I’m a huge fan of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s The Sunday Papers features and i also enjoyed doing the Reading List after my vacation in August, so i figured i might as well try my hand at turning something like this into an ongoing, semi-regular feature.
So here it is, the September Reading List. A selection of noteworthy articles that i’ve enjoyed but not written about during the last month (with bits of August thrown in for good measure):
- My piece on iPad magazines for Icon’s September 2010 issue. Matt Jones of BERG (who created the Popular Science iPad app) writes about the future of digital magazines.
- Secrets of the Little Blue Box: A 1971 Esquire article by Ron Rosenbaum about phone phreaking. Reading this opened my eyes about numerous idiosyncracies of early cyberpunk.
- Grading the Teachers: Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?: The L.A. Times analyzed which teachers help students learn and which hold them back. It’s interesting how some critics of this analysis claim that standardized tests are a poor metric for a teacher’s performance without questioning the validity of standardized tests to assess student’s performance.
- Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds: Michael Lewis for Vanity Fair takes a look at the greek debt crisis and how it came about. Prior to this article i had not known about the Vatopaidi scandal.
- War Games: Video Games That Bring Afghanistan Home: The New York Times discusses the depiction of contemporary war in modern video games such as the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor franchises.
- How I became a Foursquare cyberstalker: The Guardian demonstrates that as long as you don’t care who you’re stalking, Foursquare can tell you a scary amount of details about arbitrary strangers.
- Transmedia: Entertainment reimagined: Trends and current examples of transmedia storytelling.
- The internet: Everything you ever need to know doesn’t tell you everything there is to know, but it’s a decent start.
- Consumed – Objects with Back Stories: The New York Times looks at early incarnations of internet-of-things services and platforms. Not including Thinglink seems like a curious omission.
- Forking is a Feature: Anil Dash discusses the cultural significance of forking, not just for software development, but other creative endeavors as well.
- Revenge of the nerds: Should we listen to futurists or are they leading us towards ‘nerdocalypse’? The Independent reports from the 2010 Singularity Summit.
- Sex! Hackers! Embellishment! The Inside Story of the Facebook Movie: I remain skeptical about The Social Network, despite reading largely positive things about it.
- Apple Blinks in the Living Room: Can Apple untangle the unwieldy mess of rivaling standards and technologies in the living room? Khoi Vinh doubts it.
- Where Realtime Worlds went wrong, part 2, part 3: Unsparing analysis of what went wrong during the development of APB, by Luke Halliwell, an ex-developer at Realtime Worlds. An interesting study of software development failure.
- Staying Healthy and Sane At a Startup: Basically exercise, diet, meditation, time management. NSR meditation sounds interesting to me.
engadgeted 