The Guardian on the global economic downturn for millenials — "In the US, under-30s are now poorer than retired people" #

500 1990s Desktop Wallpapers — the original vaporwave (via) #

Data analysis uncovers crossword puzzle plagiarism scandal — the data and source are available on Pwanson's site #

Fileship — hold digital files hostage until your client pays up #

TensorFlow for Poets — beginner's guide for the machine intelligence library #

Wait But Why's Tim Urban procrastinates his TED talk about procrastination — gripping reading for anyone with a fear of public speaking (via) #

Vox on the rise of American authoritarianism — "Donald Trump could be just the first of many Trumps in American politics" #

Life and Death in the App Store — a depressing case study for bootstrapped paid iOS apps #

Wintergatan's Marble Machine — performative music instrument built from 2,000 marbles and 3,000 parts #

Vandelay Industries — a Slack bot that searches every line from Seinfeld and posts an animated GIF #

How Gawker trolled Donald Trump into tweeting a Mussolini quote as his own — Twitter bot making headlines #

New York Mag on Weird Facebook — related: Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer #

Postmortem 2021: How AI Won — Diana Kimball's speculative fiction memo on super-persuasive AI #

The Last Job on Earth — a partnership with the Guardian to imagine an automated future #

Minefield — massively-multiplayer Minesweeper (via) #

"We Are the World" using Face Swap Live — four years after Kyle McDonald and Arturo Castro's demos, real-time face substitution is an app #

PBS Idea Channel on ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? — more than just ironic, it ties into how we experience art online and where we "live" #

Pejac's Heavy Sea — the short film claims no CGI, no Photoshop #

Matt Taibbi on how America made Donald Trump unstoppable — "Trump found the flaw in the American Death Star" #

Sailor Mercury on the intersection of art and technology — art-inspired technology gives us new ideas instead of incremental improvements #

Playthings — cheeseburger drums and gummy bear xylophones on a day-glo VR island #

Metafilter's Gopher server is back after 15 years of downtime — there's no Gopher client for Chrome, but you can use an HTTP gopher proxy to browse it #

Boston Dynamics' new demo of their Atlas humanoid robots — that guy with the hockey stick will be first against the wall after the robot uprising #

Stripe Atlas — targeted to non-US businesses, but seems pretty damned useful for U.S. businesses too #

Evolution of Web Design — 2003 was a dark year #

No Small Parts: Crispin Glover — Brandon Hardesty's web series on character actors is so good #

Reagan and WarGames — incredible story of how '80s government security policy was influenced by the film, though he wasn't the first to report it #

Paul Ford on Racter, a 1980s-era chatbot — don't miss the scan of the book it wrote, worth it for the illustrations alone #

Refurbishing A 1927 Switchboard — the interface for this incredible game, Hello Operator #

Artists covertly scan bust of Nefertiti and release data to public domain — "the one object in the museum's collection off-limits to photographers" #

The Simpsons Sphere — 360° video of 500 episodes at the same time; try it in the YouTube app on your phone #

The Maker — "the simple story of one man's enduring passion" #

How Google's Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls — still feels like bad practice that Google indexes content that isn't freely available on the web #

The Outpost Is Here — the absurdly great launch lineup for XOXO's new shared workspace in Portland #

Codeology — gorgeous visualization of Github projects by size and languages (via) #

Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens — as much about how people make money on Tumblr, and Yahoo's attempts to thwart it #

Kendrick Lamar at the Grammys — barnburner of a performance #

The Brain — a neural network built in Quartz Composer #

A Large Dataset of Object Scans — more than 10,000 public domain scans #

The New Yorker profile on TMZ's paparazzi infrastructure — great quote from Alec Baldwin in there #

Smell Dating — from Useless Press, a "publishing collective that creates eclectic Internet things" #

OK Go's zero-gravity music video — how it was made, and why the video is Facebook-only #

Zebra — painful new game from Bennett Foddy; epilepsy warning #

Blab — Twitch meets Hangouts #

The Life of Pablo Generator — make your own Kanye album cover #

Creative Cloud for Mac update deletes the first hidden folder in root — for Backblaze users, it's the folder containing backup drive metadata #

Quartz's delivers the news with a chat-like UI — interesting approach to news app design #

Internet Archive adds Windows 3.1 software emulation — start with the Windows Showcase before deep-diving the rest #

Ezra Klein on the rise of Donald Trump — New Hampshire crosses the line from comedy to terror #

Jezebel on Samantha Bee's new show — the debut episode is a barnburner #