone #

Melanie Faye’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert — incredible guitarist and songwriter, she's a great Instagram follow #

TikTok and the Law — Lawfare looks at the legality of the White House's order for ByteDance to divest (via) #

Star Turns — Duncan Robson compiled all his face-aligned rotating movie posters into a single video #

Alanis Morissette performs “Ablaze” with her daughter — singing a song about parenting while parenting (via) #

Trump threatens TikTok will “close down” on September 15th unless an American company buys it — needless to say, TikTok creators and fans are freaking out #

Calendar 2020 — that feels about right #

How the Pandemic Defeated America — Ed Yong's cover story for The Atlantic is a deep dive into the U.S.'s catastrophic pandemic response #

Future Islands’ “For Sure” — animated music video about "two autonomous rental cars finding love on the way across state lines after a climate collapse" (via) #

Antibodies (Do You Have The) — Cousin Greg from HBO's Succession made a pop-punk pandemic anthem #

Matt Muir’s Web Curios goes on hiatus after 300 issues — my favorite linktastic newsletter goes on break because Imperica, its publisher, shut down today #

Sourceful — search engine for a community-submitted collection of public Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides (via) #

Meeting Intruders — convert Google Meet into a Space Invaders knockoff with your coworkers as the aliens #

Black Lives Matter protests in Portland resume peacefully as feds withdraw — first night of protesting in weeks that wasn't met with a wildly disproportionate and violent police response #

Court orders immediate release for Michigan teen incarcerated for not doing online homework — student protesters held an overnight demonstration on Wednesday #

Double Fine’s 20th Anniversary Humble Bundle — $9 gets you virtually everything Double Fine's ever made or published #

Vanity Fair on the White House’s secret aborted Covid-19 national testing system — they abandoned it because of bad models, concerns over bad publicity, and disinterest in helping Democrat-run states #

Tampa 17-year-old arrested for massive Twitter hack — Twitter added a big update to their postmortem, explaining how their employees were spear phished by phone #

The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries — an alternate ending to Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree #

Microsoft in talks to buy TikTok as Trump weighs ban/sale order — Bloomberg was first to report ByteDance will be ordered to divest its ownership #

Reconstructing Journalistic Scenes in 3D — photogrammetry for journalistic storytelling (via) #

TikTok opening algorithm, moderation, and data to regulators — an attempt to counter suspicion around Chinese government control #

Medium beta testing themes, microblogging — they're slowly turning into Blogspot #

Portland protesters forced to stop attending protests as a condition of jail release — federal judges requiring people, many charged only with minor offenses, to give up their Constitutional rights #

Tech’s four biggest companies are going on trial — hearings this week may determine the future of antitrust regulation #

“We’re Your Family Now” — personal stories of what it's like to lose loved ones to the QAnon cult #

Former Deadspin staffers launching Defector Media — employee owned and operated, should be an interesting experiment #

E.gg — experimental Facebook app is very reminiscent of Byte's original design (via) #

60 Years and Still — a tabletop mixed-media short covering incidents of police violence against Black Americans over six decades #

The Last Bronycon — Jenny Nicholson gives the brony phenomenon the documentary it deserves #

macintosh.js — an Electron app running Mac OS 8 emulating a 1991 Macintosh Quadra 900 #

Bijan Stephen profiles MSCHF — not every MSCHF drop is a winner, but they have a remarkably high hit rate #

Why your USPS packages are delayed — historic mail volume, a reliance on overtime instead of new hires, and a Trump donor as new Postmaster General #

Minecraft running in Minecraft — using the VM Computers mod letting you boot a Windows PC inside the game (via) #

The Guardian on Bortac, the quasi-military border patrol units sent to Portland — "the most violent and racist in all law enforcement" #

ProPublica releases thousands of NYPD police discipline records — "303 officers still working at the NYPD have had five or more substantiated allegations against them" #

The Pudding launches Winning the Internet, a meta-links newsletter — tracking the most popular links from other link-heavy newsletters #

More federal officers deploying to Portland as protests gain momentum — great article that talks to several Black activists who have been at the protests since the beginning #

The Verge on the Nintendo Gigaleak — internal source code and development repositories from over a dozen classic SNES and N64 games #

Success Kid, 13 years later — the family and subject of an accidental meme, born from a 2007 Flickr photo, looks back #

Alexagate — MSCHF's new drop is an Amazon Echo speaker blocker #

Tedium on the history of RIP graphics — a doomed graphical innovation for BBSes in the early '90s, released just before the web made every BBS feel obsolete #

How Flash Games Shaped the Videogame Industry — a visual essay and remembrance from a bunch of Flash game creators (via) #

Good Sudoku — Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger's new iOS app takes the tedium out of Sudoku and teaches you advanced strategy while you play #

Friends intro recreated as stock footage — several more in the Twitter thread #

Racial demographic dot-density map — Observable continues to be an incredible tool for live coding and visualization #

Defining the ’90s Music Canon — part of The Pudding's series on identifying generation gaps in music memory #

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Reunion Table Read — the instant cult classic is 10 years old next month #

Hurting People at Scale — BuzzFeed News investigation on employee dissent inside Facebook based on dozens of internal documents #